451 – Constructing a Mystery
The Mythcreant Podcast
The Mystery of the Iron Throne
A mystery can be compared to a sandwich, where the protein represents the puzzle to be solved. In a mystery, characters are focused on figuring something out, rather than trying to obtain a specific outcome. While mysteries also involve resolving threats, the emphasis is on answering a question. This is contrasted with Game of Thrones, where the mystery is who will sit on the Iron Throne. However, there is no protagonist actively solving the mystery in the show. So, essentially, a mystery revolves around unraveling the answer to a question rather than simply resolving a threat.
Lay out your magnifying glass, conspiracy board yarn, and forensics kit, because it’s time to construct a mystery! That means laying the foundation for what needs to be solved, adding stakes, and making sure there are obstacles in the heroes’ path. It sounds simple, but can get really complex in practice. Fortunately, we’re here to shed some light on the process.
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Jen. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast. With your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle.
[Opening Theme]
Oren: And welcome, everyone, to another episode of Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren. With me today is
Chris: Chris
Oren: and
Bunny: Bunny
Oren: And unfortunately, today’s podcast topic has gone missing. So, we’re gonna need to split up and look for clues. Chris, I need you to look for stakes, otherwise it doesn’t matter if we solve the mystery or not.
Chris: Serial killers. Always serial killers.
Oren: [acceptance] Mm-hmm. Always. Literally always.
Bunny: Maybe it’s vampires, if we’re looking for stakes.
Oren: Speaking of which, Bunny, I need you to find some obstacle that will make solving the mystery harder, otherwise there’s no tension.
Bunny: [laughs] Can do. Can do.
Oren: Okay, now this sounds kind of hard. I don’t know if we’re actually gonna be able to find the topic, so maybe we’ll just make “Constructing a Mystery” the topic instead, cause that’s kind of what we’re doing.
Bunny: Oh, but what am I gonna do with all these track hurdles?
Oren: We’ll just have to, we’ll do—we’ll go running on them later, I promise. We definitely won’t skip leg day.
Bunny: [sarcastic, grunt] Okay.
Oren: Today, we’re talking about building a mystery. And the first question is, “What is a mystery? Is that itself a mystery?”
Bunny: Slow down there, Mr. Ontology.
Chris: Is a mystery a sandwich? Yes. Everything is a sandwich.
Bunny: [laughs] Where’s the protein?
Chris: Come up with all kinds of sandwiches on this podcast.
Oren: Yeah. The mystery of the missing sandwich. There’s always going to be a fuzziness around the edges, but generally speaking, people won’t describe your story as a mystery unless it heavily features the characters trying to figure something out. As opposed to, say—you can say that Game of Thrones is about the mystery of who will sit on the Iron Throne, but no one is trying to uncover what that is, right? They’re all trying to get it for themselves.
Chris: I feel very called out.
[Group laughter]
Chris: I think that’s from another podcast where we were talking about mysteries being about the answer to a question as opposed to the resolving of a threat. They also need to resolve a threat, right? But, they’re a little bit more about answering a question. And I think the purpose of the comparison to Game of Thrones was talking about, in how the mystery has to be resolved, because, Game of Thrones, we also had a situation where we couldn’t just get rid of the bad guys, there also had to be an interesting answer to who would be on the throne. Even though it’s true, nobody—there’s no protagonist in Game of Thrones that is trying to solve the mystery of who will be on the throne.
Oren: And the comparison still sticks, right? There are some things in common. If you wanted a satisfying answer to who will be on the throne, it couldn’t just be one of the contestants, one of the people who was going for it, right? There had to be something more interesting there.
Bunny: Ah, they turned it into an oligarchy.
Oren: Yeah, they tried to do that, and absolutely failed. [snicker] But, they were trying.
Chris: Were they though? Were they trying? I feel like that’s in question.
Oren: They were trying in the same way that seniors are trying when they deign to come into school the last week before graduation.
[Chris & Bunny laugh]
Bunny: Phoning it in before phones.
