One of my excellent beta readers, not habitually a reader of mysteries, commented that U-town does seem to have a lot of murders and that she probably wouldn't like to live there.
A sensible thought (though there are other reasons that a sensible person would want to live there), but it made me think of the requirements of the mystery story. Different genres always have requirements, or at least tropes. Fantasy stories often have quests, for example (though detective stories have them also). Romance stories often have "good" girls and "bad" girls (or "good" boys and "bad" boys).
And mystery stories must have mysteries. And the detective must find the mysteries. On a fairly regular basis. Even to the point of statistical unlikelihood.
With amateur detectives, you just have to suspend disbelief. How did nice Miss Marple come upon so many murder victims? If that bothers you, mysteries probably aren't for you. The writers on the TV show Murder She Wrote used to refer to Jessica Fletcher as the "Angel of Death" because, wherever she went, people died. And at no point in all those episodes, over all those seasons, did she say, "Wow, this is really statistically unlikely." (Even apart from the fact that most people would have found it rather depressing.)
There was a wonderful comment on this in one episode of the audio series Sapphire and Steel. There, the "famous amateur detectives" turned out to be serial murderers. They went around the world killing people and then framing others for the murders, because (as they explained) how else could you get to be "famous amateur detectives"? How else would you find enough murders to solve (and then be able to solve them)?
With Jan Sleet, she's somewhere between an amateur and a professional. She was a reporter (she doesn't work at it very much these days, though she'd probably still identify herself as a "gal reporter" if somebody asked her profession), and it appears that one of the things she reported on was murders, but we haven't really seen that part of her life.
Now, she's somewhat official and somewhat amateur. Some mysteries are brought to her, but she still comes upon them accidentally more often than the rest of us. Which is fine with her.
Speaking of which (in case you thought this post wasn't going anywhere), our detective has just wandered into another mystery, this one by accident and coincidence. Sometimes she seeks them out, but not always.
More of Stevie One is posted. The new parts start here.
Yes, that is the issue with the amateur detective. Probably also true with the small town yet professional detective–if one wants a long series and always has the detective solving a murder. Murders aren’t as common as one would think–if one reads detective fiction!
I actually had a paragraph on professional detectives, but I cut it for length. Real PIs deal with very few murders, I’m sure, and even fewer that are really mysterious.
The other solution is to vary it up. One of the great things about Sherlock Holmes, which very few people follow, is that a lot of the stories don’t have murders, and some don’t have any real crimes at all. I’ve done that a little in the stories: one is a missing person case, one involves stolen test answers — an idea I got from an Ellery Queen story — and one is about a beating, though there are further crimes in that one.
That’s for stories. For novels I think there mostly has to be a murder.
When I said professional detective, I actually meant a police detective. 🙂
And I hope that novels don’t need a murder. Three of my four novels don’t have one, and the one that does, my PI isn’t really investigating the murder as a whole but just searching for one piece of stolen property. 🙂
I wasn’t clear. I was talking about expectations, since these days “mystery novel” seems to be pretty much synonymous with “murder mystery” I think people (including me) should more follow the Sherlock Holmes example and have all kinds of different mysteries.
Maybe that’s what I’ll work on next.