I’ve mentioned this before, but I have developed a hopefully abiding obsession with mystery, suspense, and thriller novels during the pandemic. Like romance novels, mysteries as a genre tend to follow a broad pattern: the antagonist has committed a crime, a sleuth of some kind — usually an amateur but not necessarily — does an investigation, and after a few bumps in the road that may or may not involve danger to said sleuth or their cohort, the sleuth solves it. Personally, I find romance novels to be triggering, so I’ve leaned into reading mysteries, and that got me thinking about the kinds of common tropes therein that need to be retired. Before we get into what makes a mystery trope a bad one, let’s quickly differentiate between plot and trope. A plot is something like “locked room,” a “whodunit,” etc. A fellow Rioter wrote a piece earlier this year discussing eight kinds of mystery plots, if you’re interested. A trope is a figure of speech or literary device, like an unreliable narrator or a key character having an alibi. It’s not necessarily a bad thing; we are constantly identifying tropes in books/movies and then either delighting in being right (my favorite) or that we’ve been bamboozled. Tropes are, in general, just fine. HOWEVER. People have been writing books for a long time, and we like to think we’ve come a long way in our understanding of the Human Condition. This can lead to some eyebrow-raising tropes that linger in publishing, despite them being, well, icky. Let’s talk about a few that make the skin crawl, and not in a good way.
The “Confused about their Sexuality” Murderer Trope
Directly related to the previous trope. Gross. Stop it. There are more — many, many more — tropes that are problematic, and not just in the mystery genre (more on villain tropes here). While we aren’t likely to see any of them disappear any time soon, we can educate ourselves and speak critically about plots that put minorities in a bad light. There are plenty of ways to frame a mystery that don’t involve punching down into populations that are already targets of violence and hatred.
