mystery: Types of Mysteries

Types of Mysteries

Many authors incorporate the conventions of the mystery into the novel, producing works that are warm, witty, often erudite, and filled with interesting characters and atmosphere. Such authors include Dorothy Sayers, Michael Innes, Josephine Tey, Nicholas Blake, Edgar Wallace, Ngaio Marsh, Philip McDonald, Anna K. Green, Carolyn Wells, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Elizabeth Daly, Peter Dickinson, and Hilda Lawrence. Some detective novels focus on the actions of the police in solving a crime; notable police-procedural novelists are Freeman Wills Crofts, George Bagby, Ed McBain, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, and Andrea Camilleri.

Dashiell Hammett initiated the hard-boiled detective genre, featuring tough, brash, yet honorable private eyes living on the seedy criminal fringe and involved in violent and incredibly complex crimes. Other writers in this genre are Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, Chester Himes, Ross Macdonald, and Elmore Leonard and, adding lurid sex and brutality, James Hadley Chase and Mickey Spillane. There has been a resurgence of interest in hard-boiled stories, such as those by Jim Thompson and Charles Willeford.

An extension of the detective novel is the espionage tale, which became very popular in the 1960s. Usually convoluted in plot, these novels emphasize action, sex, and innovative cruelty and sometimes stress the moral ambiguity of the spy's world. Noted authors of espionage novels are Graham Greene, Eric Ambler, Ian Fleming, Len Deighton, John le Carré, Alan Furst, and Tom Clancy.

In the subtle and perceptive works of writers such as Georges Simenon and Nicholas Freeling the psychological reasons behind a crime are often emphasized more than the crime's solution. Other writers, notably Julian Symons, have extended this emphasis, maintaining that early mysteries, with their country-house settings and aristocratic characters, are snobbish and escapist. Attempting to be contemporary and meaningful, these authors probe the psychological and sociological aspects of a crime, often producing grim and uncomfortable conclusions. The courtroom drama has also been popular, as seen in the success of Erle Stanley Gardner's many Perry Mason books, Scott Turow's Presumed Innocent (1987), The Pelican Brief (1992) and other thrillers by John Grisham, and other tales of legal suspense.

Despite its conventions, good writers can make the mystery novel their own. For example, Agatha Christie is noted for her clever plots, John Dickson Carr for his ingenious “locked room” mysteries, Dick Francis for his depiction of the horse-racing world, Ruth Rendell for her novels combining character and atmosphere with absorbing police procedure, perceptive sociological and psychological analysis, and a sense of life's tragedy, and Sweden's Stieg Larsson for a dark, wintry world of violence, sex, and international skulduggery. Other popular detective novelists include Sue Grafton, Sara Paretsky, and Amanda Cross (all of whom feature heroines) and the often humorous Elmore Leonard, Lawrence Block, Walter Mosley, Tony Hillerman, and Gregory Mcdonald. In the 21st cent. an outstanding novelist specializing in contemporary detective mysteries is Tana French, whose linked works feature a series of partners, all of whom are members of Ireland's Dublin Murder Squad.

Sections in this article:

Introduction
Types of Mysteries
History
Bibliography

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