Oren: Yeah. So, that’s what was going on there. But, I’m trying to be more narrow with this topic and look at things the reader is going to look at and say, “That’s a mystery. This is a mystery story.” [confirmational]
Often a crime is involved, but sometimes it can just be something strange, like, a ship has gone missing, or there’s a strange magical phenomenon that we have to investigate. People would sometimes—would call those mysteries, even if no obvious crime has been committed yet.
Chris: Especially in speculative fiction, where there is a lot of just, traditional whodunit plots in speculative fiction, but there’s also a lot of weirder stuff. One of my favorites, “What is up with this weird place? Why is it so bizarre?” [chuckle]
Oren: [false-scary voice] Why is it so spooky?
Chris: Severance and Lost, and From, for instance, are all shows that are mystery, in the sense of, people are in a weird place and it does bizarre things, and there is no answer probably.
Bunny: What are the spookums and what do they want?
Oren: Look, the fortunate thing is that Lost set a really good precedent for the big, final answer to stories where we’re just wondering what this really weird place is the whole time. I think everyone was very satisfied with that answer.
Bunny: I think also, mysteries can be, like, there are often minor mysteries. They might be corollary to the main plot, like the story has a mystery in it, like the queen of a kingdom has vanished. And maybe the story has a component of like, “Where did she go? What happened?” But that’s also about the political intrigue of other people bickering over the throne, or whatever. I feel like that would have a mystery component, but it wouldn’t be a mystery story, unless the seeking out and finding was the main thrust of it.
Oren: Yeah, absolutely. You can have a mystery that is a smaller part of a bigger story, or is a plot that builds in the background. There mi—people might describe the mystery of what happened to the queen, and the protagonist might solve that as the first step of a bigger conflict—that actually is what happens in Game of Thrones, because we’re investigating what happened to the previous hand of the king. And my god, it’s been so long, I can’t even remember what the answer was. But they do that, that’s part of the story. Or it can be something that builds in the background, where it’s: we can’t find out what happened to the queen. So, now we have to deal with the political instability, and as we’re doing that, we slowly uncover clues about what’s happening with the queen.
Chris: [incredulous] You can’t remember what happened to the hand? But that’s why Eddard got his head chopped off.
Oren: I don’t remember what happened there. I jus—I only remember that Eddard found out about the incest kids, I don’t remember how the hand…
Chris: But, that’s how he found out about the incest kids, is he was tracking what the other hand was looking into.
Oren: Yeah, I’m gonna have to take your word for that Chris, because that doesn’t ring any bells. Unlike the ending of Game of Thrones. [laughs]
Chris: He basically tracked the other hand’s activities, which was solving the mystery of the children and who was their actual father.
Oren: That could be the case. I have no memory of this event, but I will have to trust you that this is what happened.
Bunny: As someone who’s never seen Game of Thrones, this is a very funny thing to have without context.
Oren: Yeah, if Chris is lying to me, please comment and explain to me, or just tell me she’s lying and see if you can come up with a more convincing answer for what happened.
Chris: Yeah, so the hand? A Thing-like character that was just a hand running around…
[Oren and Bunny giggle]
Chris: And it disappeared.
Bunny: [snicker] The mystery of the reanimated glove.
Oren: Yeah, this uh, this all sounds equally plausible.
Chris: That’s definitely what was happening in Game of Thrones.
Bunny: The reanimated glove and the incest children.
[Chris laughs]
Bunny: Coming to Disney+ this fall.
[Oren chortles]
Oren: Once you have your mystery, right? Once you have your thing that the protagonist is gonna try to solve in some capacity, be it the main story, a child arc, or something that builds in the background, you need to attach some stakes to it. And this is where most of my clients have problems when they are trying to construct a mystery, because they—in the most classic mystery of the whodunit, who committed a crime, they tend to think that catching whoever committed the crime, that’s all you need, because, now justice will be served. Hurrah. But that’s just not that urgent. It’s “yeah, I guess we’ll probably catch him eventually, or maybe not, but he already did the bad things.”
Chris: Yeah. Even if it was urgent, there still has to be some kind of threat by the person staying loose. That’s what I’m talking about, serial killers. Cause they know, if you know they’re gonna kill again, then that provides some threat. But if you have no reason to believe that a murderer in a whodunit, for instance, is gonna kill again, then, it just, there are no stakes because there’s no actual threat. Yes, you wanna see the person punished, of course, but that’s just not enough to create tension.
