WEBVTT 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 00:00:04.590 --> 00:00:08.090 by Campfire Blaze! 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 00:00:12.299 --> 00:00:15.579 from overthinking them. I think it’s just a side effect of the critical analysis stuff 00:00:15.579 --> 00:00:19.580 plus approaching art and media from my weird pseudo-professional angle - I usually can’t 00:00:19.580 --> 00:00:21.440 really engage with a story without trying to pick 00:00:21.440 --> 00:00:23.660 it apart and see how it works. You know, like, 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 00:00:26.730 --> 00:00:28.380 doing and judge the plot from there, stuff like that. 00:00:28.380 --> 00:00:32.379 The one genre that breaks this rule for me, funnily enough, is mysteries. The one story 00:00:32.379 --> 00:00:36.219 format the audience is supposed to critically engage with - I don’t. More accurately I 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 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 00:00:43.469 --> 00:00:47.570 suspects straight anyway. But honestly, even the really well-written mysteries that differentiate 00:00:47.570 --> 00:00:51.200 the characters and give the audience enough clues to theoretically crack the case don’t 00:00:51.200 --> 00:00:53.170 grab me - I have a higher success rate just guessing 00:00:53.170 --> 00:00:54.750 from the tropes. Like if it’s an Agatha 00:00:54.750 --> 00:00:56.359 Christie number, even odds the killer’s gonna be 00:00:56.359 --> 00:00:58.250 the most eligible bachelor in the cast. I’ll 00:00:58.250 --> 00:01:01.980 still read ‘em and enjoy ‘em, but most of the time the ending will totally blindside 00:01:01.980 --> 00:01:04.510 me. I’m not good at putting the pieces together for myself. 00:01:04.510 --> 00:01:08.480 Which is why I love and appreciate the character archetype central and foundational to the 00:01:08.480 --> 00:01:12.540 mystery format - the detective. The one character tasked with putting all the pieces together 00:01:12.540 --> 00:01:16.160 and revealing to the audience what the actual plot is. Without the detective, people like 00:01:16.160 --> 00:01:20.160 me - the watsons of the world - wouldn’t get anything out of mystery stories. 00:01:20.160 --> 00:01:22.490 Now detectives aren’t exclusively found in mystery 00:01:22.490 --> 00:01:24.170 stories, but they are pretty inextricably 00:01:24.170 --> 00:01:27.970 linked with the genre. Detectives investigate situations and solve puzzles - mysteries are 00:01:27.970 --> 00:01:31.450 centered on the process of solving that puzzle, but mysteries and mystery-adjacent plots are 00:01:31.450 --> 00:01:35.030 present in stories of all stripes, which means the detective archetype can be organically 00:01:35.030 --> 00:01:38.640 integrated into almost any genre and narrative structure. If there’s a puzzle of any kind 00:01:38.640 --> 00:01:40.990 happening in the plot, you can have a detective in the plot too. 00:01:40.990 --> 00:01:44.970 Now “detective” is a job and a narrative role, not a character type, so theoretically 00:01:44.970 --> 00:01:48.280 any character archetype can fill the role of a detective - but there are some majorly 00:01:48.280 --> 00:01:51.930 popular subtypes that are essentially stock characters. The “Hard-Boiled Noir 00:01:51.930 --> 00:01:53.680 Detective” type is typically a tortured 00:01:53.680 --> 00:01:57.500 alcoholic or general addict with a constantly running inner monologue, a jaded and world-weary 00:01:57.500 --> 00:02:01.100 perspective on life and a disproportionate number of morally questionable dames slinking 00:02:01.100 --> 00:02:03.980 into their office for shenanigans - which is funny, because while this archetype is 00:02:03.980 --> 00:02:08.040 very well-known, classic noir detectives have almost nothing in common with the tropes they 00:02:08.040 --> 00:02:12.219 spawned. Sam Spade, the detective in the Maltese Falcon, the most iconic noir ever - has almost 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 00:02:16.189 --> 00:02:17.189 his 00:02:17.189 --> 00:02:19.930 partner with much more than mild frustration. The Hardboiled Noir Detective archetype has 00:02:19.930 --> 00:02:24.370 more in common with Dick Tracy than any proper noir protagonist. Then there’s the Gentleman 00:02:24.370 --> 00:02:27.610 Detective, almost the polar opposite of the Hardboiled Detective, a classy and frequently 00:02:27.610 --> 00:02:31.599 aristocratic adventurer type, unilaterally well-educated and almost always British, frequently 00:02:31.599 --> 00:02:35.380 butting heads with a bumbling police department coincidentally full of lower-class people. 