One of these days, I’m going to write polished, well-crafted essays, complete with a premise, coherent arguments, and a satisfying conclusion. Today is not that day. Instead, what we have here is a semi-coherent collection of thoughts I’ve been dwelling on that almost starts with a premise — that there are some definable stylistic differences between short mystery and short speculative fiction — and then, sonnet-like, takes a turn. Here we go.
I’ve read a lot of mystery stories over the past handful of years and have written one of my own. I’ve inevitably found myself comparing the stories in mystery periodicals and collections to the fantasy and horror short stories that are my usual fare, because they do read differently to me. I expected a different feel from the mystery stories, simply based on the setting (typically) being grounded in some period of the real world, lacking any magical or supernatural element. But sometimes it’s as if they have a slightly different shape, that they start and stop in different places than they would if the focus were on something fantastical. Of course, there are similarities and overlaps as well. They are, after all, stories.
One thing I’ve noticed about many mystery stories is that they don’t contain any significant mystery. This is the category my own story falls into, in fact. Elizabeth George talks about this in her introduction to the 2016 Year’s Best Mystery Stories anthology.
I’ve always seen the mystery as a particular kind of story, quite distinguishable from a tale of crime. A mystery story, to me, has always been about the game, and the game has always pitted the writer against the reader. … Not so the crime story. I’ve always seen crime stories as different altogether from mysteries…. [In the crime story] Not a single thing is withheld from the reader. And if the crime story is beautifully constructed and artfully written, the reader remains in the dark until the end.
Both approaches to this form of literature are perfectly legitimate. … Both can be a pleasure to read. But make no mistake: they are very different creatures indeed.
I remember finding George’s essay fascinating when I first read it. In my reading of various mystery stories since then, I can’t say that I’ve found them all to comport with the nuances of her description, but they all abide by the general categorization: they all contain a mystery, a crime, or both.
Now, my sample size of recent reading is small. I’ve read three anthologies “super” edited by Otto Penzler, one of which I took the above quote from. Each volume had a different guest editor who made the final decisions. I’ve read several issues of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.
On a side note, I love reading Ellery Queen. It takes me back to when I was a kid, and my mom subscribed to both Ellery Queen, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. We’d eagerly await the arrival of each new issue and trade them off as we read through them. I don’t remember most of the individual stories anymore, except The Janissaries of Emilion, by Basil Copper, a story that will stay with me until the end of my days. We’ll come back to Jannissaries later.
But, taking the sample size into account, here are some of the things that stand out to me.
- Mystery stories, or their authors, seem much more comfortable with the open ending. I can be comfortable with it as well, but it’s a story-by-story judgement, for me. I could not say that I, generally, like or don’t like an open ending. Of course, there are plenty of fantasy stories that do this as well, but I wouldn’t say I’ve seen quite as much of it. Perhaps the fact that my small sample of mystery stories is drawn from “best of” anthologies and recent periodicals implies that the mystery reader, in general, is accustomed to the open ending. Or maybe it’s just the taste of a few specific editors. I’m sure there is a relatively small community of short form mystery writers and editors, just as there is within speculative fiction.
- Another thing about endings. Often, the story may feel more like a vignette or even an excerpt from a novel. They may end at a point where I might expect a larger story to begin, as if the story was prologue. (This is something I’ve been called out for by my writing group, so I’m not necessarily opposed to it.)
- A lot more of the short fiction I’ve read is of the crime type rather than the mystery, and they all tend to be very simple in structure and plot. Even the few whodunits are quite straightforward, with few twists. I imagine this has to do with the constrained length. And, again, it’s not unique to the mystery genre. It’s true of plenty of speculative fiction as well. But I find that, when writing in a setting the reader may not be familiar with, or even an altered real world setting, such as in urban fantasy, a certain degree of world-building is required in order to orient the reader, and this can’t help but add complexity.