Oren: Yeah. You could intentionally go for a low tension story—those are often called cozies. Just be aware that if you do that, you’re gonna need to crank up the other ANTS in some capacity, ‘cause without tension you’re gonna need something else to keep people reading the story.
Chris: I suspect a lot of times, there’s lower stakes issues in many of those stories.
Bunny: I think that’s a reason why a lot of stories start with, I think it’s called a body drop? Where it’s trying to get you hooked in with a thing that’s obviously high tension. But the weird part about when cozy mysteries do that—and admittedly, I haven’t read a ton of these, but there’s one in particular that comes to mind and, because—I think that this is a problem, potentially, with body drops in general, because, they have to—in a prologue where they’re showing someone getting murdered, they have to not reveal too much, but they have to reveal enough that it’s threatening and compelling. Does that make sense? So, there was this one cozy mystery called, I think it was Murder in Christmas River? And it started with the murder, but because it was trying to be coy about who was being murdered and how the murder happened, the prologue was through the point of view of a dog?
[Oren and Chris laugh]
Bunny: None of the rest of the story was part of the dog’s perspective, just the murder.
Chris: That sounds like it would be more funny than threatening.
Bunny: Yeah, I don’t think it was all that threatening, but it was clearly meant to be.
Oren: Yeah. Admittedly, I would probably not love it if a book opened with a really high tension murder and then was a cozy for the rest of it.
Chris: That doesn’t sound like a good idea.
Oren: It would be like if Legends and Lattes, instead of opening with having—with a fantasy battle having ended, and the protagonist getting her loot from the fantasy battle, had opened with a giant fantasy fight. And then, the rest of it was the protagonist running a coffee shop.That is not the expectation you wanna set.
Bunny: I will say, just as for Legends and Lattes, I even found the opening of it as-is to be a bit jarring. The first sentence is about her squelching her hand into the head of a monster and I was like Whoah. That’s not what I braced myself for. [surprised]
Oren: Squelching. Delicious.
Bunny: Yum!
Chris: I also just have to put in here that, I think at this point, that body drop is only a term for this in our minds. [laughing] I think what happened, I think what happened is a commenter used it—those commenters say lots of things—and then I was like “Oh, is that what it’s called? That’s what I thought.” Cause it makes perfect sense.
Bunny: The body drops.
Chris: Yeah, body drops. Yeah. Perfect sense. So then, I just started using it, like it was the standard term. And then I tried to look up on the Internet if that was actually the term that people were using, and the only place Google returned was me.
[Group laughs]
Bunny: Oh no, it’s recursive!
Chris: [laughing] Congratulations, commenter, you randomly made this a term. That sometimes happens. Commenters use terms, I’m like, “Oh, OK.” That, but it’s so intuitive.
Oren: The origin of the term aside—that is very interesting—my experience is that this kind of scene is, it’s not bad, but it’s also unnecessary. Aside from obvious silliness, what Bunny was describing with the murder from the scene of a, POV of a dog, or the squelching incident earlier…
[Bunny laughs]
Oren: You can have a disconnected prologue where the body is found, right? Or the evidence of a crime. It’s important enough that it’s not usually going to bore your readers, or make them wonder what the point of that was. But, you can also just start with your protagonist finding out about it. In my experience there’s no disadvantage to doing that, and it decreases the chance that you might do something silly—have a murder through the perspective of a dog.
Bunny: And it helps if the person—you can have a prologue of someone else, of the mystery thing happening, and still make the characters involved with it present in the rest of the story, without necessarily being the main character. I think that’s also just like a more interesting way to do it. I don’t think this is a perfect example, but we can defini—Okay, I’m talking about Three Parts Dead, let’s start there, where we have the opening, and it’s not really a body drop, but we are with one of the characters—who is not the main character but is a prominent character throughout the story—being present at the time of the major conflict occurring, and then continues to be a character throughout the story. I think that works a lot better than if it was just some random guy in the temple when the alarms went off. Am I making sense?
