The Chopping Blog

In And Then There Were None, Christie subverts several tropes in the mystery genre. She disguises the central plot so completely that we don’t realize who the protagonist is until the final pages.

Harry Dresden is a magical PI in Chicago with all the familiar fixtures of a Chandler mystery: a down-on-his-luck detective, a corrupt city, a femme fatale, and a secret too dangerous to name.

Chandler drew heavily from Arthurian legend. One of his early fictional detectives was even named “Mallory,” a direct nod to Le Morte d’Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory. He later renamed the character Marlowe.

The Maltese Falcon doesn’t just shift the tone of crime fiction—it shifts the structure.

The novel is structured differently than a traditional mystery. Instead of a tightly wound plot with a single overarching case, it unfolds in a series of smaller unrelated mysteries, making it feel more like a collection of vignettes than a traditional whodunit.

The closed-circle mystery, distinct from a locked-door puzzle, amplifies tension through containment.

When Poe published this story in 1841, the word “detective” did not exist.

A mystery can be embedded into a novel without it being classified as a mystery. It’s a great way to heighten the tension and stakes in another genre—like a family drama.

Memoir contains many of the same structures as fiction. The memoirist has an equivalent need to create emotional draw in readers—that quality of a narrative that keeps us engaged, anticipatory, and thus turning pages.

Postmortem is a police procedural, which means the focus is on the investigative process from the point of view of law enforcement agencies.

The appeal of the detective subgenre lies, in part, in its episodic nature. Unlike other genres, mysteries do not (necessarily) need extensive side quests or relationship arcs.

Arthur Conan Doyle arrived on the scene when detective fiction was still in its infancy.