On being pretentious about murder mysteries

I feel like, by virtue of my character, I should enjoy the average murder mystery more. I love puzzles; I like crime stories; I enjoy intrigue and reveals and twists and a-ha moments in fiction. Therefore it should be that I enjoy the genre which stakes its claim on all of these things most strongly. And I do – or, at least, I think I do – because the very best mystery novel can inhabit my brain for days or months or years.

But I also don’t. Or, at least, I think I don’t. I am bored by many mysteries, and often from the outset. I think part of this is that mysteries are one of the most formulaic genres (paralleled only perhaps by the heist). Anything with a formula will be applied formulaicly by many authors. The problem is that this formula is not enough. Or, rather, that it is not the formula that is interesting. Maybe some readers come to mysteries to meet the detective, see the suspects, and slowly document all the clues over the course of the story.

In my opinion that is not the strength of a mystery. The presence of a detective and suspects and an inciting murder are elements a creator may use to get at those strengths, but they are not themselves at all required, any more than a science fiction movie “requires” a spaceship. Instead I think we should hold slightly different candles to the genre. In my opinion, there is a set of properties that a good murder mystery has; and it surprises me that these properties have not been, really, discussed elsewhere.

This essay is therefore me staking a claim. For too long have I been recommended substandard mysteries because “they’d be right up my alley”! I am putting a flag down on the hill: this, I think, is what a Good Murder Mystery is!

Knox and Dine

I want to start by going through some “standard” rules written by other people (i.e. white Americans in the early 20th century). These outline some ground rules that I like, and some that I think are insane. Generally I think these lists betray a certain way of thinking about these stories that I disagree with. Let’s go through them.

The Mystery

Van Dine 1: The reader must have equal opportunity with the detective for solving the mystery. All clues must be plainly stated and described. / Knox 8: The detective must not light on any clues which are not instantly produced for the inspection of the reader.

Van Dine 5: The culprit must be determined by logical deductions–not by accident or coincidence or unmotivated confession. / Knox 6: No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.

Van Dine 8: The problem of the crime must be solved by strictly naturalistic means. / Van Dine 14: The method of murder, and the means of detecting it, must be rational and scientific. / Knox 2: All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course. / Knox 4: No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end.

Van Dine 15: The truth of the problem must at all times be apparent–provided the reader is shrewd enough to see it.

All of these rules dance around a central point, the raison d’être for this genre. I would put it as follows:

metaterminal 1: There is a mystery in the story. As a reader, you should be able to solve it, because it is presented fairly… but you won’t, because the solution is tricky, corkscrewed, or otherwise ingenious, and because you have been misdirected by the characters.

In some ways, a mystery novel is an exercise in the author being cleverer than the reader. The author constructs a puzzle that, by all rights, anyone should solve, but only the very shrewdest can. The best solutions in mystery fiction inhabit this space. You are hunting for the moment of “oh, I should have seen that!” rather than “that wasn’t explained to me” or “how was I supposed to know that?”. This is why undiscovered poisons and unexplained scientific apparatuses are ruled out: the reader could not reasonably know about them. They are not within the “bounds” of the story.

Fictional poisons, magical elements, and other things are of course allowed, as long as they are explained in the story. Sanderson’s First Law applies.

The Detective

Van Dine 4: The detective himself, or one of the official investigators, should never turn out to be the culprit. / Knox 7: The detective must not himself commit the crime.

A murder mystery with a recent movie adaptation broke this rule and it was extremely unsatisfying. With that being said, if there are multiple “official investigators” – attending police officers, forensic pathologists, and so forth – then I think this rule can be broken with care.

Van Dine 6: The detective novel must have a detective in it; and a detective is not a detective unless he detects.

I think this rule gives the wrong impression. One reading of this rule might say that the detective must be in the entire story; that is, they must turn up early and do their detective shtick the whole time. This is, of course, nonsense. John Dickson Carr staked several books on the premise that the “true” detective is not available until the second half of the story, leaving the early parts of detective-work to police officers who are competent but not sufficiently brilliant. One story (I won’t say which) essentially involves multiple people entering the story at various intervals, and the reader expecting each to be the detective who shall give the final explanation. Of course, all but one fall short.

Van Dine 9: There must be but one detective–that is, but one protagonist of deduction–one deus ex machine.

This is a nice rule of thumb but, as we saw earlier, it has its asterisks. I think I would state this as, “there is one truly brilliant detective who uncovers everything”; there may of course be other characters who attempt explanations, conduct investigations, and find evidence. Some of these characters may give fairly convincing or even partial explanations. Some of these characters may be guilty and giving intentionally wrong explanations. So it goes.

