If I got to the end of a mystery novel and there was no way for the reader to solve it I would be pissed. Mind you, not everything that happens in the novel needs an answer (The Big Sleep comes to mind) because that’s how life is.
I finished the book today and it was cute, but I would not recommend it.
Richard Osman slammed in all the solution material in the final few mini-chapters to explain away the whole situation.
So, even if not every book needs a possible solution, this one clearly failed.
This reminds me of something I read in the author Sid Fleischman’s memoirs. He’d pitched a mystery novel to a publisher immediately before being drafted into WWII. He didn’t hear back from them until after the war was over. They requested a complete manuscript, but he discovered that the final chapter was missing. Of course, he could just rewrite it…but he’d forgotten who done it. Whoops. He reread the manuscript, picked a likely murderer, and rewrote a few other chapters to insert clues. He sold the book.
There are two parts to any mystery novel – the mystery itself and the characters. the mystery gives the characters something to interact over. If you don’t have interesting characters there’s really not much point in reading. Half the fun is watching Holmes and Watson interact, or Wolfe and Archie (and the rest of his cast).
But there also needs to be a legitimate mystery. I know that I feel extremely disappointed if there’s no resolution (Lost has become a poster child for this. It’s the reason I don’t care about most long-arc TV series, because they tend to do this kind of thing.) but I’m also disappointed if they don’t play fair.
Say what you want about all the good plots being used up, but i don’t think they have been, and Neil Simon, at least, said that he was annoyed by mystery writers hiding essential information – Truman Capote’s rant at the end of Murder by Death is essentially all about that. Give the reader a fair shake. even better, show you how it was that the detective used those clues and reasoned to get the answer – that’s what Doyle did in the best Sherlock Holmes stories (The Naval Treaty, for instance). Even if not all the parts are there, enough should be to let you assign probabilities (Rex Stout often had Nero Wolfe sent Saul out to get information not released until the denoument, so you couldn’t completely solve it.)
This thread put me in mind of a delightful tale by W. Somerset Maugham, The Creative Impulse, which I have just finished re-reading. If you click on the link, I apologize for the eye-watering appearance of the text (white on black).
Even if it turned out all the plots had been used up, there’s no reason that has to stop the fun. For one thing, not everyone will have read everything. But, more importantly, the mystery can be which plot is going to be used. The misdirection can get more complex, making you think you have one story when it’s really another.
I’m sure I’ve encountered this before in TV or books, but the one that comes to mind most clearly is actually a case in a murder mystery game. The first chapter in Danganronpa is really easy. There’s only one person who could possibly have done it, and the game even gives you one of the most cliched clues to tell you it’s them, the the writing the killer’s name in blood. So that had me primed to think the second case would also be quite easy. But, no, they set up a red herring that completely got me.
I also assumed that the first chapter of Danganronpa II would go the easy route to bring on new players, just like what happens in Phoenix Wright. But, instead, the game just leads the player along these fairly complicated set of events. So, once again, I was fooled.
Not that the setting in that game isn’t novel, or didn’t allow for some plots I’d never seen before. Sure, it’s ultimately a locked room mystery game, but they get some mileage out of the idea that you can’t leave unless you kill someone and get away with it.
I usually don’t try to figure it out myself, though sometimes I do. I think the worst case was one of Susan Wittig Albert’s, in which I had both murders solved before the second one was even mentioned.
This is an incredibly important artistic topic for me, so much so that I’m surprised I’m not the OP (although if I were, I probably wouldn’t even ask the topic question; I’d have it as a given).
I have held since my first exposure to the genre that the only mysteries that really satisfy me are the ones that allow me to figure it out myself. I just love puzzles.
I used to rail at anyone calling anything else “mysteries,” but I’ve loosened up a bit in that regard over the years; I realize it is and always has been a bigger tent than just my little section of it, and trying to pretend otherwise is just an old man yelling at a cloud.
What I can’t stand are mysteries that “pretend” to be the type you can figure out, but really aren’t. Like most of the Murder, She Wrote books by Bain & family. Like, I know not every episode of the series was solvable (which is unfortunate), but few if any of the books even make a token effort to be, and that kinda pisses me off, just like all other books that appear to be or evoke that style, but aren’t really.
(And I can’t help thinking their first person voice for Jessica Fletcher feels wrong, but that’s another thing.)
So yeah, nobody these days seems to want to put in the extra effort. I know it’s hard, I’ve done it myself, and it’s damn hard. But come on, at least be honest about being a “crime thriller” or what have you. Don’t tease me and then yank the rug out from under me.
(By the way, recommendations for authors or books, especially modern, are always VERY much appreciated. One good thing e-readers have done is make somewhat obscure out of print books relatively available again, which I’ve been taking advantage of. Plus, I end up paying less if I get one of the disappointments. Paper otherwise, though.)
I like to know that the clues are there for me to solve. I rarely do, though I was proud I figured out the way everyone was poisoned in a Carter Dickson.
