So I have determined that the forms of "Mystery" and "Thriller" can be analyzed to see what elements work for the series I am currently writing. And that the series appears to fall somewhere between the two. Assume, then, that I chose to emphasize the Mystery. What are the strengths and weaknesses of that form?
You certainly can't say that a mystery is incompatible with action or tension. There is a mystery element in the most action-filled adventure. Usually. On the flip side, even the cerebral Holmes sometimes needed to ask if Watson had brought along his trusty service revolver.
Thing of it is, when James Bond finds a clue, it really isn't a main line of the story. His tales proceed from the logic of action. Clues are just the mechanism of plot to get him from one action set-piece to another. He wins because he survives getting shot or blown up, not because he deduces it was the Duchess in the dark with her dirk.
(As illustration, do you know how hard it was to find a picture of James Bond looking for a clue?)
Basically, mystery and Action (our current stand-in for the somewhat different idea of the Thriller) are different streams. They don't really intersect. The action may or may not connect to the solution, but the process of solving the mystery is that process of sorting the clues into order. Not how the clues were obtained.
A lot like that disjunct between how the story in a game advances (through choices made in dialogue) versus how the larger part of the game is played (combat, exploration, crafting).
The main intersect in the thriller is that there is usually an external tension, with or without ticking clock. In a murder mystery, the murderer might get away. In a thriller, the murderer will kill again if not stopped. Action is implicit in the premise, basically, because the stakes are always mortal.
I would point out that the thriller goes hand-in-hand with violence, because you need the stakes, and the stakes need to be personalized in some way in order to engage the reader's empathy, and good story-telling rarely lets the hero slide through without taking a few hits so you've basically walked yourself into the hard steel-lined door of having your hero getting get hurt at some point. Which means the action -- the violence -- is happening up-close and personal.
But that seems trivial. Better to, for the moment, think of violence as a sort of slider that can be run up and down regardless of where a story sits on the mystery v. thriller arc.
Concentrate on action. On the idea of the action driving the plot. Well, what else is an archaeologist-adventurer? It is practically the name on the tin. They have adventures. Now, they might go around punching people, or they might be climbing rocks, but they are doing physical adventure. Meaning there's an element of physical danger.
Which points the big arrow at the end goal being physical. That is, that the end goal should be stopping the zombie uprising, not finding the mummy of Pharaoh Senebkay. Again, the difference between not letting the bad guy escape, and not letting the bad guy kill again.
Okay, not saying the Tomb Raider franchise always got that one right. In the first of the reboot trilogy, she saves...herself. Okay, she's trying to save her fellow crew members as well. She's only partially successful. In the second game, she stops a zombie army from destroying a village. That's decent. In the third, she stops a guy from getting superpowers he can use to give his people a better life. Um...yay us?
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Archaeologist-Adventurer seems pretty incompatible with Mystery, though. It is funny, because the process of archaeology is a lot more like the process of mystery. But -- and this is true for Adventure as well -- real archaeology is pretty much orthogonal to what drives the plot. It might be an excuse to get into a plot, and I've treasured the moments where I've managed to have Penny use archaeology as part of her solution, but really it is more of a character trait. Black hair, likes dance, archaeologist.
It reminds me far too much of all those cozy mysteries (Dick Francis may have started it in modern fiction) of the amateur detective who, for the purposes of the story, is a detective. For the purposes of character, though, they have a thing. They know horses, they collect orchids. It rarely intersects the plot and when it does, it can seem...forced.
So it seems worth asking if the methods of archaeology and the questions of archaeology are compatible with the process and the result wanted in a mystery. Obviously, you'd hardly call it a mystery if your protagonist scrapes dirt with a trowel for twenty-three chapters, and by chapter twenty-four is willing to write in their site record that this is probably an Athebascan burial mound from about 800 CE.
