I've done it, Watson! I've put the pieces together at last! This video was sponsored by Campfire Blaze! You know, most of the time when I read books or watch shows I kinda can’t stop myself from overthinking them. I think it’s just a side effect of the critical analysis stuff plus approaching art and media from my weird pseudo-professional angle - I usually can’t really engage with a story without trying to pick it apart and see how it works. You know, like, I’ll… listen for how an actor’s doing their performance or clock what trope we’re doing and judge the plot from there, stuff like that. The one genre that breaks this rule for me, funnily enough, is mysteries. The one story format the audience is supposed to critically engage with - I don’t. More accurately I can’t. It might just be that I’m really bad at noticing stuff in general so I skim over the sneaky clues, it might be that I’m really bad with names so I can’t keep the suspects straight anyway. But honestly, even the really well-written mysteries that differentiate the characters and give the audience enough clues to theoretically crack the case don’t grab me - I have a higher success rate just guessing from the tropes. Like if it’s an Agatha Christie number, even odds the killer’s gonna be the most eligible bachelor in the cast. I’ll still read ‘em and enjoy ‘em, but most of the time the ending will totally blindside me. I’m not good at putting the pieces together for myself. Which is why I love and appreciate the character archetype central and foundational to the mystery format - the detective. The one character tasked with putting all the pieces together and revealing to the audience what the actual plot is. Without the detective, people like me - the watsons of the world - wouldn’t get anything out of mystery stories. Now detectives aren’t exclusively found in mystery stories, but they are pretty inextricably linked with the genre. Detectives investigate situations and solve puzzles - mysteries are centered on the process of solving that puzzle, but mysteries and mystery-adjacent plots are present in stories of all stripes, which means the detective archetype can be organically integrated into almost any genre and narrative structure. If there’s a puzzle of any kind happening in the plot, you can have a detective in the plot too. Now “detective” is a job and a narrative role, not a character type, so theoretically any character archetype can fill the role of a detective - but there are some majorly popular subtypes that are essentially stock characters. The “Hard-Boiled Noir Detective” type is typically a tortured alcoholic or general addict with a constantly running inner monologue, a jaded and world-weary perspective on life and a disproportionate number of morally questionable dames slinking into their office for shenanigans - which is funny, because while this archetype is very well-known, classic noir detectives have almost nothing in common with the tropes they spawned. Sam Spade, the detective in the Maltese Falcon, the most iconic noir ever - has almost no personality, no tragic or tortured tendencies, and he doesn’t even react to the death of his partner with much more than mild frustration. The Hardboiled Noir Detective archetype has more in common with Dick Tracy than any proper noir protagonist. Then there’s the Gentleman Detective, almost the polar opposite of the Hardboiled Detective, a classy and frequently aristocratic adventurer type, unilaterally well-educated and almost always British, frequently butting heads with a bumbling police department coincidentally full of lower-class people. Sherlock Holmes, the most popular detective ever written, kinda spawned off a whole set of Sherlockalikes - all eccentric, brilliant, usually mostly focused on a forensic investigative approach, and generally accompanied by a long-suffering guy friend who narrates the actual adventures. That third-person narration angle isn’t a Holmes exclusive - in fact, it’s one of only a few ways to present a mystery to an audience. See, the problem with a mystery is the audience isn’t really allowed to know everything that’s happening in the plot until the end. There always has to be something hidden for the reveal. This means the audience can’t have a third-person omniscient perspective but they also usually can’t have a full first-person perspective on the detective, because almost all mysteries have a denouement at the end where the big twist is revealed and everything falls into place. This denouement starts when the detective reveals what’s going on, not when the detective figures out what’s going on, so if the audience is already in the detective's head, we get that information too early. Some stories will kinda fudge this by giving us the detective’s perspective and having them think stuff like “of course! that must be it! everything makes sense now!” and then reveal the actual information they figured out during the denouement proper. Failing that, most detective stories will take a third person perspective, either from a less-than-omniscient vague third-person narrator or from the perspective of another character who isn’t the detective and serves as an audience surrogate. This isn’t a hard-and-fast rule, though. There’s kind of a gradient here that sort of determines what kind of story - and what kind of detective - we’re going to get. On the high end of the scale, some mysteries show the audience almost everything. This is pretty rare, and it’s arguable that stories of this type aren’t exactly mysteries at all. Probably the most iconic example of this format is Columbo, a very popular detective show