We all love a good scare or a thrilling whodunit. But a large part of what makes the murder mystery and horror genres so comforting—yes, comforting—is their reliance on familiar tropes. Tropes are the cogs in the murder mystery machine, promising a certain amount of order to the chaos and the assurance that the puzzle will ultimately be solved.
Take everyone's favourite Locked-Room Mystery, where the victim is found dead with the doors bolted and windows secured from the inside. The payoff is a fiendishly clever solution; let's face it, we often care more about how the murderer did it than who they are. Or consider The Incompetent Police Detective, a foil that allows our eccentric main character to sweep in and solve the case. Tropes are the building blocks of the genre. An Agatha Christie novel would not be the same without the Gathering of suspects or The Grand Reveal, dramatic elements that we love to keep the audience guessing with.
Breaking the Comforting Contract
Age-old tropes exist across all genres, often bleeding into one another. The Final Girl and Cabin in the woods are horror staples, yet they offer the perfect setup for a mystery, especially when the protagonist, beaten down by the investigation, finally stands up and fights back. Tropes create our framework, the skeleton of our novel, but sometimes it is fun to move those bones around a little. We need to Frankenstein the plot and introduce some unpredictability to create something truly memorable.
Tropes are like a comforting contract: 'If I bring you a classic locked room mystery, you will look over the fact that our victim has no mobile phone service in the middle of a metropolitan city.' However, these conventions can feel stale and too predictable. For a modern murder mystery author to survive, we must create a new monster.
The Unreliable Age
The Flawless Detective is no longer a desirable character. Our new detectives are broken, human, and they make mistakes. They are unreliable, they often make the situation worse, and maybe—just maybe—they might actually be the killer.
A favourite anti-trope of mine lies in another great, genre-spanning trope: The Cliffhanger. As much as I love a grand reveal, I often prefer the more messy approach of real life. The killer isn't always caught; they aren't always arrested. Sometimes they get away. This can leave our readers, myself included, with a haunting feeling, a lingering dread that the murderer will return—a technique the horror genre executes exceptionally well.
Embracing the anti-trope keeps the genre fresh, shocking, and completely addictive.