Tag: literary puzzles

The Game’s the Thing

The Wordle craze has highlighted the fact that we all love games. Be they word games, boardgames, or computer games — we love a good challenge.

From Scrabble, Clue, and Monopoly to Bananagrams, Hang Man, Battleship, and Catan to Warhammer 40,000 and Dungeons and Dragons to Minecraft, Super Mario, and Civilization — the game’s the thing.

If this is the case, and it is, then why isn’t the classic murder mystery more popular?

If genres such as LitRPG and Gamebooks have strong niche followings, what happened to the original literary puzzle game — the murder mystery?

It’s clear that the murder mystery’s star began to wane in the 1950s, being supplanted by the thriller. The question I ask is, why? We love games. And the murder mystery is at heart a game.

The murder mystery is a contest between the writer and the reader. The writer lays down the challenge: whodunit? Who killed Mr. Body? The reader must then find the clues and solve the murder before the detective’s big reveal at the end.

In addition, though, to being a puzzle, the best murder mysteries are also stupendously good stories. And who doesn’t like a good story? Where would campfires or the office party be without them?

Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe novels are challenging mysteries, but even more they are entertaining reads. It’s like getting 2 of the price of 1!

Or take Caleb Pirtle’s Boom Town Saga. The books are magnificently crafted historical novels with atmosphere you can feel and characters you can touch. When you close the book, there’s a sadness within you that you’re leaving Eudora’s and Doc’s world. They are also doggone challenging murder mysteries. In other words, a good game.

Or what about Richard Schwindt’s Death in Sioux Lookout trilogy? Superbly introspective tales with a magnificent sense of place. And a doggone good puzzle to solve in each book.

Joe Congel, with the Razzman, gives you a good detective yarn filled with characters you can touch and feel. A satisfyingly entertaining story and a brain-challenging puzzle. In one enjoyable package. What’s not to like?

Yet the mystery story gets passed over. For some reason, readers prefer violence to order, chaos to reason. They’d rather run virtual races to escape death, then try to restore order to a world violated and torn apart by murder.

When I was a working stiff, my job was stressful enough as it was. I certainly didn’t want my reading to be stressful as well. Perhaps that’s why I liked the closed world of the murder mystery and the chance to restore order to chaos and to quash those feelings of fear, instead of promoting them.

If you like games, and who doesn’t, then give the classic murder mystery a try. It’s the original literary game. If you like Wordle, you’ll love a good mystery.

The classic murder mystery: a game disguised as a book.

You can try my own brain teasers, the Justinia Wright Private Investigator Mysteries and Death Wears a Crimson Hat, because the game is afoot!

Comments are always welcome. And until next time, happy reading!

CW Hawes is a playwright, award-winning poet, and a fictioneer, with a bestselling novel. He’s also an armchair philosopher, political theorist, social commentator, and traveler. He loves a good cup of tea and agrees that everything’s better with pizza.

 

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The Traditional Mystery

Riddles have been with us throughout our recorded history, and probably into our pre-history.

There’s something about the challenge of riddles and puzzles that draws us. Perhaps it’s like any other game: we want to be a winner.

In the world of literature, the traditional mystery, the mystery that began with Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin, became popular with Sherlock Holmes, and entered its Golden Age in the 1930s, is at base a riddle — a puzzle that demands to be solved.

Some of the finest examples are those penned by Agatha Christie. But other excellent mystery writers were Patricia Wentworth, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham, Phoebe Atwood Taylor, Rex Stout, S.S. Van Dine, Jacques Futrelle, Edmund Crispin, Erle Stanley Gardner, and Ellery Queen.

The traditional mystery is a game, as it were, between the author and his/her readers. The author must play fair by giving all of the clues to the reader so that he or she has the chance to figure out whodunit before the detective makes the great reveal at the end of the book.

This game aspect of the classic mystery story pushes it into the realm of fantasy. The classic mystery is, in fact, guilty of Raymond Chandler’s accusation that it isn’t real, or true to life. I’d argue that it was never intended to be true to life.

The traditional detective story is a literary game. It is not meant to be a slice of life. Its purpose is not to expose us to the mean streets and the sordid folk who populate them. The classic mystery is not about the people who really commit murder.

The classic detective novel is a game of Clue in book form. Nothing more, and nothing less. It’s a game, pure and simple. And as such, it is great fun.

Sad to say, the traditional mystery has been on the decline since the 1940s, when, first, the hardboiled novel and then the thriller pushed the classic detective story into the backwater of crime fiction.

And while the number of mystery aficionados continues to dwindle, I have to say that the older I get the more I prefer the mystery to any other genre.

There is something about its simplicity, its gentler pacing, its eccentric characters, and the formulaic settings that I like. After all, the world is too often mean, nasty, and brutish — why do I want my entertainment to also be that way? Isn’t the nightly news enough?

And isn’t life hectic enough? Why do I want my fiction to also proceed at a breakneck pace? Well, I don’t. Which is why I prefer the gentler and more natural pacing of the classic mystery novel.

For me, fiction is a ticket to another world. A world where I can vicariously experience triumph and victory through the exploits of the main character. I read to be entertained. I don’t want a rehash of the nightly news. I read to escape my world. I don’t want my books to put me back into what I’m trying to leave.

Fiction is for fun. And perhaps that is why I so very much enjoy the classic detective mystery: it is first and foremost entertainment. No different than a game of Scrabble, or Clue, or a crossword puzzle, or a riddle. It is a fantasy dressed up in a pseudo-reality. A world that we perhaps wish were our own.

The classic detective mystery is not meant to mimic real life. It’s meant to be a challengingly fun bit of diverting entertainment. And the best mysteries most assuredly are.

Comments are always welcome. And until next time, happy reading!

 

CW Hawes is a playwright, award-winning poet, and a fictioneer; as well as an armchair philosopher, political theorist, and social commentator. He loves a good cup of tea and agrees that everything’s better with pizza.

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