Modern Mystery Series and What Makes Me Side-eye Them
I want to start out with reassurance: Everything I am complaining about, or just observing, is said out of love. I don't hate 'tropes' or any of that jazz. I doubt you do either.
But I see these quirks in myself and others and need to air my reservations because I have a blog and I can. Also, I want to work out my thoughts on the matters. I'm a writer; I work out my fees-fees on paper. Sorry.
The Preference for an Aristocratic Protagonist
I am obviously guilty of this: my main gal is a burgravine, and the other three investigators are minor nobility. I know there are exceptions. I think Winspear has a non-noble protagonist, and mystery solvers really do run the gamut. I actually read a delightful Flapper-era story told wholly from the point of view of house maids who are solving a crime in a theater. I should go back to that series. But there is a real tendency to sneak some royal blood into the protagonists' backgrounds. Lady Ginger Gold was married to some kind of baron, Veronica Speedwell is secretly royalty...maybe I'm just overly sensitive because I started my series as historical fiction and wound up doing AU mystery thrillers. (Is that a genre? Guess it is now.)
Even with the counterexamples, the tendency for aristocratic protagonists goes straight back to the earlies days. I observed this before: quite a few of the earliest detectives are at least upperclass or minor nobility. Kind of speaks to the obsession with preserving the status quo that the whole genre can get caught up in. This can be a strength in that it asks what George Orwell once accused left-leaning works of avoiding: if this, then what? Brynhild is in charge of rendering judgement on her serfs, if one commits murder, what does she do? At what point does the need for her mercy outweigh her need for order. And it is her need. At some level, she knows this. Or at least I do. The drawback is that it encourages some weird backgrounds as the writer tries to justify a lady getting her hands soiled and the innate goodness of someone who is manifestly 'privileged' to use a fancy term. Brynhild inherited serfs. Wiggle any way I want, depict it in any way I want, the world she lives in has serfs bound to land she runs. Our tendency is to root for the underdog, but we don't want the underdog to actually be an underdog. Leads to weird pretzel logic backstories sometimes.
Weird pretzel logic backstories abound in these series.
1. Nobody is just a normal person who got a job doing a thing and is now caught up in an investigation. It can get a little exhausting as the chaotic surroundings of the protagonists, from eccentric patrons to nutty families to special schools, take up way more of the word count than actual investigation.
The Collection of Dependents
1. The longer the series runs, especially if the main detective is a single woman, the more dependents the main detective collects. First, it's the little urchin from the first mystery. Then it's the maids the nice lady hired to take care of the little urchin at the beginning of the second mystery, then it's the urchin's cousin...you get the idea. It gets ridiculous.
2. I get some of the drive: the earliest mysteries had few if any recuring characters and focused solely on solving a puzzle. That can feel dry and leave the world that the characters live in feeling small.
3. Newers stories want to give their world's depth and their main investigators backgrounds, especially female single protagonists who, I don't know man, referring back to the status quo thing, is this lady writers who want to write female badass protagonists but then also want to make them 'mom?' Maybe our realization that a lot of women are reading these books inclines us to add cute kids and pets to get their attention? Both, something else, not sure...
4. It sometimes also feels unavoidable. Somehow, Sherlock Holmes managed to be 30 or so for decades, Hercule Poirot never collected a past through the 40-plus years of his existence, but modern mysteries move forward, obviously progressing in time with people getting older. It feels hard to avoid collecting characters as we move along.
a. But can we not? Can we drop some secondary characters? One of the strengths of a series like Brother Cadfael or Sherlock Holmes is that you can read them in any order and not miss anything. (And Brother Cadfael does have books that refer to his past and reintroduce characters from earlier works. But as a rule, the cast of characters don't accumulate.) This lack of accumulation makes the series accessible. I started the Matthew Bartholomew stories on book six and was hooked largely on the relationship between Brother Micheal and Matthew Bartholomew. Since she kept to solving crimes and switched out supporting cast members with the books, I could read them out of order and not stress too much about who these people were. It also kept a certain consistency: I knew who I was rooting for.
Connecting weird pretzel logic backgrounds with dependent accumulation: when does this stop being a mystery and start being a romance/family drama story? When does the word count veer into making sure every minor urchin our good, pure noblewoman has adopted gets a happy ending instead of solving some mystery. I feel like the Cat Who mysteries and at least one other are just misbranded- they started out with some investigating, but they ultimately devolved into family drama with no puzzle attached. I have plenty of family drama in my own stories, but I feel like this needs to be its own genre- eccentric lit crit? I'm not sure.
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