from the 70s where every episode begins with a full, comprehensive view of the murder. We know who did it, how they did it, how they covered it up and usually even why they did it. The “mystery” element is not who did the crime, but how is Lieutenant Columbo going to catch them. In true mystery form the episodes all have an ending reveal of various kinds, but they’re usually revealing something Columbo did or discovered offscreen - the twist isn’t in the crime, but in the solving of the crime. This is also not uncommon in stories where the detective character is technically the antagonist and the protagonist whose POV we’re following is the actual criminal they’re trying to catch - these stories will often turn into battles of wits where the audience has more knowledge than any of the individual characters. Even some Sherlock Holmes stories technically fall into this category - there’s no mystery in A Scandal In Bohemia, the surprise reveal at the end is that Irene Adler fully saw through Sherlock Holmes’s sneaky disguise and totally outmaneuvered him to leave the country with her new husband and the photo he wanted. It’s more common for a mystery to give the audience something like 70-80% of the relevant information. We typically don’t know who did it and we don’t necessarily know the motive - so in order to keep those vague during the investigative process, the suspect’s character backstories will usually be somewhat muddled or obscured, since otherwise it’d be too easy to eliminate people and narrow it down. These mysteries will usually give us something of the method - like if someone was poisoned, a forensic report will say what poison it was - and a large pool of suspects to identify the criminal from. The reveal of the criminal almost always involves a reveal of some hitherto-unknown element of their backstory or characterization that the detective has worked out without the audience’s knowledge. In these stories, the detective character is usually digging up clues about the crime to piece together an empty profile of who the criminal is, and then finding out who in the cast fits that profile. How they do that depends on the individual detective and their personality. But before we get into that, I wanna touch on the last category - because some mysteries give the audience very little information. And this is… usually bad. Like, actually bad writing, and I don’t say that lightly. Hiding too much information from the audience can be seen as a sign of bad faith on the part of the author. If the audience couldn’t reasonably guess the solution from the information given, it’s a violation of mystery convention. For instance, if the killer is a hitherto-unmentioned character who just happened to be in the area, that’s completely plausible and it might even make more sense in context than any of the main cast doing it, but it’s not a fair conclusion to a mystery that’s supposed to be fair to the audience. All these things serve to undercut the integrity of the mystery plot. These stories feel worse for the audience to engage with. They also sometimes don’t make much sense in hindsight, since without enough information in the story to piece it together, it might not actually hold together. Writing a mystery is hard - you usually have to do it backwards from the way it’s presented in the plot, starting from the crime and working through what clues and hints that crime would leave, rather than starting from the mystery and figuring out who’d make the best criminal as you go. If the writer sets up a mystery without actually knowing the solution beforehand, the story’s not going to hold together as well. And if the writer DOES know the mystery going into it but drops, like, tiny tiny clues that don't actually combine to form the bigger picture, that kind of has the same problem where the audience can't really engage with the mystery because they don't have enough information. This brushes up against the same problem I talked about in the plot twists video - twists for the sake of shocking and surprising your audience are good if you, the writer, like feeling smart, but bad if you, the writer, want your audience to actually critically engage with your work. The audience needs to be able to follow along, and since the audience can’t know more than the author, at the bare minimum, the author needs to know the solution before they start constructing the clues what audience gets. And ideally they also need to give the audience enough clues that they could theoretically extrapolate the actual solution in kind of the same way the detective is theoretically supposed to. In the ideal mystery format, the audience is only missing one key piece of information by the end of the story, so when the detective does the reveal of that one key piece it makes everything else fall into place. But frankly it’s easier to write a mystery where the crime leaves almost no clues and the detective figures out the solution by……… knowing what the author needs them to know and being right because the author said they were. That way there’s no chance of the audience figuring it out before your detective does and thus undercutting your detective's incredible super geniusness. For instance, while Original Sherlock Holmes definitely had some pretty outrageous deductive leaps, extrapolating whole character backstories from ink stains and muddy boots, some of the adaptions take this a step further. Like when BBC’s Sherlock adapted A Scandal in Bohemia into A Scandal in Belgravia, it added in this little background mystery because the closest thing the main plot of that episode has to a mystery is what