I’m wanting to write some detective short stories and will need really brief plots, and I was trying to think of where I might find some examples of how to write them, and it occurred to me that detective comics might just be the place to look. And it occurs to me that some of the comics fans here might have some recommendations. So, who does the best detective stories in comics?
If you know someone who writes really good short detective stories, that might be good, too.
I was always a big fan of Ms. Tree, but it was serialized, which is a problem you may run into with a lot of comics.
Agatha Christie wasn’t necessarily at her best when she wrote short stories, but she did turn out a few dynamite ones, like Witness for the Prosecution and The Mouse Trap.
You might try reading some plays. Deathtrap is sort of a meta-play, because it’s a mystery play about playwrights, and a lot of dialogue is devoted to spelling out the formula for the 5-character mystery play, and mentions other plays by title, and tropes, like “Chekhov’s gun.”
Agnes of G-d is a mystery play that isn’t a detective play, but it’s a good example of building suspense quickly, and developing character through dialogue, which you need to be able to do in a short story-- well, in a novel too, but you have to keep characters to a minimum in a short story, and Agnes of G-d has only three.
Good luck.
Ellery Queen wrote some nice detective stories, usually characterized by a dying clue (given by the victim as he or she died). If you want a puzzle story, that’s worth reading.
If you can find his anthology, 101 Years Entertainment, you can get a good overview of the field.
Sherlock Holmes is a must, and the Old Man in the Corner mysteries by Baroness Orczy are clever armchair mysteries.
I should have mentioned, I am a big fan of Rex Stout, Richard Parker, Ross McDonald and John D. MacDonald and several others – I know detective fiction well. But they work at novel length, mostly. Stout has some collections, but they’re more novellas than short stories. I mentioned comics because they are brutally short, which is kinda what I’m after.
Actually, serialization might work well for me. Thanks!
Are there detective comics—is that a significant genre being written nowadays? (I know about Detective Comics with a capital D, which is the home of Batman, but I don’t think that’s what the OP is talking about.)
Detective short stories, like short stories in general, seem to have fallen out of fashion nowadays, though they are still being written. The gold standard is of course the better Sherlock Holmes stories. I’ll be watching this thread to see if anyone else has any particularly good recommendations.
I recommend Edward D. Hoch’s stories about Dr. Sam Hawthorne–impossible crimes. Also, Harry Turtledove’s time travel mystery (guy goes back in time and commits crime & locals have to solve it) “A Death in Vesunna.” Go to your local library–they may have collections of short stories from Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine or Alfred Hitchcock ditto.
I don’t know if there are such comics being written nowadays, but there were plenty back in the early days of comics. I figure a lot of them were crap, but some might have been pretty good.
Yes, Doyle knew a thing or two about writing a short but engaging story.
Ms. Treeand The Maze Agency were both very good. Some of these have been collected in “graphic novel” volumes.
(Amazon has a copy of Maze Agency v.1 for $3.95 plus shipping.)
In current comics, Dynamite Comics just finished up Sherlock Holmes vs. Harry Houdini. Pretty good, but a bit too mystical. The villain’s mesmeric powers were too effective, and so, alas, the story is more fantasy than mystery. Still, it was fun, with some nice characterization of the two protagonists. 4 issues, and don’t read the Wikipedia article, because it gives away too much!
Much fluffier, BOOM! comics just finished Fiction Squad, which sets a (failed) hard-boiled private detective in the middle of a collective fantasyland, where he has to figure out whodunit among Wonderlanders, Ozites, and other “fairy tale” denizens. Cute writing, clever art, quite a bit of fun. (A “graphic novel” collection is due out late this year.) 6 issues.
Ed Brubakeris probably the best writer of crime comics at the moment. His current series are The Fade Out and Velvet (although the latter is more of a spy thriller), and he’s previously written Criminal, Fatale, Incognito, Gotham Central, Scene Of The Crime, and a few others. Some of them tie in with the superhero side of comics to an extent, but all of them are focussed at street level, so to speak.
I forgot about The Maze Agency. I really liked it too, although I liked Ms. Tree better. The Maze Agency puzzles weren’t that hard to solve-- I got them most of the time, and I’m not a genius.
If you’re willing to go into manga and/or anime, take a look at Detective Conan (retitled Case Closed for the US translation of the anime). The premise of the detective character is goofy, but the series has plenty of tight little mystery plots. Locked rooms (and subversions thereof), alibi tricks, and frame jobs abound, most designed to be resolved in under a half hour. Be warned that some of the clues don’t translate well.
You’re probably already familiar with the EC comics from the fifties. “Crime Suspenstories” might fit the bill for you, though obviously the tone isn’t too modern !
Seconding Brubaker - he’s exactly who I thought of when I read the thread title. There’s no one today doing crime comics on his level, in my opinion.
Not looking at modernity too much, just how to set up and run a plot as efficiently & well as possible. I’m planning on writing stories set in the near future, I’ll be setting the tone. Thanks for the suggestion!
Dorothy Sayers did write a handful of short stories featuring Lord Peter Wimsey. They are well worth hunting up.
I have a collection of, I believe, all twenty-one of these stories, and I agree, they’re excellent. I prefer them to the novels. The collection is called, Lord Peter.
Seconding Conan Doyle. My favorites: “The Red-Headed League,” “The Speckled Band,” “Silver Blaze,” “The Norwood Builder” and “The Hound of the Baskervilles.”
The graphic novel Watchmen deserves every laurel it has been offered, and is a great decade-spanning detective story, too.
I found on Amazon a collection of “20 Great Short Detective Stories” that I could get for free via KU, so I went with that. Still poking around the comics, but that collection should serve for now. Plus I remember my Grand Unified Cheese Theory of Plotting that I wrote in a review of a Buck Rogers TV show which has helped a lot.
Link to Buck Rogers review (mildly NSFW with a couple of images of scantily clad women – contains links to images that are WAAAAAY NSFW and not spoilered) hence spoilered here:
The mid-'70s Batman comics written by David V. Reed (aka Dave Vern) were mostly short, punchy deductive-reasoning type stories. DC also had a number of short detective features in the fifties that were of the “Reader, you’ve seen all the clues…” style; the Roy Raymond, TV Detective series comes to mind.