1.2 A Mysterious Definition of Mystery Fiction

I planned to begin this lecture with a straightforward definition of "murder mystery." Unfortunately, my every attempt to develop a succinct description that was useful and mostly inarguable kept collapsing. I continually came up with two mutually exclusive lists: one list of apparently obvious characteristics, and a corresponding list of significant exceptions to those characteristics.

As I researched definitions of the genre, I was reassured to see that I was not alone in encountering contradictions. Here are two editors talking about mystery fiction. These comments appeared in the same article, responding to the same questions about the definition of the mystery genre as a commercial category. One editor makes the point that murder mysteries have changed tremendously and that the rules that used to govern such fiction no longer apply. The second editor feels that such rules continue to be meaningful and that the murder mystery remains recognizably itself in spite of 150 years and literally millions of books, short stories, and films depicting it.

Can they both be right?

Well, let's start with what both editors seem to agree on: that mystery fiction needs to be considered in relation to a set of rules, whether the fiction in question complies with or flouts those rules. All fiction, of course, has rules inasmuch as it uses language, which is governed by syntactic and cultural rules, and inasmuch as it is a work of art with a history of conventions and forms. Nonetheless, many novels written after the nineteenth century have conscious commitments to realism and therefore generally pretend, in spite of their obvious artistic limitations, that reality, not literary and linguistic expectations, have shaped them. Many twentieth-century novels are designed as serious attempts to mirror reality and share in its unlimited scope. Mysteries are unusual twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels because of the sense that authors and readers have had, from the beginning, that mystery novels operate as games and have the same kind of metaphoric and playful relation to reality that games have. Classic mystery plots, like the game Clue (1943)  , have limited permutations and no ambitions for representing infinite possibilities.

Built into the tradition of mystery fiction, then, is a consciousness of rules and limitations, which, as the second editor maintains, has not significantly changed. But -- and here's where I ran into difficulty -- there is also a simultaneous drive within the tradition of mystery fiction to break, re-write, and circumscribe the rules, to prove, in unison with that first editor, that rules no longer apply.

What are a poor pedantic maker of definitions and her students to do?

We might, indeed, be diligent and creative enough to develop a definition of mystery fiction that includes such diverse specimens as the following:

Not to mention hundreds of other novels with unique examples of tone, setting, concerns, themes, and styles.

Given world enough and time, we might be able to come up with a definition that somehow manages to include every novel that we recognize as a mystery, but still meaningfully distinguishes mysteries from all kinds of other fiction that it may resemble. We could also try to balance the national budget and reform Social Security while we were at it!

Instead, I propose that we explore different sets of rules for mystery fiction, as well as significant violations of those rules. Let us take as our starting point the observation that mystery fiction has, as one of its definitive qualities, an intense and contradictory relationship to the rules of its own game.