- Speculative elements are totally okay. This surprised me, and I didn’t find it to be common, but I’ve read at least a couple of stories over the past year that I thought would have been just at home in Apex or Clarkesworld as in Ellery Queen. This is probably an entirely different topic, but it gets me thinking about the bleed between genres, cross-genre writing, and how much contemporary fiction is, in my opinion, at least magical realism if not fantasy. And I have to assume this is not a new phenomenon, given that Jannissaries (told you we’d come back to it) was published in 1967 in Alfred Hitchcock’s A Month of Mystery: Book 2. This is a story about a man who dreams of being chased down a beach by a horde of murderous, mounted swordmen. Each night, in the nightmare, the swordsmen get closer, until ultimately, they catch him. This story would feel right at home attending a gathering of horror and dark fantasy stories.
Now, the turn. Let’s pick up on that bit about so many stories feeling a bit like vignettes or preludes. In the mystery story I wrote, my character, a down-on-her-luck private detective, has to decide whether she’ll complete her job and earn her badly needed fee, even though she has doubts about her client. One member of my writing group expressed the opinion that he didn’t think a character making a decision was enough conflict to hang a story on. It wasn’t a complete story to him. I thought about that a lot — not in the “how shall I devise his doom” sort of way, but in the “I think he may have a valid point” sort of way. I thought about the many stories that I have enjoyed, and why I enjoyed them. I compared them to my friend’s point of view, and I found that a strong majority of stories I have read and remember (and I read a lot of short fantasy, science fiction, and horror) do indeed satisfy my friend’s desire for the character to overcome a significant conflict or challenge and/or to fundamentally change in some way.
But is that a universal requirement? It probably is, at least, in the western tradition. Maybe the better question is this: is there a spectrum of conflict? And are some genres more comfortable at one end of the spectrum or the other? I feel like that might be closer to whatever point I may or may not be winding my way towards.
My friend was absolutely right that my character doesn’t change in the course of the story; what she does is reveal herself to the reader (and a little bit, to herself). I see why he might find that unsatisfying. Based on my reading, I doubt he’d be alone in that. But, also based on my reading, I think a group of writers more immersed in mystery and crime genres might not have reacted the same way.
I think about Toward the Company of Others, by Matt Bell [1] (Best American Mystery Stories 2016) in which Kelly, also the protagonist of Bell’s novel, Scrapper, finds a kidnapped child in a house he’s scavenging. In his contributor’s note, Bell describes the growth of the story out of the writing he was doing to get a feel for Kelly, exactly as I was doing with my protagonist, Sheila, who I hope will also have her own novel Soon(TM). This was a story that, as beautiful as the writing was, left me wondering, “Was that a story?” Ultimately, my answer is “Yes.” I think my writing group colleague would have answered differently, and I don’t think that’s wrong. But it’s clearly not the same answer that the editors who accepted the story came to, and I suspect it’s not the answer that most readers of the venues that published it would agree with, again, given the patterns I think I’m seeing.
In A Shooting in Rathreedane, by Colin Barrett (The Mysterious Bookshop Presents the Best Mystery Stories of 2022), we witness an Irish police sergeant being called out to a farmhouse about a shooting. The events unfold, the characters are interesting, the language is beautiful, and then the story ends, more or less portraying a day in the life of the protagonist. Some might call it a character study, or a vignette, and my suspicion (since clearly, nothing I have said so far can be “proven”) is that the people who would judge the story that way, are likely not drawn from seasoned consumers of mystery and crime stories.
Now, here’s the end of that winding road; the part where I’m supposed to have a conclusion. I’m not sure that I do. I find the comparison interesting to mull over, simply because I enjoy thinking about storytelling. While we all run the risk of overthinking and second-guessing ourselves from time to time, I find this sort of rumination and analysis valuable in my own writing. In fact, analyzing stories you read and figuring out why you react to them the way you do is an exercise I’ve heard recommended, and done, more than once. Finally, I don’t mean any criticism of any stories I’ve named in this article; they’re by skilled authors who are far more accomplished than I. In fact, I recommend them, and the collections they were published in. Reading more and reading broadly is another topic near to my heart, and possibly one I’ll be writing about in the future.
[1] Matt Bell is also the author of a terrific craft book called Refuse to be Done. The crew at the Just Keep Writing podcast have been doing a breakdown of it.