I am reading the Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman and I will not spoil* the book, but I am very near the end and instead of the “solution” being something that a series of clues indicated, it appears to be something that was not figure-out-able by the reader along the way. I mean, outside wild guesses, the solution/resolution appears to be something that no reader would make a reasonable guess at even if the reader wrote down every name and detail that came out.
It got me thinking. Is this a bad mystery book? I enjoyed parts of it, but do find myself increasingly disappointed that the solution appears to be so twisty, it was not something we were meant to put together along the way
Now, I am terrible at solving murder mystery books and don’t even put good-faith efforts into trying. I think about the case, give it a shot, and then smile when Sherlock Holmes or Poirot solve it for me. However, I do want to be able to admire the detective(author) for putting everything together.
Is it essential that the mystery be solvable for a mystery book to be a good one?
*if you find even my description a spoiler, I apologize. I may very well be wrong and you find the whole thing logical and solvable.
Take my opinion with a mighty grain of salt, as I’m not a regular consumer of mysteries. But I’d say no. A good mystery should be about a good mystery - i.e. an interesting problem. But it needn’t be a word problem where all the variables are given. In fact I think a good mystery could potentially end with no definitive solution at all, as long as it provides enough closure to the plot by providing one or more plausible solutions.
But I’ll add the following caveats:
1.) If it is a series where it is established that such a solution will always be possible, the faithfulness of the fans should be rewarded.
2.) It better be a damn fascinating mystery. If no real clues are given, the wrap up should be really interesting in of itself. Or the journey alone should be worth it*.
I can think of a recent TV mystery that was the normal red herring-riven plot where IMHO the final solution was a bit out of the blue. But in my opinion that journey was well worthwhile as a character study.
I’m a big fan of the old school Agatha Christie type murder mystery books. For me, the challenge of solving the mystery myself along the way is half the fun. I wouldn’t be interested in reading a murder mystery novel where I didn’t have a fair chance to guess the solution.
Total opinion here, but this may also be a fault in Thursday Murder Club. The ending could have lifted the whole experience, but instead it fizzled it. It wasn’t good enough without its hook being amazing and it isn’t really.
The traditional mystery plants clues throughout the story.* Part of the enjoyment is the detective figuring out the clues and the reader not putting it together.**
But there are other types. Police procedurals tend to find clues in a natural progression, so we watch the detectives finding a clue and then following it. The killer could be someone who doesn’t show up until near the end.
Or you could go the other way. For Columbo, the audience knew the killer before Columbo showed up. The fun was watching how he managed to play cat-and-mouse to find the one clue that pinned it on the killer.
What is disliked is when something is introduced out of nowhere to solve the crime. This happened in the early days of the genre: the detective would name the murderer due a piece of evidence that isn’t mentioned until the denouement.
*Ellery Queen used to have a “Challenge to the reader,” when the author would tell them they had all the clues necessary to solve the mystery.
**In The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Chrystie has a section where she explains exactly how the reader was mislead to show it was a fair solution.
It really depends on why it’s not solvable. I like everything to come together, so that even if I don’t solve it, it all makes sense, and there’s no remaining ambiguity (a book where remaining ambiguity is the point is a very different book, and I can enjoy it, but I’d better know what I’m getting myself into).
If the solution is deus ex machina, I don’t like it. It’s as though there was no point to reading the book. Likewise, if the clues point to several people, and the culprit is caught through dumb luck, why read the book? That was my main gripe with the Clue movie. Now, you can write a book where the point is that it takes dumb luck to catch a criminal, but that, again, is another kind of book. Josephine Tey wrote one of those, but most of her mysteries were quite offbeat.
If you are writing genre fiction, selling genre fiction, and expecting people to give you money because you essentially have a contract with them to produce a certain kind of book, produce that book. If someone is curled up on the couch in their yoga pants and old T-shirt, they want their genre fiction, mac & cheese casserole, and buttered peas. Serve them Veal Prince Orloff, asparagus with toasted almonds, and dolmas salad, and they will be cranky.
If this is not that book, the cover copy needs to make it clear.
I’m not the type of mystery reader who makes a real effort to process all the clues and solve the puzzle.
That said, it significantly detracts from my enjoyment of mystery/detective fiction when the author goes nuts introducing bizarre twists and turns to the detriment of the plot.
It’s partly about solvinjg a puzzle (if that’s what the reader is looking for), and partly about an ending that doesn’t come out of nowhere but is instead well prepared for by the rest of the story—the kind that leaves you saying “Ah!” rather than “Huh?”
