Top 10 Mystery Tropes
1. Bruce Wayne
Hero's wife and/or kids sacrificed themselves heroically in order to provide him with a level of gloomy intesnity sufficient to allow him to become a high-ranking detective.
As seen in: the Dalgleish novels.
2. Chalk and Cheese*
"Charlotte Chalk is a hard-working and career-minded young detective constable, DS Dave Cheese is the maverick outsider, tolerated by his bosses because he gets results. When they are teamed together on a murder investigation sparks are bound to fly, but somehow, they finally come to respect each other."
As seen in: the novels of Val McDairmd.
3. Psych 101
A modern introduction to the corpus.
"Wait a mo, sarge. Roll the tape back! Mullah Kaboom looked up and to the left as he said that he didn't put strichnine in the town's water supply! He must be lying!"
"Good work, constable. That's quite enough evidence to put him away for a good, long time."
As seen in: anything involving psychological profilers.
4. If anyone touches my kids I swear I'll do time
A lack of dead relatives is no barrier to perpetual misery. Just add many paragraphs featuring your protagonis worrying about the diverse females/infants he knows who have not yet had the courtesy to join the choir invisible.
As seen in: Rebus.
5. Not being ghoulish or anything, but...
"Like Francesca the Home Office pathologist, DS Haddon was well inured against the sight of corpses open on the dissecting table. But both still regretted their choice of career when the victim was a child... (follows a paragraph about how the characters are not in favour of dead children, just in case you were wondering).
As seen in: practically everything.
6. Tsun tsun
On no account must any of your female characters display a sense of humour. Ever.
As seen in: the Bill.
7. Gary McKinnon
A purely US phenomenon. Someone manifestly ill-deserving of punishment and probably quite likely to be raped and murdered in jail is sent down for a huge number of years for a trivial misdemeanour by detectives who gaze on in flinty-eyed satisfaction. We all hate the detectives' guts from this point on.
As seen in: CSI.
8. Brer Drugdealer
Apparently the the only small-time drug dealer to exist in the world of fiction. Travels from town to town following the news of a recent murder, pockets stuffed with low-grade heroin and minor bits of evidence. While his name sometimes changes (Skunk, Dopey, Whizz) his appearance remains the same. Can be recognised by his hoody, the grease which flows from him in cascades, and his internal narrative (officers believe the aforesaid narrative to have been stolen from Irvine Welsh and given a superficial covering of standard English in an attempt to hide the crime). Despite having an apparent monopoly on fictional bad drugs, he never gets rich due to his own heroic consumption levels (anything up to two £20 bags of heroine per chapter).
As seen in: anything with an urban setting.
9. A Pimp Named Slickback
Young detective who went to university, dresses well but flashily and is on the graduate fast track programme. Exists to stir up the latent class-related chip on the hero's shoulder. Early on he will make some sort of breakthrough in the case, before failing and being put back in his place.
As seen in: the Midsomer Murders Novels (which are generally pretty unsusceptible to cliché)
10. Gotta get thru this
Dialogue written as description and vice versa ("I could not talk to him about such a corruscatingly intense emotion. I did not want to," he said.). Also, people providing the wrong answers to questions they've just heard ("Could you tell me precisely what time she ate the poisoned whelk, Mr Heinrich?" "No, I don't.")
As seen in: anything involving a hero who is ex special forces.
*Name and description taken from Private Eye.
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