1 00:00:00,229 --> 00:00:04,590 I've done it, Watson! I've put the pieces together at last! This video was sponsored 2 00:00:04,590 --> 00:00:08,090 by Campfire Blaze! 3 00:00:08,090 --> 00:00:12,299 You know, most of the time when I read books or watch shows I kinda can’t stop myself 4 00:00:12,299 --> 00:00:15,579 from overthinking them. I think it’s just a side effect of the critical analysis stuff 5 00:00:15,579 --> 00:00:19,580 plus approaching art and media from my weird pseudo-professional angle - I usually can’t 6 00:00:19,580 --> 00:00:21,440 really engage with a story without trying to pick 7 00:00:21,440 --> 00:00:23,660 it apart and see how it works. You know, like, 8 00:00:23,660 --> 00:00:26,730 I’ll… listen for how an actor’s doing their performance or clock what trope we’re 9 00:00:26,730 --> 00:00:28,380 doing and judge the plot from there, stuff like that. 10 00:00:28,380 --> 00:00:32,379 The one genre that breaks this rule for me, funnily enough, is mysteries. The one story 11 00:00:32,379 --> 00:00:36,219 format the audience is supposed to critically engage with - I don’t. More accurately I 12 00:00:36,219 --> 00:00:40,040 can’t. It might just be that I’m really bad at noticing stuff in general so I skim 13 00:00:40,040 --> 00:00:43,469 over the sneaky clues, it might be that I’m really bad with names so I can’t keep the 14 00:00:43,469 --> 00:00:47,570 suspects straight anyway. But honestly, even the really well-written mysteries that differentiate 15 00:00:47,570 --> 00:00:51,200 the characters and give the audience enough clues to theoretically crack the case don’t 16 00:00:51,200 --> 00:00:53,170 grab me - I have a higher success rate just guessing 17 00:00:53,170 --> 00:00:54,750 from the tropes. Like if it’s an Agatha 18 00:00:54,750 --> 00:00:56,359 Christie number, even odds the killer’s gonna be 19 00:00:56,359 --> 00:00:58,250 the most eligible bachelor in the cast. I’ll 20 00:00:58,250 --> 00:01:01,980 still read ‘em and enjoy ‘em, but most of the time the ending will totally blindside 21 00:01:01,980 --> 00:01:04,510 me. I’m not good at putting the pieces together for myself. 22 00:01:04,510 --> 00:01:08,480 Which is why I love and appreciate the character archetype central and foundational to the 23 00:01:08,480 --> 00:01:12,540 mystery format - the detective. The one character tasked with putting all the pieces together 24 00:01:12,540 --> 00:01:16,160 and revealing to the audience what the actual plot is. Without the detective, people like 25 00:01:16,160 --> 00:01:20,160 me - the watsons of the world - wouldn’t get anything out of mystery stories. 26 00:01:20,160 --> 00:01:22,490 Now detectives aren’t exclusively found in mystery 27 00:01:22,490 --> 00:01:24,170 stories, but they are pretty inextricably 28 00:01:24,170 --> 00:01:27,970 linked with the genre. Detectives investigate situations and solve puzzles - mysteries are 29 00:01:27,970 --> 00:01:31,450 centered on the process of solving that puzzle, but mysteries and mystery-adjacent plots are 30 00:01:31,450 --> 00:01:35,030 present in stories of all stripes, which means the detective archetype can be organically 31 00:01:35,030 --> 00:01:38,640 integrated into almost any genre and narrative structure. If there’s a puzzle of any kind 32 00:01:38,640 --> 00:01:40,990 happening in the plot, you can have a detective in the plot too. 33 00:01:40,990 --> 00:01:44,970 Now “detective” is a job and a narrative role, not a character type, so theoretically 34 00:01:44,970 --> 00:01:48,280 any character archetype can fill the role of a detective - but there are some majorly 35 00:01:48,280 --> 00:01:51,930 popular subtypes that are essentially stock characters. The “Hard-Boiled Noir 36 00:01:51,930 --> 00:01:53,680 Detective” type is typically a tortured 37 00:01:53,680 --> 00:01:57,500 alcoholic or general addict with a constantly running inner monologue, a jaded and world-weary 38 00:01:57,500 --> 00:02:01,100 perspective on life and a disproportionate number of morally questionable dames slinking 39 00:02:01,100 --> 00:02:03,980 into their office for shenanigans - which is funny, because while this archetype is 40 00:02:03,980 --> 00:02:08,040 very well-known, classic noir detectives have almost nothing in common with the tropes they 41 00:02:08,040 --> 00:02:12,219 spawned. Sam Spade, the detective in the Maltese Falcon, the most iconic noir ever - has almost 42 00:02:12,219 --> 00:02:16,189 no personality, no tragic or tortured tendencies, and he doesn’t even react to the death of 43 00:02:16,189 --> 00:02:17,189 his 44 00:02:17,189 --> 00:02:19,930 partner with much more than mild frustration. The Hardboiled Noir Detective archetype has 45 00:02:19,930 --> 00:02:24,370 more in common with Dick Tracy than any proper noir protagonist. Then there’s the Gentleman 46 00:02:24,370 --> 00:02:27,610 Detective, almost the polar opposite of the Hardboiled Detective, a classy and frequently 47 00:02:27,610 --> 00:02:31,599 aristocratic adventurer type, unilaterally well-educated and almost always British, frequently 48 00:02:31,599 --> 00:02:35,380 butting heads with a bumbling police department coincidentally full of lower-class people. 49 00:02:35,380 --> 00:02:38,560 Sherlock Holmes, the most popular detective ever written, kinda spawned off a whole set 50 00:02:38,560 --> 00:02:42,870 of Sherlockalikes - all eccentric, brilliant, usually mostly focused on a forensic investigative 51 00:02:42,870 --> 00:02:46,930 approach, and generally accompanied by a long-suffering guy friend who narrates the actual adventures. 52 00:02:46,930 --> 00:02:49,329 That third-person narration angle isn’t a Holmes exclusive 53 00:02:49,329 --> 00:02:51,349 - in fact, it’s one of only a few ways to 54 00:02:51,349 --> 00:02:54,549 present a mystery to an audience. See, the problem with a mystery is the audience 55 00:02:54,549 --> 00:02:56,349 isn’t really allowed to know everything that’s 56 00:02:56,349 --> 00:02:57,901 happening in the plot until the end. There 57 00:02:57,901 --> 00:03:01,159 always has to be something hidden for the reveal. This means the audience can’t have 58 00:03:01,159 --> 00:03:05,349 a third-person omniscient perspective but they also usually can’t have a full first-person 59 00:03:05,349 --> 00:03:08,590 perspective on the detective, because almost all mysteries have a denouement at the end 60 00:03:08,590 --> 00:03:12,150 where the big twist is revealed and everything falls into place. This denouement starts when 61 00:03:12,150 --> 00:03:15,909 the detective reveals what’s going on, not when the detective figures out what’s going 62 00:03:15,909 --> 00:03:19,811 on, so if the audience is already in the detective's head, we get that information too early. Some 63 00:03:19,811 --> 00:03:22,060 stories will kinda fudge this by giving us the 64 00:03:22,060 --> 00:03:23,329 detective’s perspective and having them 65 00:03:23,329 --> 00:03:26,569 think stuff like “of course! that must be it! everything makes sense now!” and then 66 00:03:26,569 --> 00:03:29,300 reveal the actual information they figured out during the denouement 67 00:03:29,300 --> 00:03:31,079 proper. Failing that, most detective stories 68 00:03:31,079 --> 00:03:34,959 will take a third person perspective, either from a less-than-omniscient vague third-person 69 00:03:34,959 --> 00:03:38,140 narrator or from the perspective of another character who isn’t the detective and serves 70 00:03:38,140 --> 00:03:40,849 as an audience surrogate. This isn’t a hard-and-fast rule, though. 