I get irritated when I read a mystery and the author does one of those “I stared at Thing, and I suddenly knew who the murderer was” and the clue was referring to something they never divulged in the book, like the murderer was allergic to pineapple or something.
I hate solving mysteries, because I always end up spending the last third of the story sitting there and muttering “You idiot, he’s the murderer!”. Unfortunately, I’m very good at solving mysteries, and even better at understanding story structures, which means that the only way to surprise me is to withhold information.
recommendations for authors or books, especially modern, are always VERY much appreciated
From this side of the Atlantic (don’t know if they’re available in the US), how about:
On the cosy/semi-comedic side -
LC Tyler’s Herring series
SJ Bennett - Windsor Knot (the Queen guides the sleuthing!)
Simon Brett - two series, the Charles Paris series featuring an actor-detective, and the other Mrs Pargeter.
A bit grittier - Trevor Wood’s Man On The Street (a homeless man thinks he’s seen a murder and follows up himself since the police don’t take him seriously)
Britta Bolt’s Peter Posthumus series (set in Amsterdam)
Nicolas Freeling’s Van der Valk novels
Martin Walker’s Bruno series
Cay Rademacher’s Roger Blanc series
Historical:
Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther series
Volker Kutscher - Berlin Babylon
Cay Rademacher’s Frank Stave series
LC Tyler’s John Grey series
Andrew Taylor’s Ashes of London (and sequels)
Laura Shepherd-Robinson - Blood & Sugar
As a child I loved the “Encyclopedia Brown” series of mysteries that young (and older) readers could solve if they paid attention to details. I was thrilled when my own son also took to these books.
As I recall they never had an answer pulled out of thin air.
I don’t recall a Sherlock Holmes story that was solvable from clues. There was always special knowledge that Holmes had and the reader didn’t.
I ran across a short Sparknotes article that claims that “‘The Red-Headed League’ is a quintessential “fair-play” mystery, in which readers know all the relevant clues at the same time that the detective does and therefore should theoretically be able to solve the crime on their own.” (WARNING: The second paragraph has spoilers for that story, though the first paragraph is spoiler-free.)
Going just by memory, though, I’d say that “The Red-Headed League” and many other Holmes stories are better characterized as a different type of mystery: rather than a whodunit where the reader is given enough clues to figure out who committed the crime, there’s a mysterious circumstance that defies explanation. Maybe there’s an event that seems to be physically impossible; maybe there’s a character taking some odd action and we want to know why they could possibly be acting that way; maybe there’s some circumstance and we want to know how or why it could have happened. Often the reader isn’t given enough information to determine for sure exactly what did happen but can at least guess what might have happened. (Many of Chesterton’s mystery stories fit into this category, it seems to me.)
I think that’s why I didn’t love Knives Out as much as everyone else. Sure it fit together in a complex way but the solvability of the mystery was so convoluted that I’d almost classify it as unsolveable.
I don’t mind unsolvable mystery stories, but while a good mystery can be had that isn’t solvable by the reader, a great mystery is one that is clever enough to have all the clues so that a solution is possible.
My problem is that there are so many unsolvable/pull a rabbit out of a hat stories that when I do happen upon one that is solvable, I don’t know to put in the effort until it is too late. I would love it if mysteries had a solvable rating so I know whether or not I should be paying attention to the clues or just enjoying the ride.
If you’ve never watched the show Foyle’s War, the early episodes are solvable. Then they fall into the trap of springing the solution which I guess is inevitable when doing a series. A good solvable story relies on a quirk to work. There can only be so many of those lying around and reusing them is probably even worse.
Hmm, I didn’t like it mainly because of the lame acting, but the pointlessness of the plot contributed a lot.
Hmm, ‘pointlessness’, I like the word that embodies this aside about it.
You called a show called Knives Out “pointless”? I get it!
The problem with movies and TV shows, even ones based on books, unless they are exhaustively close to the original, can almost always be solved by falling back on “Roger Ebert’s Rule of Conservation of Characters.” Since every actor needs to be paid, there aren’t any unnecessary actors in a show, so the character who doesn’t seem to be advancing the plot, or doing anything else necessary (ie, didn’t discover the body; isn’t the detective; isn’t the first person accused; isn’t the close friend/relative of the victim who provides all their background info, their last known moves; etc.) is there to be revealed as the killer at the end.
You can often solve cases before the crime is even committed by using this rule.
I remember one story where it was claimed a person hid six feet underwater for an hour by breathing through a narrow tube (all details approximate). The answer to the mystery was that if you tried that, you’d smother because a person’s lungs aren’t powerful enough to push CO2 six feet straight up and out of the top of the tube.
Maybe that’s obvious to a physicist or biologist, but as a young kid I thought it was unfair to expect me to know it.
My encyclopedia brown memory is one where someone is blind but when EB visits he sees a lamp and a newspaper. I was with it enough to notice that was weird, but thought it was just bad writing because who pretends to be blind?