Chris: Another maid who finds a rich guy’s dead body?
Bunny: Exactly.
Chris: And really should be charging every time?
Bunny: And they go “Mama Mia” or whatever.
Oren: That scene in Three Parts Dead is funny because that’s Abelard we’re talking about, and he’s like….
Chris: The best character.
Oren: Yeah, he is the best character. I was gonna explain that he’s the second, secondary protagonist—the deuteragonist, as it is sometimes called. The world’s silliest sounding writing term. But he’s also the better character, because he has an actual motivation, and skin in the game for this mystery, whereas Tara, the protagonist, is just there, and would like to get a cool, lawyer job. Whereas Abelard, this is like, his God has died, and his city is at risk. So that actually, I agree that starting with Abelard worked, but it also highlights that maybe Abelard should have been the main character.
Bunny: That’s true. Abelard is my boy. I love Abelard.
Oren: He’s—Everyone loves Abelard. He’s fantastic.
Chris: Going back to stakes, I will say that my favorite stakes are the angry ghost stakes. All you do is put an angry ghost in the story. [laughing] So, basically, you better solve this murder, you better solve this mystery or I will eat you.
[Bunny laughs]
Chris: Or something like that. It’s not normally something you can do, is add any stakes to any story by just having an angry ghost tell the protagonist they have to do it.
Bunny: The ghost is gonna getcha.
Chris: Ghost is gonna getcha.
Oren: Does it have to be an angry ghost, or can it be an “angry ghost,” quote-unquote, the kind of ghost that, like, is angry but just keeps showing up until it just feels like it and the protagonist are buddies?
Bunny: Or is it a, not angry, just disappointed ghost?
[Oren and Chris laugh]
Chris: To create tension, it does actually have to be threatening, cause the ghost is being, is the tension for the mystery in that case. But, you could have a ghost that, I guess something that’s bad is happening to the ghost instead? So if the ghost doesn’t have their murder solved, they’ll be stuck in purgatory forever or something. I suppose you could do something more creative.
Oren: And that works very well, especially in stories where the protagonist is relatively inexperienced with the supernatural. It’s less effective in something like the show Supernatural, or The Dresden Files, where, at that point, you might have…, you’d start asking “why don’t they just go and take care of this ghost first?” But, if your protagonist is a relatively uninitiated private eye or what-have-you, they yeah, they don’t know how to deal with ghosts. They just gotta solve the mystery. They gotta do what the ghost says.
Chris: Yeah. Supernatural’s biggest problem with ghosts is that they had a very straightforward way of getting rid of ghosts that should have been easy if it went smoothly, so they have to have a complication every time.
Oren: Yeah, I love it. They explained to us how you get rid of a ghost in the first episode, and it literally never works.
[Oren and Bunny laugh]
Chris: Other things that you can do for stakes in a murder mystery, anyway, is, you can have, somebody can get blamed for it. So you might need to save them. Or, for any kind of mystery, if there’s some kind of greater conflict, some, a murder happened and it raised tensions higher and now two groups are fighting, you can do something like that.
Oren: Rather than “the thief stole a diamond. We need to get that diamond back or else Da Beers’ diamond consortium will take a 2% loss on their profits.” Instead what you want is “someone stole the royal jeweled scepter of the kingdom of Peacelandia, and now there will not be peace in Peacelandia, because everyone’s blaming everyone else for the theft, so you gotta find it.” That’s the sort of thing you want.
Bunny: Yeah, the clues should advance the conflict. If you’re just chasing your own tail, I guess the dog in the murder mystery, then you’re—it’s just gonna feel repetitive and like, why are we still here? Maybe they do find a piece of evidence, and then they falsely accuse someone and then the stakes are ramped up because now there’s tensions between people who would support this person and the people who hate that person, right? And then, maybe they find another piece of evidence that vindicates that person, so the tensions between those two groups start to release, but, I don’t know. Maybe they had to do something controversial to find that piece of evidence, and now there’s that problem and the groups are angry at them for that. It should, it should progress the drama.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: I would recommend trying to hold on to one threat, if you can, throughout the entire thing, just to give it a little bit more evenness and to make it feel like the through line is a little bit stronger. But often what happens is, if you have something that’s a little bit not as urgent, what you can do is add, to solve the mystery, now you can do things that are dangerous, right? And that can supplement that a little bit. One example, if somebody goes missing, that one can work really well because their life is in danger, but it does tend to lose urgency. Pretty fast. If someone’s missing and you don’t find them for a while, after a while readers are gonna be like “if they were gonna get killed, they’d probably already be dead, and we’re wasting a lot of time.” So it doesn’t really feel like time is of the essence anymore. With something like that, if you have your heroes going into intense danger, to save that person, that can help supplement something like that.
