Personal Call

Is this a series now? Last year, I wrote an article on the role and usage of clocks and timepieces in mystery fiction, which was basically a sequel to an earlier post on glasses. Mystery fiction is at the core a genre that thrives by reusing a lot of elements. Most of the reviews on this blog usually focus on plot-related tropes, like the types of locked room mysteries and their solutions, or how certain clues are developed to point to the identity of the murderer etc. However, the two posts I mentioned right now were focused on more tangible, concrete elements you often see in mystery fiction: objects and how they are used. To quote myself from the glasses posts:

Objects are often important to a mystery story. If a murder is committed, the culprit is likely to utilize an object, that is, a murder weapon, to accomplish their goal. A button left at the crime scene could prove as evidence to the identity of the murderer. Or perhaps the disappearance of an object that should be there will become the focus of an investigation, leading the question of why a certain object was so important it had to be removed. An object is thus usually a clue, something that links it to the solution of the mystery (which could be a murder, but it could be any enigmatic happening). An object might tell you who committed a certain crime, or how it was done, or perhaps why it was done. 

Funny thing is that today's post started with me thinking about something in mystery fiction that has no actual physical presence, namely the chat box or instant messenger. While most of us here probably use our smartphones daily not to call anymore, but to communicate through chat apps, it's weird we still don't see them featured in modern mystery fiction as "the normal": if they do appear in mystery fiction (which is already rare), it's often in the form of "the extraordinary" (where the Internet is considered to be something Special with a capital S), rather than an accepted part of our everyday life. Some may be of the opinion that the fast development of consumer technology has made it difficult for mystery writers to come up with a plot, but after giving it some thought, I find it actually surprising how similar "old" telephones and modern smartphones and instant messenger services are, if we look at their function as a trope in mystery fiction.

When you think of the telephone as seen in mystery fiction, you are likely not to first think of it as an actual physical object, even though it'll probably hurt if an old-fashioned dial phone is swung at your head, or you're strangled with the cord. You might think of the trope of the closed circle situation though, where the group is trapped inside a creepy old mansion or an isolated island together with an unknown killer, and when they try to call for help, it turns out the phone line has been cut (or nowadays: the mobile phones have no connection). Here the telephone is mostly a symbol for suspense, but in essence, this specific role is connected to the underlying function of the telephone in mystery fiction. That is, the telephone serves as a communication line to a third party/third location that is often perceived as direct and synchronous. Calling the police is of course the "normal" manner to use a phone: calling for help from a different place, with the communcation occuring directly and at synchronously. This is different from a letter conversation, which is asynchronous as there's a significant time lap between the utterances in the communcation that isn't considered part of the conversation anymore (receive letter -> send letter back). Instant messanger services are an interesting step between, as while the form may resemble a letter more, the messages are usually delivered err, instantly to the receiver. As everyone will know, chats can be more-or-less as quick as oral communication, so in that way, they're really not that different from telephones in terms of function (of course, one can also choose to let time lapse between messages on purpose). But obviously, the phone is often used in mystery fiction to, well, phone somebody and obtain information for example. Oh, and I'm suddenly reminded of the manga Remote by Amagi Seimaru: the detective in that series couldn't leave his home, and therefore had the young policewoman Ayaki assigned to him as his assistant-in-the-field/woman-of-action, and they mostly communicated with their cell phones, so a phone-fed armchair detective.

Communcation with a phone may be perceived as direct, but it isn't of course: you aren't physically in the same space as the receiver, and more importantly, you don't even observe the conversation partner(s) in full. For example, you don't actually see each other and even the one element that connects you (voices) are actually transported over a phone line (so through a medium), and this all leads to one of the most classic uses of the telephone in mystery fiction: the caller disguising themselves. Sometimes, the culprit phones someone masking their voice so they are simply not recognized (does the handkerchief over the mouthpiece thing really work?), sometimes the culprit pretends to be someone else over the phone. The latter trick can be a bit tricky to pull off convincingly, but the "I have a cold" excuse or the fake static trick is apparently sometimes enough to convince the person on the other side that the culprit is actually a different person. In a way, a phone is a tool that really reduces a person's identity to almost nothing, and the people on the phone often just have to believe the person on the other side of the line is actually the person they claim to be.

