Investigations in Scarlet: Introduction · 11:51pm Aug 25th, 2016
I wrapped up The Season of Spooky by plugging Higurashi: When They Cry, my absolute favorite horror anything ever. I confess that this was halfway my intent the whole time. Now that the post has been generally well received, I feel safe talking about my favorite anything ever, Higurashi's spiritual successor Umineko: When They Cry. But this presents a problem.
You can enjoy Umineko without going beyond Umineko, but Umineko itself is a work of hilariously transparent metafiction. For eight mind-bending, gut-busting, brain-meltingly absurd and interesting novels the story picks apart everything it can about golden age mysteries, puts them back together again, and tries to break every rule in the canon while simultaneously proving how scrupulously it follows them. Like, minor spoilers. Literally at one point the books introduce an arbitrary set of rules for mystery writing just to work as a thinking tool.
What I'm saying is that in order to actually talk about what I want to say about Umineko, I might want to share things about mysteries first. And that means I have a perfect excuse to talk about mysteries, yet another genre I rarely see attempted on Fimfiction and which I'd love a metric ton of recommendations for hint, hint.
So here's the thing: Full disclosure, I am not an expert and probably never will be. There are people who understand the mystery genre's history far better than I do. Some of them are probably reading this blog. If you are, I ask for your patience and understanding as I inevitably make mistakes and muddle details. With that said, most of what I'm about to blog is formed from reading enough Agatha Christie to legally qualify as an upper-class Brit, a wide range of short mystery stories written by a variety of authors usually in anthology format, Arthur Conan Doyle's work, G.K. Chesterton, and enough of the New Orthodox movement to claim reasonably familiarity with what it represents. I'm coming at this from the perspective of a fan, not an expert.
But being a fan never stopped me from talking things up before.
When I started Season of Spooky, I set myself the goal of both getting more exposure to Fimfiction's horror scene and to talk about where I think visible horror in the fandom got off to a bad start. Investigation in Scarlet, however, is going to be a bit different. I'm going to be trying out some more structured ideas that still give me the freedom to just slam out an essay on things that pop into my head whenever I'm feeling anxious or unproductive (which, full disclosure, is a big part of why I did Season of Spooky in the first place). My goals this time are as follows:
1) To talk about how Golden Age mysteries gave rise to New Orthodox mysteries, and what the key differences between the two are.
2) To understand the appeal of detective stories and mysteries in general.
3) To explore outstanding mystery recommendations here on Fimfiction
4) To extend our reach to the stars above! Jessie-*
5) To provide a starting point when I begin explaining why Umineko made enough of an impression on me that to this day my big sis and I jokingly refer to ourselves as "Mariage Sorciere", and why one of my life goals is cosplaying Erika Furude.
Hopefully I can explore enough of goals one to three to begin writing about Umineko by October, which is important to me mostly for thematic reasons.
So yeah, this is an upcoming thing. If you all have recommendations for mysteries here on Fimfiction or elsewhere - detective stories or otherwise - please give them to me now so I have time to read everything while I work on the rest of this.
Join me in the future for a quick explanation of genius detectives and the golden age.
*Meowth, that's right!
Mystery fics, eh? As you said, not a well-populated genre here. Still, I can offer a few recommendations:
The Wreck: Wherein A. K. Yearling has a recurring dream of a beached ship and tries to figure out why.
The Last Dreams of Pony Island: A strange blend of Jamestown, Rashomon, poetry, and audience participation. One of the more unique things I've read on the site.
Broken Symmetry: If you like your mysteries full of time travel logic puzzles, hard science, and awkward bookhorse romance, you'll enjoy this.
Triptych: The first story of one of my favorite AUs on the site, and oddly enough the one latest in the timeline. Something has gone horribly wrong, and despite what Twilight may think, it isn't her recent ascension.
The only mystery I can think of off the top of my head is The Magician and the Detective, which might actually not be a mystery so much as a general Sherlock Holmes crossover. Then again, it is a very new tag on this site, so that's not too surprising. Let's see what I've read...
I second The Wreck and Last Dreams of Pony Island. Make sure you find the post for the latter with all the endings! :D
The Homesteading has some mystery elements if you like shipping.
Analemma is tagged mystery, but I'm not sure it fits into the genre so much as is a mystery in itself.
