“The ideal mystery is one you would read if the end was missing.” Raymond Chandler
I recently read that quote and it got my mind thinking. Is it true? Can you have a good mystery with no reveal at the end? J.J. Abrams addressed this in his TED talk and in his iconic show Lost.
I don’t think that all people have the same appetite for mystery. Some people have an appetite for certainty, and will only entertain mystery on its way to providing us with a certain ending. As I reflect on this, I think I’m one of the people who would agree with Chandler’s idea above.
I recently read about a document known as the Voynich manuscript. It is described this way:
It is a handwritten book of 246 pages containing numerous illustrations and approximately 170,000 characters. What is special about it? The script employed is utterly unknown and therefore illegible. According to a radiocarbon analysis conducted in 2009 by the University of Arizona, the manuscript was created in the first half of the fifteenth century (probably between 1404 and 1438).