This is also related to the other major use of the phone in mystery fiction, namely as an object to establish character alibis. Because communication over the phone is considered to be instant, a phone call is often used to establish that a certain character was at a certain time at a certain place (the other side of the line). This was of course easier in the past, when there were fewer phones in general and you could only call and receive calls from specific places or phone booths, which usually would establish someone's alibi (unless some ingenious trick was used). When people started getting phones for their own homes, things became a bit more complicated and nowadays, everyone has their own smartphones and they can call from practically any place, but generally, it's still often used to find out where characters are and when. If Professor Plum was calling to his secretary from his own home, he couldn't have murdered Mrs. Peacock in the other side of town at the same time. Familiar tricks of course include the "providing the real culprit an alibi by pretending you're on the phone with them while they're actually off committing the murder," the "pre-recorded call that simulates a real-time conversation," the "the culprit uses a trick to make a phone call secretly to the place they're at, making others believe there believe the culprit is elsewhere" and the very, very basic "Say you're in New York when you're actually in Tokyo and oh, look, I'm right in front of the Empire State Building". With no visual contact and the phone effectively acting as an identity mask as mentioned above (as you can claim and pretend to be anyone, theoretically), alibis established by phones can be very tricky. Of course, even in modern times smartphones can still be used to establish alibis, even better so at times. Kindaichi Shounen no Jikenbo R's final story The Kindaichi Fumi Kidnapping Murder Case had the police check out the GPS logs of the suspects to see whether they really moved around Tokyo as they claimed they had. This resulted in an interesting alibi story, while in other stories, alibis are established (or cracked) precisely because they are mobile: with the caller being spotted as they were calling and walking outside, or catching the type of background noises you wouldn't if it were just a house phone. The first story in the Gyakuten Saiban manga by the Kuroda/Maekawa duo for example was a good example of this.

But to get back to what got me started: chat boxes and instant messenger services. In essence, these "modern" (they're getting on in age actually...) technologies function exactly the same as the phone in mystery fiction. I doubt I have to explain the "mask" aspect of chat boxes and instant messenger services: pretending to be someone else has seldom been easier than just changing a display name. When you have a mystery story about a chat box, you can be sure you'll need to be very suspicious if everyone is who they claim they are behind their display name. Familiar tricks are people using other people's display names to assume their identity, or using multiple display names to pretend to be multiple people (faking conversations). This is the same with instant messenger services, where anyone can choose their own display name and claim to be someone. One of the more interesting Detective Conan stories of the last few years was The Kisaki Eri Kidnapping Case, where Ran's mother is kidnapped. She manages to escape from her kidnappers, though she's still stuck inside the building. She tries to ask to help via a chat app through a smartphone she stole from her kidnappers, but her kidnappers catch on, and use Eri's own phone to feed fake chat messages in the same chat room, making it difficult for Conan, Ran and Kogorou to figure out which messages are by the real Eri, and which aren't. The premise of this story is thus that you already know there's a fake using Eri's name in the chat room, while most of the older stories involving chat rooms try to use that as a surprise (or if they're written now, probably just very uninspired).

In its function as a tool to establish alibis, a chat box or instant messenger service too isn't too different from a phone call. In fact, the time stamps most instant messenger chat rooms have provide a more detailed and accessible form of Ye Olde Phone Record Received From the Phone Company only the police could get. Time stamps attached to every single utterance do change up the game, making it harder to fake than a fake phone conversation with an imaginary conversation partner. One of the more interesting short stories I read last year was therefore Yukashina Miho's Nimannin no Mokugekisha ("Twenty Thousand Witnesses", 2019), where a Youtuber had a perfect alibi not only because of his live videostream at the time of the murder, but also because he interacted with his followers in the chat box accompanying the livestream. Utano Shougo's Locked Room Murder Game series must be mentioned too: while the premise is slightly different because we're talking about video conference chatting here, the use here of the chat room is a great example of the familiar phone tropes. In this series, the masked members of an underground video chat room of locked room murder fanatics commit actual murders and challenge the other members to solve their crimes. Everyone is using fake names and uses actual masks to hide their identity in the chat room, but one of the more interesting moments in the second volume is when the member Mad Header reveals they have a perfect alibi for their murder a few days back, because they were video chatting with the other members in the chat room at the time of the murder (i.e. they were chatting in a previous story, which turns out to be their alibi in the next story). To go off an tangent, Twitter isn't a chat messenger service of course, but I loved how a Twitter timeline was used for a brilliant piece of misdirection in Hayasaka Yabusaka's Mailer Daemon no Senritsu ("The Terror of the Mailer Daemon", 2018) and in principle, the trick can also work in a normal chat room too.

Anyway, this post has gone on for far too long, and I don't even really have a point to make. I guess that I wanted to point out that "modern" technology is often really not that different from "old" technology when it comes to their uses in mystery fiction. Sure, they may make some older tricks harder to pull off, but they also provide a lot of possibilities for new ideas and tricks. If you look at phones in the past and now, they couldn't be any more different, but their core use in the genre is still very similar, so I always think it's a shame authors don't utilize modern consumer technology more, especially as the genre has always thrived by taking the familiar and transforming it slightly. A phone is a phone is a phone, even if it's smart now.