Recently, I got into reading Margery Allingham’s ‘Albert Campion’ stories and I realized that she and several other mystery authors, like Agatha Christie, often made good use of the distant perspective, which is not quite omnipresent, to tell their stories in an interesting way.
Now, you might wonder, how can an outside, distant perspective make it more interesting to tell a mystery story? Wouldn’t the existence of a voice who tells it all from the outside make things less interesting? Wouldn’t that voice be present during the murder and thus tell us who did it early?
Well, the voice could do all that, but it doesn’t, not the way Allingham and others are using it for mystery stories. One way to tell a mystery is from one person’s point of view only. When we read a Sherlock Holmes story, we get to see what Watson sees and hear what he hears. Watson has his own thoughts and his limits - he can’t know what Holmes sees and hears when they’re not together, he can’t even be certain how Holmes would see and hear things.
The distant perspective is more akin to a camera, following characters, sometimes even at shoulder height, almost giving us their point of view, but it isn’t locked on one character. It can move through the house in Cambridge in “Police at the Funeral” and give us a good impression of the people in there, of how they interact with each other, of how they live. Then it can come in closer, give us almost the point of view of one or two of them, only to float away again. It can zoom in on a police inspector who is walking in the rain, only to pan over to the private investigator whom he knows and meets by seeming coincidence. It can follow that PI afterwards when he has spoken to a woman who might or might not become a client and then follows the call of an old friend. It can give us impressions of the emotions all of those people have, yet keep us out of their very thoughts to keep us from knowing too much too early.
And that is why the distant perspective is so ideal for a mystery. A big problem with mystery stories is to keep the audience from learning who did it too early (unless you have a crime story where the big question is not ‘who did it?’ but ‘will they get away with it?’). You need eyes close to the investigator, which is why the Watsonian perspective is so popular with these stories - not quite in the mind and the shoes of the investigator who needs to pin it down, but close to them.
It would be very bad writing to be in the shoes of the investigator and then keep certain ideas and certain knowledge from the audience until the time for the big reveal comes, simply because it’s unfair. If we see the world from the investigator’s perspective, we should know all they know. They shouldn’t be keeping secrets from us. If we’re just the Watson, it’s less unfair for the investigator to keep those secrets, admittedly, because we’re not them. What Watson doesn’t see and hear himself is not known to him. Yet, that perspective is not without weaknesses, because it bears the question of why we’re not in the investigator’s mind, why we’re limited to the assistant or chronicler.
These problems don’t exist in the distant perspective.
In many ways, the distant perspective also makes it easy to turn a novel into a movie or TV series, because scenes shown in this perspective are very close to scenes in the visual medium already. As I said, it’s very much like a camera following certain characters, but the with ability to show a much wider scope than a third perspective or even first perspective ever could. There may be some lines about what a character thinks or feels, but those are very much tied to the situation and also to what their body language and face might show at that very moment. Like this, the audience can make educated guesses, can work along with the investigator, but they won’t know what’s in the investigator’s mind, they will perceive all clues with their eyes, not with those of, perhaps, a trained criminalist.
If novels like “Death on the Nile”, “Murder on the Orient Express”, or “Evil under the Sun” (my personal favourite) were written from third perspective, even if that perspective switched from character to character, it would be hard to keep up the suspense.
Seeing, for instance, the scenes between Linda and her stepmother in “Evil under the Sun” from a distant perspective makes it clear how they see each other and that Linda has more than just a fleeting motive for killing her stepmother, but seeing them through Linda’s eyes would also show she’s not capable of the murder. Just seeing them from the outside, we can’t fully grasp the scope of Linda’s hatred and her capability to follow thought with action.
We only see the outside of the suspects, we only see what the detective does, but not what he thinks. We have all the clues, all the things which are shown or said, but we don’t get the interpretation. That we have to do ourselves and that makes the mystery story much more interesting.
I recently finished the third Black Knight Agency story, “Grey Eminence”, and it does feature Jane investigating a murder, which is one of the main plots. She has other things to do in this story, too, but the murder comes up over and over again and its investigation runs through the story as a long, important plotline. That was when I realized how hard it is to keep the detective in the dark and keep the suspense up like this without making them look as if they were simply too stupid to do that job. I had leeway with Jane, as she’s a former criminal and not a criminalist, but it still was something which added to my troubles with finishing the first draft. A distant perspective would have helped immensely. Should I ever write a mystery again, which might very well happen, then I will certainly keep that in mind.
The distant perspective can be a curse in stories which need the emotions of the main characters and which need to bring you in close to care about whoever the point-of-view character is. In a mystery, that’s not always necessary, as long as the mystery itself is interesting and can keep the audience invested. In this case, having a distant perspective, which allows for the audience to see and hear everything, but without any interpretation from the detective can help to keep the mystery mysterious.
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