Who murdered the mystery movie?

I’m not exactly convinced that the classic, clue-centered mystery story ever really did die (as much my fellow genre buffs say it did, at least), whether in movies or books—it just started wearing new clothes.

Take The Da Vinci Code, the second-highest-grossing movie of 2006. Putting aside any qualms about it as a movie (I’ve always kinda liked it while recognizing its flaws—it’s a helluva lot more fun than the unreadable book), it was an old-fashioned mystery masquerading as a thriller—complete with clues, alibis, red herrings, and a least-likely suspect. It even had that Ellery Queen favorite, the dying clue (and a surprisingly good reason for the victim’s not doing the obvious thing and writing his killer’s name).

Before that, though, think of all those ’90s thrillers, a bunch of which did have clues, detectives, and red herrings. Offhand I’m thinking of Kiss the Girls (1997), which is not a great mystery—a single Murder, She Wrote-esque clue, an obvious least-likely suspect—but is definitely a mystery, just dressed up like a thriller.

And then, in the late 2010s and continuing now, the mystery came roaring back to the movies in old clothes: Kenneth’s Branagh’s readaptation of Murder on the Orient Express (2017) made $351 mil. and got a sequel; Rian Johnson’s Knives Out (2019), a clue-packed mystery with a nonviolent sleuth (basically a comical Poirot), was a blowout success, recouping $311 million against a $40 million budget and getting a sequel; and the mystery was alive and well enough that Adam Sandler wanted to parody it with Murder Mystery (2019), a Netflix success that is, yes, getting a sequel.

Even if the ’90s mystery-thrillers don’t fit the bill on nonviolent sleuths, the Branagh, Johnson, and Sandler movies certainly do.

While we’re at it, I don’t think the classic mystery has disappeared from TV either. The much-award-winning Monk (2002-2009) is a close cousin of Columbo: Both shows have intricate, clue-filled plots despite (usually) showing the killer’s identity at the beginning. And certainly British shows have never stopped offering traditional mysteries, e.g., Jonathan Creek (1997-2004, off and on since then) and the still-running and very popular Death in Paradise (2011-present).

So I’m not sure the mystery ever went away. While we have a range of views on mysteries in this thread, I think the audience will always be there for a genre that, at least at its best, combines the emotional thrill of character and story (believe it or not, Christie could do in-depth characterization—read, e.g., Five Little Pigs) and the intellectual thrill of puzzle-solving, of feeling a blend of surprise and inevitability when the pieces come together to show an unexpected pattern.

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One more thing and then I’m out: This combination of mystery and thriller is (contra mystery writer John Dickson Carr, who I don’t think really believed what he preached on this front) nothing new. Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Speckled Band”—a mystery story by any account—has popped up in anthologies as gothic fiction, horror fiction, adventure fiction, you name it.

Even during the so-called Golden Age of Detective Fiction, when the emphasis on ratiocination was at its height, Agatha Christie was combining mystery and pure thrills (The Seven Dials Mystery, The A.B.C. Murders, Murder Is Easy, especially And Then There Were None). Carr, the king of complex plots, virtually made a career out of it (see, well, almost every Carr book). Ellery Queen began “his” career with books of bloodless logic but quickly combined intricate plots with thrills (The Egyptian Cross Mystery, The Siamese Twin Mystery), character development (Calamity Town, The Murderer Is a Fox), and both (Ten Days’ Wonder, Cat of Many Tails).