Knox 9: The stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal any thoughts which pass through his mind; his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader.

There is the obvious asterisk that sometimes the detective is the perspective character; in that case concealing thoughts for dramatic effect is, I think, very permissible, in the same way that the detective may not explain their theories to a Watson until the end.

Van Dine 2: No willful tricks or deceptions may be played on the reader other than those played legitimately by the criminal on the detective himself.

(Or the viewpoint character, if the viewpoint character is not the detective.)

In my words:

metaterminal 2: A detective will solve the crime. There may be some characters in the story who try their hand at the mystery; but they, like the reader, will fall short. Only the ultimate detective (the one who will, ultimately, give the solution) is smart enough to solve the case. They will alight upon critical details and see through misdirections, and by this method alone they will solve the case.

metaterminal 3: The ultimate detective is on the same side as the reader. They will not intentionally trick them (though they may refrain from explanation until the final reveal). This includes perpetrating the crime themselves.

The Solution

Van Dine 10: The culprit must turn out to be a person who has played a more or less prominent part in the story. / Knox 1: The criminal must be someone mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow.

This rule betrays a certain opinion about mystery stories that I disagree with. To wit: the purpose of a mystery story is not necessarily a whodunnit.

Consider a story in which it is abundantly clear who is responsible for the crime, but not how. That is, person A clearly wanted to kill person B, and is the only one who could have… but there is no way that they could have done so, because the murder was impossible to commit. (And unless it can be proved, they’ll get off scot-free!) The story has little interest in “discovering” the hidden motivations of characters, only in determining how, on earth, the murder was committed at all. Maybe this sounds outrageous to you; but if you have read much Carr, it is not a fair distance from his habitual style. (For what it’s worth, he tended to have both: a crime that was impossible to commit, and a mysterious culprit. The Reader is Warned is closest to what I described, though it’s not precisely the same. Also that book is quite racist. The reader is warned.)

There is also a very famous literary exception to one part of the above rules, which I shall not mention because spoilers.

Van Dine 17: A professional criminal must never be shouldered with the guilt of a crime in a detective story.

See above. (Carr’s The Unicorn Murders is an interesting counterpoint; a professional criminal is known to be present among the suspects, but their identity is hidden.)

Van Dine 7: There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse the better.

Yes, and, the dead body may not necessarily be the most interesting part of the crime.

Van Dine 12: There must be but one culprit, no matter how many murders are committed.

This has so many counterpoints that it would be foolish to try to list them all; which is good, because listing them would be spoilers. I think this is a silly rule and should be ignored.

Van Dine 18: A crime in a detective story must never turn out to be an accident or a suicide.

I can name several excellent mysteries in which a death turns out to be either accident or suicide; the interesting part is that those stories still involve criminal behavior (usually other murders). For example, in Lee Child’s The Enemy, the death which kicks the plot into motion is a heart attack with natural causes. (There are others throughout the story.) However, it is generally true that there must be criminal activity involved for the plot to feel worthwhile.

Van Dine 19: The motives for all crimes in detective stories should be personal.

“Personal” is a very slippery thing. A person may be killed because they witnessed something, or knew something, or because they were in the way of something else, even if the murderer does not know the victim personally at all.

In general, the above rules tend to outline a very specific kind of mystery: the domestic mystery, where someone whom the victim knew killed them for personal reasons without assistance, and where the time in the plot is spent working out who that person was and why. This is the classic “means, motive and opportunity” trio. I think I’ve made it clear that there are many more options than this.

metaterminal 4: There must be criminal activity by a guilty person or very small number of persons, working either alone, in opposition, or in tandem. The detective must either understand who did some criminal activity with a known method, determine the method of criminal activity of some known criminal(s), or identify both the method and the criminals.

metaterminal 5: At least one person should die due to actions conducted by a guilty party. (This may not always legally constitute murder.)

The World

Van Dine 3: There must be no love interest in the story.

Counterpoint: The Black Spectacles by John Dickson Carr.

Van Dine 13: Secret societies, camorras, mafias, et al., have no place in a detective story.

This is trying to avoid a sort of plot where the motive for murder was involvement in a mafia or society (either by falling afoul of them or because the deceased was a member). But I think, read literally, this rule is too prescriptive. You of course may figure secret societies into your story if you want. Just, for Christie’s sake, do it elegantly, would you?

(Maybe invoking Christie is a poor choice, given that she was wont to do this; note her (in my opinion) quite-unsuccessful The Seven Dials Mystery.)

