Wit & Attitude Quote by Peter Straub

Straub’s line turns the cozy promise of mystery fiction inside out: the “core” isn’t a clean answer, it’s a rotating set of wrong ones that harden into dogma. That’s the trick of the Blue Rose mythology as it runs through Koko, Mystery, and The Throat: violence isn’t a puzzle box; it’s a contagion of stories. “Various incorrect solutions” reads like a procedural shrug, but the real sting is in “assume the status of truth.” Straub is pointing at the social mechanics of belief, the way institutions, media, and even survivors prefer a usable narrative to an accurate one.

The specific intent is meta and moral at once. Meta, because he’s acknowledging how detective plots usually work - a sequence of theories collapsing into a final reveal - and then refusing the comfort of closure. Moral, because he’s naming the collateral damage produced by false certainty: once an explanation is crowned “truth,” it organizes memory, assigns guilt, and authorizes punishment, regardless of whether it fits the messy reality.

Subtextually, Straub’s horror isn’t just the murderer; it’s consensus. The phrase “assume the status” suggests an almost bureaucratic transformation, as if truth is a stamp applied to a file. In that light, the Blue Rose murders become less a set of crimes than a cultural event, endlessly reprocessed by people who need the terror to mean something tidy. Straub writes from the late-20th-century anxiety that facts don’t simply win; they’re negotiated, narrated, and often sacrificed to the story that best calms the room.