71 00:03:40,849 --> 00:03:44,200 There’s kind of a gradient here that sort of determines what kind of story - and what 72 00:03:44,200 --> 00:03:47,370 kind of detective - we’re going to get. On the high end of the scale, some mysteries 73 00:03:47,370 --> 00:03:51,360 show the audience almost everything. This is pretty rare, and it’s arguable that stories 74 00:03:51,360 --> 00:03:55,200 of this type aren’t exactly mysteries at all. Probably the most iconic example of this 75 00:03:55,200 --> 00:03:56,200 format is Columbo, 76 00:03:56,200 --> 00:04:00,269 a very popular detective show from the 70s where every episode begins with a full, comprehensive 77 00:04:00,269 --> 00:04:04,140 view of the murder. We know who did it, how they did it, how they covered it up and usually 78 00:04:04,140 --> 00:04:08,319 even why they did it. The “mystery” element is not who did the crime, but how is Lieutenant 79 00:04:08,319 --> 00:04:12,060 Columbo going to catch them. In true mystery form the episodes all have an ending reveal 80 00:04:12,060 --> 00:04:16,220 of various kinds, but they’re usually revealing something Columbo did or discovered offscreen 81 00:04:16,220 --> 00:04:20,140 - the twist isn’t in the crime, but in the solving of the crime. This is also not uncommon 82 00:04:20,140 --> 00:04:23,790 in stories where the detective character is technically the antagonist and the protagonist 83 00:04:23,790 --> 00:04:26,760 whose POV we’re following is the actual criminal they’re trying to catch - these 84 00:04:26,760 --> 00:04:28,730 stories will often turn into battles of wits where 85 00:04:28,730 --> 00:04:30,361 the audience has more knowledge than any of 86 00:04:30,361 --> 00:04:33,640 the individual characters. Even some Sherlock Holmes stories technically fall into this 87 00:04:33,640 --> 00:04:37,161 category - there’s no mystery in A Scandal In Bohemia, the surprise reveal at the end 88 00:04:37,161 --> 00:04:41,230 is that Irene Adler fully saw through Sherlock Holmes’s sneaky disguise and totally outmaneuvered 89 00:04:41,230 --> 00:04:43,950 him to leave the country with her new husband and the photo he wanted. 90 00:04:43,950 --> 00:04:47,870 It’s more common for a mystery to give the audience something like 70-80% of the relevant 91 00:04:47,870 --> 00:04:51,080 information. We typically don’t know who did it and we don’t necessarily know the 92 00:04:51,080 --> 00:04:54,000 motive - so in order to keep those vague during the investigative process, 93 00:04:54,000 --> 00:04:55,580 the suspect’s character backstories will 94 00:04:55,580 --> 00:04:59,540 usually be somewhat muddled or obscured, since otherwise it’d be too easy to eliminate 95 00:04:59,540 --> 00:05:00,850 people and narrow it down. 96 00:05:00,850 --> 00:05:04,150 These mysteries will usually give us something of the method - like if someone was poisoned, 97 00:05:04,150 --> 00:05:07,910 a forensic report will say what poison it was - and a large pool of suspects to identify 98 00:05:07,910 --> 00:05:12,010 the criminal from. The reveal of the criminal almost always involves a reveal of some hitherto-unknown 99 00:05:12,010 --> 00:05:15,290 element of their backstory or characterization that the detective has worked out without 100 00:05:15,290 --> 00:05:18,640 the audience’s knowledge. In these stories, the detective character is usually digging 101 00:05:18,640 --> 00:05:22,140 up clues about the crime to piece together an empty profile of who the criminal is, and 102 00:05:22,140 --> 00:05:25,980 then finding out who in the cast fits that profile. How they do that depends on the individual 103 00:05:25,980 --> 00:05:29,370 detective and their personality. But before we get into that, I wanna touch 104 00:05:29,370 --> 00:05:30,370 on 105 00:05:30,370 --> 00:05:32,260 the last category - because some mysteries give the 106 00:05:32,260 --> 00:05:34,281 audience very little information. And this 107 00:05:34,281 --> 00:05:39,010 is… usually bad. Like, actually bad writing, and I don’t say that lightly. Hiding too 108 00:05:39,010 --> 00:05:42,370 much information from the audience can be seen as a sign of bad faith on the part of 109 00:05:42,370 --> 00:05:46,090 the author. If the audience couldn’t reasonably guess the solution from the information given, 110 00:05:46,090 --> 00:05:50,160 it’s a violation of mystery convention. For instance, if the killer is a hitherto-unmentioned 111 00:05:50,160 --> 00:05:53,360 character who just happened to be in the area, that’s completely plausible and it might 112 00:05:53,360 --> 00:05:54,360 even make more sense 113 00:05:54,360 --> 00:05:57,570 in context than any of the main cast doing it, but it’s not a fair conclusion 114 00:05:57,570 --> 00:05:59,090 to a mystery that’s supposed to be fair 115 00:05:59,090 --> 00:06:02,990 to the audience. All these things serve to undercut the integrity of the mystery 116 00:06:02,990 --> 00:06:03,990 plot. 117 00:06:03,990 --> 00:06:07,790 These stories feel worse for the audience to engage with. They also sometimes don’t 118 00:06:07,790 --> 00:06:10,950 make much sense in hindsight, since without enough information in the story to piece it 119 00:06:10,950 --> 00:06:15,370 together, it might not actually hold together. Writing a mystery is hard - you usually have 120 00:06:15,370 --> 00:06:18,640 to do it backwards from the way it’s presented in the plot, starting from the crime and working 121 00:06:18,640 --> 00:06:22,140 through what clues and hints that crime would leave, rather than starting from the mystery 122 00:06:22,140 --> 00:06:25,370 and figuring out who’d make the best criminal as you go. If the writer sets up a mystery 123 00:06:25,370 --> 00:06:26,370 without 124 00:06:26,370 --> 00:06:28,180 actually knowing the solution beforehand, the story’s 125 00:06:28,180 --> 00:06:30,970 not going to hold together as well. And if the writer DOES know the mystery going into 126 00:06:30,970 --> 00:06:35,200 it but drops, like, tiny tiny clues that don't actually combine to form the bigger picture, 127 00:06:35,200 --> 00:06:38,610 that kind of has the same problem where the audience can't really engage with the mystery 128 00:06:38,610 --> 00:06:40,530 because they don't have enough information. This brushes 129 00:06:40,530 --> 00:06:43,680 up against the same problem I talked about in the plot twists video - twists for the 130 00:06:43,680 --> 00:06:47,620 sake of shocking and surprising your audience are good if you, the writer, like feeling 131 00:06:47,620 --> 00:06:51,060 smart, but bad if you, the writer, want your audience to actually critically engage with 132 00:06:51,060 --> 00:06:54,790 your work. The audience needs to be able to follow along, and since the audience can’t 133 00:06:54,790 --> 00:06:55,790 know 134 00:06:55,790 --> 00:06:58,630 more than the author, at the bare minimum, the author needs to know the solution before 135 00:06:58,630 --> 00:07:02,740 they start constructing the clues what audience gets. And ideally they also need to give the 136 00:07:02,740 --> 00:07:07,300 audience enough clues that they could theoretically extrapolate the actual solution in kind of 137 00:07:07,300 --> 00:07:09,590 the same way the detective is theoretically supposed to. 138 00:07:09,590 --> 00:07:11,640 In the ideal mystery format, the audience is only 139 00:07:11,640 --> 00:07:12,640 missing 140 00:07:12,640 --> 00:07:15,630 one key piece of information by the end of the story, so when the detective does the 141 00:07:15,630 --> 00:07:20,090 reveal of that one key piece it makes everything else fall into place. But frankly it’s easier 142 00:07:20,090 --> 00:07:23,470 to write a mystery where the crime leaves almost no clues and the detective figures 143 00:07:23,470 --> 00:07:27,140 out the solution by……… knowing what the author needs them to know and being right 144 00:07:27,140 --> 00:07:29,110 because the author said they were. That way there’s 145 00:07:29,110 --> 00:07:30,460 no chance of the audience figuring it out 146 00:07:30,460 --> 00:07:34,790 before your detective does and thus undercutting your detective's incredible super geniusness. 147 00:07:34,790 --> 00:07:36,930 For instance, while Original Sherlock Holmes definitely 148 00:07:36,930 --> 00:07:40,930 had some pretty outrageous deductive leaps, extrapolating whole character backstories 149 00:07:40,930 --> 00:07:44,880 from ink stains and muddy boots, some of the adaptions take this a step further. Like when 150 00:07:44,880 --> 00:07:49,220 BBC’s Sherlock adapted A Scandal in Bohemia into A Scandal in Belgravia, it added in this 151 00:07:49,220 --> 00:07:52,871 little background mystery because the closest thing the main plot of that episode has to 152 00:07:52,871 --> 00:07:58,260 a mystery is what is Irene Adler’s Phone Password, which isn’t… you know… interesting. 