Oren: Yeah. And, gathering clues is another place where a lot of writers really stumble, and Chris has a whole article on gathering clues, but I’ve found that the really common problem when people are trying to construct their mystery is that they just don’t give the mystery enough content. And so, the heroes are always one clue away from unraveling the entire thing. And so as a result they never find any clues. And so, there’s no movement. And that’s a real problem.
Chris: Hero can’t have agency, cause if they have agency, they’ll solve the mystery immediately.
Oren: And that was the problem with the book Wanderers, was that the actual mystery of where did these zombies come from was really simple. The answer was incredibly obvious, and if the protagonists had made any progress they would have figured it out, so they basically just aren’t allowed to find clues until the very end. And wow, is it frustrating. [laughs]
Chris: It’s very frustrating. If anybody’s not read Wanderers, in that book they have zombies whose skin is just… and the main character, by the way, works for the CDC, so his job is literally to find out what this disease is. So like, their skin is so impenetrable that it’s like Superman skin, where any knife breaks, right? And then as soon as they die they like, explode or something. They have one—they do get one body. Oh, if they stop them from moving, so that, if they try to delay them, and put them in quarantine, at all, they just explode, and they die. They finally get a body, and then the body is just immediately stolen, [pauses, laughs] before they can investigate it. Ah it’s just, it’s a very frustrating book.
Oren: It’s like they try to collect samples. Can’t collect samples, skin too hard. It’s ok, we’ll hold one of them to experiment on. Can’t hold one of them, explodes immediately. It’s like, okay, can we examine the remains of the one that exploded? No, it disappeared from the morgue, it’s gone now.
Bunny: [laughs] Definitely running against a brick wall, which, maybe that is what it’s like working at the CDC.
Oren: That is a particularly stringent example, but I have seen a number of stories where this happens. What you want to do in that case, is you just need to make your mystery a little more involved. You need to add more steps, essentially, that the hero can uncover. And if there’s people who are—have disappeared, then, you find one of the disappeared people, and they’re in this weird, mysterious stone circle. Hey, you found a clue and you’ve made some progress. Now, you have to figure out what’s going on with the stone circle, and that leads you somewhere else, right? And as long as that feels like it’s part of the same story, and you’re not just going from unrelated event to unrelated event, that’s generally a good way to go.
Chris: One thing that I’ve seen happen before, is that, again, your clues need to build on each other, right? And it feels like it matters what happens, and… you can’t spread your clues out to horde information. So, if the hero gets a bunch of clues that don’t seem in any way related to each other, and their relevance to the story isn’t known, just so that you can have a cool ending moment where “Oh, it all comes together” and clicks together at once, I understand the impulse to do that, because everybody loves their cool reveals. But if you have every clue seem unimportant and unrelated, so that you can not give away any information until the end, then it makes your book feel like it’s very aimless. It makes your scenes feel pointless. It doesn’t feel like anything is happening, or any movement in the story is happening. So, you do have to have one clue and then another clue that feels related to it in some way. [chuckles]
Bunny: Yeah, oh yeah. I was just gonna say, I think a corollary to this is also important, which is the order in which you present the clues, which has to do with not only making sure the movement makes sense, but also making sure the reasoning makes sense. So, I have a bit of a weird example of this going wrong, which I think people on the discord have heard me talk about, because it was an extremely strange episode of Criminal Minds that I caught when I was running on the treadmill.
