![]() The Evil Victim: seemingly bringing their dreadful fate upon themselves and supplying us with a large cast of suspects and a large variety of motives. Other great tropes for the mystery genre include: These can work well together to muddy the waters a bit for the armchair detective, making us focus on the wrong thing and miss finding the killer before Poirot or Miss Marple. I love the combination of two or more tropes in the same book. These all have doomed lovers, doomed because they must suffer the consequences of their actions, or doomed because one of them is manipulated by the object of their affection, who is not what he or she seems. (Spoiler alert) I’m thinking of Death In The Clouds again, and this is also a second trope for Death On The Nile, and another book I love, Evil Under The Sun. Or the romance genre’s trope, doomed love: this works well in mystery too. Though of course, knowing Christie, the killer is usually someone we’ve investigated then eliminated, just to put the reader off the scent. They all work brilliantly: a closed, finite circle of suspects the detective can investigate one by one, and eliminate until the only one left is the killer. Or what about Death In The Air – a plane instead of a boat instead of a train instead of a manor house. Or you might prefer Death On The Nile – a boat instead of a train instead of a manor house. The country house is exchanged for a snowbound train. that’s all very well, but there are a variations on the country house. Agatha Christie was of course the Queen of the trope: want a closed community? How about a familiar one: the country house mystery? For example, The Mysterious Affair At Styles, or The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Each time the story is told, we hope the author will bring their own new slant on a familiar trope. ![]() There are quite a few often-repeated ideas. We all know about country house or closed community mystery. There is the second-chance trope, or another is the Romeo-and-Juliet ‘doomed love’ trope.Īnd so it is with mysteries. ![]() There is the Cinderella trope, or we might call it a rags-to-riches story. It’s more a set idea or plot outline that is used many times over, hopefully with variations on the theme. Although those words have a negative connotation. If you read romance as a book category, you are probably aware of the concept of a trope.Ī trope is, in a way, a kind of cliché or a stereotype. ![]()
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