Sherlock Holmes, Cluzzle, and Reading Artifacts

No, this blog entry isn’t a game of One-of-These-Things-Is-Not-Like-the-Others. Last week, I attended the Reading Artifacts Summer Institute at the Canada Science and Technology Museum. Many thanks to all those who recommended, organized, and participated; I gained some amazing perspectives on the work I do as an aspiring historian. But I also gained a couple insights into work I aspire to do wearing another hat —  that of a mystery writer.

The idea from RASI that stuck out for me is this: that what some literary theorists call the “thing-ness” of things — their physical presence and 3D existence in the real world of objects — conveys knowledge that one simply can’t get from textual sources. This can range from knowledge inaccessible through language because it’s inherently tacit (for example, how it feels to use a particular scientific instrument) to knowledge that might be available through language but doesn’t get noticed because physical objects are needed to bring it to one’s attention. It’s this latter that interests me as a writer, because it gets used in mysteries all the time.

For instance, reading artifacts is arguably Sherlock Holmes’s greatest skill. From a moment’s observation of Dr. Watson’s pocket watch, he can draw astonishing conclusions about Watson’s unhappy older brother. Watson knows the properties of the watch just as well as Holmes does: it’s scratched, the initials H. W. are on the back, Watson recently came into possession of it. They’re also equally aware of the social norms of their country and time, including the monetary value of certain timepieces; the usual attitude of owners toward expensive jewellry; and the ordinary rules of inheritance.

Yet Watson ignores the physicality of the watch: what would you have to do to it to scratch its face? To make grooves around its key hole in that particular manner? Why would you make those movements? Under what circumstances? Holmes, on the other hand, reads from these details the behaviour of the human being who has been handling the watch and draws conclusions regarding his character.

Thinking up showcases of deduction like this one is the relatively easy part of writing one into a mystery. We’ve all had a moment when we noticed something funny like that — my fake-leather jacket is worn away on the shoulders because I’m a student and I carry a backpack; your laptop has certain stains or spots on it because of the way you hold your hands while typing. It’s a little tougher to figure out how to build details like these into the key points of a legitimate mystery, but even that’s easier than the real tough part: introducing the object into the story in such a way that the reader doesn’t immediately spot it as A Clue.

See, the reason we don’t draw many Holmesian conclusions from objects in real life is because we’ve learned not to pay attention to certain details. It’s not that we can’t make lots of startling deductions about an object if asked to focus (as I definitely learned at RASI last week) — it’s that  nobody generally thinks to ask. Many of us take most of the inanimate objects with which we interact for granted. They’re just there, literally “part of the furniture.”

So if I were Watson in real life, palling around with my buddy Holmes, I wouldn’t feel cheated if he noticed that the pair of scissors on the table were left-handed ones instead of right-handed ones, placing the left-handed vicar at the scene of the crime rather than the right-handed Baroness von Redherring. I would’ve had the exact same opportunity to read the scissors as Holmes; I just would’ve ignored them because my brain didn’t pick up on them as a detail worth noticing.

However, if I’m reading “The Case of the Mysterious Stabbing Death With a Pair of Scissors,” and the first time the scissors are mentioned in the story is when Holmes says, “By the way, Watson, those scissors that were on the mantlepiece were for the left-handed!”, I will feel cheated. How could I possibly have tried to beat Holmes to the punch when I didn’t know there even were scissors in the first place?

Even if the narrator mentioned them, I might feel justifiably annoyed if there was no hint that they might be lefties — if Watson didn’t absent-mindedly pick them up and notice that his fingers didn’t fit properly, or, at the very least, if Holmes didn’t raise an eyebrow at them and murmur, “Curious.”

But this is where the writer runs into a Catch-22: nothing “exists” in a text unless the narrator deliberately describes it. Unlike moviemakers or theatre directors, who can count on the audience being able to see the furniture and set-dressing in a scene, writers have to make an explicit list of what they need the audience to know. The Catch-22 comes in because readers of mysteries know that the things that writers need them to know are the clues to the solutions of said mysteries.