00:02:35.380 --> 00:02:38.560 Sherlock Holmes, the most popular detective ever written, kinda spawned off a whole set 00:02:38.560 --> 00:02:42.870 of Sherlockalikes - all eccentric, brilliant, usually mostly focused on a forensic investigative 00:02:42.870 --> 00:02:46.930 approach, and generally accompanied by a long-suffering guy friend who narrates the actual adventures. 00:02:46.930 --> 00:02:49.329 That third-person narration angle isn’t a Holmes exclusive 00:02:49.329 --> 00:02:51.349 - in fact, it’s one of only a few ways to 00:02:51.349 --> 00:02:54.549 present a mystery to an audience. See, the problem with a mystery is the audience 00:02:54.549 --> 00:02:56.349 isn’t really allowed to know everything that’s 00:02:56.349 --> 00:02:57.901 happening in the plot until the end. There 00:02:57.901 --> 00:03:01.159 always has to be something hidden for the reveal. This means the audience can’t have 00:03:01.159 --> 00:03:05.349 a third-person omniscient perspective but they also usually can’t have a full first-person 00:03:05.349 --> 00:03:08.590 perspective on the detective, because almost all mysteries have a denouement at the end 00:03:08.590 --> 00:03:12.150 where the big twist is revealed and everything falls into place. This denouement starts when 00:03:12.150 --> 00:03:15.909 the detective reveals what’s going on, not when the detective figures out what’s going 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 00:03:19.811 --> 00:03:22.060 stories will kinda fudge this by giving us the 00:03:22.060 --> 00:03:23.329 detective’s perspective and having them 00:03:23.329 --> 00:03:26.569 think stuff like “of course! that must be it! everything makes sense now!” and then 00:03:26.569 --> 00:03:29.300 reveal the actual information they figured out during the denouement 00:03:29.300 --> 00:03:31.079 proper. Failing that, most detective stories 00:03:31.079 --> 00:03:34.959 will take a third person perspective, either from a less-than-omniscient vague third-person 00:03:34.959 --> 00:03:38.140 narrator or from the perspective of another character who isn’t the detective and serves 00:03:38.140 --> 00:03:40.849 as an audience surrogate. This isn’t a hard-and-fast rule, though. 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 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 00:03:47.370 --> 00:03:51.360 show the audience almost everything. This is pretty rare, and it’s arguable that stories 00:03:51.360 --> 00:03:55.200 of this type aren’t exactly mysteries at all. Probably the most iconic example of this 00:03:55.200 --> 00:03:56.200 format is Columbo, 00:03:56.200 --> 00:04:00.269 a very popular detective show from the 70s where every episode begins with a full, comprehensive 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 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 00:04:08.319 --> 00:04:12.060 Columbo going to catch them. In true mystery form the episodes all have an ending reveal 00:04:12.060 --> 00:04:16.220 of various kinds, but they’re usually revealing something Columbo did or discovered offscreen 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 00:04:20.140 --> 00:04:23.790 in stories where the detective character is technically the antagonist and the protagonist 00:04:23.790 --> 00:04:26.760 whose POV we’re following is the actual criminal they’re trying to catch - these 00:04:26.760 --> 00:04:28.730 stories will often turn into battles of wits where 00:04:28.730 --> 00:04:30.361 the audience has more knowledge than any of 00:04:30.361 --> 00:04:33.640 the individual characters. Even some Sherlock Holmes stories technically fall into this 00:04:33.640 --> 00:04:37.161 category - there’s no mystery in A Scandal In Bohemia, the surprise reveal at the end 00:04:37.161 --> 00:04:41.230 is that Irene Adler fully saw through Sherlock Holmes’s sneaky disguise and totally outmaneuvered 00:04:41.230 --> 00:04:43.950 him to leave the country with her new husband and the photo he wanted. 