I collect vintage paperbacks, partly because a huge percentage of them are mysteries and I got hooked by those mysteries when I was a teen and they were still alive and publishing and I could look forward to the next.
These are Golden Age mysteries, where the plot is set in a closed circle and the murderer is always the one with the seemingly perfect alibi. I don’t try to figure them out - as Raymond Chandler once said of an Agatha Christie, “Only a half-wit could guess it” - but I do care that all the clues are presented and the solution is worth the time getting to.
But for the last four or five books in a row, the murderer is unguessable anyway because the motive for the murder isn’t revealed until after the solution.
I’m not sure why - the answer to a brain teaser doesn’t depend on a motive - but this resolution infuriates me. It seems more contrived than the mysteries in which everyone in the closed circle has a good motive for murder and that’s also ridiculous.
Does anyone else feel this way? If you’re reading a classic from the olden days - and yes, Christie has done this - do you want the victim to be a lout deserving of death from the beginning? Should their nefariousness be steadily revealed throughout the book? Or do you not care why they died as long as it doesn’t take very long to get to their death and the good stuff?
I like the Golden Age mysteries too, and I expect a convincing motive. It can be convincing by the standards of their time, doesn’t necessarily have to be by today’s standard (the classic for this is the murder of a spouse to avoid a socially unacceptable divorce). That doesn’t mean I expect a victim that evidently deserves death; I’m fine with having a victim I sympathise with getting murdered for plain greed on the murderer’s part, as long as the motive is clear and fairly laid out for the reader.
In my view, it’s much easier for writers to come up with a motive than with the seemingly perfect alibi, so usually novels pass at least the motive test - although I do appreciate the exceptions where the writer comes up with an unusual and cleverly designed motive. Sometimes writers play with the whole thing; Jorge Luis Borges, for instance, says in the preface to his short story collection Fictions that his aim was to write a murder story in which the preparations for the crime as well as the crime itself were plainly laid out for the reader, but that the reader would still, until the last paragraph, not see the motive for the murder. The resulting story, The Garden of Forking Paths, is definitely worth a read. (No spoilers so far, but that Wikipedia article does contain a spoiler that gives a way the surprising motive.)
In the Agatha Christie I recently read (The Mirror Crack’d), a key to figuring out whodunit was figuring out the motive behind the murder. So of course the motive isn’t revealed until the end, but enough clues and foreshadowings are laid ahead of time.
Can I assume that what you’re complaining about is, not something like this, but where the motive is never even hinted at until we find out who done it?
In some murder mysteries, it’s clear from the beginning how the victim was killed, but in others (e.g. locked room mysteries), the “how” is part of the mystery that must be solved. Similarly, sometimes the why is clear from the beginning (or each suspect has an obvious motive), while other times it’s part of the mystery.
To my mind, the ideal mystery is one in which the crime and the solution flow naturally, and aren’t contrived. Too many mysteries are written as puzzles or exercises in baffling the reader, but don’t make a lot of sense when you get to the end. Motives are often the weak link in this – the characterization of the murderer and the motivation seem to be the last things considered in the writing, with the cleverness the first thing.
I don’t think the criminal should be a lout deserving of death. There are cases where the criminal has 9or believes they have) a good motive, and are true to their philosophy without it being unreasonable. But the characterization ought to be consistent and believable. if the criminal WAS a lout, and incapable of a Perfect Crime (and lacked the good fortune for happenstance to cover it up), =his or her guilt ought to become clear in the development of the story, and they should react accordingly.
@ Thudlow_Boink, Yes, I mean that the motive isn’t even hinted at until the reveal. In one, the motive was that the murderer was an egomaniac who wanted to feel what murder was like, although even that was undercut by the murderer manipulating another person to do the actual crime. In another, the murderer was insane but only in relation to the victim; nobody else suspected madness before or after the crime. One had a murderer kill because of a arcane aspect of British inheritance law.
@ Schnitte, yes, I’m certainly fine with greed as the motive. It’s far better than madness. But points of law that the writer obviously didn’t expect readers to be familiar with are down there with secret poisons unknown to science or the angle of a knifing due to the murderer committing the murder while sliding down a banister. For reals. I just read that.
@ CalMeacham, I didn’t mean that the murderer was a lout, but that the victim was so satisfyingly killable that it makes the whole book fun and gives sympathy to the actual killer. People who shouldn’t be killed ruin the atmosphere of a puzzle. Leave that for modern serial killers.
Some great mystery stories revolve around the detective trying to establish a motive.
Strong Poison by Dorothy Sayers has Peter Wimsey settle on a prime suspect pretty early in the book. Trouble is, the suspect seems to have no motive for murder, and every reason for wanting the victim to stay alive. It took a book’s worth of investigation to establish whydunnit. And also howdunnit, but I thought that was obvious from the start.
What I like in a murder mystery is for it to make more sense the second time around. That is, I’m okay with the motive not being explicitly revealed, as long as when you go back over it again, you can see how events are being shaped by this unknown force which you didn’t really realise was there the first time around.
I’m thinking of a specific Georgette Heyer mystery in particular here - people may well recognise it from my very vague description if you’ve read it, but I don’t think it will spoiler things for anyone who hasn’t - where it turns out that the ultimate motive hinges on a very specific facet of inheritance law, that’s so obscure that the detective actually has to go look it up in order to finally fit all the pieces together. Nobody would have the opportunity to work out who the murderer was based on that specific key fact unless they were a real expert in the area - but once you know it, you can see that things she made explicit about the murderer’s history and personality are relevant to why they would end up killing, given this one key fact.