And, so this episode is called Today I Do, and, what has happened is that there’s a, the body of a teenage girl has turned up in a pond, and another teenage girl is missing. And, we first see the pond scene, and they’re like, investigating it, and they decide that the murderer must be female, because it was a water burial. And even if it’s true that statistically, women murderers are more likely to dump the bodies in water, that’s also—statistically, men are more likely to do a murder. First of all, that doesn’t work. Second of all, the next scene after that is, that they realize that the girl who’s disappeared had a mysterious woman living with her. I dunno, man, maybe you should present that first. That’s a lot more compelling evidence that the murderer might be female.
Oren: It would be good if your clues made sense. [chuckle]
Chris: And your heroes don’t feel like they’re metagaming.
Bunny: Yeah. I recommend that you make your story make sense. Yeah, I recommend that.
[Chris laughs]
Bunny: Alright. Anyway, I do like the premise of that episode, which is, it’s like a murderous life coach, self-help guru. I just think it was like, just a very weird way of doling out information, and it felt like the wrong order. And also, I don’t even know if I would, it doesn’t seem sexist, it just seems poorly thought out in a, at least parallel to sexist kind of way. Like the women murderers, if someone was poisoned, it was a woman. That sort of thing.
Chris: It’s at least stereotyping. Especially since if you’re actually solving a crime, you cannot, you know, state a statistic like that and, it’s fact. Right? Even if 70% of water burials were done by women murderers, that’s still only 70%. [laughing] Right? You can’t just state, like that—yeah, it’s definitely a woman. No, there’s a 30% chance it’s a dude, or not even counting like non-binary people, or what-have-you. And so, you can’t just rule all those people out. That’s not how that works.
Bunny: It would be a lot more sensical if they were like “Oh, the disappeared girl was living with a mysterious woman, and then they found the body in the pond, and then they can be like, this is statistically making the fact that it might have been a female killer more likely, because there’s a mysterious woman in the mix now, so I feel like you’re more justified in thinking like that. Or they could just be disproven. Show them the folly of being like, “women do be burying bodies in lakes, amirite?”
[Oren and Bunny laugh]
Oren: My absolute favorite, the whole like, poison is a weapon that women use to kill people, is my favorite misunderstanding of statistics there is. Because the actual statistic is that, women who murder are slightly more likely to use poison than men who murder, but not only do men commit so many more murders that any random poisoning is much more likely to have been committed by a man than a woman, but women are also still much more likely to use other methods, because poison is a relatively uncommon form of murder. So it’s just, it is a misunderstanding on two different levels, and it’s my absolute favorite. I love explaining that to people. Even though it’s, we’re a little bit out, out-of-bounds on terms of topic now, but I just couldn’t help myself.
Bunny: Hey, if you dis—if you’ve dissuaded at least one person in our audience of using that trope, then you’ve done us a public good.
[Oren laughs]
Oren: Alright so before—since we’re coming up on the end, I think it’s relevant to talk about the climax of a mystery story. Cause this is also difficult, because, if for no other reason than people have this idea of the detective gathering everyone together and revealing who did it, and oh boy is that hard to do in a book.
Bunny: It was the butler.
Oren: Yeah, it could be the butler.
Bunny: Oh, it’s de—it’s definitely the butler.
[Group laughs]
Chris: The butler is statistically likely to poison people.
[Group laughs]
Chris: And then dump them in a pond.
Oren: See, this is the kind of an ending, big reveal moment we need. But, typically speaking, stories that do that are almost all TV shows, or the old Sherlock Holmes stories, where the story was told through Watson’s perspective specifically so that Holmes could hide things from us because if we knew what Holmes knew, the mystery would be solved too early. And, that’s just not a good way to write a story. It’s not worth it. The losses you get from keeping the story out of your protagonist’s point of view are too high. In general, I think you’re gonna have a hard time doing the classic, get everyone in a room and explain who did it. You can have something that has a similar aesthetic. You can have similar appearances. You, your character could get everyone in a room as part of finding out who did it, but if they already know? Eh, you are gonna have a hard time with that one. That is gonna be a tough sell.
Chris: It could happen at a big event where everybody happens to be present. The protagonist bursts in, last minute, “Hey, I know who did it!” If you want everybody to be there.
