At the core of a
mystery story is a question and the story itself is all about solving that
question. ‘Who killed Mr. Body?’ is such a question, of course. (I think it was
Colonel Mustard in the library with a candlestick.) ‘Who wants the philosopher’s
stone and why?’ is also such a question, even though it has nothing to do with
a crime per se.
The mystery story is
built around the question. That question can be ‘who did it?’, but just as well
‘will they win the big game?’ or ‘who wrote those wonderful love letters?’.
Essential for the mystery story is that the main character spends most time in pursuit
of the answer to that question, even if there’s additional plots and additional
things to do. Finding and interpreting new clues must be a main part of the
story, not just something which turns up every now and then while the author
has nothing else planned.
That is easy if the
mystery story is a crime story, especially if the main character is a
professional or semi-professional in the world of crime solving. Then they’re
expected to solve that crime. If they’re an amateur in the world of crime
solving, but stumbling over many cases, that might be suspicious instead. (I’m
a big fan of the fan theory that Jessica Fletcher did all those murders in the ‘Murder
She Wrote’ series herself.) The questions here are questions about motive,
means, and opportunity, about why they did it, how they did it, and whether
they had the chance to do it.
In other cases, the
answer to the question will demand different sub-questions to be solved, but it
usually comes down to finding clues and interpreting them, so clue-finding is
an important job for the main character or characters in any case.
The scope of the
question is also important. ‘What will I have for lunch?’ can be an interesting
mystery question for a short story of the ‘slice-of-life’ variety. Unless you work
with a very, very dark, dystopian future, I don’t see it carrying a whole
novel. On the other hand, it will be pretty challenging to squeeze the answer
to the question ‘will they save the world?’ into the roundabout five hundred
words of a flash fiction piece.
The question is the
most important plotline of the story, the through-line, if you want to put it
like that. It has to fit with the size of the story, because while you can
always bolster a novel with a few additional plots, the main plot has to carry
most of it. If the question gets answered halfway through the novel (or pushed
aside for other plots for most of it), then you have a problem.
Since mystery stories
are built around the mystery, it’s important to give the main character or
characters the means to solve that mystery. This means they need to go out and
actively look for clues, for ways of solving that mystery. If your question is ‘who
killed Mr. Body?’, that’s relatively easy, because your characters will go
looking for means, motive, and opportunity. If your question is ‘what’s the
chamber of secrets and what’s in it?’, then it’s a bit harder, because anything
called a ‘chamber of secrets’ should, by its very nature, be steeped in secrets
and thus not easy to find out about.
Clues can, of course,
lead to more questions. The amulet lost at the scene of the theft has a symbol
on it which none of the main characters can identify, so this symbol becomes a
minor mystery question in itself. The sudden stop of those love letters leaves
the main character with the question of not only who wrote them, but also why
they stopped. At the same time, that stop suggests that, perhaps, the writer of
the letters has fallen ill or left the country or was for other reasons kept
from writing, which will allow for the main character to eliminate some of the
suspects.
There can be
misleading clues, often called ‘red herrings’, but they shouldn’t be too common
in a story. Trick the reader once and they will enjoy it. Trick them five
hundred times and they will despise your story. Most of the time, therefore,
your clues should lead somewhere, even if the direction isn’t immediately
clear. Another neat trick is the clue which seems to be a red herring, but
ultimately puts the main character or characters on the right track.
With every clue the
characters unveil, with every hint in the right direction, the reader, too,
should be able to make an educated guess at the answer of the question. The
guess might be right or wrong - most likely, it should be wrong at the
beginning of the story, because there are a few twists and turns ahead.
One important part in
which the reader engages with the mystery story is by trying to solve the
mystery by themselves. The mystery story is a puzzle and humans do love to
solve puzzles. We like the challenge for our mind, we like thinking about such
a question, about such a riddle. It’s only possible to solve a puzzle, though,
if we are given all the parts, so that’s another important point of the mystery
story: it inherently needs to be fair.
All clues must be
given in a form which makes it possible to interpret them in the right way.
That doesn’t mean that they must be obvious the moment they are given, but they
must be there, they must be identifiable, if only in hindsight. The main
character may not at the end draw on a fact, on a clue, never given to the
reader. They may not solve the question through a coincidence or by some kind
of divine intervention (deus ex machina is bad, m’kay?). It must, at least from
the answer to the question, the solution to the mystery, be possible for the
reader to look back on the story, find the clues, and put them together to form
the full picture. It should, for an experienced reader of mysteries, be possible
to solve the mystery alongside the main character or characters, perhaps even
interpret a clue or two earlier than they can.
In that aspect, the
twenty rules of the detective story by S.S. van Dine are still true, even
though some of them have outlived their usefulness (such as ‘no love stories’
or ‘no servants as culprits’). The mystery story must be fair, the reader must
be able to solve it, if they pay enough attention.
The mystery story is a story which revolves around a question. It can be
a crime story, but it doesn’t have to be one. Throughout the story, the
question must be the main plot thread for the main characters to follow.
Throughout the story, there must be clues, both for the characters and for the
reader. Those clues must lead to the ultimate answer of the question, to the
solution of the riddle we’re given. If you follow that principle, you will end
up with an enjoyable mystery story for your readers to engage with.