Preventing genre-savvy second-guessing in murder mysteries
In a murder mystery, most of the story is generally focused on figuring out who the murderer is; in "Fair-Play" mysteries, it's assumed the murderer is a significant character in the book, and the fun is in figuring out which of them it is.
This being the case, readers familiar with the format generally try to second-guess the investigation. That is, not only do they try to solve the case along with the sleuth and the unfolding information within the story (which is fine, that's something I want); their guesses are often based upon their knowledge of the structure and conventions of mystery stories - along the lines of "Mr. X can't be the murderer, because he's the first guy the detective suspects," or "It's got to be Little Miss Innocuous, because she's being portrayed as being innocent and trustworthy - so she's the one the author doesn't want us to suspect!".
Now, plenty of mysteries can withstand this sort of meta-interrogation, and some intentionally subvert these conventions. But I'm interested in avoiding this reaction altogether, or at least minimizing it - I want my readers' wits engaged in a duel with the mystery, not with genre-savvy one-upmanship.
How can this problem be addressed - how can I maintain suspense and suspicion towards a wide range of suspects, and encourage the reader not to second-guess the story?
(Note that I'm not looking for suggestions which will surprise the reader despite his genre-savvy. I'm looking for suggestions which will keep him from relying overwhelmingly on genre-savvy to begin with.)
1 answer
A popular variant of the whodunit structure is the howdunit or the howcatchem, in which the question isn't who committed the crime - it's how he managed to pull it off, and/or how the detective succeeded in conclusively proving the culprit's guilt.
I find that this neatly sidesteps the problem, because the reader is no longer guessing which of a list of people is the murderer. So the howdunit discourages "gaming the system" with guesswork, similar to how an open-form question discourages guesswork far more than a multiple choice question.
A lot of mystery stories, both classic and popular, use the "howdunit" structure - including some Sherlock Holmes stories, and TV shows like Monk. Another TV show, Veronica Mars, does something similar - it frequently shifts focus away from finding the culprit and towards clearing somebody who's been unjustly accused.
On the other hand, I personally find the howdunit variant to be less inherently compelling than the whodunit. Watching the detective fill in the blanks - clever as they may be - when the overall lines are abundantly clear simply isn't as suspenseful as the promise of the killer's identity being dramatically exposed.
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