is Irene Adler’s Phone Password, which isn’t… you know… interesting. And it’s the first half of Sherlock’s name because she’s in love with him now, and that’s the kind of basic-ass romantic subplot nonsense the audience could see coming a mile away, so that doesn't really scratch the "my detective needs to be smarter than the audience" itch. But the mystery sideplot centers on the unexplained death of a tourist by blunt force trauma to the back of the head with no apparent weapon and no sign of the killer in the middle of an empty field. Sherlock brushes this off immediately, claiming that he’s figured out the answer just from the position of a car that backfired relative to the tourist and from the fact that the tourist was killed by a blow to the back of the head. This is the last we really hear of it for a while until Adler reveals to Sherlock that she has also solved it, and explains that the tourist was killed accidentally by his own boomerang. Does this make sense from the information given? K-uh… …kinda. It theoretically fits the lack of any killer or murder weapon, since the boomerang flew merrily away after clocking the dude, although it is a little questionable if the boomerang could've done that kind of killing impact and then flown like a hundred feet away and landed in the nearby creek, but that's okay. Is that something the audience could’ve been expected to guess from “the position of the car relative to the hiker at the time of the backfire” and “a single blow to the back of the head”? Absolutely the f*ck not, come on. It’d be just as valid to assume (and probably easier to believe) that he got hit by a very small meteor. What were the odds? I dunno! This mystery isn't fun to solve or see solved because the audience doesn't even get a chance to think about it. When a mystery gives the audience too much information, there’s not much of a mystery, since there’s nothing to figure out - but if a mystery gives the audience too little to go on, it’s not gonna keep them guessing - it’s going to lose their engagement. It’s like, you need to give them enough pieces of the puzzle that they can guess what the final picture is gonna look like - not all of them, or they’d know for sure, and not just a few edge pieces or the monochrome sky background, because that’s not interesting for the audience to engage with. At its worst it actively discourages the audience from trying to solve the mystery. It’s a tricky balance to strike. But at the heart of the mystery story is the detective. As the character at the center of unraveling the mystery, or, more broadly, revealing the plot, the detective is, in some ways, the center of the mystery and the narrative overall. And how they navigate that mystery depends a lot on their individual character. The first place we tend to look to understand a character is their character motive. Most characters have a clear reason for doing what they do - but that’s not always true for detectives. While some are motivated by a general goodness or a sense of duty or a general intellectual curiosity, some detectives have next to no personal investment in solving crimes or mysteries - it’s just their job. The more jaded ones might even complain about it. Ironically, for a detective, motive is one of the least important facets of their character. Instead, there are three important aspects of the detective’s character, and they mirror the narrative structure of the mystery. First, there’s their investigative method. How a detective gathers clues and information depends almost entirely on their character, personality and skillset. For instance, Sherlock Holmes takes a forensic focus, observing and gathering trace physical evidence to paint a picture of the crime. Then he often does more on-the-scene investigating, frequently in increasingly ridiculous disguises to gather information without putting people on-edge. In contrast, we get detective characters like Miss Marple, who’s a purposeful trope subversion - she looks like a totally different stock character, a pleasant but slightly vague gossipy old lady who also happens to have an encyclopedic understanding of the human psyche, and solves the crimes she investigates through nothing but psychological profiling and her general understanding of how people work, relying on other people to do the actual clue-gathering legwork. In a similar vein, Agatha Christie’s other detective hero, Hercule Poirot, also focuses more on the psychological angle, though he does more in-person investigating and clue-gathering. Instead of broad psychological profiles, Poirot focuses more on understanding the motive behind the crime and deducing the criminal from there. Columbo is another deliberate subversion - he’s a proper police detective, but he comes across as a befuddled and disorganized dude, dresses pretty sloppily and drives a car so old he’s frequently asked if he’s undercover. He tends to do a first pass spotting physical evidence the forensic guys don’t always catch cuz they don't realize what they're looking for, but the bulk of his investigative method relies on interviewing slash pestering the killer about the problems he’s noticed in their story in such a good-natured and innocent way that they get so rattled they end up incidentally revealing the truth. Other detectives have other methods - the grittier, more hard-boiled ones will sometimes threaten or even torture people for information, the more gentlemanly ones usually rely on their book-learning and scientific knowledge to piece things together, etc etc. Since this clue-gathering usually takes up the bulk of the mystery in one way or another, this