In the stories I've written so far, Penny rarely digs anything up herself. She is more like an academic researcher, going through existing collections to draw conclusions from the material there. And she does, even of most of the book is taking place outside the lab (aka out in the real world having conversations and, yes, sometimes getting chased by yakuza).
And the questions I have her dealing with as the core and most important questions are anthropological. Which in the States archaeology falls under as a sub-discipline. Sure, Penny may recognize a name, or a jacket, or some other traditional Mystery clue, but she knows the importance of it because she has put it in an anthropological context.
(The Paris book is interesting here; she has four big contextual realizations. But only two of them come out of the anthropological context the story has been focused on; what the last poem refers to, and why there might be a secret in a cemetery in Montmartre. The other two are a much shallower sociological context and, strangely, are the ones she almost loses her life over.)
But in the end, she could be an anthropologist or a historian or, for that matter, a travel writer or a novelist or a social worker and still bring the same skillset to bear in piecing together all the little cultural traits with the hints she's gotten and realizing who Ichiro is really working for and who he is protecting, or that Linnet's "Captain" had a stash of guns hidden under the Nine Elms station.
But not a beekeeper. That wouldn't have helped.
(To get a bit more technical, in Indiana Jones or similar situations, the heroes use the clue to tell them where to dig the hole. The actual digging is putting a shovel to what the ancient inscription said or where the light beam from the intricate mechanism fell on the first day of the year. In actual field work, digging the hole is the thing and the clues come out of not even what is dug up but the context that can only be discovered by that careful and technical excavation.)
Which brings me back around to the intersect the stories were partly written to address; between fictional archaeology and the real thing. Real archaeology may be a "find some fish for Aquaman to talk to" in a mystery, but it falls even more outside the thriller. It matters to the actual engines of the story (that is, climbing skyscrapers and punching bad guys) the way it matters that Denise Richard's character is a nuclear physicist.
Is, however, an archaeologist-adventurer incompatible with mystery? Can Lara Croft do the Miss Marple? It does seem a waste of what that character brings to the table. If Nero Wolfe was a circus strong-man, you'd think his cases would have a little less talking and a little more Santos Superman about them.
(And, yes, there is a whole sub-genre of Luchadores being cops, priests, superheroes...)
Since there really isn't an established genre of "Tomb Raider solves crimes in her spare time" it doesn't really feel like an avenue worth pursuing.
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Put that aside as inconclusive. What am I writing a story for, irrespective of what my protagonist might call herself? As I said in the last entry, I seem to have moved towards Regional Mystery. Mystery split fairly early on into the detached cerebral puzzle -- locked rooms and the like -- the more action-oriented and hard-boiled stuff (and see above for where that sits on the "mystery v." axis) and lastly, mysteries that use the mystery as frame for character and social commentary. Led perhaps by the "knight in tarnished armor" himself. A phrase used by both Robert Parker and John D. McDonald, with the former specifically crafted to explore ideas of the previous work.
And although Sam Spade had SF and Spenser explores him some Boston, it is Travis McGee who shows focus on the place where the stories are happening. (Not to say Chandler didn't do so as well for an equally sun-drenched LA).
Mark the next era with Tony Hillerman, where the setting is a character in itself, and perhaps more importantly, readers are coming to the books for the setting as much as for the story. The mystery de jour is almost an excuse to hang out in Four Corners with the diné.
Is this sort of celebration of place compatible with the thriller? Writers from E.R.B. to Alistair MacClean were giving a strong sense of place within a plot that was pure action-adventure. The thing I think this misses is that in Hillerman we are, again, anthropological. We get deep into culture and language and religion. We get into a place at the bones of economy and history. It isn't "Here's Prague, isn't it spooky with all the old buildings and the fog."
There's an almost science-fiction element to it, because of course it is a scientific interest. Maybe there's a reason the stock detective character is a wryly cynical observer, standing just slightly outside (rather than fully outside, an intellect vast and cool and unsympathetic).