I don't recall Cloven Hearts and Cloudy Hooves, despite my saying that it is memorable, but it apparently has "multiple mysteries... wrapped around a dark solution".
The Writing on the Wall is a horror story masquerading as an archaeological mystery.
The Devil's Trick sounds like something of a thriller more than a mystery, but I unno.
All the Mortal Remains is another extremely good story.
Lastly, Dreamflow is apparently "an A-class piece of fanfiction!"
I am okay with this, and looking forward to it.
Even beyond the obvious angle, I've recently started working on an original mystery / romance novel. And beyond Umineko, my background in actual mystery fiction is sorely lacking.
I'm super excited both for the blog posts and the story recommendations.
Also, I have to add my voice to the congregation of people recommending The Last Dreams of Pony Island. That story ruled my life for a good week or two while the epilogue contest was running. One of the best things I've ever participated in, online or off. Just goes to show what kind of quality material Horizon put together.
The Games We Play by Absolute Anonymous is an interesting case in that it is built around a mystery, but even though the author tries to keep the audience guessing until the end, the answer to the mystery is eventually becomes obvious or else the themes of the story wouldn't work. It is still one of my favorite stories on the site.
Not a story recommendation, but Bad Horse wrote a very informative series of blog posts on the mystery genre that are worth a read. Here's the first post, which links to the other two installments:
http://www.fimfiction.net/blog/623139/the-mystery-of-mysteries-part-1-core-narratives-of-genres
Under a Silver Moon says it is a mystery and probably is.
Others have already mentioned Trick Question, who wrote multiple stories that read like mystery or are mystery. Twilight’s Secret Journal definitely is. Keep in mind this one is exceedingly polarizing.
I don’t have much to contribute beyond those, other than an observation:
Mystery is underrepresented in ponyfic for a reason, and it is not quite the same reason horror is underrepresented for. For better or for worse, the place of ponyfic in the cosmos of fiction revolves around fantasy, which, as Bad Horse aptly put, rests on the idea that laws of physics have a moral dimension. Ponies can readily be victims of horror, moral dimension or not, it’s not common because we are disinclined to see them so inconvenienced. But most of us have trouble imagining ponies as unrepentant murderers, when, for a classic mystery, no crime less vile than murder will suffice. And also, for a reason. Ponies have their own special subplot “which one of them is a changeling,” but I have yet to see a full mystery novel built on this.
I wonder, does this ring any bells, then?
Clayton Rawson, “From Another World”, 1948.
4172481
TSJ isn't a mystery. It is a horror story masquerading as an absolute sex-fest. Polarizing is not the word I would choose because polarizing feels inadequate
I'm trying to think of what I'd plug. I would plug my Gnosis again but I did that for Horror and it feels vain to do it again, but I am /curious/ to see what you make of it. Actually, most of the mystery stuff that comes to mind I plugged in your Horror stuff because a good Horror has loads of mystery elements in it.
4172926
But "controversial" is even less adequate!
Seriously, this is probably the most iresome story I've encountered that definitely isn't a trollfic, and it does have more mystery elements than a lot of things that call themselves a mystery. I hate it. And I still think it's very noteworthy. :)
4172956
I don't -hate- it, but - well, being a friend of Trixie, I suppose my perspective on it is odd. I agree, it's incredibly irksome, but that's because Trixie hates meting out details. I'd argue The Price of a Smile is a far, far better mystery story by her, and one far more satisfying.
Wow. I have no complete Mystery-tagged stories in my favorites. D: (KitsuneRisu's These City Walls was cancelled after 137,000 words, and Archmage Ludicrous' Anterograde is incomplete.)
Bad Horse's The Magician And The Detective is an amazing and highly recommended Sherlock Holmes character study, but the mystery elements are very thin.
PP covered the two Mystery-tagged stories reviewed by the Royal Canterlot Library already.
That said, I'm gonna do a horribly rude thing and self-promote, because I actually have three pieces that fit the bill, and given that I'm responsible for three heavily acclaimed pony mysteries (or mystery-adjacent stories) out of only 1300 in the tag, I'm probably one of the leading authors in the genre here. That feels very weird to say. I hope I'm wrong.
