One of the
pleasant surprises I’ve experienced since my second mystery novel, Wash Her Guilt Away, went live several
weeks ago has been the response to the mystery itself. Several people have
commented that they found the puzzle puzzling and the solution and explanation
of it interesting and entertaining.
Seventy
five years ago, the puzzle or mystery was why people read mystery novels. Some
authors (early Ellery Queen comes to mind) would even issue a challenge to the
reader at the point where the detective was about to unmask the killer and
explain the crime. The challenge was, essentially, you know everything the
detective knows; all the clues have been laid before you fairly and openly; can
you deduce who the killer was and how the crime was committed?
There’s a
certain pleasure to be had from this sort of matching wits with the
detective/author, but the genre has largely gotten away from that sort of
story. Instead, we tend to have police procedurals, where we follow the cops as
they collect one piece of information after another until the picture comes
into play, or we have books where the killer is known and the suspense is in
catching him or her.
Doing It Backwards
In my book,
the puzzle is a locked-room mystery, an old chestnut that goes back nearly a
century and a half. For all that, modern practitioners have still tried their
hands at it. I’m thinking of Peter Lovesey in The Circle and Sjowall and Wahloo in The Locked Room. And why not? It’s a nifty gimmick.
I
originally conceived my book, years ago, as a social-tension mystery, where a
group of people are cooped up in a remote place and things start getting a bit
chippy. Somewhere along the way, it occurred to me that having the murder occur
in a locked-room setting would be a nice touch, so I worked that into the
outline and used it as a selling point in the book description I put up on
Amazon.
That sort
of device is fun, but there are two things that have to be understood. The
first is that there is no mystery involved for the author. He essentially does
the story backwards, figuring out how to create the locked-room situation, then
writing it in such a way as to misdirect the reader and sow confusion. The
second is that the solution is always a bit disappointing, since it has to be more
prosaic than the situation as presented.
Underestimating the Mystery
Perhaps
because I approached the locked-room mystery in the way described, I wasn’t all
that impressed by my own creation. In fact, I went through moments of angst in
which I was telling myself the solution was so obvious as to be cringe-worthy
and subject to ridicule by readers.
I was
emboldened, however, by the fact that neither my wife nor my editor figured it
out, which was an indication that I had pulled off the literary shell game with
at least some degree of competence. And, after all, it was a good tease for the
book, so I went ahead with it, and that’s looking as if it was the right
decision.
In the
handful of reviews now up on Kindle, most comment on the quality of the puzzle
as being something the reader liked in the book, and I’ve received several
comments from people who said they were baffled until the mystery was explained
by the detective at the end. I suppose it goes to show that the old pleasures
never die; they’re simply reinvented over and over.
