The tropes of the murder mystery genre are familiar and widely parodied.
My personal favorite is the remote island location: barren and desolate, bordered by a wild blue sea, too sparse to have any hiding places and too far from the mainland to swim to, with a single, unimposing house. The perfect place for a murder.
My debut novel, The Eighth Detective, is a book all about murder mysteries and their tropes. It centers around a reclusive author, Grant McAllister, and a quick-witted young editor, Julia Hart, who meets with him to discuss reprinting some of his old stories, which have been unavailable for nearly thirty years. While Julia works hard to decode their secrets, which may or may not lead back to a murder, several of Grant’s short stories are reproduced in the novel in full.
I wanted those stories, ostensibly written in the nineteen thirties, to have all the hallmarks of the ‘Golden Age’ of detective fiction, that period between the wars that gave us Agatha Christie and her peers, as well as the ingredients that we today associate with the classic murder mystery.
So I sprinkled them liberally with tropes. Remote locations; country houses; characters distinguished only by their eccentricities; families ruled over by grumbling figureheads; bodies discovered in toilets, attics, and beds that don’t belong to them; poisoned drinks and disappearing weapons. But it wasn’t until I came to write them that I started to consider how these things became tropes in the first place, or why so many authors returned to them so often. What struck me was how useful they all are from the point of view of plotting. Each one offers a shortcut through pages and pages of narrative convolutions.
Take the remote location, for example. It may be atmospheric, but what’s more important is the use it has to the story. Our murder mystery needs to present the reader with a limited list of suspects, along with the promise that one of them will later be exposed as a murderer. We need to assure the reader that the crime couldn’t have been committed by a passing stranger. But there’s no need to tie ourselves in knots trying to justify this confected situation, when geography compels it. That’s the beauty of the remote location, bucolic or otherwise. The trope acts as a narrative shortcut.
This is taken to an extreme with the island setting, described above. It was used most famously and memorably in Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, a novel so enduring and influential that it single-handedly established its island location as a familiar trope of the genre, no less effective now than when it was first used.
The premise of Christie’s book is simple: ten people are stuck in the middle of nowhere and someone is murdering them, one by one. It’s the island that assures us the murderer must be one of the ten, since the only passersby are passing boats, which could be spotted from miles away. But in that story, the island also serves a secondary purpose: it keeps the victims trapped in place, while they’re being killed off one after another. They have no boat, and a timely storm is looming. You can imagine the lengths you’d have to go to if you wanted to set a similar story somewhere more populous.
Other Golden Age tropes are similarly utilitarian, though maybe in more subtle ways. Have you ever wondered why the suspects in a murder mystery all seem to have recently visited a costume shop? Distinctive professions abound: doctors, actors, diplomats and countless retired military men, with bonus points for having an unusual nationality. The purpose of this oddball group of characters is to keep the suspects distinct, without distinguishing them by means of psychology. We don’t want the reader to be able to make any accurate summations about their behavior. Dorothy L. Sayers is one of my favorite authors, but she’s the only mystery writer whose endings I can regularly guess. Her characters are just too well drawn.
I can think of no better example of this trope than in the board game Clue, and its film adaptation, where the suspects are literally interchangeable (the killer is selected at random before beginning the game, while the film has three contradictory endings) and so each of the characters is defined by nothing more than a color plus a profession, or a marital status in the case of the female characters. At least, this was true in the British original, which had a Professor, a Colonel, a Reverend, a Nurse, a Miss and a Mrs.
What about the trope of the oddly located corpse? Ideally we want our dead body to be discovered in the most unlikely place possible, in the middle of a hedge maze or draped over a sundial. The library is familiar; the golf course was a Golden Age favorite. I would suggest the reason this trope is ubiquitous is that it provides a nice shortcut from tragedy to puzzle. If the circumstances of the death are bizarre enough, it almost forces the characters to forget the plight of the bereaved and go straight to wondering how it all unfolded.
Clues, on the other hand, should be as banal as possible, so the solution to our puzzle hinges on something so ordinary it couldn’t possibly be of interest to anyone. Forget fingerprints and bloodstains, in a Golden Age novel you’re more likely to be convicted by button or by bus ticket. In Murder on the Orient Express, for example, all that’s found with the body is a pipe cleaner, a match, a handkerchief and a burnt piece of paper. This trope recalls the surrealist technique of assemblage, putting everyday objects in unlikely combinations, but like the others it serves a purpose. I’d suggest the reason for it is to make the genuine clues indistinguishable from the red herrings, and vice versa.
One of my favorite murder mystery clichés is the character of the cantankerous patriarch, or matriarch. It’s a figure we meet in many Golden Age mysteries, including Christie’s Crooked House and Appointment with Death. And it fuels the spectacular sniping we get in the film Gosford Park. Like the other tropes, there’s a functional aspect to it. Specifically, it solves the structural problem of having to find a victim with enough nefarious baggage that there are seven or eight plausible reasons why someone might want them dead. Instead, the cantankerous patriarch gives everyone involved at least two reasons to murder them. If sheer dislike isn’t enough, there’s bound to be a complex web of inheritance waiting behind the scenes.
The Eighth Detective makes copious use of all these tropes, and many more. It features an angry grandmother, murdered by one of her relatives; a host of actors, doctors, florists and colonels; a killing unravelled through a simple scarf, another by a box of chocolates; a detective who finds a body in his own bed.
And, of course, a remote island.
