GENRE 101 – Mystery

“The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.”

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles

Do you ever dream of being the bad guy, vanishing people who annoy you, robbing their fortunes and forcing their decisions by imposing fear? Or would you rather be the good guy, the one to observe strange event, collect evidence and draw conclusions, a seeker of truth? How about you could be both?

The Mystery genre is a relatively young contestant in the fight for the best position on the bestseller lists. It has proven enormously successful and versatile. Mystery stories come in all shapes and forms, wherever there is a question mark attached to the events described in a story. As a result, Mystery novels serve a diverse catalogue of themes, sometimes verging on the mythological, the ghostly but more often they cater to the factual disillusion of expressly worldly schemes. That is why Mystery does not have to feature crimes or criminals, but often does. Their dramatic counterparts are the criminal and the crime detector, the illusionist versus the analyst, the deceiver versus the revealer. Sometimes the mystery that the protagonist is being entangled in, is born out of horror, the insecurity and fear that the unknown conveys must be challenged by an investigator who is not afraid of the truth or the consequences that arise from uncovering it.

Destruction spells Respect

There are not many rules you have to observe when writing a Mystery novel, you can insert it into any possible scenario or marry it to another genre. You do not have to stick to a certain place or time or universe but an infinite number of permutations can be used to make your mystery unique. There is not even a need for criminals and detectives, there may not be any crime whatsoever, no intention of harm, no active influence by conscious beings. There only has to be the question and the search for the answer.

There is no requirement to introduce malevolent characters into the Mystery story, you can even thumb the readers nose and laugh while they are running in circles like comic book author Hergé did in his amusing dig at the Mystery genre by the title of Tintin et Les Bijoux de la Castafiore in 1963. The better you get at this, the more your audience will enjoy it in fact. There is some wisdom we can learn from watching a magician at work, sawing their assistants in half or pulling rabbits from top hats. We crave to know how it is done, but once the mystery is solved and we see how simple the trick really is, the magic is broken, the mystery is no more and that is the goal.Therefore the Mystery story is always a story of investigation as well as of destruction. It is almost like the question, the riddle, is the main character of your story, so get used to the thought that it will be killed at the end of it. That is the respect you owe your readers for their patience and effort. They need to know. Even if your criminal gets away with the crime, even if the detective dies without a chance of telling a friend what they found, no matter whether justice is served. The reader has to know what happened. The mystery has to be destroyed. There is no point in starting the quest if you do not rip the lid of this Pandora’s box once and for all.

Being a reader of Mystery novels always entails the feeling of sheer vulnerability, one reason why Mystery and Horror are so closely related. Both genres spring from the same source: the fear of the Unknown. But as a Stephen King does not have to explain the dark powers that caused the demonic dog Cujo, the murderous It or the creeping insanity of The Shining, in Mystery, failing to explain the events logically and reasonably is unforgivable. The prime objective is not surviving the experience but to discover the truth as a personal challenge. The demystification of the Unknown becomes a service to the soul, like an antidote to madness. That conclusion is especially satisfying when the stakes are high, when Death is placing its bets against the protagonist. It is a gambit in which the hero may win and lose at the same time. If done correctly, the suspense of your story will keep the reader awake at night.

The Truthseekers

Analysis, logic and reasoning are the heart of the Mystery story, as curiosity is the blood that keeps it going. Even though on the fringes of the Mystery genre you may find the Hardboil Crime, Thriller or Horror genre, where it agglutinates with motifs of violence, terror and gore, the largest part of Mystery is decisively a battle of wits.

Some of the most famous problem solvers like Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot were no sticklers when it came to equality before the law though. A hunger for justice is not what brought them into crime detecting. Once the mystery is solved they might even let the criminal off the hook for a set of principles of their own, a more liberal interpretation of justice than the law allows.

In Holmes’ words:

Hercule Poirot also has priorities:

Truth seekers do not necessarily have to be good people, but they need to be driven and fearless. They have to be smarter and more curious than the average person and stop at nothing to solve the mystery. They have to be adventurous. How much they are willing to give up to get to the core of the Mystery can only be evaluated by the sacrifices they make. William of Baskerville, the protagonist in Umberto Eco’s Il Nome Della Rosa, risks losing more than just his life and faith when he travels to the desolate monastery in the mountains. The growing list of mysterious deaths only serves to make him more curious. The mystery hidden behind the fatalities interests him more than the life of his colleagues or his own safety. He only stops in his course when the evidence is lost. At least he discovered that what he had been looking for all the time was indeed real, moments before it is destroyed.

