Impossible Mysteries

After watching the last of the BBC's new Sherlock series the other week, we had a conversation about mysteries and genre fiction. I'm discovering a new appreciation for genre fiction (after reading about China Mieville's The City and The City I felt that maybe I'd given sci-fi short shrift) and mysteries particularly. Really, I've always liked them - I read The Three Investigators and The Hardy Boys when I was a kid, loved those 60s spy TV series like The Champions (are these really mysteries?) and Bond films, and have rather enjoyed Miss Marple and enormously enjoyed Poirot recently. I love the formulas you find in them, and the particular modus operandi each detective uses, Poirot's "leetle grey cells" or Marple's faintly irritating faux-little old lady act.



Much as I loved Sherlock, and I really did love it, especially the last one (see vid above), I wondered after whether these famous detectives should diversify their methods. Not necessarily for crime-fighting reasons, but more for reasons of audience edginess. Whilst we may not know who committed the crimes, and we are usually given enough clues to be able to imagine any number of people capable of committing it, we always know that the detective's prized and trusty M.O. will, in the end, discover the culprit. That is the one thing that is never in doubt. This is even admitted insofar as both Poirot and Sherlock Holmes have a figure - in both their cases a woman towards whom they have complicated feelings - who has bested them (once) and who acts as a sort of spectre of failure. Nevertheless, the Irene Adlers of the world are for all intents and purposes merely spectral, and whilst Holmes may say "only one person has ever beaten me", ostensibly in order to show his fallibility, it just goes to show the opposite.

My wondering led me to imagine a mystery story where the uncertainty led all the way down, so to speak, so that the reader wasn't even sure of the detective. You could take this as far as you liked, you could have just his/her M.O. that was iffy, or you could extend it to their whole universe - are they really a detective at all? I remember trying to write a play once about a group of people that thought they were revolutionaries, and that it was only a matter of hours before the anti-terror police would come crashing through the door. The idea was to make it uncertain whether they truly were dangerous revolutionaries or kids excited by pictures of Che Guevara. (Writing that now, I realise I missed a trick - that uncertainty could say a lot about the over-harsh anti-terror laws the last government introduced). The play was aborted, as I wasn't a good enough - or dedicated enough - writer to make it work, and doing this thing with a detective would be particularly difficult, given the intricacies of mystery plots. But it would be great to do, to make a sort of existential detective (not like those in I Heart Huckabees), to introduce continental philosophy to the mystery genre, where the reader doesn't know anything at the start and continues not to know anything throughout, but keeps reading because there is bait enough that they will know something sooner or later.