153 00:07:58,260 --> 00:08:00,890 And it’s the first half of Sherlock’s name because she’s in love with him now, 154 00:08:00,890 --> 00:08:04,400 and that’s the kind of basic-ass romantic subplot nonsense the audience could see coming 155 00:08:04,400 --> 00:08:07,820 a mile away, so that doesn't really scratch the "my detective needs to be smarter than 156 00:08:07,820 --> 00:08:10,070 the audience" itch. But the mystery sideplot centers 157 00:08:10,070 --> 00:08:12,010 on the unexplained death of a tourist by blunt 158 00:08:12,010 --> 00:08:15,200 force trauma to the back of the head with no apparent weapon and no sign of the killer 159 00:08:15,200 --> 00:08:18,420 in the middle of an empty field. Sherlock brushes this off immediately, claiming that 160 00:08:18,420 --> 00:08:21,060 he’s figured out the answer just from the position of a car that backfired relative 161 00:08:21,060 --> 00:08:23,991 to the tourist and from the fact that the tourist was killed by a blow to the back of 162 00:08:23,991 --> 00:08:26,660 the head. This is the last we really hear of it for a while until Adler 163 00:08:26,660 --> 00:08:30,400 reveals to Sherlock that she has also solved it, and explains that the tourist was killed 164 00:08:30,400 --> 00:08:34,939 accidentally by his own boomerang. Does this make sense from the information given? K-uh… 165 00:08:34,939 --> 00:08:35,939 …kinda. 166 00:08:35,939 --> 00:08:39,789 It theoretically fits the lack of any killer or murder weapon, since the boomerang flew 167 00:08:39,789 --> 00:08:43,310 merrily away after clocking the dude, although it is a little questionable if the boomerang 168 00:08:43,310 --> 00:08:47,060 could've done that kind of killing impact and then flown like a hundred feet away and 169 00:08:47,060 --> 00:08:49,630 landed in the nearby creek, but that's okay. Is that 170 00:08:49,630 --> 00:08:51,300 something the audience could’ve been expected 171 00:08:51,300 --> 00:08:55,060 to guess from “the position of the car relative to the hiker at the time of the backfire” 172 00:08:55,060 --> 00:08:59,459 and “a single blow to the back of the head”? Absolutely the f*ck not, come on. It’d be 173 00:08:59,459 --> 00:09:03,360 just as valid to assume (and probably easier to believe) that he got hit by a very 174 00:09:03,360 --> 00:09:05,740 small meteor. What were the odds? I dunno! 175 00:09:05,740 --> 00:09:09,339 This mystery isn't fun to solve or see solved because the audience doesn't even get a chance 176 00:09:09,339 --> 00:09:10,389 to think about it. 177 00:09:10,389 --> 00:09:13,699 When a mystery gives the audience too much information, there’s not much of a mystery, 178 00:09:13,699 --> 00:09:16,350 since there’s nothing to figure out - but if a mystery gives the audience too little 179 00:09:16,350 --> 00:09:19,750 to go on, it’s not gonna keep them guessing - it’s going to lose their engagement. It’s 180 00:09:19,750 --> 00:09:22,970 like, you need to give them enough pieces of the puzzle that they can guess what the 181 00:09:22,970 --> 00:09:26,340 final picture is gonna look like - not all of them, or they’d know for sure, and not 182 00:09:26,340 --> 00:09:30,160 just a few edge pieces or the monochrome sky background, because that’s not interesting 183 00:09:30,160 --> 00:09:33,880 for the audience to engage with. At its worst it actively discourages the audience from 184 00:09:33,880 --> 00:09:36,950 trying to solve the mystery. It’s a tricky balance to strike. 