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Mystery Fiction
aka: Whodunnit

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Albert Wiles: If it's murder, who done it?
Sam Marlowe: Who did it.
Albert Wiles: ...That's what they say, 'Whodunnit.'

Also known as a "mystery story" or simply a "mystery", Mystery Fiction is a genre where the plot revolves around a mysterious happening that acts as the Driving Question.

In a standard mystery, the explanation for the mystery is gradually revealed by the investigative process of the protagonists. This is accomplished through a mixture of intelligence, ingenuity, the logical interpretation of evidence, and sometimes sheer luck.

Detective Drama is a type of Mystery Fiction that focuses on a detective solving a crime, and the term is often treated as synonymous with Mystery Fiction.

Basic Classes of Mystery

  • The Fair-Play Whodunnit: You know what the detective knows, and if you're smart enough, at a certain point, you can solve it ahead of him without being Genre Savvy.
  • The Clueless Mystery: The author doesn't provide enough clues for the audience to figure it out.
  • The Reverse Whodunnit: The reader knows who, what, where, when, and why, perhaps in more detail than the detective will ever know. For the reader, the question is: How will the detective solve what appears to be a perfect crime?
Subgenres of Mystery Fiction
  • Amateur Sleuth: A character with no formal connection to law enforcement regularly solves crimes, but does not get paid for it.
  • Cozy Mystery: Sex and violence are downplayed or treated humorously, and the crime and detection take place in a small, socially intimate community. The detectives in such stories are nearly always amateurs and frequently women. They are typically well-educated, intuitive, and often hold jobs that bring them into constant contact with other residents of their town and the surrounding region. This frequently features the Little Old Lady Investigates, and may or may not contain paranormal elements.
  • Great Detective: The classic Great Detective relies on his personal powers of deduction, education and insight to solve crimes.
  • Hardboiled Detective: A tough, cynical guy with a gun and a lot of Street Smarts, who solves mysteries with dogged persistence rather than astounding insight, the Hardboiled Detective was America's Darker and Edgier response to the classic ideal of the Great Detective. This type of Mystery Fiction is often associated with Film Noir.
  • Historical Detective Fiction: Detective and mystery stories set in the past.
  • Occult Detective: A detective investigates supernatural cases. Said detective may or may not be supernatural themselves.
  • Paranormal Investigation: Based on the investigation of actual or alleged paranormal activity, this subgenre by its very nature tends to be less realistic than the others.
  • Police Procedural: The emphasis is on realistic or at least semi-realistic depictions of modern police investigative techniques.
  • Tour Guide Detective: Solving a mystery is used as a way to explore a setting.
  • For just a few of the other ways of classifying mysteries, see here and here.

For a brief history of Mystery Fiction, see the Analysis page.


Examples:

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    Video Games 
  • 64th Street: A Detective Story: Sort of, except the detective backstory is one of the flimsiest excuses ever as set-up for a video game where the player goes around beating up mooks.
  • Alone in the Dark (2023): A Fantastic Noir Survival Horror mystery game.
  • Caper in the Castro: An LGBT first-person whodunnit adventure.
  • Crime O'Clock focuses on Time Police solving anomalous crimes by going back and forth in time to find and track suspects.
  • Deadline from Infocom is an Interactive Fiction game where the player has 12 (in-game) hours to solve a Locked Room Mystery.
  • Detective Pikachu: a mystery Adventure Game set in the Pokémon universe.
  • Discworld Noir combines this trope with Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, casting the player as a citizen who becomes a detective because of the Theory of Narrative Causality.
  • Fox Hunt
  • Insanity: Combined with Explorer Horror; a group of teens enter a supposedly haunted mansion and must uncover its tragic past to escape.
  • Investi-Gator: The Case of the Big Crime is a parody of detective stories starring the eponymous Investi-Gator, a Clueless Detective alligator who can't understand that most of the crimes he investigates are being committed by his Obviously Evil brother, Insti-Gator.
  • Judgment has an ex-defense attorney named Takayuki Yagami who's forced to leave his job and be a private eye after his client, gotten acquitted of a previous criminal charge, was accused as the main suspect in the death of his girlfriend. He suspects that someone blamed his client for being a murderer.
  • The Kids We Were
  • Kona is kicked off by Private Investigator Carl Faubret being hired by rich industrialist William Hamilton to investigate several cases of vandalism that have occurred on his property.
  • Lucifer Within Us is a short Cyberpunk investigation game, starring a digital exorcist that must solve crimes and purge viral daemons from the culprits' minds.
  • Murdered: Soul Suspect is about the ghost of a detective trying to investigate his own murder.
  • Master Detective Archives: Rain Code is about an amnesiac Kid Detective solving crimes with the help of a mysterious ghost.
  • The Painscreek Killings is a puzzle-heavy Environmental Narrative Game in which a journalist tries to solve a number of unsolved murders which took place in a now-empty town a few years prior. Most of the clues are found in old letters and journals, and you can make a guess as to who did it on the basis of these — but to reveal the whole story, you need to find the murderer, who never actually left.
  • Paradise Killer is set in a psychically-powered alternate future, and you're tasked with finding (or rather, deciding) who killed "Paradise" island by murdering its Council.
  • Pedestal (2021) centers on Aoi Ooe and her investigation to discover the truth behind the death of School Idol Shiori Natsume, who supposedly committed suicide. She does this by piecing together details of Shiori's life and relationships.
  • Persona 4 follows a group attempting to find the one who is killing people by throwing them into a unknown realm inside the television.
  • The Raven is about a police constable looking into the titular Gentleman Thief and his theft of two valuable rubies.
  • Read Only Memories: A retraux LGBT first-person adventure.
  • RE:CALL is a mystery adventure game in which multiple characters, primarily a detective named Bruno Gallagher, are able to mold reality via their recollections in order to find a serial killer.
  • Return Of The Obra Dinn: A murder mystery.
  • Unheard is a series of investigations with minimal visual clues, making the player rely on listening carefully to the voices of suspects in the moments leading up to each crime.
  • Why Am I Dead At Sea, the loose sequel to flash game Why Am I Dead?; similar to Murdered: Soul Suspect, the story is about a ghost that was murdered on a cruise ship that must uncover who killed them, and why, by possessing various passengers and uncovering dark secrets.
  • World of Horror centers on a seaside town in Japan in the 1980s in the middle of an economic boom where cults and serial killers roam the streets while monsters and Old Gods are about to come out of the woodwork.
  • YIIK: A Post-Modern RPG tells the story about a group of friends wanting to learn the truth behind the circumstances of a woman's disappearance inside an elevator after witnessing an otherworldly force abduct her. Their search leads them to discovering a conspiracy, one that puts the fate of the world at stake.

    Visual Novels 
  • Closed Nightmare
  • Danganronpa: Sixteen students get trapped within a unprecedented location and their only choice of escape is to commit the perfect murder without being discovered. The protagonist of each game must find the culprit of each killing, as well unravel the truth behind the location of where the killing games occurs.
  • Imabikiso, partially since the hero is trying to investigate where the drug Vision is being made from.
  • Misericorde
  • Process of Elimination
  • Sea Bed is billed as a yuri-themed mystery, focusing on trying to figure out what happened that caused the two main characters, Takako and Sachiko, to drift apart.
  • Umineko: When They Cry
  • War: 13th Day first challenges you to solve the mystery of what happened to the sun. Later, you're tasked with piecing together the truth between two unreliable narrators. The True End gives you the biggest mystery of all: who are you?

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Alternative Title(s): Mystery, Mystery Story, Whodunnit, Whodunit

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