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 00:04:47.870 --> 00:04:51.080 information. We typically don’t know who did it and we don’t necessarily know the 00:04:51.080 --> 00:04:54.000 motive - so in order to keep those vague during the investigative process, 00:04:54.000 --> 00:04:55.580 the suspect’s character backstories will 00:04:55.580 --> 00:04:59.540 usually be somewhat muddled or obscured, since otherwise it’d be too easy to eliminate 00:04:59.540 --> 00:05:00.850 people and narrow it down. 00:05:00.850 --> 00:05:04.150 These mysteries will usually give us something of the method - like if someone was poisoned, 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 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 00:05:12.010 --> 00:05:15.290 element of their backstory or characterization that the detective has worked out without 00:05:15.290 --> 00:05:18.640 the audience’s knowledge. In these stories, the detective character is usually digging 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 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 00:05:25.980 --> 00:05:29.370 detective and their personality. But before we get into that, I wanna touch 00:05:29.370 --> 00:05:30.370 on 00:05:30.370 --> 00:05:32.260 the last category - because some mysteries give the 00:05:32.260 --> 00:05:34.281 audience very little information. And this 00:05:34.281 --> 00:05:39.010 is… usually bad. Like, actually bad writing, and I don’t say that lightly. Hiding too 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 00:05:42.370 --> 00:05:46.090 the author. If the audience couldn’t reasonably guess the solution from the information given, 00:05:46.090 --> 00:05:50.160 it’s a violation of mystery convention. For instance, if the killer is a hitherto-unmentioned 00:05:50.160 --> 00:05:53.360 character who just happened to be in the area, that’s completely plausible and it might 00:05:53.360 --> 00:05:54.360 even make more sense 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 00:05:57.570 --> 00:05:59.090 to a mystery that’s supposed to be fair 00:05:59.090 --> 00:06:02.990 to the audience. All these things serve to undercut the integrity of the mystery 00:06:02.990 --> 00:06:03.990 plot. 00:06:03.990 --> 00:06:07.790 These stories feel worse for the audience to engage with. They also sometimes don’t 00:06:07.790 --> 00:06:10.950 make much sense in hindsight, since without enough information in the story to piece it 00:06:10.950 --> 00:06:15.370 together, it might not actually hold together. Writing a mystery is hard - you usually have 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 00:06:18.640 --> 00:06:22.140 through what clues and hints that crime would leave, rather than starting from the mystery 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 00:06:25.370 --> 00:06:26.370 without 00:06:26.370 --> 00:06:28.180 actually knowing the solution beforehand, the story’s 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 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, 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 00:06:38.610 --> 00:06:40.530 because they don't have enough information. This brushes 00:06:40.530 --> 00:06:43.680 up against the same problem I talked about in the plot twists video - twists for the 00:06:43.680 --> 00:06:47.620 sake of shocking and surprising your audience are good if you, the writer, like feeling 00:06:47.620 --> 00:06:51.060 smart, but bad if you, the writer, want your audience to actually critically engage with 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 00:06:54.790 --> 00:06:55.790 know 00:06:55.790 --> 00:06:58.630 more than the author, at the bare minimum, the author needs to know the solution before 00:06:58.630 --> 00:07:02.740 they start constructing the clues what audience gets. And ideally they also need to give the 00:07:02.740 --> 00:07:07.300 audience enough clues that they could theoretically extrapolate the actual solution in kind of 00:07:07.300 --> 00:07:09.590 the same way the detective is theoretically supposed to. 00:07:09.590 --> 00:07:11.640 In the ideal mystery format, the audience is only 00:07:11.640 --> 00:07:12.640 missing 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 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 00:07:20.090 --> 00:07:23.470 to write a mystery where the crime leaves almost no clues and the detective figures 00:07:23.470 --> 00:07:27.140 out the solution by……… knowing what the author needs them to know and being right 00:07:27.140 --> 00:07:29.110 because the author said they were. That way there’s 00:07:29.110 --> 00:07:30.460 no chance of the audience figuring it out 00:07:30.460 --> 00:07:34.790 before your detective does and thus undercutting your detective's incredible super geniusness. 