Using Mystery as the Frame of the Story | Falcon Talks
When the answer to the mystery doesn’t matter as much as the rest of the story
It’s the early days of Batman’s superhero career.
His home, Gotham City, is overrun with crime families - the most powerful of which is led by Carmine Falcone.
Forming an alliance - Batman, Captain James Gordon, and Distract Attorney Harvey Dent swear to work together to bring down the Falcone crime family while staying on the right side of the law.
However, just as Falcone's nephew is about to testify against his uncle, someone murders him on Halloween - ruining Dent's case against Falcone.
At first, it seems simple enough - Falcone had his nephew killed to silence him.
But then another associate of Falcone's is killed on Thanksgiving, and then another on Christmas.
Thus begins the Holiday Killer's serial killings and the mystery of just who this killer is...
But, uh... that's not what this story is really about.
Hang on, I’ll explain. 😅
But first…
So, as I was saying - even though the mystery of who the Holiday Killer is is important to the story, the answer and the solving of the mystery is not the CORE of the story.
Instead, the core of the story focuses on two main threads:
Batman growing into his role as a superhero, as Gotham’s protector, and as a detective
Harvey Dent’s tragic downfall into villainy and eventual transformation into Two-Face
And these two main threads are intertwined with many side threads as well - just to name a few: Batman and Catwoman’s budding relationship, Harvey’s relationship with Glinda (his wife), Gordon’s role as a Captain in the Gotham City PD, the Falcone family’s dynamics, and the Joker and other supervillains’ growing involvement in Gotham’s crime world.
All of these threads (the two main ones and the numerous side threads) are held together by the FRAME that is the mystery of the Holiday Killer and their serial killings over the course of a year, which began on Halloween.
And so, rather than being a story about solving the mystery of who the Holiday Killer is, The Long Halloween is really a story about one year in the early days of Batman’s superhero career - the same year of Harvey Dent’s tragic downfall, and a year that was punctuated by the Holiday killings.
Another example of a story that uses mystery as a frame rather than the core would be Only Murders in the Building.
While one could argue that its first season does have that season’s central mystery as a core of the story, this becomes less and less true over each subsequent season (so far).
More and more, the story shifted its focus over to the three main characters and their lives, with that season’s mystery in the background of most episodes. Even in the first season, the story had already focused a substantial amount of time on the three characters’ intertwining lives, instead of the mystery.
Broadchurch (UK) is another example of this, as well.
While the mystery is compelling, the first season of Broadchurch is definitely much more heavily focused on how a boy's murder has affected a small town's denizens, rather than going through how the mystery is solved.
Even the second season, after the mystery had been solved, is about how the subsequent trial of the murderer affects the characters - using the mystery from the first season’s lingering presence as the frame for the story, rather than introducing a new mystery.
(The third season follows a similar approach as the first, with a new mystery introduced.)
And those were my three examples of stories that used mystery as a frame for the story, rather than the core.
Let me know in the comments below if you can think of any other examples!
For now though…
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