And I think that sort of perspective, and that attention to detail, is firmly on the Mystery side. If for no other reason than that there are only so many words to go around and every word that's being used to describe the history of the Eiffel Tower is a word that can't be in a crazy parkour scramble to get away from some street thugs.
And yes, I have two chase sequences in the Paris book that are largely for the incongruity of doing the tourist-view of Notre-Dame de Paris in the middle of a foot chase, or the same in Gallerie Vivienne.
Which I guess answers one question. Tony Hillerman is facing the same thing, which is how to tie all of that setting back to plot. He is using that same sense of context to understand the clues, a context that can only be grasped by the reader through leading them through the same landscapes and showing them the same cultural ways. John Begay wouldn't have left his truck and walked because you don't leave the truck, not here in this desert landscape.
I was so conscious of doing this in the Paris book, that it is embedded in Huxley's book and clues as well. Meta-textually, she is going through the same experience with his fictional book, as we are with the book that contains it.
This is a ride I want to craft. Is it the ride the reader wants to take? Can I do it better? What parts of what I've been doing are making me unhappy, and what parts of it are making my readers unhappy?
I can't help coming back to the idea that this is too much license for me to indulge, and this is why I've got readers (well, family -- nobody else seems to want to comment) about getting lost in Japanese history or Bazalgette's sewer system. That I'd be more focused if I had more pressure on my protagonist, giving them only enough space between blows to glimpse the front of the Pantheon, but not enough time to mention Baron Haussmann.
Obviously a mystery can pass as lightly as a thriller over all of these too-tasty details. I mentioned reading an urban fantasy set in Paris (written by a German now living in New Zealand) and even though the character has a day job at the Pantheon I can't even say for sure if there are stairs. Much less any other detail of the physical building.
On the other hand, her protagonist also meets and has commentary on a dozen different famous people who are buried there. Complete with a hundred-year-strong, page-long argument about philosophy (something so far outside my area of interest I couldn't name you the characters involved even with having just read the book).
In any case, I lack any good metric of what "too much stuff" means. So finding an approach that isn't using that "stuff" as an underlying plot (or at least closely plot-adjacent) mechanism might be something I need to do.
What if I advance the mystery on a different set of clues? What if the clues are things like a clock broken at exactly 10:43 or a left-handed shooter; things that aren't dependent on the story being set in Anchorage, Alaska? Where I can absolutely chose to show or not to show language or food or religion because they are only there for color?
I don't like it. There's nothing fun about using Mystery elements that have been there since a certain Belgian first groomed his mustaches. And since nothing ties them to the setting, might as well set the mystery in a white room. And on the flip side, since none of it matters, there's no reason to care where the mystery is set, either. And, really, this doesn't even work for thrillers. As much as there are so many stock settings, the docks, the late-night warehouse, the crowded precinct station, the seedy boxing ring, the thriller lives for the set-pieces that are absolutely regional. Tied to some specific element of some specific place.
But is this contextual? I would argue that it is. Bond's famous Thames boat chase looks cool, but it gets resonance through recognizing the London landmarks in it. In a book, you at least have to name-drop if you are going to get that thrill.
I felt there was more to it, though. The exercise I did in the Paris book was that two locations in particular are tied to some of the mythology that surrounds them; she tails the treasure-hunter gang through the Paris Opera House while ruminating on The Phantom of the Opera and what that story has meant to people including one future historian (herself). And of course The Hunchback of Notre-Dame for Notre-Dame de Paris.
To the point where there are in-jokes; Penny hisses under her breath "So it is to be war, then, war between us both" (a paraphrase from the musical) in the former, and comments Captain Phoebus won't catch her if she falls from the latter (a detail which only appears in the Disney movie).
So already we can see the slippery slope. Assuming "too much information" is the problem I think it is. The problem might actually be one of lack of urgency, lack of tension, lack of a clear goal and a clear victory...and for all of that, I need to look at the series as a thriller.
Next essay.
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