So if a writer mentions, say, a knitting needle sticking out of the basket of wool, or a strange bell-pull, seemingly for no reason, the reader can be confident that those things will turn out to be important to the eventual apprehension of the murderer. But readers don’t want to read a mystery where they can pick out all the clues and guess the ending right away; readers want to be surprised.

This is where Cluzzle comes in.

Cluzzle is a board game similar to Pictionary played with clay. You sculpt a chosen word in the hopes that other players will be able to guess it. However, Cluzzle is unlike Pictionary in that you don’t want the other players to guess it right away. The longer you can keep them stumped, the more points you get when they eventually get it right — but if the time runs out before they get it, you get no points at all. Just like a mystery writer, you want to be clear enough that nobody will feel cheated when they eventually find out what you have in mind; just like a mystery writer, you don’t want to be so clear that everybody will immediately guess your secret.

Having played Cluzzle too many times to count, it seems to me that there are two main strategic styles, both of which apply to writing mysteries: Where’s Waldo and Modern Art.

I have to credit the invention of Where’s Waldo style of Cluzzle play to my ingenious friend, JB. Instead of (or as well as) trying to make her sculpture of her target object too vague to guess right away, JB also hit upon the tactic of making a detailed scene, one detail of which was the object  she wanted us to guess. The other players faced not only a problem of identification but also a problem of appropriate focus: one of the parts of this sculpture is important, but which?

Similarly, mystery writers can hide object-related clues by describing a larger number of superfluous objects. Which piece of furniture or tool in the toolbox will turn out to be the important one? An astute reader can sometimes guess. but usually there are plenty of interesting possibilities.

This tactic also has a secondary advantage. The extra details in JB’s scenes weren’t just dressing. Instead, they helped to establish the world of the object and make sure that once you knew what you were looking for, you could also easily tell what it was. In a like fashion, mystery writers can use those extra objects for other purposes: to develop atmosphere, to establish character, or to tie into other plot points.

Where’s Waldo can be used in tandem with the second approach, Modern Art. I find this latter can best be illustrated by an example. What does this represent?

According to one of my cousins, it’s a goalie. Now that I’ve said so, it’s relatively clear how it’s meant to represent the concept. But before you read that, did you have any idea what was in the artist’s mind when she sculpted it?

For me, this is the tougher aspect of trying to hide object clues in text-based stories. While the Where’s Waldo approach tries to hide the fact that a particular object is a clue, the Modern Art approach tries to hide what the clue means even when the reader knows it’s a clue. This can range from the dare-you-to-figure-out-what-this-means clue featured in the back-cover copy (a man stabbed in a locked room with no murder weapon to be found and a puddle of water on the floor*!) to “oh, that strange monster described by the ignorant narrator was a man in a diving suit!” to “hmmm, the author is challenging me to deduce something about that prominently mentioned thimble, but what?”

The difficulty of the Modern Art strategy lies in the fact that when you already know the secret word on your card or the eventual revelation of the murderer, it’s easy to overestimate how obvious you’re being. Many a round of Cluzzle has ended with all parties glaring at each other because most of the sculptures haven’t been guessed. But even if you’re aware of this mental block, it’s easy to overcompensate and make your sculpture way too blatant.

That said, the Modern Art strategy is the one that works best, when it does work. There’s nothing quite like that feeling of realizing that you’ve been looking at the sculpture from the wrong angle, or you’d assumed it was constructed on a different scale, or you thought it was a 3D representation but it’s actually bird’s-eye-view — that gestalt “Aha! I KNOW WHAT IT IS!”

In the end, the only reasonable way to have confidence in the effectiveness of object-based clues is to take another cue from Cluzzle and actually try them out on people. There’s no way to predict beforehand what’s too obvious and what’s too obscure; feedback will help a writer to properly balance the exposition in a mystery.

Because another thing I learned from RASI: when it comes to reading artifacts, there’s always some element of reading people as well.

* If you have ever played MindTrap, you know what happened here.