Mystery

Mystery movies are a fairly limited genre in terms of what the usual process and themes are from start to finish of a film. However, some of the world’s most reputable films fall into this category thanks to the suspense and crime solving genres that can be attached to such a film.

Suspense is a crucial element of the mystery movies, with successful films in the genre needing to maintain a tight control over the audience tension with popular film techniques of the style being camera angles, femme fatales, murders or crimes to solve and plot twists.

Most mystery movies fall into one of two categories, either an open or closed format, which means the difference between a standard whodunit which follows the protagonist who is in pursuit of a criminal, which is revealed at the end of the film, and the open style, which reveals the culprit at the beginning and lets the story be retold.

Alfred Hitchcock movies are perhaps the most renowned movies that fall into this genre with some of his most famous work being Rebecca (1940), The Paradine Case (1947) and Psycho (1960).

There have also been a number of Hollywood success films that fall into the mystery movies genre, including Roman Polanski's classic Chinatown (1974) and Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express (1974).

Mystery movies are also able to be blended with other genres to create a multi-layered film, namely horror, science fiction, and historical.

Examples of Mystery Movies, Night at the Museum 2 and Angels And Demons:

Beginnings

The earliest known murder mystery and suspense thriller with multiple plot twists and detective fiction elements was "The Three Apples", or in Arabic, Hikayat al-sabiyya 'l-muqtula ("The Tale of the Murdered Young Woman"), one of the tales narrated by Scheherazade in the One Thousand and One Nights (Arabian Nights). In this tale, a fisherman discovers a heavy locked chest that is painted pink with flowers on it along the Tigris river and he sells it to the Abbasid Caliph, Harun al-Rashid, who then has the chest broken open only to find inside it the dead body of a young woman who was cut into pieces. Harun orders his vizier, Ja'far ibn Yahya, to solve the crime and find the murdererer. This whodunit mystery may be considered an archetype for detective fiction.

Modern mystery fiction is generally thought to begin with The Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allan Poe (1841), followed by The Woman in White (1860) by Wilkie Collins. Collins wrote several more in this genre, including The Moonstone (1868) which is thought to be his masterpiece. The genre began to expand near the turn of century with the development of dime novels and pulp magazines. Books were especially helpful to the genre with many authors writing in the genre in the 1920s. An important contribution to mystery fiction in the 1920s was the development of the juvenile mystery by Edward Stratemeyer. Stratemeyer originally developed and wrote the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew mysteries written under the Franklin W. Dixon and Carolyn Keene pseudonyms, respectively (and later written by his daughter, Harriet S. Adams, and other authors). The 1920s also gave rise to one of the most popular mystery authors of all time, Agatha Christie.

The massive popularity of pulp magazines in the 1930s and 1940s increased interest in mystery fiction. Pulp magazines decreased in popularity in the 1950s with the rise of television so much that the numerous titles available then are reduced to two today: Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. The detective fiction author Ellery Queen (pseudonym of Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee) is also credited with continuing interest in mystery fiction.

Interest in mystery fiction continues to this day because of various television shows which have used mystery themes and the many juvenile and adult novels which continue to be published. There is some overlap with "thriller" or "suspense" novels and like authors in those genres may consider themselves mystery novelists. Comic books and like graphic novels have carried on the tradition, and film adaptations have helped to re-popularize the genre in recent times.

The Mystery Writers of America, an organization for authors of mystery, detective, and crime fiction, was founded in 1945. This popular genre has made the leap into the online world, spawning countless websites devoted to every aspect of the genre, with even a few supposedly written by real detectives.

In recent years, Cozy mysteries have become popular. Cozy Mysteries usually take place in a small town and often include extra material such as recipes.

Classifications

Mystery fiction can be divided into several categories, among them the "cozy mystery", "police procedural", and "hardboiled" (for instance, Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon's main detective, Sam Spade).

Copyright: This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Mystery film".