is the side of the detective that usually reveals the most about their fundamental character. The second aspect of the detective’s character is how they put it all together. This is much subtler than the clue-gathering because most of the time we don’t actually see how this works - it’s an internal process wherein the detective figures out what exactly has been going on, and if the audience gets too clear a look at it, they’re gonna find out the big reveal too early. But even if it’s largely invisible, it’s still a fundamental facet of the detective’s character. Maybe they put things together in sudden bursts of clarity and inspiration and run off without explaining anything first, maybe they take careful and methodical notes and collect the dots more slowly, maybe they chase down a hunch or two before they hit on the right angle. If the audience has a more omniscient perspective and already knows what the detective has to figure out, we’ll sometimes see the detective putting the pieces together mostly for the audience’s benefit - spotting a clue we’ve already seen, noticing a discrepancy we’ve already realized doesn’t work, looking befuddled for a moment before silently realizing something, or (in contrast) calmly and immediately figuring out the information the criminal has tried very very hard to hide and explaining how they came to that conclusion so we, the audience, know they weren’t cheating - there’s all sorts of ways to play it depending on the detective’s character. And finally, the third aspect of the detective’s character is how they handle the big reveal. When they finally put the pieces together and lay it all out for the audience so we get the full story for the first time, how the detective handles that says a lot about them. Some are very flamboyant and bombastic, hitting on the right answer with a big speech and a room full of awed listeners and one not-so-secret criminal in the throes of a third-act breakdown. Some are the complete opposite, entirely subdued and maybe even sad at the whole tragic picture. Some might be businesslike or methodical, with only the barest hint of an emotional response peeking through. Sometimes there’s no triumph and no victory - this is more common with the hardboiled detectives, who tend to be broadly pretty jaded and depressing even on their best day, but you can also get this with the more emotionally sensitive detectives when a particularly depressing case rolls around - like if the criminal was a victim of circumstance or a lovable innocent bystander got hurt or the situation is generally kinda fucked. Some detectives will, in rare circumstances, actually let the criminal off the hook, which can say a lot about the detective and how much they might be willing to bend the rules in rare circumstances. But that said, the greatest asset of the detective character is also their greatest narrative weakness - they’re inextricable from the context of the mystery narrative. Some detectives do have rich, personal lives on the side - for instance, Dorothy L. Sayers’s detective character Lord Peter Wimsey has a rich inner life and eventually makes the slow shift from Gentleman Playboy Detective to Love Interest For The Author Self-Insert - it’s really good, I promise, it's just so funny to me that that’s very obviously what happened. But most detectives are kind of nonentities outside the context of the case. Sherlock Holmes is ferociously bored whenever he’s not on a case and frequently self-medicates with technically legal drugs, and that’s almost become narrative tradition with the grittier detectives, who will often be addicts struggling with current or former dependencies with very depressing non-lives outside of work. Sherlock Holmes and his various Holmesalikes also usually have next to no social life or friends, and they’re often framed as being consumed by their work and the thrill of the case. That’s not to say it’s impossible to write a detective character with more to their life than just the mystery - but it’s really not necessary most of the time, so a lot of writers avoid it, since the only parts of the detective’s character that come up during the mystery-solving process are the parts that tie into their role as detective, not the rest of their life. Circling back to Columbo again, we know that he’s got a life, and a pretty good one by all estimates. From his various charming quirks and anecdotes we know that he’s got a dog he never names, a loving wife and a massive nebulous extended family he’s on good terms with - but, for instance, we never learn his first name, and it's a running gag that his wife never appears onscreen. He has a life outside of work that we catch blurry glimpses of, but it never matters to the story, so glimpses are all we get. You know, it’s funny, when I, uh, originally sat down to write this script I was trying to focus entirely on detectives and not go off on mysteries too much. But it wasn’t until I was halfway through that I realized you really can’t separate them. The detective is fundamental to the mystery and the mystery is fundamental to the detective - even if the audience perspective changes, that mutual structure stays constant. The nature of the detective is to engage with the mystery; they can have basically any character outside of that, but how they engage with the mystery is really what defines them as a detective. So… yeah. And thanks again to Campfire Blaze for sponsoring this video! As you may know, Campfire Blaze is a browser-based tool suite designed to help writers write and worldbuild their stories. 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