00:07:34.790 --> 00:07:36.930 For instance, while Original Sherlock Holmes definitely 00:07:36.930 --> 00:07:40.930 had some pretty outrageous deductive leaps, extrapolating whole character backstories 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 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 00:07:49.220 --> 00:07:52.871 little background mystery because the closest thing the main plot of that episode has to 00:07:52.871 --> 00:07:58.260 a mystery is what is Irene Adler’s Phone Password, which isn’t… you know… interesting. 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, 00:08:00.890 --> 00:08:04.400 and that’s the kind of basic-ass romantic subplot nonsense the audience could see coming 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 00:08:07.820 --> 00:08:10.070 the audience" itch. But the mystery sideplot centers 00:08:10.070 --> 00:08:12.010 on the unexplained death of a tourist by blunt 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 00:08:15.200 --> 00:08:18.420 in the middle of an empty field. Sherlock brushes this off immediately, claiming that 00:08:18.420 --> 00:08:21.060 he’s figured out the answer just from the position of a car that backfired relative 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 00:08:23.991 --> 00:08:26.660 the head. This is the last we really hear of it for a while until Adler 00:08:26.660 --> 00:08:30.400 reveals to Sherlock that she has also solved it, and explains that the tourist was killed 00:08:30.400 --> 00:08:34.939 accidentally by his own boomerang. Does this make sense from the information given? K-uh… 00:08:34.939 --> 00:08:35.939 …kinda. 00:08:35.939 --> 00:08:39.789 It theoretically fits the lack of any killer or murder weapon, since the boomerang flew 00:08:39.789 --> 00:08:43.310 merrily away after clocking the dude, although it is a little questionable if the boomerang 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 00:08:47.060 --> 00:08:49.630 landed in the nearby creek, but that's okay. Is that 00:08:49.630 --> 00:08:51.300 something the audience could’ve been expected 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” 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 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 00:09:03.360 --> 00:09:05.740 small meteor. What were the odds? I dunno! 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 00:09:09.339 --> 00:09:10.389 to think about it. 00:09:10.389 --> 00:09:13.699 When a mystery gives the audience too much information, there’s not much of a mystery, 00:09:13.699 --> 00:09:16.350 since there’s nothing to figure out - but if a mystery gives the audience too little 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 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 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 00:09:26.340 --> 00:09:30.160 just a few edge pieces or the monochrome sky background, because that’s not interesting 00:09:30.160 --> 00:09:33.880 for the audience to engage with. At its worst it actively discourages the audience from 00:09:33.880 --> 00:09:36.950 trying to solve the mystery. It’s a tricky balance to strike. 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 00:09:40.779 --> 00:09:44.500 of unraveling the mystery, or, more broadly, revealing the plot, the detective is, in some 00:09:44.500 --> 00:09:48.020 ways, the center of the mystery and the narrative overall. And how they navigate that mystery 00:09:48.020 --> 00:09:51.759 depends a lot on their individual character. The first place we tend to look to understand 00:09:51.759 --> 00:09:53.199 a character is their character 00:09:53.199 --> 00:09:56.680 motive. Most characters have a clear reason for doing what they do - but that’s not 00:09:56.680 --> 00:10:00.162 always true for detectives. While some are motivated by a general goodness or a sense 00:10:00.162 --> 00:10:04.500 of duty or a general intellectual curiosity, some detectives have next to no personal investment 00:10:04.500 --> 00:10:07.670 in solving crimes or mysteries - it’s just their job. The more jaded ones might even 00:10:07.670 --> 00:10:08.670 complain 00:10:08.670 --> 00:10:11.639 about it. Ironically, for a detective, motive is one of the least important facets of their 00:10:11.639 --> 00:10:13.990 character. Instead, there are three important aspects 00:10:13.990 --> 00:10:17.339 of the detective’s character, and they mirror the narrative structure of the mystery. First, 00:10:17.339 --> 00:10:20.699 there’s their investigative method. How a detective gathers clues and information 00:10:20.699 --> 00:10:24.911 depends almost entirely on their character, personality and skillset. For instance, Sherlock 