H. Hodgkins is a professor of English Literature at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and the author of Style and the Single Girl: How Modern Women Re-Dressed the Novel, 1922-1977. Her professional fiction debut, the story “When Baptists Go Bad,” appears in the Department of First Stories of our May/June 2024 issue, on sale April 9th. In this post, she suggests some interesting challenges for mystery writers, derived from her knowledge of literature. —Janet Hutchings
I doubt most mystery writers have difficulty thinking up ideas. A picture, a news story, or a brilliant phrase will do it: my newbie story in Ellery Queen was prompted when my husband and I passed a little church with one of those trying-to-be-funny-and-also-deep signs. He chuckled, remarking, “When Baptists go bad!” And there I had it, title + plot + twist all in one.
But a grabby theme doesn’t ensure a full plot. I’m always seeking not-too-shopworn narrative models adaptable to nefarious settings. Fortunately, after thirty years of teaching college English, certain classic texts are burnt into my brain. Heck, if it worked for Tolstoy or for Joyce, why not for you or me?
Donning my literature professor cap, I proffer some literary works whose structures I’d love to use, or see cleverly used by someone , in short mysteries. Spoilers included.
First, a disclaimer.
You hear it said, “All literature is mystery.” But fictions entice in various ways. We study Shakespeare for his virtuosic poetry, read Dickens for humor, sentiment, and satisfyingly predictable outcomes. For those who insist on Dickens as a mystery author: Honestly, don’t you know who shot Mr Tulkinghorn in Bleak House ? Or, for that matter, what happened to Edwin Drood? For genuine Victorian mystery, see Wilkie Collins, whose Moonstone and Woman in White still stymie and entice readers.
Also, we read a few brilliant writers, such as P. G. Wodehouse, for their wit. We little care, or long remember, who got Bertie’s girl or tumbled from the country-house window. But Wodehouse’s immortal lines light up our lives: “Many men in Packy’s position would have shrunk from diving in to the rescue, fully clad. Packy was one of them” ( Hot Water , 1932).
Certainly one can do this in mystery writing: see Mick Herron, whose Slough House thrillers I’d read for their sentence-by-sentence wit alone. His latest, The Secret Hours , opens with “The worst smell in the world is dead badger,” limns a bucolic walk and possibilities for disposing of a dead animal, to conclude the paragraph thus: “Which is why he wasn’t sure the badger would be there a couple of nights later, when he was running for his life.”
Herron like Wodehouse practices a quite British structural deprecation, in which a phrase, or a paragraph’s final sentence, undercuts all that’s gone before.
And speaking of structure, consider the following exemplars, most available through our friend Google.
Naive narrator: In Henry James’s novel What Maisie Knew , a poor little rich girl is kicked back and forth between narcissistic divorced parents. Maisie observes and learns—but always from a place of innocence. When (in James’s crazy fictional tidiness) her parents’ exes get together, and Maisie must choose which “parent” to live with, she picks her impoverished but devoted governess—a choice that condemns an entire decadent culture.
The fascinating possibilities for mystery lie in the ways Maisie is morally educated, by faulty people, in a way that nonetheless directs her to the best solution. Has this been done, in our postmodern cynical world? Some mystery novels (Alan Bradley’s Flavia de Luce series; Joanna Cannon’s Trouble with Goats and Sheep , 2016) employ charming young sleuths. We’ve also seen experiments with neurodivergent and/or genius children: Mark Haddon’s 2003 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and Muriel Barbery’s 2006 The Elegance of the Hedgehog , successful one-offs that seem perilous to imitate.
How about a short story in which the amateur sleuth is a bright but ordinary, decently observant child? “What _____ Knew”—or “Didn’t Know”; or “How ___ Solved the Mystery.”
Beginning with the ending: In Leo Tolstoy’s “Death of Ivan Ilyich” (1886), the title character—guess what—dies. In fact the story starts with his funeral, then scrolls back to examine Ivan Ilych’s life. We trace his climb up the career ladder, then follow, in excruciating detail, his terminal illness. (Supposedly this story inspired Elisabeth Kűbler-Ross to undertake her famous study on the stages of grief.) Yet Tolstoy’s 40+ miserable pages conclude in a totally unexpected affirmation as Ivan Ilych breathes his last. Only an unrelieved grimness could keep this transcendant deathbed from sentimentality, and take our breaths, too.
Likewise, in Eudora Welty’s “Death of a Traveling Salesman” (1941), the salesman Bowman will die. Ill, with his car broken down in the Mississippi countryside, he’s forced to seek help from poor people in a run-down cabin. In his last moments Bowman realizes the shoddiness of his materialism—and that these simple folk possess a contentment which he should have aimed at.
Both stories purchase an affirmative epiphany through near-unrelieved grimness—until the final twist. Elementary in process, but a Class A challenge for a noir narrative: conclude with a shocking, happy ending. Try “Murder of _____,” or “Death Comes for _____” ( à la Willa Cather’s “Death Comes for the Archbishop”).
