Hildegarde

When I write mysteries, I often also read mysteries.  And I tend to read older mysteries, at least as much because it’s hard to find the kind of mystery I like being published today. 

We are in an era of “thrillers,” and thrillers don’t thrill me very much.

But we are also in an era of escalation, if that’s the word for it. 

There are so many mysteries being published by so many different people in such a very few subgenres, that each of the subgenres seems to me to be in a state of constant one-upsmanship. 

I have no idea if the grammar of that sentence makes any sense.

But you know what I mean.  Each author feels the need to go one better than the last author, especially the last best seller author.   Each serial killer novel is gorier and more outrageous than the last.  Each police procedural has a more convoluted set of body wounds or a more complex set of twists that rely on the idea that the police aren’t necessarily angels.

This kind of thing causes problems in any subgenre it occurs in.  After awhile, readers like me tend to get innured to the blood and gore and yet another sexual aspect and to feel more bored than shocked or entranced.

But in the particular subgenre in which I work–the fair play mystery–there’s another problem, and it’s a big one.

If you’re going to start out your mystery with a corpse found in a spectular situation–dressed like a bat and hanging upside down from its knees from the lintel of his wife’s front door, say–you’d damn well better have an explanation that is just as spectacular.

Okay, I’ll admit it.

I like that bat thing.

But I’m never going to use it, because there are only two ways in which I could explain it that would be in any sense plausible.

The first is that there is something about the commission of the crime that REQUIRES the perpetrator to resort to such a thing.

And by requires, I don’t mean “was made at the victim and this was his way of getting revenge on the victim by making the victim look ridiculous.”

That’s the kind of explanation we get for most of these things, and it’s beyond lame.

I know a lot of you here don’t think it’s necessary to stick to what could happen in the real world when you’re writing a story, but a situation like the one I’ve outlined above, coupled with the kind of explanation I’ve outlined above is beyond being implausible.  It’s just plain silly.

Murderers do not dress their victims up as bats and hang them from lintels for the very good reason that doing so naturally increases the chance that they’ll be caught. 

That kind of thing takes a lot of time, and it provides many more opportunities for the murderer to leave physical evidence, like fingerprints and clothes fibers. 

The closest thing I ever saw to a decent explanation for a situation like this came in a Murder, She Wrote episode, where the corpse was dressed in a costume from a costume party in order to make people believe, when seeing it, that it was really somebody else.

The plot did  not require that anybody buy the mistaken identity for very long, and the reason for the switch was in fact necessary to the murderer getting away with it, but it was still iffy.

In most cases, the explanation isn’t nearly as well thought out, and what we’re left with amounts to “the murderer went through all this extra trouble because the victim locked him in a room with a bat when they were both five.”

The other possible explanation is that the murderer wasn’t able to avoid leaving the corpse in such an outrageous position–that the living person was actually in that position at the time he was killed, or that something about the disposal of the body or the killer’s need to get away left him no other choice but to do this thing.

The obvious problem with this, of course, is that there are very few circumstances in which this sort of thing would be the case.  How plausible is it (there’s that word again) that the ONLY time the killer could have to murder the victim is in the middle of a costume party while the victim is hanging from a lintel in a bat costume? 

In the actual world of murder mysteries, and especially of cozies or quasi-cozies–we get a lot of situations like this in which the reason for the victim wearing the bat costume is plausible enough (costume party, Halloween), but where we are then told that the murderer deliberately posed the body over the lintel.

Worse, we eventually come to find out that by doing this, the murderer was “sending a message” he expected at least some other people to be able to read.

Apparently, the murderer does not care that sending messages of this kind will almost certainly make it much easier for the police to figure out who did it.

This is, I think, a large part of what I don’t like about the core of the “cozie” subgenre.  I’m not a big fan of cute in any case, but I don’t mind the outlying regions of “cozy” which are not so much “cozy” as they are just sort of straightforward middle of the road detective stories.

But the artificialness of this kind of situation makes me wild.

And that goes back to why I end up reading old mysteries.

Before the escalation started, there were a fair number of books written that did the outrageious-circumstance thing fairly well, and did it both plausibly and without resorting to lots of silly not-really-within-the-realm-of-believability explanations.

Of course, there were also a lot of books that did just the kind of awful thing I’m talking about–but they’re now out of print.

This morning, I’m reading Erle Stanley Gardener’s Perry Mason mystery The Case of the Half-Wakened Wife.

He’s very good at the kind of thing I’m talking about.

And he’s a genius–because only a genius could have named a continuing character Ham Burger, and gotten away with it for 40 years.