4172481
Then I'm gonna have to self-plug The Case Of The Cowled Changelings, which is an old, old Writeoff story of mine, that I tried to edit for FIMFiction and ran into a giant wall of trying to make it too many things for too many people. At some point I'm going to pick it back up, take a deep breath, and re-polish it. In the meantime, the original (gold-medal-winning) version is still over on the Writeoff site and still eminently readable. It's hardly a novel, but it's a complete detective story about changeling disambiguation.
Several people have mentioned The Last Dreams of Pony Island, for which I'm super flattered. (The alternate-endings blog post that 4171836 mentioned is right here, or you can skip straight to the unpublished story with all of the entries.)
I'd also complete the trifecta with Hearth Swarming Eve, which is tagged Thriller but is very much structurally a mystery, with parallel plot lines involving what's going on with Rarity and what's going on with Chrysalis as the two of them feint and plot and draw each other into their web of intrigue.
4174464
Thank you! It's rude of me to correct what's already high praise, but the story does have an impossible crime, many clues, many points of deduction used in pursuit of further clues, and a gradual working-out of the complete method by which the impossible crime is possible. It just turns out to be irrelevant.
The Last Dreams of Pony Island may be.... surprising to someone raised on Agatha Christie. I think calling it a mystery undersells a unique literary experience. The original story doesn't explain the mystery. Horizon held a contest for others to make their own final chapters to explain it. Reading all the different ways of wrapping up the mystery, and discussing them, is real Death of the Author stuff, in an interesting way.
4186080 I'd actually read Last Dreams before I came here, oddly enough.
I'm going to try to write about it, but Last Dreams is also very much the kind of thing where it dovetails sort of kind of into one of the areas I need to hit. I'll expand on it when I get to the blog post proper, but New Orthodox is this sort of weird genre that's simultaneously a direct homage to golden age mysteries while also trying to rip them apart down to their core to get what the person who coined the term saw as the essential element of mystery.
Last Dreams actually does end up covering very similar ground, albeit in a very different way, by being a mystery story where the idea isnt' challenging the reader to come up with the "correct" solution but also to effectively come up with a "better" one. It's a challenge meant to test not so much your ability to solve the mystery but your ability as a reader/writer to come up with a solution that satisfies everyone else reading and writing. It's the kind of story made a lot easier to create and work through by the existence of the internet.
So yeah it's not quite Agatha Christie (and it's not very golden age in its sensibilities even when you strip away audience participation), but it does iterate on what mystery can do in a fundamental way that stays true to the whole "grandest game" reputation of the genre.
4186080
I stand corrected. Ultimately irrelevant is a much better characterization, and working from memory I think that's why it didn't ping as a "mystery" to me: the gut-punch of the story is as a character piece and it masks that for a while by looking like detective fiction. (Which it does do.)
Which makes "it doesn't feel like big-M Mystery genre" a bit odd, because floating a pretext and using it to disguise a reveal is a very Mystery thing to do, but the core of the story (as opposed to the dressing of all the mystery-solving) feels off on a thematic level and maybe that resonates more strongly with me: the core of the story is not about "how" but "why".
… that sounded more clever when I wrote it than when I re-read it. Plenty of mysteries are about "why". But this feels different and that's the closest approach I can find.
4186156
Without the Internet, I think LDOPI would have hewed pretty close to its roots, which was "Rashomon x Spoon River Anthology" — but without the Internet it probably wouldn't have been written. Going back through my author's notes I was explicit even at the time that I put together a solution I felt was logically consistent but I exposed it only through hints, and I wanted to see what kind of discussion it provoked in the Writeoff Association review thread. When readers didn't bite, and I opened it up by publishing it and running the epilogue contest, that ended up infinitely more rewarding for me than the writing itself — just the level at which people were engaging, both with my original story and with the submitted entries.
Even with a year's worth of perspective, I'm pretty sure that hearing the following out of Skywriter:
… will end up, on my deathbed, being one of my great prides as a writer.
If you're still interested in recommendations, I like the old ones HapHazred did: Unexpected Turbulance, Remain Calm and Don't Murder Anypony and The Case of the Purple Diary. They also wrote Shades of Noire, but that's more hardboiled crime fiction than a classic mystery.
4234121 THANK YOU.
The more of these I have, the more likely I'll be able to get an actual good spotlight post series set up.
Just remembered one more, though another hard-boiled story: Sharp Spark's Do Changelings Dream of Twinkling Stars. In spite of the title, it has nothing to do with Philip K. Dick.