Thursday, November 29, 2018

N Or M?

A while back, I made a post about floorplans and diagrams in mystery fiction, and I mentioned how excited I could become just by seeing them at the beginning of a book. Often, the floorplans are only presented at the relevant part of the story, for example when there's an investigation of a room, but I always love it when I see the plans in the first few pages of the book, even if only because it suggests location will play a big part in the story. But then I also remembered that there's another thing I love to see in mystery novels between the cover and the actual start of the story: a character list!


The dramatis personae is of course nothing but a list of the names of the principal characters in a work, often accompanied with a short one-line description of said character. The detective or Hated family patriarch who is totally going to get killed for the inheritance or something like that. Occassionally we even have authors who manage to write a witty dramatis personae. But I can feel my glee-levels rise even if it's just a plain list of names and roles. In essence, it's not much different from seeing the names of the actors of a stage play in the pamphlet, and there is indeed something overly theatrical about seeing a list of names before you have even read one word of the story. Seeing the names and their roles and relations presented in bullet point form helps create an preliminary image of the story, and it can be fun seeing your expectations be proven right or wrong. As someone who often sees the mystery story as an intellectual game, the dramatis personae also feels like a fair gesture towards the reader, by giving a proper and clear list of all the concerned parties.


Also, I'm simply horrible with remembering names and characters! I am a fan of the short story form, where the dramatis personae is not often utilized as they're not really needed practically speaking, but man, sometimes I really need one when reading longer novels. Some of my favorite reads of this year like Shijinsou no Satsujin, Toshokan no Satsujin or Kubinashi no Gotoki Tataru Mono for example luckily feature a dramatis personae, because all of them feature easily more then twenty, thirty named and significant characters! Add in the fact I often read multiple novels at the same time, and I can say I can only be grateful for character lists, as they help me remember who belongs in what story.

By the way, I am also a big fan of how names and characters are presented in the anime adaptations of Detective Conan and Kindaichi Shounen no Jikenbo. Kindaichi Shounen no Jikenbo for example has a very iconic avant-title screen, where they show all the important characters of the story in a grid. What makes this character screen especially creepy is that they grey out the characters who die each episode, so with each episode, you see more and more greyed-out panels, leaving fewer and fewer suspects. Seeing all the characters on the screen at the start of each episode also helps when a story takes four episodes to tell. What both Conan and Kindaichi Shounen also do are the floating name panels whenever a new character makes their first appearance. Name, age and profession are projected beneath the character in question, immediately explaining who they are. It's incredibly artificial and theatrical, as you have text floating in your screen suddenly near a character, but it's also incredibly handy for remembering new characters, as you see the name spelled out. Some might think it's too artificial, but I think it works wonderfully in puzzle plot mysteries, where characters are important puzzle pieces of the "game"  and it doesn't hurt to clearly label them.

By the way, I can't think of any mystery stories I've read at the moment that really make use of the dramatis personae as part of the mystery plot. I've seen mystery stories avoid them to be fair, for example, because one character is actually playing two characters at the same time and it wouldn't be fair to write down both personas in the list. But not really one where you need the dramatis personae to solve the mystery, so it'd be nice to come across one once.

Next time in my aimless musings: family trees, and how complex should they be? (*I'm not serious)

7 comments :

  1. Interesting, see, as I'm really not a fan of character lists and always skip over them; if the story itself can't make it clear who's who and how they relate to each other, well, it needs to be better written!

    That said, I do often worry I'll forget names and find the most convoluted ways of remembering them. I've recently encountered a vicar (in print) with the surname James, so I think of the King James Bible, and allow myself a moment to picture the vicar with a crown on his head...memory-aiding stuff like that. I've seen one too many character lists hint at too much, so I'll always leave them until last and try to improve my memory in the meantime :)

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    1. I agree a good story should /need/ a character list to be understandable, but still, I love it when they're there, even if they're not necessary.

      Your method reminds me of what they did in the book I reviewed last time, The Murders in the Villa of the Dead. There's a scene early on where the protagonist herself suggest a few mnemonics for all the people they met in the story. Which is rather artificial of course, but it helped (even if the book also had a character list).

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  2. I think they can be quite useful especially in Japanese Fiction because their names are very different, and many times they sound really alike.

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    1. I gather that'd be the case for any novel translated from a language featuring names you aren't familiar with. I imagine most Western readers would also have trouble with Chinese and Korean names.

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  3. why do they put the age of the suspects in Conan and Kindaichi ?

    what purpose does it serve ?

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    1. Why not add them? It's not like it's intrusive, it's something easy to flesh out the character a bit and sometimes, it might actually be useful to the mystery (and it'd be strange to only include when the mystery revolves around ages).

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    2. Yeah they use those for the tricks sometimes. Can't think of many examples in Kindaichi but they do have moments where the culprit is assumed to be X but with evidence you can deduce the right one to be of different age.
      The ages are definitely used more so in Conan with some of the characters, like how you can deduce the age of Shuichi's brother from the ages of the Red Woman case's cast that went to the same school as him. Ages of Vermouth and the boss are pretty huge as well.

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