When people ask me what I like to read, I say mysteries...
But it's really more complicated than that, isn't it?
Sure, if you go to the bookstore, the plaque usually says Mystery... but sometimes it says Mystery/Thriller... or Mystery/Thriller/Suspense. And if you get your books online, the categories vary even more.
So why does this genre have so many aliases? What is the Mystery genre? At the very least, why is it that 3 or 4 genres get lumped together in this category? What is the common ground? The tone of books on the shelf can vary so drastically that at a glance it's hard to rationalize putting them side by side.
The aliases of mystery
I love browsing the bookstore to discover new authors and books, but if I'm in the mood for something specific, I tend to search online. The Mystery genre has branched off so much, you never know what you're going to get by just picking one off the shelf-- the back cover descriptions aren't always helpful and I don't necessarily have time to read the first few pages of 20 different books to find the type of mystery I'm looking for.
I decided to dig a little deeper and see just how much variation there is in the name of this genre. There were only small variations in the physical locations I visited-- Mystery, Mystery/Thriller, or Mystery/Thriller/Suspense-- and the selection was always the same. However, this graphic represents the various mystery genre names listed across the catalogues of just 10 bookstores and libraries when I started searching online.
The primary reason for this seems to be advances in technology. It's not practical to have a small bookstore divided into 50 genres, even if those genres are more accurate than just grouping books into the 5 most recognizable ones. But an online catalogue doesn't have those limitations. Instead, each book is tagged with the genres into which it fits. Any given book might have 5 or 6 associated categories, and those categories could be very specific. (Again, it's just not practical to stock the same book in 6 locations within a physical store.) Although card catalogues had the same capability, the online catalogues available now allow us to click through these categories in seconds, filtering down the thousands of available options to find the perfect book. There's no cost to getting more specific in our categorizations, aside from the potential research into what those labels should be, and they can be structured in a hierarchy that's easy for users to browse. Just look at Netflix's never-ending genre list.
Anyway, back to the question that started this whole thing: why is it always Mystery/Thriller/Suspense (and sometimes Crime)?
Mystery stories revolve around the unknown, which is fairly vague as far as genre categorizations go, and probably why Suspense & Thriller are always tacked on to the end. Where else would those books go? Even though the tone is much more tension-driven than Miss Marple, the story still focuses on unanswered questions.
Thrillers incorporate action elements-- there are good guys and bad guys, but you may not know who is who and someone is always on the run.
Suspense is more closely related to horror-- the high-anxiety, waiting-for-the-other-shoe-to-drop tone is how these mysteries are usually written.
Crime is very closely correlated with mystery, though not all mysteries to be solved involve illegal activities. Procedurals follow the authorities' efforts to solve the crime and bring the criminals to justice-- think Law & Order.
conclusion: there's a mystery for everyone
I have to acknowledge the limitations of a physical inventory, even if it means suspense-mystery novels cluttering out the whodunits I usually look for. I really can't expect them to accommodate everyone's specific interests. Plus, who knows how many books I've tried from the shelf that I wouldn't have found if there was a section for every kind of mystery. And even if digital tags label everything very specifically, the ability to label each book with several tags opens up even more avenues for discovery.