Mystery novels have patterns in common:
1) Opening. This is when the author introduces the hero, setting, regular characters, the fun theme of the series, sets the tone, and lays in the quick expositional strokes that set up the story. Then there's a death.
2) The hero accepts the call. This introduces the middle game. Mostly it's about interviewing one character after another in a series of scenes. The whole purpose is to collect facts about what happens.
What you always get--what makes the mystery fascinating--is contrasting observations, opinion and conclusions about what happened. Some of the misdirection is deliberate, but it's all individually marked. The mystery novel demonstrates the human fact that SHARED REALITY IS A COMPOSITE, and MAY NOT EVEN BE SHARED.
The middle game is all about this phenomenon as applied to a specific example, a specific event. The hero has to compose the one true picture. Often, usually, there's a backlash against this process. Someone is actively fighting against truth, against an integrated, consistent understanding of the facts. This person does more than hide; usually, there's a physical confrontation or a threat at least. Often there are additional deaths. Usually the picture can only be fully assembled by the hero fitting in the final piece: the knowledge of who it is who is doing the hardest fighting.
3) End game. The hero must do more than "know"; the hero must "reveal." Traditionally, the hero figures everything out before the reader. The end game consists in the reader enjoying the suspense of trying to get there first as the hero sets up the dramatic ending. Sometimes all the characters are called together for a final reviewing of all the facts, the whole process the hero went through. This can provide for false climaxes. Sometimes the reveal is sudden, and the process is reviewed afterwards during the denouement.
The World of Ordinary Day is disrupted, or revealed to have been flawed all along, by a sudden death. The Hero accepts the Call to restore order.
The great thing about mystery stories is that, in a good one, things are put back better than they were before: secrets come out, scary destructive people get taken out of the environment. Agatha Christie was great at this. Lots of incidental traumas and problems got resolved as the clues were sorted out and issues unrelated to the crime were disposed of. Sometimes relationships improved as a result. Agatha took every cliche and xenophobic prejudice and trotted them out and examined them: the creepy, implied ethnic or jewish foreigner was universally regarded with suspicion but turned out to be innocent. The fresh-faced English rose turned out to have a guilty romance. The rising diplomat favored son turned out to be a spy. The dumpy servant girl turned out to be a lot smarter than she looked. In a mystery, every Ally could turn out to be a shapeshifter. Every adversary may secretly be your new best friend. Even a Mentor could turn out to be a Trickster with a knife up his sleeve. The point is that during the friendly little cozy genre piece, the whodunit, all this gets sorted out and the World of Ordinary Day, as restored by the Hero, is better than it was before the crime. This makes the Victim's death redemptive. The body in the library is a sacrifice.
What about the Hero's death? In a cozy and in most crime drama, the Hero never dies. (Except maybe in Lee Child's 61 Hours. Time will tell!) In what respect is her death sacrificial and redemptive?
At the height of her ordeal, the Hero will die symbolically. A best friend will die, or some aspect of the Hero will die, leaving the Hero to be reborn in some other form. Kinsey Millhone, hunted nearly to death and hiding in a trash can, did not just kill the murderer in the last line of A is for Alibi: "I blew him away." One of the greatest last lines in the history of all literature. She also killed off her old self. Every part of Kinsey that had not killed someone died in that trashcan. Kinsey Millhone the kickass private eye was born in that trash can. Talk about returning with the Prize.
Typically there's a denouement where everyone talks and the Hero winds up the loose threads. We the reader/worshippers need a transitional phase to take us out of the climax and get us out of the reality of the story. (Part of the reason A is for Alibi is so compelling is we are denied that denouement. All the other letters of the alphabet series, in a way, comprise the denouement of A is for Alibi.) This denouement is when we experience the new reality the Hero has created, the redeemed world. The new ordinary.
That's not all that's happening. As with the other type of climax, we became one. We identified wholly with the Hero during that excitement. The Hero's sacrificial death was ours, we were reborn along with her into new strengths and new insights. The Prize she achieved and brought back into the new world, we get to keep. We need to savor this identification for awhile. We need to try the insights and strengths on to see how they fit. We are still identified intimately with the Hero as she walks with our new steps. We can't hurry this process if it's going to keep. The desire to get back into that identification is part of what makes us go back for the next book.
Our symbolic death is possible because we've identified with the Hero, but that's foreshadowed and even made possible because during the middle game the Hero becomes identified with the Victim, who really did die. The Hero begins the investigation by learning for about the Victim. Early than that, the Hero embarks on the investigation in the first place because the Hero cares about the Victim. Maybe it's not an empathic, emotional caring but a practical one: maybe the Hero was the real target and the Victim died as a warning or by mistake. Maybe the Hero is being wrongly blamed for the crime and must clear her name, which actually forces the Hero into identifying with the Enemy, the priest who wields the blade. Through our identification with the Hero, we find ourselves not only represented in the story by the Victim (so that by continuing to read through the ordeal we vindicate our sacrificial deaths) but also by the Enemy, the Adversary. On one level mysteries are suspenseful because they represent an intellectual puzzle that we want to solve, on another level they may actually be frightening. On the deepest level they create tension by subconsciously evoking our identification with the destructive and evil. We read through it so that the bravest and best part of ourselves can defend the weak and innocent part of ourselves against the worst part of ourselves.
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