00:10:24.911 --> 00:10:28.519 Holmes takes a forensic focus, observing and gathering trace physical evidence to paint 00:10:28.519 --> 00:10:31.879 a picture of the crime. Then he often does more on-the-scene investigating, frequently 00:10:31.879 --> 00:10:35.499 in increasingly ridiculous disguises to gather information without putting people on-edge. 00:10:35.499 --> 00:10:39.390 In contrast, we get detective characters like Miss Marple, who’s a purposeful trope subversion 00:10:39.390 --> 00:10:43.350 - she looks like a totally different stock character, a pleasant but slightly vague gossipy 00:10:43.350 --> 00:10:47.329 old lady who also happens to have an encyclopedic understanding of the human psyche, and solves 00:10:47.329 --> 00:10:50.589 the crimes she investigates through nothing but psychological profiling and her general 00:10:50.589 --> 00:10:54.370 understanding of how people work, relying on other people to do the actual clue-gathering 00:10:54.370 --> 00:10:58.249 legwork. In a similar vein, Agatha Christie’s other detective hero, Hercule Poirot, also 00:10:58.249 --> 00:11:02.880 focuses more on the psychological angle, though he does more in-person investigating and clue-gathering. 00:11:02.880 --> 00:11:06.839 Instead of broad psychological profiles, Poirot focuses more on understanding the motive behind 00:11:06.839 --> 00:11:10.579 the crime and deducing the criminal from there. Columbo is another deliberate subversion - he’s 00:11:10.579 --> 00:11:14.690 a proper police detective, but he comes across as a befuddled and disorganized dude, dresses 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 00:11:18.330 --> 00:11:19.330 tends to do 00:11:19.330 --> 00:11:21.850 a first pass spotting physical evidence the forensic guys don’t always catch cuz 00:11:21.850 --> 00:11:23.350 they don't realize what they're looking for, but 00:11:23.350 --> 00:11:26.650 the bulk of his investigative method relies on interviewing slash pestering the killer 00:11:26.650 --> 00:11:29.839 about the problems he’s noticed in their story in such a good-natured and innocent 00:11:29.839 --> 00:11:31.459 way that they get so rattled they end up 00:11:31.459 --> 00:11:35.660 incidentally revealing the truth. Other detectives have other methods - the grittier, more hard-boiled 00:11:35.660 --> 00:11:39.120 ones will sometimes threaten or even torture people for information, the more gentlemanly 00:11:39.120 --> 00:11:42.319 ones usually rely on their book-learning and scientific knowledge to piece things together, 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 00:11:46.319 --> 00:11:49.209 or another, this is the side of the detective that usually reveals the most about their 00:11:49.209 --> 00:11:51.871 fundamental character. The second aspect of the detective’s character 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 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 00:11:59.579 --> 00:12:02.800 the detective figures out what exactly has been going on, and if the audience gets too 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 00:12:06.279 --> 00:12:09.681 largely invisible, it’s still a fundamental facet of the detective’s character. Maybe 00:12:09.681 --> 00:12:13.209 they put things together in sudden bursts of clarity and inspiration and run off without 00:12:13.209 --> 00:12:16.550 explaining anything first, maybe they take careful and methodical notes and collect the 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 00:12:19.689 --> 00:12:23.170 angle. If the audience has a more omniscient perspective and already knows what the detective 00:12:23.170 --> 00:12:26.399 has to figure out, we’ll sometimes see the detective putting the pieces together mostly 00:12:26.399 --> 00:12:30.300 for the audience’s benefit - spotting a clue we’ve already seen, noticing a discrepancy 00:12:30.300 --> 00:12:33.839 we’ve already realized doesn’t work, looking befuddled for a moment before silently realizing 00:12:33.839 --> 00:12:37.730 something, or (in contrast) calmly and immediately figuring out the information the criminal 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 00:12:41.430 --> 00:12:42.430 audience, know 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 00:12:45.339 --> 00:12:47.800 character. And finally, the third aspect of the detective’s 00:12:47.800 --> 00:12:50.959 character is how they handle the big reveal. When they finally put the pieces together 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 00:12:54.079 --> 00:12:57.880 