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.
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