Three weeks ago, I began this series with one question: why, when crime fiction is designed to keep us on our toes, do its writers still rely on tropes we’ve seen a thousand times before? To find an answer, I’ve looked at why Getting Stranded is an enduring favourite, why we love to hate the obnoxious Rich Family, and why the Big Reunion makes such a good backdrop to murder.
Now, as this mini-series draws to a close, there was only ever one trope I could end with. After all, what half-decent thriller doesn’t conclude by unveiling some secrets from the past?
What Is It?
We meet our protagonist, ironically, at the happiest time of their life. They’ve got the perfect job, the perfect house, the perfect family, and everything is finally going their way. Surely nothing can go wrong for them now…
Except, of course, something will. Just as they’ve achieved their dream life, that terrible secret they’ve been keeping hidden for years rears its ugly head again and threatens to derail all that they’ve worked for. Maybe they receive a blackmail note; maybe a familiar face turns up at just the wrong time; maybe a new building development threatens to (quite literally) reveal where the bodies are buried. Any which way, they must do everything in their power to stop all being revealed.
From here, there are two ways this trope can play out. In a traditional murder mystery, the reader won’t find out this information until right at the very end, when it is revealed as the killer’s motive. In other words, the victim found out the murderer’s terrible secret, threatened to expose them, and had to be silenced. In modern thrillers, though, this set-up often forms the starting point from which the rest of the plot unravels. As our present-day antihero grapples with their desperation to keep their past a secret, a series of flashbacks gradually reveals exactly what they’ve been hiding.
How Does It Work?
In a way, this isn’t so much a trope as a necessity. Murder mysteries can survive without islands, rich kids, and reunions—but they’re nothing without a motive. True, sometimes the ‘whodunnit’ will boil down to a psychopath with no true reasoning, or a more recent dispute. But, ninety percent of the time, our detective is forced to look far back into the past to work out who the culprit is. Despite the almost endless iterations it can take, this practicality makes it arguably the most irresistible trope of the genre.
Above all, it plays into our intrinsic distrust of people who seem just a bit too good to be true. Just as the rich family trope encourages us to take against those most fortunate in life, secrets from the past always attach themselves to those who seem most respectable. After all, who really has everything going for them, and hasn’t accumulated at least a few skeletons along the way? Crime fiction’s insistence on tidy endings might seem conservative, but its tendency to back anyone but the great and powerful betrays a rebellious streak.
What’s more, this plotline can tell us a lot about what we hold dear in life. You can’t exactly hold someone up as a paragon of achievement without establishing what makes them so good. Do they own their own house in the suburbs? Have a happy spouse and 2.5 children? Manage their own thriving business? Just as strandings force us to confront what we’d do to survive, and big reunions cast doubt on how much we really change, the dilemma of a successful individual in danger of losing everything makes us ask ourselves: what in our lives might we kill to keep a hold of?
The Best of the Best
In the interests of avoiding spoilers, I won’t be listing my top four murder mysteries in which a long-buried secret is the motive for murder. Instead, here’s some of the best thrillers which make their characters’ hidden misdeeds clear right from the start:
- Louise Candlish, The Only Suspect: Alex lives a quiet and perfectly normal life, complete with a wife and dog. But all that changes when an unused path is dug up as part of a nature project, threatening to reveal what (or rather who) he buried there decades before. But who is it? How did they get there? And who is Alex really?
- Charlotte Philby, The End of Summer: Judy has long appeared to be a respectable widow who truly loved her husband. Her daughter Francesca is therefore understandably shocked when she is accused of his murder. It might sound a bit unoriginal, but Philby’s excellent character-building makes this a surprisingly moving literary thriller.
- Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Plot: Creative writing teacher Jake becomes an overnight sensation with his novel Crib. There’s just one problem: he stole the entire plot from one of his late students. It soon becomes clear someone, somehow, knows everything—and is determined to make him pay. But Jake might not be the only character keeping a few things to himself…
- Lucy Foley, The Midnight Feast: Not content with just one secret from the past, Foley brings together a whole cast of characters who are, very literally, not who they seem. Professional hippie Francesca riles all the locals by opening a luxury retreat in an ancient wood. Yet the mythical giant birds (yes, really) prove to be the least of her problems as faces from her sordid past start cropping up everywhere. It’s heaps of ridiculous fun.
So, have I cracked the mystery of the formulaic thrillers? Well, sort of. I’ve certainly found that each of the seemingly rather different tropes I’ve covered actually have quite a lot in common. First and foremost, they are tools for manufacturing tension, without which any whodunnit would be worthless. And yet, they also hide greater depths than literary snobs might give them credit for. Whether it’s exposing our class prejudices or uncovering our deepest fears, these old classics interrogate human nature just as intensely as any detective questions their suspects. Maybe, in the end, their timeless ability to get under our skin says less about the books themselves, and more about the baggage we as readers bring to them.
Love crime fiction? This is the dramatic finale of a four–part series exploring the tropes which keep thrillers thrilling. Take a look back at the previous instalments on Getting Stranded, The Big Reunion, and The Rich Family for more murderously good clichés.
Words by Eleanor Harvey
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