The mystery of the mystery plot

(Hey! Psst! If you’re only here for info on my new releases, just scroll all the way down, past the wall of text, to the “New Stories” section! If you’re here for convoluted takes on the mystery genre, read on.)

The old adage goes like this: “In a good mystery, the reader should have all the clues they need to solve the mystery. They shouldn’t actually solve it before the story is over, but the reader should theoretically have been able to connect the dots and guess the culprit. This is an absolute must-have in good mystery writing.”

I’ve heard that idea stated like fact so many times that for a long while, I took it as gospel. I’m no longer sure it’s true.

To be fair, there are great reasons why this advice is so persistent:

1. When a mystery (or a science fiction or fantasy story with mystery elements) builds up a grand puzzle in which pieces of evidence are presented one by one, the reader expects the answer to arise naturally from the evidence. This is because the story is making an implicit promise to the reader: hey, I’m showing you this mysterious letter tucked into the victim’s desk. Hey, I’m showing you that there was dirt on the windowsill on the fourth floor. I’m showing you these things because they’re important. Pay attention. I promise it’ll be worth it. If those bits and pieces aren’t actually part of the solution later on, the narrative has essentially stood up the reader and failed to apologize for it. Following the rule of “the reader could solve it right now” is a good way to avoid that.

2. A common source of excitement and engagement in genre fiction is the feeling that you, the reader, are experiencing challenges alongside the protagonist. It’s tremendously fun to be invested enough in a story that you feel the characters’ defeats and victories alongside them. Making a reader feel like they’re solving a puzzle alongside the main character is a great way to foster engagement and identification with the protagonist.

3. If a crucial piece of evidence is hidden from the reader, and it’s handled poorly, it often feels arbitrary, even lazy. I’ve heard a fellow reader complain “oh, the author totally just made up a reason we couldn’t know about that earlier,” which is a really fascinating statement when you consider that by definition everything in fiction is made up by the author. Weird, isn’t it, how certain authorial decisions feel only natural, as if the author’s hand was forced by the internal logic of the narrative, whereas others are often dismissed as too intentional? Weird and cool.

I began to question this old standby of mystery plot writing advice because I am, regrettably, in possession of a Tumblr account, and for inexplicable reasons two mystery TV shows have recently had a small resurgence on Tumblr: Columbo (1971) and House (2004). I say “inexplicable” because Tumblr’s core demographic wasn’t born yet when Columbo aired and, if I recall correctly, Tumblr users as a whole absolutely, passionately despised House back when it was on the air. But for whatever reason, these two shows kept showing up on my dash, so eventually I caved and watched several episodes of each.

Both of those TV shows do very, very weird things to the traditional formula for maintaining reader (er, viewer) engagement.

Columbo’s subversion is pretty straightforward: the show’s big conceit is that each episode shows you the crime itself in full detail, culprit and everything, and then the next hour is about watching how the titular Columbo deduces all the things you already know. Regardless of whether you personally like the show, you have to admit it was quite successful—it aired all the way into the 21st century—so clearly someone found it narratively satisfying. That says something interesting about how we derive enjoyment from mysteries. It suggests that the central joy of a mystery narrative isn’t necessarily our own attempt to solve a puzzle—that a mystery story won’t lose its special magic if there’s no secret to guess.

That’s a bit of a relief, to me. I’ve always enjoyed mysteries, but the closest I’ve gotten to writing one is a “but who really assassinated so-and-so?!!” plotline in a SFF story. Straight-up no-speculative-elements examples of the mystery genre often feel like strange and miraculous artifacts to me, complex little puzzles that require the author to somehow perfectly understand their entire audience’s ability to guess a made-up answer to a made-up question. It’s exciting to see a successful piece of media whose entire premise is that it’s cool if the audience knows what’s going on.

