In Creative Writing, we are working on murder mystery stories. What’s so interesting to me about this genre is how particular it is. You just have to have certain strict elements to make this type of story work. For instance:
Objects. Objects are crucial to murder mysteries in a way that they are not to basically any other type of fiction. Obviously “the murder weapon” is often important, but more crucially, the plot itself is almost always driven by the discovery of objects–physical clues that lead the protagonist to the truth.
Think: in the first episode of the new Sherlock series, what object is crucial?
Yup. The pink suitcase. It’s essential. If the murderer had not forgotten leave the pink suitcase with the body, it would have been nearly impossible to prove that the lady had not committed suicide. But since the pink suitcase was missing, and Holmes knew (by the splash of dirty water on her left ankle) that she had been dragging a suitcase behind her in the rain, the so-called “suicide” had to involve at least one other person on the scene–the murderer.
Still not convinced?
In the episode we watched in class, for example, we see Columbo reading a newspaper while the police scurry about the house and the medical examiner peers over the body. As usual, Columbo gets some weird glances for seeming to be so uninterested in what is most important.
Wait. What? You’ve never seen a Columbo episode before???
But, in his characteristic way, there is always just “one more thing” that Columbo has questions about. In this case, he has questions about the newspaper. The murderer claimed she had not left the house all day and there was no one else who came to see her. The newspaper must have been delivered to the house, she said.
Ah– but only morning editions of the paper are delivered. The evening edition had to have been bought by someone at a drug store or grocery, proving that the murderer had, in fact, left the house even though she claimed not to.
So the challenge for my students is to recognize–and utilize–the importance of objects in their own murder mystery stories. Most really good mysteries rely upon them.
Speaking of objects, I wrote a paper in college tracing the development of the novel by looking at how objects are treated in four specific works: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Gustave Flaubert’s novella A Simple Heart, William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop.
The objects I consider in these works are, respectively: Mr. Darcy’s portrait, Felicite’s green parrot, the coffin and Our Lady’s tilma.
What’s interesting is how these four works suggest the increasing importance of objects in novels over time. Jane Austen (1775-1817) and other early novelists (Phillip Sidney, John Bunyan, Jonathan Swift, Laurence Sterne, Anthony Trollope) almost never talk about objects because they are more interested in ideas, concepts, conversation, and character. This is why the scene where Elizabeth experiences a revelation about Mr. Darcy while looking at his painted portrait is so interesting; it is very unusual for Austen and most other early novelists. By the time we get to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, objects are everywhere.
The biggest exception I can think of to this rule about early novelists is in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), where one of the best scenes in this early novel is about the main character salvaging various objects from the wreck of his ship. But the story still centers around his inner thoughts and religious conversion. Moreover, in most of these early novels, the narrator (even if she is not directly involved in the action of the story) uses 1st person–giving a sense of subjectivity rather than objectivity.
By the time we reach Flaubert and his parrot, however, objects become a lot more prominent in novels—perhaps partially due to the increasing influence of the Industrial Revolution and advances in science and what is “objectively” real. Think of the significance of the scarlet letter in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s famous work (1850), or the whale (is i