If a book is advertised as a “fair play” mystery, it had damn well better have all the clues available to the reader, so that the reader could, theoretically, have figured it out for him/herself. If it’s not billed as that particular kind of mystery, that’s not so important, but the ending should still be satisfying and well set up rather than a deus ex machina.
It is not very important for me as I have read several mystery books for which the author clouds the ability to deduce the case as you progress. Throwing in red herrings to lead you one way while the big reveal goes the other. Or constantly implementing a new twist so you can put forward more than one solution and more than one potential villain which really is no good at all. After all if you’re coming to the end of the book and the process of elimination has not narrowed down the list then you’ve expended a lot of thought process to profile the characters for little reward.
What I will say is those types of books are actually more enjoyable to me because they typically give less of an importance to the detective trying to solve the case and more to each of the characters implicated. Most mystery books place you in the boots of the investigator trying to get to the bottom of it and looking at the suspects from the perspective of the person trying to find the truth rather than from the perspective of people who have something to hide.
The last great mystery I read was not really solvable by clues in the story. I mean, it could have been solved, but I’d guess 99.9% unlikely.
Instead, once the solution was revealed, it changed everything we knew about the story that had come before. It was a very clever and masterful work. If I’d been able to figure it out early with the clues, it would have ruined the story.
Assuming the mystery is a “whodunnit” style mystery, then yes, I do think those need to be solvable. Maybe not every aspect has to be. But you should be able to try and predict who did it and possibly be right.
Even if you don’t actually try to guess, it feels cheap when you get to the end and it doesn’t feel like it logically followed. It’s as unsatisfying as a bad twist. It makes the ending feel like it came out of nowhere.
A good twist is harder, of course, since you ahve to leave the clues but hope no one gets them. While, in a mystery, you can leave more obvious clues.
That said, there are other types of mysteries. There’s the “howdidit,” “howsolveit,” and just a suspenseful book that uses some mystery tropes. I’m sure there are more. And I can’t know what kind this book is intended to be, or how well it lets the reader know what kind of story to expect.
However, it if is the same Richard Osman I think of when I hear the name, known for being smart and making smart TV gameshows, then, by default, I would expect that his book would be a “whodunnit.” And, since you say you’re not very good at those types of books, I would wonder if maybe it was solvable (to the extent I mentioned above) but you missed it.
Not a slight on you—I’m going only by your own statements. For all I know, you’re underselling your abilities.
For me it’s vital that the reader be given all the clues and be reasonably able to solve the mystery. Asimov’s Black Widower series are short tales of a mystery or puzzle. The reader is cleverly and unobtrusively given all the clues they need to solve the mystery. After having read a few dozen, I only solved two before the solution was announced. But, at no time did I feel lied to or cheated.
In Clive Barker’s The Great And Secret Show, we meet a mystic named Kissoon. He lives (minor spoilers) in kind of a loop in time. We get little clues here and there as to where and when exactly. Non Spoiler So many fascinating things are going on in the book and with so many details and at such a pace that when the mystery is resolved, I smacked my head and said “Of course! I should have seen that!” IMO that’s the very best kind of mystery.
I can enjoy a mystery without trying to solve it. I loved the Nero Wolfe stories and rarely cared one wit who did it. I imagined Wolfe sitting in his office, the various characters in the specific chairs Archie had described, and then he would finally explain and reveal to all of us who had perpetrated the crime.
Give me a Miss Marple and I’ll skip to the end as soon as I figured it out. And it’s always the person she had made look to be unable to have committed the murder.
I personally don’t care at all. And I don’t believe that I have ever tried to solve the mystery. I read mysteries for the story, not to play detective. I enjoy Asimov’s “Black Widower” stories, and I equally enjoy Sherlock Holmes, just in different ways.
When Dr. House solves a medical mystery, I know I probably couldn’t have solved it because I’m not a doctor. But if we’re dealing with sort of ordinary logic not requiring specialized knowledge, I want to feel think the author gave me enough info, along with some misleading clues etc. The author challenged me, and either I dropped the ball or got it right.
Monk with Tony Shaloob was originally a ‘whodunnit’. Then, they went to showing us how the criminal committed the crime in the first few minutes and it became a ‘howcatchem’. I really disliked the format change.
Some readers do, of course, try to solve it. But even among those that don’t, there’s a certain joy at seeing the puzzle pieces, which we may not have realized the significance of at the time, all fit together neatly at the end.
Would you please share the name of that show? I’ve watched a season or so of a couple TV series that took multiple episodes to solve the mystery and while I enjoy the story development possible with this style, both seem to drag on much longer than I thought the mystery deserved.