Mysteries tend to follow a very established arc. More modern mysteries tend to color outside the lines a bit, but all of the plots tend to meet up in the end and all of the loose ends were tied up in a more or less neat bow. Red herrings spice things up. Suspects drop in and out of view. Readers usually have a fair shot at working out what happened, unless the detective withholds a clue like Agatha Christie’s used to…or it turns out that it’s a messy mystery.
(Image via Pinterest)
Last August, I read my first messy mystery: Lightning Men, by Thomas Mullen. Ordinarily, the crime is committed by a single criminal or a conspiracy. But in what I’ve come to think of as messy mysteries, it’s impossible to map what happened to one of Vonnegut’s plot graphs. In Lightning Men, for example, there isn’t just one crime. There are multiple crimes that intersect and make things even more difficult for the detectives. Where we can see traditional mysteries following a graphable arc, I tend to see the messy ones as Venn diagrams. One criminal’s act bumps into another criminal’s, forcing them to act and possibly bump into a third criminal’s subplot. Each bump makes it harder to track motives and evidence—sometimes to the point where I marvel at any detective’s efforts make sense of the tangles.
When I read Lightning Men, I was frustrated because I couldn’t force the pieces of the puzzle to fit. It wasn’t long, however, before I started to appreciate the realism. Real criminals don’t have a clear field to commit their crimes. Real detectives are often working on several cases at the same time. It makes sense that mysteries would get messy all the time. I understand why mysteries authors don’t go this route. This kind of mystery must be hell to create. And I image that publishers are reluctant to greenlight messy mysteries because a lot of readers will give up on mysteries with so many moving parts. Speaking for myself, I’m glad this sub-genre—a new genre-let—exists.
If you’re interested in reading some messy mysteries, here are some recommendations in addition to Lightning Men:
- Paper Ghosts, by Julia Haeberlin
- The Man Who Died, by Antti Tuomainen
- The Master Key, by Masako Togawa
- Ohio, by Stephen Markley