The title IS the solution: For a special refinement of the above, see Elizabeth Bowen’s 1941 “Love” (available in her Collected Stories .) A discontented, not-too-bright shopgirl takes a holiday at the seaside. Bored and tired, she and her friend come across an old resort hotel with a crooked sign reading “Teas.” An odd-looking lady on the terrace tries to wave them away, but they approach and knock at the ramshackle building until a young man opens. He serves them tea, making them promise to tell no one that they’ve seen “Miss Meena,” whose family would commit her to an asylum. Miss Meena’s self-styled protector explains that, now financially and mentally ruined, twenty years ago she was the belle of the resort, while he was the small, adoring son of the manager. As the girls depart, they avoid discussing the subject, because “what can you think when a thing doesn’t make sense?”
The sense is, of course, in the title—a word which never appears in the story itself.
It’s a stunt—but a good one. Why not construct a mystery story where the answer stares the reader in the face all the while? Distractions, red herrings, and a limited point of view (whether first or third person) would be essential to keep the reader from noticing that the solution is right there in the title .
The doomscroll : I’m repurposing the neologism “doomscroll,” which is far too good a word to waste on media addictions. Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” (1953) obviously is a crime story: a Southern family on a road trip ends up stuck in the woods when their car breaks down. Unfortunately the psychopathic Misfit and his cronies are stuck in the same woods. They dispatch mother, father, two bratty children and finally the grandmother. But how does this unfortunate convergence occur?
O’Connor puts responsibility full on the grandmother, whose small dishonesties—she sneaks the cat into the car; she lies about an old plantation house she wants to visit—culminate in the death of her entire family. We watch with fascination as small sins, little mistakes, and general familial grumpiness suggest the vacation from hell. But these comedic bits obscure our view: the vacation unrolls into tragedy—complicated by the Misfit’s jaded philosophical pronouncements, and (because it’s O’Connor) the grandmother’s awakened sympathy for her killer at the very moment she dies.
Why not a mystery doomscroll? Comedy starts in a low, unhappy state, then raises its characters to happiness; the tragic hero begins on top of the world but ends crushed, for his or her sins, under the wheel of fortune. You don’t have to be O’Connor to mix the two, setting your reader off-balance through funny small everydayness (see Mick Herron). Not that doom doesn’t loom from the start, with an opening reference to the Misfit “aloose from the Federal Pen.” Still, O’Connor’s tone and structure suggest he’s only regional color—rather than that gun in the first act.
A comedic mystery doomscroll would—opposite to Tolstoy and Welty—obscure a coming terror through humor, and petty characters who don’t seem deep or important enough for tragedy. O’Connor’s genius means that the grandmother’s compassion for her killer gives uscompassion for her—for the first time—and raises the story above the Misfit’s “no pleasure but meanness.” Why shouldn’t a mystery story do this?
The non-conclusive conclusion. Humans like answers, but we don’t always get them in real life (see Stacey Pearson on irresolvable cold cases: https://www.donnellannbell.com/our-fascination-with-cold-cases/ ). Thus some would argue that mystery fiction caters to OCD types who want everything tidily wrapped up.
How about a conclusion that balances on a fulcrum regarding the outcome? Think of Michael Caine’s plight at the end of the delightful 1969 film The Italian Job : a literal cliffhanger, with no definitive answer.
For literary prototypes, see James Joyce and Vladimir Nabokov. Each novelist is notorious for challenging fiction; but each also possessed a chameleon-like wordpower, seemingly able to write anything, from any perspective—including heart-tugging short fictions that conclude by dropping a dilemma into the reader’s lap.
In Joyce’s “Eveline” (1904), a middle-class Irishwoman keeps house for her drunken father. But not for much longer! The sailor Frank, after a whirlwind courtship, has promised to take Eveline away on the evening steamer. Still, Eveline has doubts: “to go away, to leave her home. Was that wise?” Frank is “very kind, manly, open-hearted,” and has a house waiting in Buenos Aires. But at the last minute Eveline can’t bring herself to do it. As the story ends she stands paralyzed on the dock while her lover hurries aboard, calling her to follow. Has Eveline ruined her chance for love and happiness? Or is Frank, as her father insists, a charlatan? (Buenos Aires was famous for sex trafficking.) Eveline—and we—will never know.
Likewise, in Nabokov’s “Signs and Symbols” (1948) an elderly Russian couple traverses New York to visit their only son in a mental institution. Once there, they learn he’s attempted suicide again. Late that night in their tenement they can’t sleep, for worrying over their son. Then the phone rings, a rare occurrence. It’s a wrong number. It rings again: the same mistaken caller. They’re drinking tea, and starting to relax, when the phone rings once more: story’s end.
We’re left to guess—another wrong number? Or the institution calling, with bad news? Over the years my classes have been evenly divided. About half insist that, realistically, the concluding phone call is a random wrong number. The other half say, No , since the ringing phone concludes the story we know that, of course , it means the son has harmed himself. Both are correct: we’re confronted with our deep human longing for answers and how—Nabokov’s point—we ourselves read signs and symbols in literature as the delusional son reads each detail of his world, finding clues in every leaf and grass blade.
Both Joyce’s and Nabokov’s stories suck us in through sympathy: we hope for better things for Eveline and the elderly immigrant parents. Then we’re left to decide.
Might a mystery story do this, set up signs and clues to a puzzle and leave us to conclude? Is it mystery readers alone who insist on conclusions—or do writers feel impelled to provide solutions? Only you , dear reader/writer, can answer that one.
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