Van Dine 16: A detective novel should contain no long descriptive passages, no literary dallying with side-issues, no subtly worked-out character analyses, no “atmospheric” preoccupations.

This is actively bad advice and usually ignored by the best authors.

Overused Tropes

Van Dine 11: Servants–such as butlers, footmen, valets, game-keepers, cooks, and the like–must not be chosen by the author as the culprit.

Van Dine 20: Do not use any of the following:

Determining the identity of the culprit by comparing the butt of a cigarette left at the scene of the crime with the brand smoked by a suspect.
The bogus spiritualistic séance to frighten the culprit into giving himself away.
Forged finger-prints.
The dummy-figure alibi.
The dog that does not bark and thereby reveals the fact that the intruder is familiar.
The final pinning of the crime on a twin, or a relative who looks exactly like the suspected, but innocent, person.
The hypodermic syringe and the knockout drops.
The commission of the murder in a locked room after the police have actually broken in.
The word-association test for guilt.
The cipher, or code letter, which is eventually unravelled by the sleuth.

Knox 3: Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable.

Knox 10: Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.

I grouped all of these “things that you can’t use” together because I think they’re all about as equally useful. Which is to say: don’t use them unless you can think of an interesting twist on them. At least one of the above was done with a twist in a recent mystery in a way that was very exciting and made it fresh.

(No, it did not involve twins.)

And, one more:

Knox 5: No Chinaman must figure in the story.

The full rule makes Knox’s meaning clear as “don’t be racist”; it was common at the time for detective novels to feature insensitive ethnic stereotypes who would figure into the plot solely as villains. With the understanding that the short version is poorly phrased, I endorse the intended message.

OK, I’ve put a few flags down. How about some more?

metaterminal 6: Ideally, the crime should be sensational, impossible, or fundamentally intriguing in some way.

I want to draw a sharp delineation between a mystery that has many possible solutions that must be whittled down, and a mystery that seems to have no possible solutions whatsoever. If a reader can supply reasonable explanations where any of the suspects are guilty, then I have no particular desire to read on to find out which of them is arbitrarily correct! Nothing makes me lose interest faster than the statement “Any one of them could have done it.” Far more interesting is the seemingly airtight: “My word! None of them could have possibly done it!”

Murder works best for this, because it is shockingly immoral, leaves an enormous amount of physical evidence (i.e. a corpse), requires a motive, and leaves no witnesses. Murder mysteries can spend a great amount of time dancing around “what did [the murdered character] know/see before they died?”

But murder alone is not enough. As an example of something I dislike: An unpopular man is murdered in a big manor, with the other suspects milling around in various parts of the house. The murder could have been committed by any of them and is a bog-standard “shot/stabbed from behind”. Sorry, I couldn’t hear the detective’s explanation, I’ve already fallen asleep.

I will also note that, at this point, a standard “door locked from the inside” restriction is not sufficiently intriguing(, Liam). A good premise will rule out additional keys, secret passages, climbing up the outside of the house or down the chimney, or otherwise standard explanations.

(This is also why I haven’t been enjoying Robert Jackson Bennett’s Ana and Din stories as much as everyone else; I find the crimes generally not very interesting in and of themselves, and the solutions tend to be more trivial than imaginative. But the worldbuilding is excellent.)

metaterminal 7: The story must have a theme or central idea, which is not understood by most characters. The ultimate detective is able to untangle the truth, not because they know obscure facts or happen on the correct trick, but because they alone have understood the central theme of the story.

This is a thorny one and best illustrated by examples. The Benoit Blanc movies by Rian Johnson excel at this (Knives Out, Glass Onion, and Wake Up Dead Man). Blanc arrives at a true understanding because he perceives what the story is About, and by laying bare the course of events, the detective not only presents the Answer, but also explores the central ideas of the story, and advances a thesis statement on all that has come before. (Bennett’s mysteries, which I libeled earlier, are usually also very good at this.)

To put it another way: the reader is unable to solve the mystery, not (just) because they missed some key detail, but because they do not yet understand the central idea of the text. This is, in my opinion, what separates parlor tricks from genuine magic, and what makes a detective puzzle into a detective story.

(Sidenote: while Knives Out is inarguably the “best” of the three movies, Wake Up Dead Man is certainly my all-star favorite. …Glass Onion is decent.)

metaterminal 8: The function of the story relies most of all on the behavior of all present parties seeming, if not realistic, at least plausible. Plotlines involving repressed memories, fugue states, post-mortem body/brain activity, deliberately-induced fainting spells without an underlying medical history, unrealistic forms of “madness”, or other unreal psychology should be avoided at all costs.