House’s subversion is a little weirder, because you can watch it and go “yep, that’s a standard mystery plotline with a hospital setting plopped on top.”But when you look closer, you realize that the maxim of “the audience should have been able to put the clues together” doesn’t apply. Because the audience isn’t made up of doctors. In one episode of House, it turns out the patient is suffering from selenium poisoning because he ate too many brazil nuts—which I guess you might be able to guess if you just so happen to be familiar with the effects of selenium poisoning? Which you definitely aren’t, unless you listen to a very weird set of podcasts. But even if you say “okay, okay, but the idea is that the audience still could have figured it out, if they had the right training,” you confront the issue that basically every clue in this show could mean at least three different things. The characters acknowledge it within the text: they say things like “but a fever could be anything” and have at least one argument per episode about how a particular combination of symptoms could signify at least four wildly different ailments.

If you look too closely, if you think about it too hard, House becomes curiously hollow. The central mystery of each episode becomes nothing but a word game, empty actions and empty numbers without even a passing relationship with reality. Medical terms that are vaguely familiar to a lay audience emerge upon a froth of petty interpersonal drama, ultimately meaning nothing more than remember, this is about medicine, remember, this is serious. There’s no time in the story for an in-depth explanation of the root causes of the unusual medical problems the characters discuss, so the showrunners toss the audience a halfhearted metaphor every now and then, maybe a CGI shot of the inside of a lung that probably looked very impressive in 2009. If you actually think about any of the metaphors or graphics for longer than three seconds, you realize that none of it makes sense.

But it doesn’t matter. The made-up facts that lead to a made-up solution to a made-up puzzle aren’t actually important. Maybe the fictional evidence matters more in other pieces of media, but in this one, at least, the “evidence” isn’t really evidence at all—it’s a signifier that points to the idea of there being evidence. And that’s all the show needs. It still works.

The showrunners are betting that the reason people watch mysteries isn’t for the experience of saying in amazement, “Oh, but that’s so obvious! How did I miss that?” The reason people watch is… well, a bunch of things, but one reason people watch mystery TV is because the rhythm of evidence revealed and hypotheses tested is satisfying in and of itself, even if you can’t follow along at home. It’s just fun to watch a fictional person tug at a fictional problem until it’s solved. These shows reminds us that the real magic in a mystery isn’t the mystery itself. In the end it all comes down to character, rhythm, dialogue, setting. It’s not about invented facts, not really. It’s about the same things all good stories are made of: little made-up weirdos saying weird things to other made-up weirdos in a weird place at all the best and weirdest times.

I don’t know. There’s more to say here, I think, but I can’t quite put it in words.

New stories

“The Wren In the Hold” and “Without Any Sound But the Sea”: two new narrative poems in the May/June issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction!

1. “The Wren In the Hold” is set in the same universe as “Seven Needles Glinting,” the short story that you get when you subscribe to the Unreality Effect emails.

2. “Without Any Sound But the Sea” is about queerness and respectability and history and the sea. It’s a little bit eldritch.

3. Get the physical version of the magazine here.

4. If you prefer ePub, go here. (I think it might be available on Amazon too?)

"Every Bone a Bell”: a very short and (hopefully) very disturbing science fantasy story in Lightspeed about the absolute worst form of faster-than-light travel I could think of. Read it here.

“Where the Heather Grows,” originally published in Nightmare, has been translated into Spanish by the wonderful people at Voces de lo insólito! It’s the first time anyone has translated my work and I’m absolutely delighted.

They also conducted a brand-new interview with me (at the previous link) that’s been translated into Spanish as well. Voces de lo insólito is a new and really exciting project, and they do good work — even if you’re not interested in my stuff, you’ll probably love everything else they’re doing. Check it out.

Other news

My story “The Kaleidoscopic Visitor” will be on the Notable Stories list for 2023’s Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy volume! (In other words, it was longlisted, but won’t appear in the anthology itself.) You can read the story in Uncanny.

Where to find me

I’m sporadically on Twitter and more frequently on Tumblr. If you’re looking for a chronological list of all my published works, this page on my website is your best bet.