What Is A Mystery Story?

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.