the detective handles that says a lot about them. Some are very flamboyant and bombastic, 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 00:13:01.000 --> 00:13:04.209 not-so-secret criminal in the throes of a third-act breakdown. Some are the complete 00:13:04.209 --> 00:13:08.029 opposite, entirely subdued and maybe even sad at the whole tragic picture. Some might 00:13:08.029 --> 00:13:11.490 be businesslike or methodical, with only the barest hint of an emotional response peeking 00:13:11.490 --> 00:13:15.040 through. Sometimes there’s no triumph and no victory - this is more common with the 00:13:15.040 --> 00:13:18.879 hardboiled detectives, who tend to be broadly pretty jaded and depressing even on their 00:13:18.879 --> 00:13:21.940 best day, but you can also get this with the more emotionally sensitive detectives when 00:13:21.940 --> 00:13:25.680 a particularly depressing case rolls around - like if the criminal was a victim of circumstance 00:13:25.680 --> 00:13:29.411 or a lovable innocent bystander got hurt or the situation is generally kinda fucked. Some 00:13:29.411 --> 00:13:33.370 detectives will, in rare circumstances, actually let the criminal off the hook, which can say 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 00:13:36.500 --> 00:13:39.339 circumstances. But that said, the greatest asset of the detective 00:13:39.339 --> 00:13:42.389 character is also their greatest narrative weakness - they’re inextricable from the 00:13:42.389 --> 00:13:46.809 context of the mystery narrative. Some detectives do have rich, personal lives on the side - for 00:13:46.809 --> 00:13:50.350 instance, Dorothy L. Sayers’s detective character Lord Peter Wimsey has a rich inner 00:13:50.350 --> 00:13:54.550 life and eventually makes the slow shift from Gentleman Playboy Detective to Love Interest 00:13:54.550 --> 00:13:58.309 For The Author Self-Insert - it’s really good, I promise, it's just so funny 00:13:58.309 --> 00:13:59.309 to me that 00:13:59.309 --> 00:14:02.410 that’s very obviously what happened. But most detectives are kind of nonentities outside 00:14:02.410 --> 00:14:06.269 the context of the case. Sherlock Holmes is ferociously bored whenever he’s not on a 00:14:06.269 --> 00:14:10.389 case and frequently self-medicates with technically legal drugs, and that’s almost become narrative 00:14:10.389 --> 00:14:13.569 tradition with the grittier detectives, who will often be addicts struggling with current 00:14:13.569 --> 00:14:17.379 or former dependencies with very depressing non-lives outside of work. Sherlock Holmes 00:14:17.379 --> 00:14:19.679 and his various Holmesalikes also usually have next to no 00:14:19.679 --> 00:14:23.059 social life or friends, and they’re often framed as being consumed by their work and 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 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 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 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 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 00:14:40.309 --> 00:14:41.309 got 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 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 00:14:47.970 --> 00:14:52.019 family he’s on good terms with - but, for instance, we never learn his first 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 00:14:56.190 --> 00:14:58.610 of work that we catch blurry glimpses of, but it never matters 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 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 00:15:06.430 --> 00:15:09.290 off on mysteries too much. But it wasn’t until I was halfway through 00:15:09.290 --> 00:15:10.290 that 00:15:10.290 --> 00:15:13.449 I realized you really can’t separate them. The detective is fundamental to the mystery 00:15:13.449 --> 00:15:17.160 and the mystery is fundamental to the detective - even if the audience perspective changes, 00:15:17.160 --> 00:15:20.529 that mutual structure stays constant. The nature of the detective is to engage with 00:15:20.529 --> 00:15:24.490 the mystery; they can have basically any character outside of that, but how they engage with 00:15:24.490 --> 00:15:26.949 the mystery is really what defines them as a detective. 00:15:26.949 --> 00:15:27.949 So… yeah. 00:15:27.949 --> 00:15:30.699 And thanks again to Campfire Blaze for sponsoring this video! 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 00:15:34.089 --> 00:15:37.629 and worldbuild their stories. 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