The grief process doesn’t abide by the rules of fair play

Note: This essay contains spoilers. And you should be aware that it deals with suicide.

This one goes out to everyone who has lost a sibling.

It was the cover that first drew me to “Fair Play.” Bold pink type on a green cover with a picture of a house? Yeah, that speaks to me. Then the synopsis pulled me in: A group of friends gathers for a murder mystery-themed New Year’s Eve birthday party. In recent years, siblings Abigail and Benjamin have created their own traditions, reshaping their family after the separate deaths of their parents. I literally celebrated New Year’s Eve 2024 with a murder mystery party. I love this stuff.

But when I read that Benjamin, the birthday boy, doesn’t wake up the next morning, I was sold.

Although the quickly rule Benjamin’s death a suicide, Abigail copes with her brother’s death by recasting the murder mystery party as a detective novel. Detective Auguste Bell interrogates each of the party guests as well as the mansion’s staff. Abigail is certain there’s another explanation. If she can just understand why her brother is gone, Abigail will be able to accept his death and move forward.

The reality is, life isn’t so simple. Some deaths may never make sense.

Death of someone you love is tough. Period. I’ve been through several of them in the past few years: sister, cat, dad, friend, grandmother. The causes varied, but they were all hard.

In my mind, though, there’s a particular and difficult overlap between deaths by suicide or substance abuse. I don’t pretend to know the experience of mourning someone who chose their end. But death by alcoholism feels like a near-suicide to me. The deceased had a direct hand in their death in a way that a dementia patient did not. Addiction is complicated and I’ll probably spend the rest of my life trying to understand it. But to me, it has felt like an end my sister chose, at least through denying her condition.

After a visit with one of Benjamin’s friends, Abigail turns to a photo taken on the last night she spent with her brother. She zooms in to study him, but his stance and expression are neutral. “Whatever it is she is looking for, she won’t find it here,” debut novelist Louise Hegarty writes.

On Reddit and GoodReads, many readers pan the book. And I get it: If you picked this because you craved a classic detective story, you would be disappointed.

But that’s not what “Fair Play” is, really. Hegarty pays homage to detective novels in a self-knowing way. Bell and Abigail often break the fourth wall to explain rules of fair play that this mystery can’t violate.

“There were no signs, no clues. I know my brother. I would have known. I would have seen,” Abigail says. “And anyway, it couldn’t possibly be a suicide. It would break Van Dine’s Eighteenth Commandment. It wouldn’t make any sense.”

That commandment? “A crime in a detective story must never turn out to be an accident or a suicide.”

Comments like this refer back to the rules Hegarty shares before the detective’s arrival. T.S. Eliot, Father Knox and S. S. Van Dine spelled out these guidelines in 1920s publications. “Fair Play”may not be a detective novel, but it often embraces the genre’s tropes.

Some readers have lamented this mismatch. They weren’t looking for a meta literary novel about grief; they wanted a traditional whodunnit.

Fine. I hear that.

But when I realized what Hagerty was actually doing in drawing this portrait of loss, I drew a quick breath and fought tears. In an interview with NPR, Hagerty draws a parallel to the World War I trauma that readers were reeling from during the golden age of detective novels. She said they found comfort in these familiar narratives.

My grief library is full of self-help and memoirs. Memoirs, in particular, were a comforting landing place in the first year after Cristin’s death. But this novel might be one of the closest depictions of what it felt like to mourn my sister (and how it sometimes still feels).

Abigail’s coping mechanism is a murder mystery. For me, it was logic puzzles. For weeks—months?—after my sister’s death, I sat with a Puzzle Baron book. The puzzles were a comfort that reminded me of my childhood; the gifted classes Cristin and I were enrolled in often featured these types of puzzles. They fit in neatly with my love of the board game Clue and my desire to make sense of any given body of information. When I craved a puzzle between class sessions, I would write my own.

And as an adult puzzling out my sister’s death, I sat on my best friend’s couch each night, working through sets of clues to pair individuals with objects, places, storylines. When I ran out of options in my book, I purchased more puzzles on the series’ app. The predictable rules and rhythms of these games soothed me. In a particularly difficult season, I knew the norms of this space.

A sibling’s death is a special loss. They share so many of our experiences. Although my living sister and brother are some of my favorite people alive, they’re much younger than me. Our childhoods weren’t the same. Cristin and I were born 14 months apart. When she died, it was like losing part of my memory.

Abigail feels that separation at Benjamin’s funeral: “The coffin slides into the hearse, and it feels like an ending. Her chest tightens a little. Her childhood is in that box. The memories of her parents, of every Christmas morning, every trip to the beach.”

Now, nine years after Cristin’s death, I’ll occasionally text our younger sister to see if she recalls a tidbit from childhood. Sometimes the six years that separate us don’t feel so big, and she can jump right in on a memory. Sometimes I’ll recount an incident that occurred before she had memory.

Our sister’s death might baffle me, but we remember her and walk forward together.

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