A few years ago I was at my first ever writing workshop, and one of the stories I was asked to critique was a mystery in a Science Fiction setting. It was a pretty good story, but as I was forming my opinions about the story I realized the Mystery genre of fiction has a very special relationship with its readers. It’s a pretty formal contract, and if you violate it, you will irk your readers mightily.
The contract comes down to this: The reader must be given access to all the relevant facts before the big reveal. Those facts can be obfuscated, passed off as trivia, or otherwise hidden, but in retrospect, the facts must have been presented. The reader must be given a fair chance to solve the mystery before the famed detective.
We can see that contract develop over time. Doyle allowed Sherlock Holmes to bring up some shit like the mud on a suspect’s shoes out of the blue in the big reveal. You have to cut the writer some slack; he thought he was writing adventure stories. Doyle wrote a rough draft of the contract, and it was in part his readers’ reactions that formalized the compact. By the time we get to Agatha Christie, the rules are in place.
Mystery novels are literature, absolutely, but they are also puzzle games. This dual identity makes them very hard to write well. Character, setting, tiny details, and plenty of red herrings that in the end have to fit into their places in the jigsaw.
I think perhaps Doyle’s greatest invention was not Holmes, but Watson. The mystery writer must present all the facts, but must closely guard the analysis. You simply cannot write from the detective’s point of view. There must be a Watson or a Japp to record the discoveries and to provide their own by-definition-unreliable analysis. We can never be inside Poirot’s head, or the drama will break.
I got back onto this train of thought recently while working on my serial novel. There are some mystery elements developing in Knives, with people doing things for reasons unclear, but it will never be a mystery story. It can’t be. We are in the head of the problem solver, and tempting as it is to be coy and hold things back, that would not serve anyone. So we will know what Martin figures out, as he figures it out. This is not a whodunnit.
But there may be times Martin is wrong. Just sayin’. That’s what I get in return.
Man somebody is getting prolific with the ol’ blog. finding it difficult to keep, tho…. not a criticism.
The contract was most excellently (and succinctly) demonstrated in those “Two Minute Mysteries” I used to consume wildly from Scholastic Books back in elementary school.