By David Griffin Brown

Mystery runs on a particular fantasy: the deliverance of order out of chaos. No matter how bad the mess gets, the detective is going to set the world right. But what we’re really here for is to follow one specific person solving a case in a way nobody else quite could.

All fiction has to sell us on its main character before it can sell us on anything else. We don't even need to like them. Some of the most memorable protagonists in literature are vain or insufferable. But we need to find them interesting enough to keep turning pages, and given all the books out there competing for our attention, a novelist has to make their case quickly.

Mystery makes that job harder than most genres, for the same reason romance does. We already know how the story ends. The detective will solve the case. The lovers will end up together. That's the deal we signed when we picked the genre off the shelf, which means there's no surprise in the destination, only in who's driving and how. Solving a murder, on paper, doesn't require Hercule Poirot specifically, or Mma Ramotswe. Plenty of people could do it. The question a mystery has to answer is why this particular person is the one worth following.

That's the job of the detective-and-their-methods beat. In other fiction, we call this beat stasis. It’s a glimpse of someone's life before chaos kicks the door in. In a mystery, it’s a quick demonstration of how this particular detective's mind works, what they notice that nobody else does, what unique skills they will bring to the hunt. Quite often it also tells us what a case has to offer before they'll bother taking it on. Sherlock Holmes won't take a case that bores him. Atticus Pünd, dying when Magpie Murders opens, won't take one unless the stakes are worth what little time he has left.

The Rue Awakening

Before C. Auguste Dupin has a crime to solve in Poe's The Murders in the Rue Morgue, he gets a scene designed purely to prove he's worth following. Poe opens with Dupin reading his friend's thoughts as they walk, then explains his deductions step by step in a way that Holmes fans will find very familiar.

There we have it. The very first murder mystery, written before the word "detective" was in common parlance. And this curious plot point was there right from the start. There will soon be a murder to solve, but we’re already hooked by the intellect of the man who will solve it.

Holmes Sweet Holmes

Doyle takes Poe's setup and makes it his own. So many of his stories open with Holmes and Watson sitting around at 221B Baker Street; Holmes is bored, so he puts on a show of deduction for his friend and biographer. In The Hound of the Baskervilles, Holmes asks Watson to deduce what he can from a walking stick left behind by a visitor. Watson does his best, which of course is completely wrong, then Holmes sets him straight with characteristic flair. There’s no murder to hook us yet. We're drawn in by the performance of genius.

Elementary, My Dear Abbot

Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose is an impressive work of literary historical fiction replete with theology and semiotics, and yet still he heeds the form. Before Brother William investigates anything, he and Adso run into a search party hunting a lost horse. William deduces exactly where the animal went, reading nothing but hoofprints and disturbed mud. In a homage to Holmes, Eco even names his detective William of Baskerville.

This is evidence of how structurally important the methods beat is. Eco is using core elements of the mystery genre to convince readers to wade through an ocean of church history and medieval theories of laughter, and he starts with this essential ingredient.

First Class Inference

In Murder on the Orient Express, we know from page one that Poirot is watching and listening. The reader knows something is coming, and meanwhile Poirot is already filling mental filing cabinets with potentially relevant data. By the time the murder happens, we trust that nothing on that train has escaped him, even if the initial context clues make little sense to us.

Forceps and Fingerprints

In Postmortem, Patricia Cornwell takes this plot point in a clever direction. Instead of one detective demonstrating their method, she puts two competing methods in the same crime scene. Kay Scarpetta studies the body for patterns, hunts for scientific clues that might connect this victim to three prior corpses. Homicide detective Pete Marino on the other hand works the scene with a cop’s instinct: footprints, points of entry.

We are connecting with two detectives following two methods, and we’re also hooked by the tension between them. It’s clear that these two people would solve more crimes together than alone, if only their interpersonal conflict wasn’t getting in the way.

A Knight to Remember

The Big Sleep is noir, and noir does things differently. So Chandler doesn’t give us Phillip Marlowe demonstrating his powers of deduction. Instead, he opens with Marlowe standing in front of a stained-glass window of a knight failing to rescue a woman tied to a tree, thinking he'd probably have to climb up there and finish the job himself. In very short order, we have a clear sense of this detective’s code, which is foundational to the subgenre.

Marlowe’s code is not the method by which he will solve the case; rather, it’s the ethical framework he will try to live up to as he wades into the corruption of the noir world. There will be maidens to save, and he will endeavor to bring some form of chivalry to the quest.

The Case of the Missing Detective

The detective-and-their-method beat is nearly universal in mystery novels, but there are some exceptions.

Celeste Ng's Everything I Never Told You has a detective, but this isn’t a story about Officer Fiske following clues to an inevitable solution. Instead, it’s a character-driven drama about what happened to Lydia—all the factors that led up to her death. The story unfolds in parallel timelines with omniscient dives into Lydia’s parents and siblings, and only the reader is privy to all the conflicting perspectives. So despite using elements of the genre to fuel reader intrigue and emotional draw, this novel isn’t structurally a true mystery, which explains why it can safely skip the methods beat.

Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None is the best-selling crime novel of all time. There’s a murder. A bunch of murders actually. And the culprit remains mysterious right up until the end. Few people would argue that this novel doesn’t qualify as a mystery, and yet it is structurally so experimental that it gets a pass on the methods beat. For one thing, there is no detective leading us from start to finish. Chaos reigns—order is not restored. Well, not entirely. The victims are culprits in their own right, so a tenuous justice is served. It turns out the villain is actually the protagonist, and it is he who reveals the truth of what went down on Soldier Island with a confession in a bottle.

No detective-as-protagonist, no detective-and-their-methods beat required.

Build Your Own Sleuth

Stasis in a mystery novel is something of an audition. We know the detective is going to solve the case in the end. That’s why we’re here. We want to see order restored. But we don’t want to follow just any cookie-cutter cop to get us there. The detective needs to do things differently. They need to approach the investigation in a way that no one else could.

If you're building your own detective, ask yourself how they will lead readers through a world of death and chaos and back into the light in a way we’ve never seen before. You don’t need to come up with all-new pyrotechnics of cleverness. The genre is well trodden. We’ve had pretty much every method you can think of. That leaves modern mystery with a new take on the methods beat. Namely: characterization. Give us a detective with a method, sure. But give them an idiosyncrasy, something to prove, something to redeem, or some nugget of backstory to explain why they are so doggedly determined to fight the chaos.

David Griffin Brown is an award-winning short fiction writer and co-author of Immersion and Emotion: The Two Pillars of Storytelling, Story Skeleton: The Classics, and Fake Query Letters by Dead Authors. He holds a BA in anthropology from UVic and an MFA in creative writing from UBC, and his work has appeared in literary magazines such as the Malahat Review, White Wall Review, and Grain. He has published three novels: When the Sky Breaks, We've Come for Your Eggs, and No Country for Old Dragons. David founded Darling Axe Editing in 2018, and as part of his Book Broker interview series, he has compiled querying advice from over 100 literary agents. As an editor, he pays special attention to structure, relationship arcs, and voice. David lives in Victoria, Canada, on the traditional territory of the Songhees and Kosapsum Nations.