Hello, my name is Nate. Welcome to my original blog post idea.
After reading You Are Fatally Invited by Ande Pliego, I got to thinking. What even is a locked room mystery? Because whatever that was, that wasn’t it. Looking at Wikipedia (as my original source didn’t even list “locked room mysteries” as a subgenre and is thus wrong) there are several different categories. I will now list them and then explain what they are in my own words, thus justifying the existence of this blog. For bonus points I won’t even read what wikipedia classifies these subgenres as, that way you get that raw unfiltered Nate directly in your eyeholes.
Detective Fiction: This is your classic mystery with a detective. Like Poirot and Sherlock Holmes and Michael Weston on certain epsiodes of Burn Notice if he were a detective and not a former-spy. Now a detective fiction CAN be a locked room mystery like The Yellow Room which was a locked room mystery AND starred a tomato-faced detective man.
True Crime: This is exactly what it says it is. It’s a real crime. This really happened. I know there are a lot of book examples of this but we haven’t read any on the podcast so I think more of those various shows about True Crime. Again, we haven’t read a single True Crime novel. Not a single one. Certainly not one originally written by the murderer seeking to profit off his own murdering. Consider subscribing to our $3 patreon tier!
Cozy Mystery: Uhhh.. I assume this is like baby’s first mystery? That’s proabably not entirely fair. I assume these are more Whodunit type mysteries. I assume they’re also less gritty and bleak. Like amateur detectives. I assume the Boxcar Children are amateur detectives, right? They’d be in here. As would the Ghost Hunter Adventure Club’s mystery elements.
Legal Thriller: I’d guess this is like the DA side of the law and order. Focusing more on the court processes and the drama between attorneys and the people they represent.
Police Procedural: Uhhh okay so this is liek the police side of the Law & Order. This is where you see police solving mysteries for the state. They have to play things by the book… except the ones that don’t. You won’t find them just walking in and using their detective powers to deduce everything. They need to interview witnesses, they need to get warrants for their evidence to stick, and the focus is not just catching the murderer (who we might not even know beforehand, unlike some of the classic detective mysteries which are generally contained to a single location) but also on making sure that the charges will stick.
Howcatchem: Pass. That’s not a real genre. You’re trying to trick me. Well it won’t work. Okay, fine. I’ll pretend this is a real thing. If a Whodunit is to figure out who did the crime. I’m guessing a Howcatchem is something where we already know that and the trick isn’t figuring out who did it, but how to catch them. How can we prove it was them or how can we lure them out of hiding? Or it’s fake.
Hardboiled Fiction: This is… what I assume a private eye who is also a loose cannon. A real man’s man. A real hairy hardboiled egg type man. Who pistol whips first and asks questions after a second pistol whipping. It’s grittier and grimmy-er and eggy-er.
Historical Mystery: Amelia Earhart.
Locked-Room Mystery: Ahhh here it is. That good shit. Well… okay not really. No, I don’t know if I care for this genre. But anyway the LRM in my opinion is where there is a room that a murder happens in and golly gee how could anyone have gotten into that room? The doors were locked. The windows were barred. The room lacks any secret passage ways. The hallway outside the room was watched. The courtyard had a bunch of people in it. How can this crime have happened? A lot of the time the means of accessing the room is part of the mystery. There’s sometimes a Rube Goldberg machine so that someone can automatically close the room so it looks like it was never accessed to begin with. This is like what The Yellow Room was and The Honjin Murders were.
So was You Are Fatally Invited a LRM? No. This house is lousy with secret passages. Nobody ever speculates how someone gets got. It’s definitely not a situation where the killer isn’t expected to have been able to gain access to the rooms of the victims. Nobody goes at length to talk about how impossibly locked each room was!
So what is this? Well there’s one genre that Wikipedia doesn’t have. I don’t know what I would call it. Spider Detective mystery? After the Spider class from Blades in the Dark? Mastermind Detective Mystery I suppose? Where the killer is some sort of elaborate super genius who has planned everything out in advance and is one of the supposed victims. You’ll sometimes see the murderer’s perspective as well and I would say that when you do, that’s when its at its purest form. And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie (the only title for that story by the way) and this book here would both fall into that category. It’s where the author has to obscure the thoughts of the characters in such a way that they’re kind of aware they’re being mind-read by an outside reader. It’s where there are multiple homicides that are planned and don’t all occur at the same time and occurred for different reasons (i.e. they’re not all part of 1 big crime but are a series of separate crimes by the same person). Those crimes are also not crimes of passion or opportunity such as where the killer plans to kill one particuilar person and then someone gets to close and there has to be another murder to cover up the initial crime. I’d say that Gokumon Island falls somewhat under this category but without the murderers’ perspective. That’s a blend of this genre and a detective mystery.
So that’s my take. I don’t think this is an LRM. I think it’s something else that wikipedia doesn’t classify. Or maybe it classifies it as something else but I didn’t read wikipedia’s classifications and I’m not gonna. At the end of the day classifications are subjective. Except mine. Which are objective. I am right. Anyway thanks for coming to my Ted Talk… what do you mean Ben already covered this?