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Amateur Hour at the Local Crime Scene

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Average Everygirl #57, Average Aftermath: the Villain confesses | Panel 1: In her last act as an amateur sleuth, Average faces Quirky, who regards her from behind the bars of a jail cell. She says, with indignation, "Mr Detective, you murdered a man, tampered with evidence, and tried to frame someone else while pretending to look for the culprit." | Panel 2: She continues, "And all this over blubberwurst? Was it really worth it?" | Panel 3: Quirky replies, "Blubberwurst is always worth it." | Panel 4: Left alone, he faces the reader and states, "That girl needs to get her priorities straight."

Let’s hear it for the amateur sleuth solving the case!

In all seriousness, amateur sleuths belong to a breed of character that both entertains and baffles. Who are these people surrounded by death and mayhem? They wake up each morning, walk out their door, and stumble across a crime scene? I can understand a book series about a professional detective (police or private), because it’s their job to encounter the seedy underbellies of the world. Amateur sleuths are simply living their lives—amid a slew of depraved and desperate criminals, apparently.

A Wide-spread Problem

This trend is not confined to murder mysteries. Many children’s mystery series revolve around amateur sleuths solving crimes: the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Encyclopedia Brown, and (my personal favorite) Trixie Beldin, to name a few. Even The Boxcar Children, which was most definitely not a mystery to start, became The Boxcar Children Mysteries when it was serialized (a transition that, I’ll be honest, has always bewildered me).

What, then, is the appeal of an amateur sleuth, that adults and children alike can enjoy such exploits?

Amateur vs. Eccentric

The Amateur Sleuth exhibits superior logic, quick thinking under duress, and a painstaking attention to the details that most people would overlook or dismiss. These admirable traits create a bond between reader and sleuth: we instinctively want to be an intelligent, detail-oriented person, and the amateur sleuth provides an avatar for those desires.

The Eccentric Sleuth, in contrast, is no avatar at all. They provide a spectacle, an idol, but never a comrade-in-arms. The reader more readily relates to the “normal” sidekick, the Dr. Watson, Captain Hastings, or Archie Goodwin of the story. (Although one might argue these particular examples fall short of normal, when juxtaposed against their respective cohorts, they become such. “Normal” is always relative.)

The Amateur Sleuth, then, shifts that “normal” character into the focal role of crime-solving, a condition that may appeal to the reader because it transitions their avatar from observer to active agent in solving the mystery.

Just like using an agent-assigning verb renders more dynamic prose than using an experiencer-assigning verb.

(Yeah, I’m drawing a parallel between content and structure. Formalism for the win.)

Also working in the Amateur Sleuth’s favor is our culture’s love of an “uninitiated layman” solving a problem that is beyond the grasp of educated professionals. I don’t know if we like seeing haughty betters knocked down a peg, or if we prefer the chance of inherent genius unrecognized, or if it’s a combination of both. Regardless, this pattern shows up not only in mysteries, but across genres. Usually, the amateur does end up being an unconventional sort of genius.

And the audience preens, as if this character development reflects well on them, too.

And maybe it does. We are what we read, to some extent.

Yes: amateurs, mostly.

6 thoughts on “Amateur Hour at the Local Crime Scene”

  1. *coff*Midsummer Murders*coff*

    Always wondered just HOW so many murders happened in that tiny little village! 😀 Surely by now it would have been blacklisted as a no-go zone for tourists…

    1. BUT SERIOUSLY. Especially when the amateur sleuth(s) live in a small town and murders keep happening all over the place, why isn’t there some sort of mass exodus from the area? You know the property values sink lower with each new death. 😀

  2. EXACTLY. How Jessica Fletcher manages it, I’ll never know. Though in her defense, she DOES do a bit of travelling from being a writer, so not ALL the deaths happen at home.

    But a heck a lot of ’em do.

    1. Haha, yup! You’d think people would know to steer clear of Jessica, what with how many of her associates die on a regular basis.

    1. Yes. All you have to do is murder a few people… in your stories, and earn loads of cash to buy your nice, affordable house.

      Oh, look! You’re already headed down that path! (RIP, Raoul et al.)

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