1. The
reader must have equal opportunity with the hero/heroine for solving the
mystery. There must be clues, and all clues must be available to the
reader.
2. There
must be a corpse, the earlier the better, and the reader should care about
the victim, unless the hero/heroine is the prime suspect for the murder, so
that the death puts the hero/heroine in jeopardy. Or, perhaps the dead
person is important to the hero/heroine in some other way; or the
hero/heroine has important reasons for investigating the death of the
victim. In this case the reader will care about the victim for the
hero/heroine’s sake, rather than for the victim’s sake.
3. The
guilty person must have a prominent part in the story.
4. The
criminal must be caught through the deductions/actions of the hero/heroine,
not by accident or coincidence; and those deductions must be logical and
sensible, not absurd, or magical/supernatural.
5. There
should be multiple possible suspects, and clues that can have more than one
interpretation. Ideally, there is an obvious suspect to whom circumstantial
evidence points, but who is not guilty.
6. Accuracy
is essential, especially in details.
Some celebrated books, described or designated
as mysteries by the critics – even put on lists of “best mysteries” compiled by various
authorities—ignore those rules. For example, in Iain Pear’s The Raphael
Affair, no crime is committed until page 100 (of a 226-page book), and
the reader first learns that a murder has occurred on page 134. The reader
meets the victim on page 96, and has very little contact with him
thereafter. In short, the reader doesn’t know or care about the victim.
That’s two big rules broken, and in my view, The Raphael Affair is
not a successful mystery. (Page numbers refer to the Berkley Crime
paperback edition, 1998.)
Consider Sarah
Caudwell’s Thus Was Adonis Murdered, 1981, about which a reader
commented, “the clues, such as they are, lead nowhere,” and, “could the
guilty person at least be a suspect?” (In fact, the identity of the
murderer and the solution to the crime apparently occur by magic.) Thus
Was Adonis Murdered has some interesting elements, but it is not a
successful mystery. (Thus was Adonis Murdered sometimes appears on
“art mystery” lists, although it has almost nothing to do with art. I
sometimes wonder if those who compile the lists of various kinds of
mysteries read the books, or just pull them out of the air.)
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