185 00:09:36,950 --> 00:09:40,779 But at the heart of the mystery story is the detective. As the character at the center 186 00:09:40,779 --> 00:09:44,500 of unraveling the mystery, or, more broadly, revealing the plot, the detective is, in some 187 00:09:44,500 --> 00:09:48,020 ways, the center of the mystery and the narrative overall. And how they navigate that mystery 188 00:09:48,020 --> 00:09:51,759 depends a lot on their individual character. The first place we tend to look to understand 189 00:09:51,759 --> 00:09:53,199 a character is their character 190 00:09:53,199 --> 00:09:56,680 motive. Most characters have a clear reason for doing what they do - but that’s not 191 00:09:56,680 --> 00:10:00,162 always true for detectives. While some are motivated by a general goodness or a sense 192 00:10:00,162 --> 00:10:04,500 of duty or a general intellectual curiosity, some detectives have next to no personal investment 193 00:10:04,500 --> 00:10:07,670 in solving crimes or mysteries - it’s just their job. The more jaded ones might even 194 00:10:07,670 --> 00:10:08,670 complain 195 00:10:08,670 --> 00:10:11,639 about it. Ironically, for a detective, motive is one of the least important facets of their 196 00:10:11,639 --> 00:10:13,990 character. Instead, there are three important aspects 197 00:10:13,990 --> 00:10:17,339 of the detective’s character, and they mirror the narrative structure of the mystery. First, 198 00:10:17,339 --> 00:10:20,699 there’s their investigative method. How a detective gathers clues and information 199 00:10:20,699 --> 00:10:24,911 depends almost entirely on their character, personality and skillset. For instance, Sherlock 200 00:10:24,911 --> 00:10:28,519 Holmes takes a forensic focus, observing and gathering trace physical evidence to paint 201 00:10:28,519 --> 00:10:31,879 a picture of the crime. Then he often does more on-the-scene investigating, frequently 202 00:10:31,879 --> 00:10:35,499 in increasingly ridiculous disguises to gather information without putting people on-edge. 203 00:10:35,499 --> 00:10:39,390 In contrast, we get detective characters like Miss Marple, who’s a purposeful trope subversion 204 00:10:39,390 --> 00:10:43,350 - she looks like a totally different stock character, a pleasant but slightly vague gossipy 205 00:10:43,350 --> 00:10:47,329 old lady who also happens to have an encyclopedic understanding of the human psyche, and solves 206 00:10:47,329 --> 00:10:50,589 the crimes she investigates through nothing but psychological profiling and her general 207 00:10:50,589 --> 00:10:54,370 understanding of how people work, relying on other people to do the actual clue-gathering 208 00:10:54,370 --> 00:10:58,249 legwork. In a similar vein, Agatha Christie’s other detective hero, Hercule Poirot, also 209 00:10:58,249 --> 00:11:02,880 focuses more on the psychological angle, though he does more in-person investigating and clue-gathering. 210 00:11:02,880 --> 00:11:06,839 Instead of broad psychological profiles, Poirot focuses more on understanding the motive behind 211 00:11:06,839 --> 00:11:10,579 the crime and deducing the criminal from there. Columbo is another deliberate subversion - he’s 212 00:11:10,579 --> 00:11:14,690 a proper police detective, but he comes across as a befuddled and disorganized dude, dresses 213 00:11:14,690 --> 00:11:18,330 pretty sloppily and drives a car so old he’s frequently asked if he’s undercover. He 214 00:11:18,330 --> 00:11:19,330 tends to do 215 00:11:19,330 --> 00:11:21,850 a first pass spotting physical evidence the forensic guys don’t always catch cuz 216 00:11:21,850 --> 00:11:23,350 they don't realize what they're looking for, but 217 00:11:23,350 --> 00:11:26,650 the bulk of his investigative method relies on interviewing slash pestering the killer 218 00:11:26,650 --> 00:11:29,839 about the problems he’s noticed in their story in such a good-natured and innocent 219 00:11:29,839 --> 00:11:31,459 way that they get so rattled they end up 220 00:11:31,459 --> 00:11:35,660 incidentally revealing the truth. Other detectives have other methods - the grittier, more hard-boiled 221 00:11:35,660 --> 00:11:39,120 ones will sometimes threaten or even torture people for information, the more gentlemanly 222 00:11:39,120 --> 00:11:42,319 ones usually rely on their book-learning and scientific knowledge to piece things together, 223 00:11:42,319 --> 00:11:46,319 etc etc. Since this clue-gathering usually