Not me vagueposting about The Clock House Murders by Yukito Ayatsuji.

As a more general statement, if someone is going to take an unusual course of action, it better be the viewpoint character and we’d better see them making it! A reader is more likely to go along with the narrator making an unusual decision because we can see why they are making them (even if they’re patently ridiculous, ill-informed, or braindead stupid). The previously mentioned Knives Out and The Unicorn Murders both do this well. (Also, the detective is somewhat exempt from this, because the Eccentric Detective who uses unusual means to solve mysteries is a well-established trope. No, Sherlock probably doesn’t need to disguise himself constantly, but it’s what he does.)

metaterminal 9: Relatedly: the criminal should not conduct unusual behavior purely to make the crime seem impossible or bewildering. While a criminal doing a bunch of random behaviors just to throw off the scent may be realistic, it does not make the story fair or thematic; it is tantamount to the author controlling the hands of the characters rather than the characters making decisions true to themselves.

If a criminal performs a bunch of extremely unusual actions just to make the crime seem Unusual, without any other motivation, then that doesn’t make the crime more interesting; it just makes the motivations of the criminal seem false.

We have also brushed against another pleasure in the Impossible Crime genre: not only why the crime was committed, but why it was made to seem (or turned out to seem) impossible. Sometimes that is an artifact of the method; sometimes it is used to advance a certain narrative or related trick in the story; sometimes it is a complete accident. “It was made to seem impossible because impossible crimes are harder to solve” is not a good explanation, especially in fictional universes where crack detectives are known to exist.

I think an exception to this rule can be permitted if the criminal is noted to enjoy intentionally confusing or misleading, or often pulls these sorts of tricks (and does so, seemingly innocently, throughout the story). Then the behavior of that character once again seems true to their own personality.

metaterminal 10: The events of the story should all derive from a single action or inciting incident. One highly unlikely set of circumstances is enough for any story. If, in order for the narrative to make sense, there must be two completely unrelated highly unlikely set of circumstances (which both predate the events of the plot and have absolutely nothing to do with each other) which collide, then that is beyond what a reader could reasonably deduce. A reader can and should be able to assume that all the major events of the story are causally connected.

Not me vagueposting about [spoilers redacted].

Summing Up

A murder mystery is not just a puzzle presented by the author to solve, although it is also that. Like all stories, it is also an examination of human nature, pushed to its logical extremes.

…a murder mystery is a farce!

A farce is a form of comedy where a number of characters, each of whom have personality traits that (though exaggerated) feel genuine, become involved in increasingly complicated and comedic situations. A farce is distinct from absurdism in that it starts from seemingly “normal” circumstances; under these normal circumstances, characters encounter misfortune, coincidences, or make (seemingly) reasonable decisions that cause events to become wilder and wilder. Characters attempt to cover up mistakes, narrowly miss each other while entering and exiting rooms, or accidentally interfere with each others’ plans. This ultimately culminates in a huge explosion of chaos (insert gif Donald Glover returning in the burning apartment from Community).

In a farce, the joy is first observing the normal situation, and then seeing how it devolves into chaos.

In a mystery, the audience sees the chaos first, and it is on the detective to unravel the chain backwards into the original situation.

This is why the solution lives and dies on seeming reasonable, and above all on the actions of the characters making sense. If a character undertakes a crazy, convoluted, and above all risky ploy for no other reason than “that’s what would make the plot function”, then the farce no longer functions. You have put the cart before the horse.

I think the very best plots have a degree of strange deterministic fatalism about them. Given the initial conditions, the arrangement of characters and relationships and fortunes and personalities, there is absolutely no other way that the plot could have unfolded.

A New Set of Ten Rules

Once more, with feeling:

1. There is a mystery in the story.
2. A detective will solve the crime.
3. The detective who ultimately uncovers the solution is on the same side as the reader.
4. There must be criminal activity by a guilty person or very small number of persons, working either alone, in opposition, or in tandem.
5. At least one person should die due to actions conducted by a guilty party.
6. The crime should be sensational, impossible, or fundamentally intriguing in some way.
7. The ultimate detective is able to untangle the truth, not because they know obscure facts or happen on the correct trick, but because they alone have understood the central theme of the story.
8. The function of the story relies most of all on the behavior of all present parties seeming, if not realistic, at least plausible.
9. The criminal should not conduct unusual behavior purely to make the crime seem impossible or bewildering.
10. The events of the story should all derive from a single action or inciting incident.