Plot-Driven vs. Character-Driven: English Detective Stories

Evelyn Waugh on mystery writers: "Mrs Christie, on the whole, concentrates her ingenuity on a kind of three card trick, "spot the villain", and even exercises a kind of mesmeric influence on the reader in diverting his attention from the significant details. Miss Sayers, on the other hand, devotes herself more to devising unexpected mechanisms of crime and in creating characters who are of real personal interest quite apart from the importance they attain through the events of the story."

And that is just the difference between a plot-driven and a character-driven novel. Two of the best known English writers of detective stories in the first half of the Twentieth Century, Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, do very much illustrate this difference.

Christie’s work is thoroughly plot-driven. Yes, she created quirky and interesting characters, but they do not grow and change much, neither during the original stories nor in the many sequels. The focus is all on the methodology of solving the mysteries, with the characters incidental to this.

I’m entirely willing to admit I’m not much of an Agatha Christie fan. The books are certainly well-written; indeed, they are textbooks of genre mystery writing. They just don’t hold my interest that well.

Sayers is quite another matter. Her best known sleuth, Peter Wimsey, very much grows over the course of several novels. As does his girlfriend* when she appears around halfway through the series. The mysteries, as mysteries, are pretty good but it is really the characters who take our interest. We are investigating not only the who of who-done-it, but also the why.

And for that matter, why the investigator investigates. This doesn’t mean I always care for the points she makes, but there are things to make one think. One doesn’t come away with much of that from a Christie novel.

One would be correct in assuming my own work veers toward the Dorothy Sayers side of things. I’m naturally a writer of characters and not overly interested in complex plots and puzzles: life is usually pretty straightforward, but people aren’t!

*A fairly obvious self-insertion by the author. We’d all like to date our main characters, wouldn’t we?