takes up the bulk of the mystery in one way 224 00:11:46,319 --> 00:11:49,209 or another, this is the side of the detective that usually reveals the most about their 225 00:11:49,209 --> 00:11:51,871 fundamental character. The second aspect of the detective’s character 226 00:11:51,871 --> 00:11:55,720 is how they put it all together. This is much subtler than the clue-gathering because most 227 00:11:55,720 --> 00:11:59,579 of the time we don’t actually see how this works - it’s an internal process wherein 228 00:11:59,579 --> 00:12:02,800 the detective figures out what exactly has been going on, and if the audience gets too 229 00:12:02,800 --> 00:12:06,279 clear a look at it, they’re gonna find out the big reveal too early. But even if it’s 230 00:12:06,279 --> 00:12:09,681 largely invisible, it’s still a fundamental facet of the detective’s character. Maybe 231 00:12:09,681 --> 00:12:13,209 they put things together in sudden bursts of clarity and inspiration and run off without 232 00:12:13,209 --> 00:12:16,550 explaining anything first, maybe they take careful and methodical notes and collect the 233 00:12:16,550 --> 00:12:19,689 dots more slowly, maybe they chase down a hunch or two before they hit on the right 234 00:12:19,689 --> 00:12:23,170 angle. If the audience has a more omniscient perspective and already knows what the detective 235 00:12:23,170 --> 00:12:26,399 has to figure out, we’ll sometimes see the detective putting the pieces together mostly 236 00:12:26,399 --> 00:12:30,300 for the audience’s benefit - spotting a clue we’ve already seen, noticing a discrepancy 237 00:12:30,300 --> 00:12:33,839 we’ve already realized doesn’t work, looking befuddled for a moment before silently realizing 238 00:12:33,839 --> 00:12:37,730 something, or (in contrast) calmly and immediately figuring out the information the criminal 239 00:12:37,730 --> 00:12:41,430 has tried very very hard to hide and explaining how they came to that conclusion so we, the 240 00:12:41,430 --> 00:12:42,430 audience, know 241 00:12:42,430 --> 00:12:45,339 they weren’t cheating - there’s all sorts of ways to play it depending on the detective’s 242 00:12:45,339 --> 00:12:47,800 character. And finally, the third aspect of the detective’s 243 00:12:47,800 --> 00:12:50,959 character is how they handle the big reveal. When they finally put the pieces together 244 00:12:50,959 --> 00:12:54,079 and lay it all out for the audience so we get the full story for the first time, how 245 00:12:54,079 --> 00:12:57,880 the detective handles that says a lot about them. Some are very flamboyant and bombastic, 246 00:12:57,880 --> 00:13:01,000 hitting on the right answer with a big speech and a room full of awed listeners and one 247 00:13:01,000 --> 00:13:04,209 not-so-secret criminal in the throes of a third-act breakdown. Some are the complete 248 00:13:04,209 --> 00:13:08,029 opposite, entirely subdued and maybe even sad at the whole tragic picture. Some might 249 00:13:08,029 --> 00:13:11,490 be businesslike or methodical, with only the barest hint of an emotional response peeking 250 00:13:11,490 --> 00:13:15,040 through. Sometimes there’s no triumph and no victory - this is more common with the 251 00:13:15,040 --> 00:13:18,879 hardboiled detectives, who tend to be broadly pretty jaded and depressing even on their 252 00:13:18,879 --> 00:13:21,940 best day, but you can also get this with the more emotionally sensitive detectives when 253 00:13:21,940 --> 00:13:25,680 a particularly depressing case rolls around - like if the criminal was a victim of circumstance 254 00:13:25,680 --> 00:13:29,411 or a lovable innocent bystander got hurt or the situation is generally kinda fucked. Some 255 00:13:29,411 --> 00:13:33,370 detectives will, in rare circumstances, actually let the criminal off the hook, which can say 256 00:13:33,370 --> 00:13:36,500 a lot about the detective and how much they might be willing to bend the rules in rare 257 00:13:36,500 --> 00:13:39,339 circumstances. But that said, the greatest asset of the detective 