This week: Mystery or Suspense Edited by: Max Griffin 🏳️🌈  
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There's a great confusion between the words "mystery" and "suspense." The two things are absolutely miles apart. Mystery is an intellectual process, like in a whodunit. But suspense is essentially an emotional process.
---Alfred Hitchcock
I love whodunits, and I love Hitchcock's films. In the same interview where he makes the above distinction, Hitchcock also describes film devoted to "mystery" as "wasted celluloid." That got me thinking about the difference between "puzzle" mysteries such as those by Ellery Queen or Agatha Christie, and more gritty noir examples of the genre, such as those by Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett. You'll find both sorts in the "mysteries" section in the book store, but they are almost different genres.
Maybe Hitchcock was right. Maybe mystery and suspense are miles apart. See below for my thoughts. |
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Like many people, I love mysteries.
My fascination dates back to childhood, when I read the Perry Mason mysteries my father checked out from the public library, but it continues today. What is that makes mysteries so appealing?
I think the Hitchcock quote above gives a partial answer. I like mysteries, but I'm a mathematician.
I'm all about solving puzzles. In whodunits, there's a crime and a detective. The detective collects a pile of evidence. By the end of the story, the evidence fits together in one and only one way to reveal the criminal. It's an exercise in inductive reasoning, where the detective uses the evidence to construct a theory of the crime. This kind of reasoning resonates with mathematicians, for whom induction is a powerful tool in proving theorems.
So, one of the appealing things about mysteries is solving the puzzle. The reader learns information along with the detective, and it's a race to see who can solve the crime first. Usually, the detective wins, but in a well-written whodunit, the readers will slap their foreheads and say, "Of course! I should have seen that coming."
But Hitchcock is right: solving the puzzle is an intellectual process. In the same interview, Hitchcock claims he never directed a "mystery." Really? You could have fooled me. The Man Who Knew Too Much is surely a mystery. So is Rear Window, or Rebecca, to name two more examples. His point, though, is that the puzzle isn't the heart of the movie. Instead, suspense is the heart of the movie. The energy that drives the plot doesn't come from the clues or even the crime, it comes from elsewhere. It comes from the characters,.
Characters have goals, something they need. Bad things happen if they don't achieve their goals. Those are the stakes. Characters face obstacles in striving for their goals. Tension comes from the conflict between goals and obstacles. The conflict matters because of the stakes. Authors ramp up tension by refining goals or by increasing obstacles and stakes. Tension--suspense, if you will--is the engine that drives the plot and keeps the pages turning.
Hitchcock also observed that the audience cares about the characters. The plot, he continued, is there to give the characters something to care about.
So, what about classic detective novels? Dashiell Hammett said, "What I try to do is write a story about a detective rather than a detective story." If you think about, say, The Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade has a personal stake in solving the murder of his partner. Raymond Chandler's fourth commandment is that a mystery novel "...must have a sound story value apart from the mystery element: i.e., the investigation itself must be an adventure worth reading.
Chandler reviled classic "cozy mysteries" such as those of Agatha Christie. But the detectives in her mysteries have a stake in solving the crime: their reputations rely on it. My all-time favorite TV detective show, Columbo also concentrates on the characters and not the puzzle. In fact, the viewer almost always sees the crime being committed in act one, so there is no mystery about whodunit. The tension comes from the battle of wits between the Everyman, Columbo, and his wealthy, elite suspects. It comes from the characters whose goals are in opposition. Columbo himself is a metaphor for the proverbial Common Man, which makes the stakes high for the viewers, who identify with his rumpled, self-effacing demeanor.
Dashiell Hammett again gives insight to successful mysteries. "Keeping the reader fooled until the last, possible moment is a good trick and I usually try to play it, but I can't attach more than secondary importance to it. The puzzle isn't so interesting to me as the behavior of the detective attacking it."
I'd have to say Hitchcock was right. Solving the puzzle is an interesting intellectual process. But readers care about the solution to the puzzle because they care about the characters. Whether it's Mrs. Marple, or Columbo, or Sam Spade, or the criminal himself, it's the passions of the characters that matter. Goals, stakes, and obstacles are the engine that propel the plot. The puzzle is an interesting device, but it's the characters that keep us riveted to the story.
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Mystery: January 02, 2019 Issue [#9269]
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