The Sherlock Holmes Mystery Formula

 

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did not invent the mystery genre. That honor goes to Edgar Allan Poe.

But Doyle did make the nascent genre extraordinarily popular. Once Sherlock Holmes caught on with the public, there were dozens of imitators all vying for attention.

The Sherlock Holmes Mystery Formula

The formula that Doyle created for his genius sleuth endures to this day. It’s the formula all traditional mysteries follow. With stylistic variations, of course.

Here’s Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes Mystery Formula:

1. We meet the detective at home or in his office and learn that he is a genius.
2. The client enters, tells the detective a tale of woe, and the detective decides to take the case.
3. The detective hunts for clues to solve the murder (or other crime, if the story isn’t a murder mystery).
4. The detective, having gathered enough clues finally knows who did it, and either catches the killer himself, or tells the police how the murder was done.

The significance of the Sherlock Holmes Mystery Formula is that the story’s focus is on the sleuth and the puzzle he is trying to solve.

Mysteries are Cerebral

At base, mysteries are cerebral, not visceral, reads.

Mysteries are a puzzle. The author is challenging the reader to see if he can figure out who did it before the detective’s great reveal at the end of the book.

By comparison, thrillers are visceral reads. They are packed with emotion. Their goal is to keep you on the edge of your seat, chewing on your nails.

Thrills and Spills

That doesn’t mean there can’t be thrills in a mystery, because there certainly are thrills. Often plenty of them. Car chases. Kidnappings. Shootouts. And lots more. They just aren’t the main course. The puzzle is.

My own Justinia Wright Private Investigator Mystery series follows, more or less, the Sherlock Holmes formula. 

If your reading diet is mainly thrillers, you might find the mystery pacing too leisurely, or sedate. At least initially.

But hang on to your hat, because by the middle of the book things are heating up and heating up fast.

Real People

My Justinia Wright series was patterned after Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin mysteries.

Like Wolfe and Goodwin, sister and brother Tina and Harry Wright are people. They have lives apart from being private investigators.

Chandler gives us little glimpses into the private life of Philip Marlowe. And I can see why the glimpses are brief. Marlowe’s personal life is rather boring. He does play chess, but it’s games out of a book.

Tina and Harry, on the other hand, have interesting lives — and I share their lives with you. They are, after all, real people. At least I think they are.

So the lives of my detectives get intertwined with the mystery to provide a seamless window into the world of Tina and Harry Wright, and the people and critters they care about.

Get in on the Fun

If you like books about people, if you like Wordle or other puzzles, then you’ll like the world of Tina and Harry Wright.

You can find all of the many cases in the Justinia Wright Private Investigator Mystery series on Amazon.

Comments are always welcome! And until next time, happy reading!

CW Hawes is a playwright; award-winning poet; and a fictioneer, with a bestselling novel. He’s also an armchair philosopher, political theorist, social commentator, and traveler. He loves a good cup of tea and agrees that everything’s better with pizza.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider buying me a cup of tea. Thanks! PayPal.me/CWHawes 

The Detective Novel

Last week we looked at the mystery vs the thriller. And we all know the thriller is hot, hot, hot these days. The traditional mystery? Not so much. Although the mystery in its chick lit cozy form is doing very well. This probably has something to do with the chick lit element, more than the mystery.

In any case, I’d like to take a look today at the detective novel. That form of the mystery that started the mystery craze, and in effect defined the mystery genre.

Crime stories go all the way back to the Arabian Nights. However, the crime story as we know it today, comes from the fertile imagination of Edgar Allan Poe, with his creation of C Auguste Dupin in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”, published in 1841.

Poe even invented the word “ratiocination” for the thinking process that Dupin used to solve crime.

If Poe invented the detective story, and all detective stories ever since have more or less followed Poe’s formula, it was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes that made the detective story a mainstay of the literary scene.

I find it of interest that Dupin and Holmes are not professionals. They’re amateurs. The police are at best bumblers who know when they’re licked and need to call in the brilliant amateur specialist. And this is a feature of most mysteries that have an amateur sleuth.

Of course CSI-type forensics were a long ways off and the solution of crimes often did require the exercise of those “little grey cells”, whether or not the sleuth was a professional or amateur.

The 1930s are often called The Golden Age of the mystery, by which we mean the detective story. During that time, scores of amateur and professional sleuths appeared and disappeared. A few became household names: such as Sam Spade, Hercule Poirot, Nero Wolfe, Miss Marple, and Ellery Queen.

Others have faded to near oblivion. Sleuths such as Miss Silver, Mr & Mrs North, The Thinking Machine, Dr Thorndyke, Asey Mayo, and Loveday Brooke.

These sleuths, and many others, used ratiocination to solve the crimes that frequently baffled the police.

Today, however, the amateur is, or seems to be, very much out of his depth. DNA. Advanced surveillance equipment. Hacking of phones and computers. Traffic and surveillance cameras. Highly advanced crime labs. All these things are beyond the amateur sleuth, and even small town police departments.

Which may explain the rise of the modern chick lit cozy craze, that unlikely fusion of chick lit and the cozy mystery, and the vintage mystery, which is set in the pre-CSI past.

The vintage mystery, if well done, can be a very satisfying read, taking us back to The Golden Age — our glamorized view of the ‘20s, ‘30s, ‘40s, and ‘50s.

The chick lit cozy, focuses on a small town, or a small circle of people within a large city, crafts and small businesses, women’s issues, and at some point the crime. These reads are very popular. They’re not officially labelled “chick lit cozies”. That is a term I adopted from another writer who used it to differentiate them from traditional cozies. They’re simply called cozies and have essentially taken over that sub-genre.

Personally, I’m not fond of the chick lit cozy. Generally, there is more chick lit than cozy mystery in these books. Particularly the sweet romance element. Which probably explains why the sub-genre is dominated by women writers and readers.

However, they may end up being the mystery genre’s salvation. Mystery readers are aging. A fact brought vividly home to me recently when a Facebook ad for my Justinia Wright mystery omnibus was almost totally served to those 65 and over. And in that group, overwhelmingly to women.

The mystery is essentially a puzzle. A problem, the crime, that needs to be solved. It is a riddle, and we want to know the answer.

Which, to my mind, means that for all the sophisticated data gathering equipment available to the professionals, it still takes ratiocination, those little gray cells, to make sense of all the data and determine motive, means, and opportunity.

This fact actually makes the detective story very modern. A part of our ongoing discussion concerning the role of people and machines. The detective story clearly comes down on the people side of the equation.

The detective story is a human story. It is a story about righting wrongs. Wrongs done to people and society at large. The detective story focuses on a small group of people to find a killer and bring that killer to justice. It’s personal. It’s about bringing balance and order to the world of a group of people that has gotten out of balance and lacks order due to the violent crime.

Which is why I do think the mystery will endure. What it will take to bring it back into popularity, I don’t know. But the success of series such as Lawrence Block’s Matt Scudder and Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Milhone give me hope. Lots of hope.

We all know the big names of the mystery genre, even if some of us aren’t mystery fans. Next week, though, I’d like to focus on some of the lesser lights and their creators, and even a few of the new kids on the block.

Comments are always welcome, and until next time — happy reading!