You might think that, as a fan of mysteries, I’d be big on
Sherlock Holmes. And you’d be wrong.
Something about Holmes always ate away at me, even when I
was young. I thought it had something do to with the way Watson was often
portrayed as a blithering idiot. I could never understand why these two were
even in each other’s orbit, other than as a quick and easy way to make Holmes look
that much smarter and cooler.
(As a side note, this is also the same reason why 1988’s Without a Clue with Michael Caine and
Ben Kingsley is so fantastic. It’s definitely worth checking out.)
Then, sometime around high school, I got around to actually reading the Sherlock Holmes stories and
discovered what it was that ate at me: They’re a cheat. The readers never have
a chance to deduce anything for themselves. Instead, we have world-class
know-it-all Sherlock Holmes tell readers everything before the readers are ever
shown anything.
Apparently J.K. Rowling felt the same way, too, because she
approaches the mysteries in her Harry
Potter novels in a completely different way. If you’re like me, you never
really thought of the Harry Potter
stories as mysteries, but Sage Hagen of Just Write does and takes a deep dive
into how Rowling writes mysteries in this video essay:
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