Would it be one of Agatha Christie’s?
Also, I ask the same question for crime movies. I suggest Memento.
The Godfather is a crime novel/film. Pretty dense, too.
Memento has a complicated structure, but a pretty straightforward plot.
Ed McBain’s “Downtown” and “Money, Money, Money” are both very complicated.
“The Big Sleep”
Easy, Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. Almost impossible to follow but that doesn’t matter to me, at all. What really matters is the gritty imagery and poetry of sleaze. This is a good thing, as legend has it when Howard Hawks (director of the 1946 movie adaptation) called Chandler to ask who the hell killed the chauffeur, Chandler reportedely replied “how the hell should I know? You figure it out” and then hung up.
The Big Sleep is really a series of separate novelettes that Chandler loosely strung together to make a full-length novel. It doesn’t hold together because they weren’t conceived as one narrative.
My nominee would be one of the Ellery Queen or John Dickson Carr novels from the Golden Age. Queen’s The Egyptian Cross Mystery involves four murders with headless corpses, so that the identities of the murderer and murderees become hopelessly enmeshed. Carr’s impossible crime books are the best of their sort ever written. The Three Coffins is so complicated that Carr actually takes a chapter off to give The Locked Room Lecture detailing all the ways a murder can be committed in a seemingly locked and watched room. You’re still fooled by the ending.
If you don’t want coherence, then there’s Harry Stephen Keeler.
Dorothy Sayers has some mystery novels with very complicated plots. As in, you feel like you are being invited to whip out a pad and paper and work it like a logic puzzle. The Nine Tail**ors has some complicated theme about playing music on church bells. There is another, I think it’s Five Red Herrings, that has all these train timetables in it.
And they all work out in the end, unlike Chandler.
Really? I am most definitely going to read that.
Not sure if these count since they are historical fiction with mysteries in them, but:
- The Name of the Rose - a code embedded into heart of the mystery
- An Instance of the Fingerpost - told through 4 narrators, 3 of whom, we learn in later sections, may not have all the facts or may be mis-representing their interests…
It’s not really what the OP asks for, but you might consider this –
I watched Anthony Schaffer’s play Sleuth, and his mystery writer protagonist Andrew Wyke makes a reference to “The Poisoned Chocolates Case” – “It’s practically a textbook on the matter,” he says, “A tour-de-force with six separate solutions.”
I thought he was making it up, but years later I stumbled across a copy, and had to read it. (the mysteries referred to in Sleuth all are real, and worth looking into, it turns out)
It’s a 1929 book by Anthony Berkeley, and well worth ther read. It actually has seven solutions (although one is a sort of duplicate), and is really a sort of textbook on the kinds and nature of evidence. The first couple of solutions aren’t very convincing, but the leter ones are more involved and impressive. The novel, by the way, uses the format of a “club of detectives”, eacj of whom contributes a solution. I once saw something like this in a 1960s Batman comic, which I now realize must’ve been paying an hommage to Berkeley.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Poisoned_Chocolates_Case
I’d have to rank James Ellroy’s *L.A. Confidential * and *American Tabloid * up there too, as far as complicated plots go.
I actually read The High Window first, and later found The Big Sleep to be a cakewalk by comparison.
I’m not sure this is exactly what you’re after, but almost all of Ross MacDonald’s Lew Archer mysteries involve a series of seeming coincidences or unrelated events resulting in a murder, and in order to find the thread that relates the unrelated events he has to solve a crime that occurred decades earlier, generally within the lifetime of several of the current protagonists. Often he’s investigating both crimes simultaneously so it can get really complicated, and generally the key to solving the crime lies in unearthing the real identities or relaitonships of the current set of characters/suspects. It’s not the same thing as a formal logic problem as in a locked room mystery, but it’s still fascinating to watch it unfold.
I was just popping in to see if anyone had mentioned Ellroy. That’s some serious convalutin’ there.
CalMeachem, Anthony Berkeley, who also wrote as Frances Iles, is probably the most important and influential author of the Golden Age that nobody remembers today. He’s not easy to find, but all his books are well worth it.
The Poisoned Chocolates Case is more of a stunt than a real novel, but if you liked it you’ll probably love Leo Bruce’s Case for Three Detectives. In it, the case is “solved” three times in his own distinct way by parodies of Lord Peter Wimsey, Hercule Poirot, and Father Brown, while Bruce’s “hick” Sergeant Beef keeps saying “But I know who done it.” And does.
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Why do you assume that I don’t know what I’ve just written about?
I do appreciate the suggestions. I’ll look up Leo Bruce, of whom I havent heard.
Wasn’t that a Monty Python sketch?
When I read the OP, The Big Sleep sprung to mind. What about Mullholland Drive?
The Big Sleep. Nobody knows who killed the chauffeur, including the author.
But that’s less a factor of the plot being confusing as it is the book not really being about plot; it’s about mood, and corruption, and despair. And it has the best opening pages I’ve ever read.
I was expanding on what you wrote for the sake of others who probably don’t know.