Category Archives: mystery

Mystery or Thriller?

Posted on by

Is this book in my hand a mystery or a thriller? Not until I started writing stories myself did I run up against the startling realization that a lot of the books I liked best—starting with Frederick Forsyth’s Icon—were not mysteries at all. They were “thrillers,” “suspense.” To me, they were just exciting books that kept me turning pages. Think Silence of the Lambs. Think Reamde. Think The Little Drummer Girl.

Oh. So? People who have actually gone to the trouble of analyzing the differences between these two genres can present quite a list of them, along with which go different reader expectations. Looking back, the short stories on my publications list (this website) were all mysteries—puzzles—especially “Evidence” and “Premeditation.” I’ve also written a novel—Witness—and it’s definitely a thriller. In writing it, I fell into thriller mode automatically.

What is the difference? Carolyn Wheat in her excellent How to Write Killer Fiction (a title that tells you these are words to live by) describes “the funhouse of mystery” and “the roller coaster of suspense.” Readers of a classic mystery identify with the detective—from a professional like Harry Bosch to an amateur busybody like Miss Marple—who is attempting to solve someone else’s problems, usually a murder or two. We readers follow “two steps behind,” Wheat says, as our detective gathers and analyzes evidence and tries to figure out who the bad guys are.

In suspense novels, the main problems belong to the main characters. They’re the ones in danger, who must figure out how to save their own lives even as they may be saving others, too, of course. Jason Bourne. Jack Ryan. We know who the bad guys are and what the threat is, because the author has shown them at work. As a result, we typically know more than the hero, and are actually two steps ahead. We’re thinking, “Don’t take that call,” “Take that call!” and “Don’t trust that guy,” and “Don’t go into the British Embassy wearing that electric blue sequined dress and that Tina Turner wig and think you can pass as a legitimate party guest,” we telepathically yell at Whoopi Goldberg in Jumpin’ Jack Flash.

Detectives, like tv’s Inspector Lewis, have legendary ability to see through layers of disinformation and assemble logical pictures from the slimmest clues, clues equally available to us, as readers, but whose significance the author has deftly obscured. The writer’s challenge is to present all those clues without either giving away the game on page 20 or being so obtuse the reader feels unfairly dealt with. In the end, every piece is in place, and the reader’s reward is the intellectual satisfaction of tidied loose ends.

By contrast, suspense heroes, even if they achieve their goals and avert World War III, may not make it out alive. Or not in very good shape, if they do. Daniel Craig’s James Bond needed recovery time at the end of Casino Royale. And his nemesis got away, to plague him yet another day. Still, our hero has prevailed, and the reader’s reward is the emotional satisfaction of that victory, even if it is temporary and we see another battle looming over the sequel horizon.

Immutability and the Endings of Stories

Posted on by

I’ve heard Peter Straub say the ending of one of his supernatural thrillers caused so much reader clamor to know what happened to one of the characters, he capitulated and added another chapter. Having just read his Mr. X, I think he must have meant that particular book, and the short final chapter that’s tacked on addresses but doesn’t answer the question his readers posed.

Two of my recent reads—Mr. X and Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin—share the same mystery—who is the narrator? As we read along, who is telling us this story? In the end, Atwood answers the question, which the reader has perhaps suspected, but Straub raises it in that brief final chapter, calling into question everything that has gone before. If such a fundamental and seemingly straightforward narrative issue can be uncertain, how many of our other assumptions about “what’s going on” in a book are up for grabs?

It’s a testament to the writer’s ability to make us care about a story’s characters that sometimes we wrestle with these assumptions long after the last page, the last scene. No matter how many times I’ve seen West Side Story, I still hope unreasonably that Chino won’t appear with his gun. Reading Anna Karenina provokes the same reaction. Or Hamlet. But it is not to be. (One question resolved, anyway.)

At the last moment, Charles Dickens changed the ending of Great Expectations, one of his best-known and most-read novels, with a scene that offered a happier prospect, but one probably less true to everything that went before. He made the change on the advice of Edward Bulwer-Lytton—a popular 19th c. author, best-known today, alas, for opening his novel Paul Clifford with “It was a dark and stormy night,” and the eponymous annual contest “to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels.”

What story’s ending would you change, if you could? What else would have to change to make your ending possible? And do you soon find yourself in a hopeless tangle of unintended consequences like poor Jake Epping trying to change events in Stephen King’s 11/22/63?

Endings and the Reader’s Imagination

Posted on by

“I wished it would never end.” How many times have readers said that as they closed their book with a sigh. I’ve caught myself reading slower and slower over the last few pages of a book I’ve loved, just to delay the inevitable!

For a class on Dickens I’m taking this fall, I just reread A Tale of Two Cities. At the end, the travelling coach carrying Lucie and her daughter, Doctor Manette, Mr. Lorry, and the unconscious Sidney Carton speeds away from Paris in its desperate escape. We know that the unconscious man is really Lucie’s husband Charles and that Carton has taken his place in the tumbrils headed for the guillotine. I waited in vain for identity of the slumbering man to be recognized, for Charles to wake up and realize he had been “recalled to life.”

But Dickens doesn’t give us that scene. He leaves us to imagine it. I can see amazement and joy mixing with horror and guilt when the realization finally comes to them, and they understand what Carton has done. What, in fact, he told Lucie he would do, some 200 pages earlier: “For you, and for any dear to you, I would do anything.” I see Lucie’s misery, as she recognizes the implications of Carton’s vow and feel the unbearable weight of her promise to keep it secret.

My vision of that scene—and yours—is beyond the covers. Our own ending to solve and resolve.

Sunday we saw the new movie Argo. A lot in that movie takes place by inference. As in the real world, the participants don’t have complete information and neither does the viewer, though we have the benefit of some multiple perspectives. Glimpses of the treatment of the main body of hostages let us imagine the rest. Likewise, details of the escape of the Canadian ambassador and his wife, also in deadly peril, must be mostly created by the viewer.

Have you imagined final scenes involving the characters of stories you read, see, or listen to? Share!