In this post that is as thoughtful as it is entertaining, S. B. Watson recounts a spirited discussion around a question that many of our readers have likely had before: What truly makes a great mystery?

Years ago, I was sitting at a dingy table in the backroom of a musty public house, “house”being the operable term—it was a residential building that had somehow gained the zoning to be turned into a tavern. Every room had garishly different lighting than the last, every table was of a different design and make, and every chair was a one-off. The walls were covered in old playbills, movie posters, inexpensive pop-culture memorabilia. The place was a minimalist’s nightmare. The only consistent factor between rooms was the pervading odor of stale spilled beer.

I went there weekly, meeting with a few friends to play nerdy card games. (Android Netrunner, not Magic, in case anyone wonders.) One of our players fancied himself a writer of literary fiction. Since I was just starting to write seriously, we occasionally talked shop… until he discovered I was working on locked-room mysteries.

He said he didn’t like locked-rooms. Said they forced a writer to sacrifice character depth and plot quality on the altar of form. Said they were all shallow. Said they all hinged on word-trickery and that it was impossible to write a story with emotional value while dabbling in such.

Well, I tried to disagree, but he used big words, and fell back on an insufferable knowledge of the Classics and philosophy, and his experience as a writer, and a deep confidence in his ability to discern “good” mysteries from “bad.” Nothing I said changed his mind. If memory serves, I also lost my match against him . . . injury to insult.

That was the first time I’d ever experienced, first hand, the infamous bias against locked-room mysteries. Undeterred, I kept on writing them, but that conversation—and the criticisms it voiced—stayed with me. It lingered in the back of my mind as I wrote for years. I found myself trying to prove my friend wrong, crafting locked-rooms with emotional weight and plausible motivations, warping plots even more than necessary to infuse forced weight and depth into stories that didn’t need them.

It’s been more than a decade since that beer-soaked discussion of philosophy and writing and detective fiction. Locked-room mysteries are no longer theoretical to me—I now have a small bibliography to my name of impossible crimes, of varying bizarreness and implausibility. I think it’s the right time for me to give that friend an ‘official’ response. This is it.

Structure is fine. Free-form poetry is nice, but so are sonnets, and anyone who argues that Elizabeth Barret Browning or Shakespeare were wasting their time constraining themselves in a formal scheme of meter and rhyme has altogether missed what makes poetry powerful. (Just my opinion.)

Shallowness is fine. I just finished reading the ten-volume Malazan Book of the Fallen, by Steven Erikson, which involves hundreds of characters, hundreds of locations, plot arcs that span thousands of pages over multiple novels, and emergent storytelling that forces the reader to parse what they’ve just read when they’re given context hundreds (sometimes thousands) of pages later. It was marvelous. Amazing. Incredible. But I now have a stack of standalone dime-novels and pulps that I’m more excited to dive into than a puppy with a closet of fresh Italian-leather shoes. Depth, complexity, subtext, are all dynamic tools in the hands of a master writer. But sometimes it’s the pulpy, low-stakes stories that stick with us and never leave. Case in point—Sherlock Holmes. (Just my opinion.)

Word-trickery . . . isn’t what good locked-rooms hinge on at all. Here’s an example of my friend not understanding what he was criticizing. Sure, some impossible crimes make use of language-play and word tricks. But the best ones often don’t. There’s no denying many locked-rooms play fast and loose with character depth and emotions, but, again, sometimes they don’t. The truth is, all these things are mere tools in the hands of the locked-room craftsman—if the story requires emotional depth, then it’ll have it. If the emotional depth would hurt the effect or the payoff, then it won’t be there. Criticizing locked-rooms for being all word-play and no grist is naïve. (Just my opinion.)

Magicians trick people. They’re honest about it—you know they’re going to try to deceive you up front. Sometimes, you even catch them at it. As long as their presence is compelling enough, and their talent deft enough, nobody complains—the challenge of trying to see how they do it is part of the fun. And when you fail to catch the tells, and you’re genuinely surprised, well, that’s its own kind of entertainment entirely.

Locked-rooms inhabit this same space, a neverland between rational sense and accepting impossibilities as fact, even temporarily, in lieu of more plausible explanations. The reader usually knows up front they’re going to be challenged with a problem—their enjoyment comes from the deftness in the telling of the problem, catching some clues on the way, falling for a few misdirections, and the brilliance of the solution. If, for even a moment, the writer can seduce the reader into admitting complete wonderment and confusion over the impossibility-factor of the crime, then he has succeeded. Obviously, then, the higher the impossibility-factor, the better the payoff can be.

And there lies both the problem, and the solution, of locked-room mysteries as they relate to their Bigger Literary Brothers. Bad magicians do exist. Boring magic shows have cursed corporate banquets and children’s birthday parties for decades. Bad locked-rooms are out there; they’re bad for the same reasons. It’s the magic not the illusion that makes good magic good in the first place. The sense of wonder, confusion, and surprise. It’s the same for locked-rooms.

So, these days, I don’t worry about following form. I don’t kill myself to have deep, philosophical characters. Likewise, I don’t force myself to stay away from word tricks, and if I think a low-blow will get the job done best, so be it.

The main thing I worry about is keeping the impossibility-factor high, the misdirections engaging, the clues fair and open, and the solution as sharp as possible. I’m fine with shallow. I’m fine with pulp. I don’t care if I’m not the next T. Pynchon or Homer. I just want to shock you, puzzle you, challenge you to outsmart me as you read, and for you to have fun doing it—sometimes, simple pleasures can be the best ones.

Just my opinion.