258 00:13:39,339 --> 00:13:42,389 character is also their greatest narrative weakness - they’re inextricable from the 259 00:13:42,389 --> 00:13:46,809 context of the mystery narrative. Some detectives do have rich, personal lives on the side - for 260 00:13:46,809 --> 00:13:50,350 instance, Dorothy L. Sayers’s detective character Lord Peter Wimsey has a rich inner 261 00:13:50,350 --> 00:13:54,550 life and eventually makes the slow shift from Gentleman Playboy Detective to Love Interest 262 00:13:54,550 --> 00:13:58,309 For The Author Self-Insert - it’s really good, I promise, it's just so funny 263 00:13:58,309 --> 00:13:59,309 to me that 264 00:13:59,309 --> 00:14:02,410 that’s very obviously what happened. But most detectives are kind of nonentities outside 265 00:14:02,410 --> 00:14:06,269 the context of the case. Sherlock Holmes is ferociously bored whenever he’s not on a 266 00:14:06,269 --> 00:14:10,389 case and frequently self-medicates with technically legal drugs, and that’s almost become narrative 267 00:14:10,389 --> 00:14:13,569 tradition with the grittier detectives, who will often be addicts struggling with current 268 00:14:13,569 --> 00:14:17,379 or former dependencies with very depressing non-lives outside of work. Sherlock Holmes 269 00:14:17,379 --> 00:14:19,679 and his various Holmesalikes also usually have next to no 270 00:14:19,679 --> 00:14:23,059 social life or friends, and they’re often framed as being consumed by their work and 271 00:14:23,059 --> 00:14:26,291 the thrill of the case. That’s not to say it’s impossible to write a detective character 272 00:14:26,291 --> 00:14:30,110 with more to their life than just the mystery - but it’s really not necessary most of 273 00:14:30,110 --> 00:14:33,130 the time, so a lot of writers avoid it, since the only parts of the detective’s character 274 00:14:33,130 --> 00:14:36,959 that come up during the mystery-solving process are the parts that tie into their role as 275 00:14:36,959 --> 00:14:40,309 detective, not the rest of their life. Circling back to Columbo again, we know that he’s 276 00:14:40,309 --> 00:14:41,309 got 277 00:14:41,309 --> 00:14:44,269 a life, and a pretty good one by all estimates. From his various charming quirks and anecdotes 278 00:14:44,269 --> 00:14:47,970 we know that he’s got a dog he never names, a loving wife and a massive nebulous extended 279 00:14:47,970 --> 00:14:52,019 family he’s on good terms with - but, for instance, we never learn his first 280 00:14:52,019 --> 00:14:56,190 name, and it's a running gag that his wife never appears onscreen. He has a life outside 281 00:14:56,190 --> 00:14:58,610 of work that we catch blurry glimpses of, but it never matters 282 00:14:58,610 --> 00:15:02,070 to the story, so glimpses are all we get. You know, it’s funny, when I, uh, originally 283 00:15:02,070 --> 00:15:06,430 sat down to write this script I was trying to focus entirely on detectives and not go 284 00:15:06,430 --> 00:15:09,290 off on mysteries too much. But it wasn’t until I was halfway through 285 00:15:09,290 --> 00:15:10,290 that 286 00:15:10,290 --> 00:15:13,449 I realized you really can’t separate them. The detective is fundamental to the mystery 287 00:15:13,449 --> 00:15:17,160 and the mystery is fundamental to the detective - even if the audience perspective changes, 288 00:15:17,160 --> 00:15:20,529 that mutual structure stays constant. The nature of the detective is to engage with 289 00:15:20,529 --> 00:15:24,490 the mystery; they can have basically any character outside of that, but how they engage with 290 00:15:24,490 --> 00:15:26,949 the mystery is really what defines them as a detective. 291 00:15:26,949 --> 00:15:27,949 So… yeah. 292 00:15:27,949 --> 00:15:30,699 And thanks again to Campfire Blaze for sponsoring this video! 293 00:15:30,699 --> 00:15:34,089 As you may know, Campfire Blaze is a browser-based tool suite designed to help writers write 294 00:15:34,089 --> 00:15:37,629 and worldbuild their stories. 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