Layered mysteries

WARNING: The following post contains significant spoilers for Raymond Chandler’s novel The Big Sleep, for the 1973 film The Long Goodbye based on his novel on the same name (so probably for the novel itself), and the video game Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.

“At the deepest point of the dungeon, behind the throne, beyond the rooms where the battles took place, after everything is done and the enemy dead, there is a crack. A black empty space where the wall joins the stone floor, a foot and a half high and three wide. A breeze comes out. You’d never notice it. You could lie on your belly and fit inside.” – The Veins of the Earth, by Patrick Stuart and Scrap Princess. (No longer in print, here's hoping it will find a better publisher some day)

After Raymond Chandler’s hardboiled private eye protagonist, Philip Marlowe, manages to use homophobic blackmail to get the killer of one of his loose ends to confess to killing the other, and therefore giving the police one suspect to solve two cases, while keeping his employer out of potential scandal, he is paid in full, and The Big Sleep seems like it should be over. But he is unhappy. Something worries at him. That, more than the fact that he’s being followed, eventually pushes him to do something stupid and fly off to the casino run by a crime boss to push the anthill further and get himself into more trouble, and the more bracing truth beyond it.

As portrayed by Elliott Gould, in The Long Goodbye, Marlowe again finds himself with all loose ends tied. His friend, accused of murdering his own wife, is dead – officials in Mexico confirmed it to Marlowe personally. The money the friend owed to a gangster, and which the latter was about to extract from Marlowe in blood, is returned. The eccentric author who was having an affair with the previously mentioned dead wife has thrown himself into the ocean. And yet Marlowe runs off to see who paid this money, and is rewarded with a car accident. After he recovers, instead of moving on with his life, he goes back to Mexico. Bribes to the same officials from before expose the fraud – his friend faked his death, just as the gangsters suspected. Moreover, he did, in fact, kill his wife. The eccentric author’s wife was his lover, and is coming to join him, here, where he’s safe, as everyone already thinks he’s dead. Marlowe is only satisfied by turning the fraud into reality, killing his friend in cold blood. But he could have lived the rest of his life not knowing, if he were satisfied. He wasn’t.

A perfectly acceptable playthrough of the video game Castlevania: Symphony of the Night has the protagonist, Alucard, fighting through Dracula’s castle until he encounters its current ruler, Richter Belmont. Richter is a former hero now corrupted, and it makes sense to kill him. The game can now end, but there is clearly something unsatisfying about it. If, instead, several important items are discovered, they eventually lead to acquiring magical glasses, which show the entity controlling Richter. If this entity is defeated, then a more sinister plot is uncovered – Richter was manipulated in order to bring about the return of Dracula. Defeating the entity turns Richter’s relationship with you on its head – as well as the castle itself, which now must be explored again, upside down.

These three examples are of something I don’t know how to express exactly. A layered mystery, which has a relatively superficial solution, which might still require overcoming some challenges to get to, but also a deeper, more disturbing solution.

I wonder if there’s a way of pushing it even further. I’m really into supernatural mysteries and horror,  whether Gothic, Lovecraftian, or recently, Splatterpunk, but usually the horror shows itself from the start, with protagonists rejecting the evidence of their senses for more rational solutions until they are not tenable anymore.

But what if you had a mystery that can be resolved in an entirely mundane way, where the loose ends are minor at first glance? The rational explanation will hold up to quite a bit of scrutiny, even beyond what a bored police detective is willing to muster when dealing with a closed case. You would have to have some underlying dissatisfaction or sensitivity to subtle clues that lead further to get to the supernatural horror. Would this be satisfying as a, say, Call of Cthulhu scenario? Or in a video game?

From discussions with other fans of CoC, some are willing to accept a mundane mystery in the system, others would be very disappointed to not have anything supernatural, much less nothing to do with the Cthulhu Mythos. But would this translate to them digging further into what looks like a closed, mundane scenario? Or will they just feel cheated and disengage?

Maybe it's an issue of pacing. Marlowe ties the case in a neat bow about halfway through The Big Sleep, so the reader knows there's more to come even before he admits to doing the stupid thing and flying down to the gangster's casino. There is still about an act left to The Long Goodbye when the superficial mystery ends. Symphony of the Night has an indicator of percentage of coverage of the map to Dracula's castle, which at the very least tells you that there is more there to uncover, even before you find the second, inverted version. Maybe it's a matter of making sure the mundane mystery is relatively short - halfway through a four-hour slot in a convention, or a single session into what should be a campaign.

Unfortunately, this post will end in a mundane way for now, as this is a recent idea that I've been mulling over, and I have no solutions, much less experience to work from. There's always the possibility that this is a well-known genre or sub-genre, and I'll be kicking myself for not searching for it properly.