“Not all books can be categorised within a genre, a plot, or a historical moment.” Penny Fielding’s description of feeling herself “inside a process without a predictable destination” when reading Graham Greene’s Stamboul Train sums up what many of us enjoy feeling while immersed in a mystery. Margaret Cohen appreciates “the erroneous escapism” of the political thriller Riddle of the Sands. Yet she also sees Erskine Childers as “a writer fascinated by the ephemeral conditions occurring at the meeting of water and land—a zone of practical danger, keen nature knowledge, and poetry, all at once.” Leah Price discovers in Celia Fremlin’s The Hours Before the Dawn a new way of writing about motherhood: “If the agony of childbirth is epic, the discomfort that follows finds its natural home in the genre of the everynight … the mystery novel.” Ramie Targoff, by contrast, shows that tucked inside the most seemingly formless of genres is clarity. The seventeenth-century diarist Anne Clifford reveals her single-minded devotion to that most Law and Order plot, an inheritance squabble: “What becomes clear, and oddly compelling, is the absolute lack of separation between her psyche and her estates.”