Agatha Christie admitted in her autobiography that her biggest inspiration for creating the meticulous, perfectionist Hercule Poirot was none other than Sherlock Holmes, the indifferent, chaotic investigator who made Sir Arthur Conan Doyle one of the biggest writers of all time. If the Queen of Crime allowed herself this kind of confession, who am I to come here and babble about the mystery genre without addressing the ones who deserve credit? Isaac Newton once wrote a sentence in a letter stating that “if I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants“, and that’s exactly the idea for Mystery Elsewhere, to explore new pathways for the genre without forgetting the ones who actually paved it.
My inspirations were clearly Christie and Conan Doyle, as I think they were for most readers of this article. However, any online research on the topic quickly shows that others also ventured down this path. A couple of years ago, in a podcast, I heard the term Locked Room Crime, describing the supposedly “perfect” murder, in which there’s a body in a closed room with a bullet wound. The assassin could not have escaped through any door or window, and the people outside claim they didn’t see anyone around.
After a quick search, I found that the term was attributed to someone other than Christie or Conan Doyle (for me, they’re the Big Two), an American writer named John Dickson Carr, in a book called The Hollow Man (the writer was American, so let’s use the American name). I found that fascinating. Don’t get me wrong, I knew that limiting the mystery genre’s origins to The Big Two was a mistake, but I’m not sure about the readers of this website. In southern Brazil, it’s pretty rare to see this kind of work in libraries or bookstores, and even searching online proved to be a hard endeavor. So how can one acquire this knowledge if not for detailed research or asking the AI? This is actually one of the things that makes me consume this genre, the deep lore that traces back hundreds of years, when times were different.
Then we get to what I believe is the core of Mystery Elsewhere, the geographical and cultural differences we can find in the genre. In the West, the Big Two are the most famous classic mystery writers, but who can say for sure that it’s the same in a continent as big as Asia? Once again, one just has to google it to find that the genre is maybe even bigger in countries like Japan and China. So how come we hear so little about the ways other people consume the genre? And not only the geographical and language barriers, but also how technology reshaped what was once a text only media.
I borrowed a book from my cousin once, and he told me that it was similar to one of those Ian Livingstone game books of sword and sorcery medieval fantasy, but it was in London, and we played as a young detective helping John Watson get rid of a murder accusation that happened in a pub he used to frequent. In Brazil, it was called The Crown Against Dr. Watson, and we could take notes of hints, suspects, and even assets like currency. That got me fascinated, each page that I’ve read took me to a random other page with the continuation of the plot line that I was following, according to all the hints I managed to put together. The thrill of the investigation was more alive than ever. Fast forward to maybe a bit more than a decade later, I turn on my PC and log into YouTube to watch a couple of videos. I saw this thumbnail of a mystery murder game, in which the player had to investigate a cold case in an abandoned town in the US. Closed the video instantly. I knew the thrill was back.
That game was called The Painscreek Killings. You can buy it on Steam. The game is a maze of hints and clues and, sometimes, a red herring, that eventually leads us to a crazy ending that I’ll not spoil for now. There will be a review of these two works eventually. Arriving at the Sheriff’s office gave me the same feeling as entering the pub in London for the first time. It was proof that this genre was not dead; it just needed a push in the right direction. The mental wrestling between the reader (in this case, the player) and the writer is by far my favourite feature of the mystery genre.
It’s just to say that the genre is not lost in the past, with the classic “founding fathers”, for say. It’s more alive than it ever was, with so many media embedding the core of the investigation. And of course, we will explore it to the last bit.