My correspondent Null-A asks:
What would you say is the basic structure or structures of a mystery story?
It depends on the type. Roughly, there's the suspense and the detective types. There's all sorts of elaboration and subdivision and crossover, but for our purposes, we'll say that the mystery is either focused on Charismatic Action or Solving the Crime.
Charismatic Action is the easiest to deal with: Remember Spenser? Also Magnum, Mickey Spillane, Lee Child, etc. The hero wisecracks and fights, and fights and wisecracks, until he uncovers the truth (which is mostly just a secret and not mysterious).
The structure here is: The hero gets sucked into the case. If he's a private dick, it walks through his door as a case; if he's not, he gets swept up in circumstance (e.g. DIe Hard, North by Northwest). He then alternates going to see people and having people come to see him. He wisecracks to everyone, becoming sufficiently irritating that the antagonist takes action against him, which he beats up, suffers, or narrowly escapes. Each encounter brings out a little more of the truth. Repeat until you have the big revelation, at which time the hero knows all, and may or may not beat the villain and emerge victorious.
Solving the Crime has more varied incarnations. Here, your examples are Nero Wolfe, Sherlock Holmes, most "cozies". There is a mystery, which the hero figures out.
The structure here is: Something mysterious happens, usually a murder. It's unclear who, how, and/or why the crime was committed. The hero investigates, either as his job or because he's nosy. He learns a few facts, develops some theories of the crime. Now facts become harder to find and he has to pry harder to learn things. New facts cause him to re-evaluate old facts, discard some theories and revise others. The big reveal comes when he explains the crime and how he figured it out.
This is simplified to the point of uselessness. I expect that Kevin Maroney or someone like him will pop up and say something insightful that invalidates, expands, or better explains my categorizations. But this is what I got for the space I'm taking.
You have a correspondent?
(Didn't RTFA.) ;)
My correspondent is Null-A, who engaged me in the Math Dialogues a while back.
I have read published-authors-who-write-Writers-Digest-books opine that suspense is about an emotional need to see how things play out, while mystery is an intellectual curiosity about how and why they happened. The implication seems to be that mystery is about figuring something out after the fact -- and the solving-the-crime nature of detective mysteries, at least, seems to back this up.
Now, I can see how both can be applied to the same story. For example, in Aliens where they go to the planet and there's a brief "what happened here?" subplot before the suspense kicks into high gear. Although...how much of a mystery is that, really, since the audience knows darn well what happened? You could apply the same thinking to a movie like Predator -- the only thing we don't really know is what the alien looks like and what all of its capabilities (are far as facts go), because we already know that the threat is, in fact, an alien from the advertising campaign that got us to the theater in the first place.
As for "Charismatic Action," I think I see. Let's take something like the first Alien movie. It's not really a mystery because there's nothing for the intrepid crew to really figure out. They basically try to hunt the critter and then try to survive while the full scope of the alien's life cycle, abilities, and kick-assness are revealed along the way. So this would be an example of what you're talking about, right?
Well, the first Alien movie isn't much of a mystery; it's horror. Different set of rules. There's not a sharp dividing line, of course. (Scream is an excellent mystery by movie standards, as well as being both horror and meta-horror.)
Die Hard is a good example of a Charismatic Actioner, I think: There's a lot of action and wisecracking in a series of encounters between McLean and the bad guys, through which McLean gradually learns what the bad guys are up to, leading to the big revelation that they're not terrorists, they're thieves. Die Hard has a huge unity (of place, obviously, and also of time) that isn't common in Charismatic Actioners otherwise.
I would have characterized the attraction of Charismatic Action as melodramatic more than emotional, but they're probably ultimately the same thing.
There are two basic kinds of mysteries: the who-dun-it and the how's-he-gonna-catch-him.
THe who dun it is the Sam Spade Sherlock Holmes deal. The how's he gonna catch him is Hamlet (which is really a detective story in many ways). If we stick with tv, Banacek was the best example of the first kind, while Columbo was the best example of the second.
In the first kind, something mysterious happens, asnd the detective has to figure out what and why and who. In the second, we know what and why and who, the question is how Columbo will catch him.
How are the rules for horror specifically different than the rules for mystery or suspense?
Incidentally, I don't disagree with your thinking for the "charismatic actioner," but I don't think Die Hard is specifically a suspense story. It's an action story, and while action stories do make good use of suspense when they work, they're not the same thing. I'm thinking that Vertigo would be a suspense movie but not a Hollywood action movie (right?).
Veronica Mars is definitely Solve the Crime. She's charismatic as all hell, but the focus is on who/how/why dunnit.
This is also clear when you consider that villains are active in Charismatic Action, but are generally passive or reactive in Solve the Crime. That is, in Charismatic Action, the bad guys sends some thugs to play some skull music on the protagonist's casaba, but in Solve the Crime, when the detective is closing in, the bad guys don't respond, or respond indirectly, e.g. by killing the next witness, except at the very end. VM's cases are definitely examples of indirect reaction.
It should be obvious that horror's rules are different from mystery's rules, since the two genres are trying to accomplish different things. Horror and suspense aren't too far apart, but they're still different enough. One of the key differences is that in horror, you don't see a way out. In a mystery/suspense, you can see your way clear: get the proof or escape or uncover the secret. Horror doesn't offer an escape; its focus is on simply continuing to survive. Figuring out how to stop the horror is a late-stage development, and to some extent optional (e.g. Pitch Dark).
Mike is wrong; the how's-he-gonna-catch-him is an elaboration or subdivision, not a major type. Columbo fits nicely into the Charismatic outline, in that he goes and repeatedly annoys his subjects until everything comes out. But you can't fit Spenser or Magnum or Travis McGee into a Columbo mode.
I'm not sure you're right about horror. Or rather, what you're saying is applicable only to a subset of horror stories. I wonder if horror isn't largely a genre like sci-fi that can support a variety of story types or story structures. I think The Exorcist is horror (dramatic horror instead of genre horror?), and it doesn't really fit your paradigm.
Going back to the Alien example, I think it's primarily a suspense story dressed in sci-fi trappings and using some horror devices. But the characters are certainly striving toward a way out the entire time (and, indeed, there is one). In fact, I'm not sure that it's true that you can't see a way out in even the "purest" horror story. There might not actually *be* a way out, but there would be no suspense at all if the characters and the audience could see that there were no real options available to the characters. The more I think about it, the more I don't think that's the point of horror at all.