Oren: Yeah, that’s also po—that’s there’s—you could do it, there are ways, but the classic scenario is extremely difficult. And just in general, the ending that a lot of writers seem to want, which is where the protagonist has all the clues, and the climax is them putting all the clues together, that’s also very difficult, because if you give your protagonist all the clues, chances are, you’re readers will figure it out too early, and then be frustrated that the protagonist hasn’t figured it out yet. Because they have all the clues they need, why haven’t they put them together yet.
Bunny: Yeah. I think there’s also a problem in a lot of these big “oh! It all clicks!” reveals moment is that when, is, it’s when the author is trying to write a character that’s smarter than both themself and the audience. But they have trouble doing that, because they’re the author and, the best they can do is make a character that’s like, as smart as them? So it just ends up with contrivances that have the trappings of seeming intellectual. Like, the BBC Sherlock is a great example of this.
Oren: Yeah, they’re often just making huge leaps of logic that’s—that doesn’t actually hold up. That’s… it’s like you say that it had to have been this guy, because there are scratches on his phone, and so he had to have been an alcoholic, but there are lots of ways that guy could have gotten scratches on his phone.
Bunny: Yeah that train of logic will haunt me. I seem to remember there was one particular, there was one where Sherlock decides that someone is an adulterer, because the inside of their wedding ring is clean, and every time I fiddle with my watch or my earrings, I’m like “would Sherlock think that me fiddling with these is a…”
Chris: You’re an adulterer. [giggle] Statistically likely.
[Bunny laughs]
Chris: Those who fiddle with their jewelry are cheating.
Oren: Yeah. So that’s, that is the other problem, is that very often when authors do this, they have the protagonist make this incredible leap of logic that doesn’t actually follow from information that they know, and that’s just as unsatisfying. And so, that’s usually why the climax of the story, when they finally figure it out, that will usually be the protagonist getting some new piece of information they didn’t have before, and that is what will make it all click together, and that’s how you figure it out. Usually. That’s just much easier than the alternatives.
Bunny: And make it, don’t try to be smarter than the audience, make it something that the audience can understand. Don’t be like, I figured it out because of some clues that the audience was never shown, that I 4D chest my way into my magic mind powers and top—talked to some people off-screen and here’s the answer. That’s just gonna be frustrating.
Oren: Yeah, clues that the audience didn’t know, that’s always frustrating. Man, the current season of Nancy Drew, they have so many weird leaps of logic. My favorite one was recently. They found that someone had dug a grave, had snuck into the graveyard and dug a grave, and from that, they’re like “Aha! It’s this lady we know. She wants to kill…” another character, and I’m just sitting here wondering “ok, there are reasons why she might want to kill that person.” There—those exist in the plot. If you think carefully, you can figure them out. They’re not very well explained, but they are there…, why would she dig a grave first?
[Chris and Bunny laugh]
Oren: In the graveyard!
Bunny: Look, she’s just being efficient. Like, when you got the body right there, you’ll wish you dug a grave.
Chris: Even if she wants to kill him, she has no more reason to go to the graveyard and dig a grave than anybody else. I should probably mention this town is full of weird stuff and murders all the time of course, because it’s a show that takes place in a small town. The murders per square foot number is very high, given a random-dug grave, that could be like anybody, or anything. Right? I can tell the shape of this grave that a woman dug it, and it must be…
[Bunny laughs]
Chris: a woman who’s very snobby dug it, and hates the historical society, and I could, from these marks I have deduced this.
Oren: Actually, I can tell that a woman dug it, and I can tell because she accidentally dropped her pronoun pin in here, which is, it’s nice that she’s inclusive. So, I think with that, we’re gonna go ahead, and call this episode to a close.
Chris: If you enjoyed this episode, support us on Patreon! Just go to patreon.com/Mythcreants
Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a few of our existing patrons. First we have Callie Macleod. Next, there’s Ayman Jaber, he’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Kathy Ferguson, who’s a Professor of Political Theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week!
[Closing Theme]
Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening and closing theme, The Princess Who Saved Herself, by Jonathan Coulton.
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