Becoming the Challenge

Crime is not the only possible instigator in the construction of a Mystery story, it is just the most common one. The polarity of two parties competing with each other creates the perfect platform for moves and countermoves.

The one very apparent advantage you have over your readers is, that as a writer you are allowed to observe the story unfold from the ending to the beginning. No matter who caused a body to be there, you already know who did it before it hit the floor. You know if there ever really was a crime or maybe just clever trickery to distract from something even more sinister. You may at times see yourself not simply as a writer of Mystery, but as the criminal, the murderer, the antagonist. If you wanted to commit a crime, how would you do it? You would play the devil’s advocate and do the best you can not be be caught. Once you switch roles and start interacting as the detective, you will literally fight against your own ingenuity and inventiveness. The reader may not be aware of that and that is why many mysteries look clever from the outside, while from the inside, they are merely well timed to the consumption pace of the uninitiated.

In 1841, Edgar Alan Poe was dismissive of the praise he received for his Crime Mystery introducing the prototypical sleuth C. Auguste Dupin. He wrote in a letter to his colleague Philip Pendleton Cooke:

Mystery and Crime Fiction is one of the best exercises when it comes to finding weaknesses in the fabric of the story, for as a detective you will try to find the loopholes that your criminal failed to cover up. You are constantly fighting yourself. In resolve it will be enough if the criminal makes one simple mistake that is impossible to cover, preferably something your reader did not think of immediately or has been manipulated to dismiss as insignificant. That will be the plot twist that blows the case wide open.

Catching yourself at a crime you planned yourself is not as clever as it first seems, but writing about it as if it was extremely hard is the true challenge. You will have to switch allegiance all the time as to connect not only the characters actions and reasoning, but also to understand the impact on the observer, your reader. You will have to play not two but three roles. Constantly assess whether something is becoming too obvious or too confusing. The information that you possess can become a mental impediment if you are unable to distance yourself from it. At this point, talking with friends and colleagues about the main storyline without giving them the background of the plot will prove helpful. Ask them, what they would do. Their point of view, their train of thought and their methods of detection will give you new insight on where you need to either blunt or sharpen the edges of your story.

Motive of Action

Analysis, logic and physical evidence are the pillars on which to build your case and it is important that you stay within the limits of possibility of your story’s respective universe. That is only one of the reasons why Mystery has always and will always mix wonderfully with Historical Fiction. Modern crime detection often has a stench of sanitization to it because the methods are very refined and clear cut. Before the establishment of the professional crime fighting units and implementation of forensic methodology, before there was dyctyloscopy and DNA analysis, video footage, audio recordings and satellite surveillance, investigators and police forces had to work with the very few and basic tools they were given. Many tactics they used were just as much of a challenge as the perfect crime and until criminal-gone-criminologist Eugène Francoise Vidocq, who made the task a science and introduced espionage into policing, crime detection often led to the wrong conclusions.

Characters like Sherlock Holmes only became possible because logic and reconnaissance came into play, but at the same time these methods were still smirked at by the hands-on police force of the Victorian era that followed. They were used to busting down doors, cudgelling those who resisted arrest and putting cuffs on dangerous hardened criminals. They felt their raison d’être in an already frustrating work environment threatened by the new requirements.

When investigators became scientists a lot changed. Many mysteries that had until then been looked on as unsolvable opened up like a charm. It was a world of wonder and it altered the perspective the people had on crime and the criminal mind. Understanding why some people felt drawn to breaking the law had for a long time been the métier of the clergy. There have never been lengthy trials where the motive had to be established. A murderer was a lost soul who had given himself up to the devil, let demons possess him or had simply been driven mad and was a threat to society. The police had no interest in understanding why someone was a killer, as long as they could establish that he was one. This all changed and the police force became interested in the reasons and psychology behind a crime. It helped greatly in projecting the next move of the unidentified evil-doers and was the key to not merely solving a crime, but preventing it altogether.

The motive of a crime is always one of the biggest factors in the solving of a mystery. One of the greatest examples and one of the first classical murder mysteries can be found in the novel “Das Fräulein Von Scuderi” by E. T. A. Hoffmann, published in 1819. By including biographical information on the murderer in the story, the author explained the development of his personality, the urge that made him act and therefore the motive. It did not absolve him, but it invoked an emotional response from the readers by solving a mystery that had until then not often been considered as such: How does someone become a killer in the first place? The motive has since become an essential building block in the construction of the case and must be unlocked to fully unravel the strange events in the Mystery novel.

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