In the Dark, All Crime Scenes Look the Same
Edgar Allen Poe refused to acknowledge that his detective stories had any degree of cleverness. His justification was that there is no cleverness in untangling a mystery that you yourself created. This has always seemed at least somewhat disingenuous to me, but we'll leave it be for the moment.
The construction of a mystery story, in the normal way of things, involves selecting a killer and then generating a set of clues that leads to that killer. Notably, I have yet to do this in Pulp Decameron. None of my mystery stories have had solutions. One of them was about a crazy person, one of them was a quick comedic riff, one of them was a self-referential bit about race and gender, and one of them was a weird philosophical bit about entrails. The most proper mystery in the Decameron so far was actually a horror story. That one had a crime scene, it just didn't have a solution. I didn't write it as a detective story because I never intended to put the clues together. It's just clues.
So this is the counterpart to that. It's a story with a killer. But I stopped then - I didn't write the sequence of clues. I just have a killer. But that's the essential part of a mystery. An answer to the question "Whodunnit?" The leadup to that, the clues, those don't have to be there. They can exist outside of the form of a mystery, but so long as you have "Whodunnit" and an answer, you have a mystery.
So this is the mystery without clues. Or, at least, no revealed clues.
The butler did it.
Copyright 2005 by Philip Sandifer. Released under a Creative Commons license.
The construction of a mystery story, in the normal way of things, involves selecting a killer and then generating a set of clues that leads to that killer. Notably, I have yet to do this in Pulp Decameron. None of my mystery stories have had solutions. One of them was about a crazy person, one of them was a quick comedic riff, one of them was a self-referential bit about race and gender, and one of them was a weird philosophical bit about entrails. The most proper mystery in the Decameron so far was actually a horror story. That one had a crime scene, it just didn't have a solution. I didn't write it as a detective story because I never intended to put the clues together. It's just clues.
So this is the counterpart to that. It's a story with a killer. But I stopped then - I didn't write the sequence of clues. I just have a killer. But that's the essential part of a mystery. An answer to the question "Whodunnit?" The leadup to that, the clues, those don't have to be there. They can exist outside of the form of a mystery, but so long as you have "Whodunnit" and an answer, you have a mystery.
So this is the mystery without clues. Or, at least, no revealed clues.
The butler did it.
Copyright 2005 by Philip Sandifer. Released under a Creative Commons license.