[ETA: oh, going back up two posts, I’m pretty sure this is the same one that’s already been referenced, right? I didn’t think that was unfair. The murderer’s character is enough on display that you can see it’s the sort of thing that might be a motive, and I count at least two other mysteries going on at the same time, one of which is eminently solvable without any outside knowledge at all]
Sub-mysteries are good too. Especially ones that you don’t know are sub-mysteries until after they’re explained - someone does something weird and you think no more of it than “well, they’re a bit of a freak” until right at the end, when the explanation gets thrown at you out of nowhere without you expecting it.
I agree that that’s a bad way to write a mystery. What the author is supposed to do is present you with all the necessary information to solve the mystery - and only the bare minimum needed - then give you a fair chance to solve it yourself. And if you can’t, then the author reveals the answer by tying together all the pre-mentioned clues.
To withhold something until after the fact is shoddy unfair writing.
Sure, it helps the police to know why someone wanted someone dead, but sometimes it’s a circumstantial case or a witnessed case. “I know John Smith killed Bob Random at this date, this time, with this weapon. I don’t know or care why he did it.”
This doesn’t make for a very satisfying novel though. I recall reading a novel where the villain was very strange (and, IMO, well-written), and I hoped he would be captured by the protagonists (a police officer and a psychologist) and made to reveal his motives, plus perhaps get some kind of diagnosis. But then the villain took a baby hostage and had to be shot by a police sniper. Such a letdown!
Not at all, surprisingly. The other author was a lawyer who looked for such things but I don’t want to say the name because it was done more than once and therefore might spoil other books.
Did Heyer’s detective reveal the motive before or after naming the murderer?
I like my mystery to be neat. When the solution is revealed I want the loose ends tied and if the motive is not revealed until the end it should have still been guessable. Red herrings are acceptable in moderation. By that I mean its OK to have a lot of suspects, clues and motives, but it is kind of tedious to keep arresting and then eliminating suspects until the actual culprit is by default the one left at the end.
If I’m reading a mystery, I’m not going to reject a suspect for lack of apparent motive, even if it’s made a big deal of. Hell, that might make me more suspicious.
It was kind of simultaneous, because the circumstances were so very specific that the moment the legal detail was revealed, there was only one person it could possibly apply to. Also, the wider motive was “the victim had discovered this legal wrinkle and had been using it for blackmail” - the fact that the victim was the kind of person who might well be a blackmailer was not exactly hidden, so I think that’s playing fair.
I think the worst example of “cheating” that I’ve come across was a novel set in WWI era Melbourne or Sydney (can’t remember the author - I’ve expunged the terrible details from my memory) where the name of the killer is revealed about twenty pages from the end because the junior detectives have been beavering away in the background and come up with “Well, we’ve been cross-checking this, this and that fact that we know about the murderer, and they all apply to this bloke here [completely new character, not previously shown or hinted at], he lives at such and such street, lets go talk to him”.
They do, it’s the murderer, they arrest him. I mean, I’m sure that’s how a lot of real life crimes really do get solved, but in a murder mystery? F minus!
Generally I agree with that; an arcane legal provision that establishes an otherwise unidentifiable motive but which the reader cannot be expected to know is as much a violation of Ronald Knox’ fourth rule as magically undetectable poison or contrived scientific elaborations to explain how the seemingly impossible murder was committed.
But as always, there are exceptions. There’s a nice short story by Lord Dunsany titled The Speech, in which, out of nowhere, a murder is committed (you would have expected a murder to happen, the story was building up to it, but you’d have expected another person to be the victim). Towards the very end, it becomes clear to the reader why a particular legal provision meant that the murderers could achieve their objective indirectly via killing a person other than the obvious victim.
Yes, there are a number of books in which the murderer works backward, i.e. kills off a distant heir or two first so that when the doddering oldster dies a seemingly natural death no one would suspect murder.
I should mention, since this is turning out to be an appreciative audience, Michael Edward’s The Golden Age of Murder. It’s a sorta history of the British Detection Club using short biographies of its members. As an American who thought he knew the era very well I was surprised at how many names never caught on over here, and so weren’t reprinted in paperback where I do all my reading, like founders JJ Connington, Clemence Dane, Robert Eustace, Lord Gorell, Edgar Jepson, Jerrold Ianthe, and Milward Kennedy. Today they’re all back in print or on Kindle, though.
I’m mentioning rather than recommending the book because Edwards, a well-known current British writer and now President of the Detection Club, has obsessions that I don’t. He tries to find parallels in every book to a real-life British crime, which he recounts in detail. If he can’t, then the books are considered to be drawn from the messy personal romances of the authors, which he recounts in detail. However, there is a vast amount of information new to me, justifying taking it out of the library.
FWIW I worked this out at the second mention of the victim (that is, several paragraphs before the murder) because I knew the legal provision in question. I doubt it’s common knowledge, but it’s not especially obscure either and it has from time to time been in the news.
So I wonder if there’s an extent to which the obscurity of the motive to us isn’t a completely fair reflection on how obscure it would have been to original readers who might have had context we don’t.
Reading those detective stories I often wonder if the murderer might be me and I am always relieved I wasn’t. But it is indeed frustrating when I don’t understand why I am not. The good ones are when I am not but would have liked to be.
wow, i made a thread about that one last year … it was the only miss Marple story I’ve ever really liked … there was soo many red herrings in that story …
lol that’s not a mystery that’s a police procedural … did they have those back in the day ? i don’t remember those getting big until the 60s / 70s well maybe the fifties through dragnet
what about if in the book the detectives were wrong about the motives?
In Caleb, carr’s the alienist everything is guided by a motive that’s never explicitly explained due well its awful even by modern standards and the “detectives” almost figure it out but the antagonist is killed so there’s no stated motive other than what they’ve deduced