I am not a big fan of the mystery genre. It seems to me that 99% of the stories are about murders or jewel heists. (Or art heists. I suppose jewelry is a subset of art.)
Recently, I saw the movie Peeper, starring Michael Caine. It has its share of mayhem and larceny, but at its core, the detective is hired to identify the biological parents of an adopted child. (The film is set in the 1940s, when DNA testing did not exist, and adoption records were guarded more zealously than military secrets.)
What examples can you give of stories where the detective has an unusual or original puzzle to solve?
There is no murder or theft in Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers. The issue is a series of « poison pen » letters at a women’s college in Oxford University.
There’s a foreboding throughout the book that the person sending the malicious letters may break into violence (and there is some violence, not rising to murder).
The challenge for Wimsey and Vane is to find the letter-writer before there is a killing.
Mysteries are broken down into a lot of categories. The category I think you’re looking for is procedural, where the story follows the process of solving a crime, not necessarily a murder.
The classic police procedural is the 87th Precinct series, written by Ed McBain. It’s a little dated these days as it started in the 1950s. I think the first twenty years or so are still the best, with 33 novels appearing through the 1970s. Everything has been reprinted so they should be easy to get and you can usually eliminate murder cases just by looking at the titles.
Fuzz was made into an all-star movie in 1972. Several different types of crimes are being investigated by the department - one of the best things about the series is that it’s almost never one hero cop on one case, but a whole squad doing whatever comes in on that day. Fuzz eventually has a murder but it’s not what they started out with.
On the other pole are private eyes. Ross MacDonald’s Lew Archer did start out as a hardboiled cliche but by the 1960s he “swapped the hard-boiled trappings for more subjective themes: personal identity, the family secret, the family scapegoat, the childhood trauma; how men and women need and battle each other, how the buried past rises like a skeleton to confront the present.”
Detective short stories that aren’t about murders or jewel heists aren’t all that uncommon. Quite a few of the Sherlock Holmes tales fit.
Many of the kids’ mysteries that I remember reading as a boy (The Three Investigators, Encyclopedia Brown, et al) are about mysteries other than murder.
That’s certainly true about short stories. The problem is that they’re much harder to find.
However, the Mystery Writers of America put out an annual “best of” volume, e.g. Bunches are listed on Amazon. If you want to check them out first, or are cheap, or a library lover like I am (plus being cheap), most libraries have anthologies of mystery short stories.
Asimov’s BLACK WIDOWERS stories were built around the idea of a group of armchair sleuths coming to grips with whatever mystery came their way — which, yes, sometimes did mean solving a murder or figuring out who committed a theft, but often the mystery didn’t even involve a crime: someone who did something seemingly unexplainable, say. (And sometimes there was a crime, but an offbeat one: how the heck did that college student manage to cheat on that final exam?)
I had just thought “Oh, I’ll pop into that thread and mention the Black Widowers!”
It’s a classic theme: the members gather, and sometimes it’s the faithful butler of the club who says “I happened to run into an old acquaintance…” And the game is afoot.
But those stories are short. I’ll be reading this thread to try and get that same frisson of excitement out of a longer story.
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I listen to mysteries, and part of that is because then I have no idea if I’m almost at the end (or if there’s time to develop three more suspects…). But also to add to the atmosphere.
Well-narrated ones have been Michael Bradley’s Flavia DeLuce books. She’s a precocious child who, with her manservant and her grandfather’s chemistry set, solves quirky mysteries.
And Brad Meltzer has some not-your-ordinary-mysteries. His early stuff (The Zero Game and The Millionaires) are different and fun. His later works center on classic conspiracies like Washington’s Culper Ring.
Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op(erative) was involved in solving definitely non-cliched mysteries.
An example is 1929’s Red Harvest, in which the Op is assigned to a case where a wealthy industrialist offers a $10,000 fee for ridding his city of murderous competing gangs. The opening lines of the novel are classic.
“I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte. He also called his shirt a shoit.”
And maybe the Bones books. Kathy Reichs was a forensic pathologist, and the procedures are fascinating.
There are a lot of great Holmes-Adjacent books: Enola Holmes is Sherlock’s sister; Laurie King has written and compiled a number of volumes (e.g.“In the Company of Sherlock Holmes”) written by a wide range of brilliant authors.
Oddest mystery? The City And The City. China Miéville penned a “Scandahoovian Noir” book where a city is divided… but not geographically. Just read it…
Decades ago I stole that and used it in reference to our organization’s Poisonel Department. Caught on very quickly. I actually credit it with the advent of the newer HR.