Elisa Shoenberger has been building a library since she was 13. She loves writing about all aspects of books from author interviews, antiquarian books, archives, and everything in between. She also writes regularly for Murder & Mayhem and Library Journal. She's also written articles for Huffington Post, Boston Globe, WIRED, Slate, and many other publications. When she's not writing about reading, she's reading and adventuring to find cool new art. She also plays alto saxophone and occasionally stiltwalks. Find out more on her website or follow her on Twitter @vogontroubadour.
It’s a good time for fans of metafiction and mysteries. Several books have come out in the past year alone that play with the murder mystery format in fun and creative ways.
But what exactly is metafiction? And how does it relate to mysteries? The Darling Axe blog has a really great definition of metafiction: “Metafiction is fiction that knows it’s fiction. It’s a novel with self-awareness. A narrator who winks at you while telling the story.” Sometimes the narrator talks directly to the reader; other times, the structure of the text points to its own construction.
It’s definitely not a new phenomenon; It goes back centuries. Some attribute Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605) as the first book of metafiction, but that’s disputed. Nonetheless, the genre took off in the 20th century with works like Laurence Stern’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1767), Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis’s The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (1888), and James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922).
Metafictional mysteries are a subset of the genre where the text plays with the structure of the mystery novel itself. There are certain tropes that mystery novels take on and the metafictional mystery breaks or bends them. Of course, the text can also reference itself or have the narrator talk to the reader.
So here are seven recently published meta mysteries that will delight and surprise you as they play with the form in different ways.
Unusual Suspects
Sign up to Unusual Suspects to receive news and recommendations for mystery/thriller readers.
The Game is Murder by Hazell Ward
You, yes you, have been invited to a murder party. You don’t know the people involved and you are not sure why you were invited. But you still go. You learn that you have been asked to take the role of the Great Detective to help solve a real-life unsolved mystery from the 1970s. Cold cases are hard, but metafictional cold cases are even harder. This one gets weird and surreal really quickly, which is exactly my cup of metaphorical tea.
The Woman in the Library by Sulari Gentill
It was hard to choose which Sulari Gentill book to include since she’s got several amazing books that would qualify, but this one’s my favorite. It’s a story within a story, a classic metafiction trope, but it’s more than that. It’s a meditation about the writing process and reality versus fiction. The story within is about Winifred Kincaid, an Australian aspiring writer who is living in Boston thanks to a scholarship. One day, she’s sitting in the library when she hears a woman scream. That prompts her to talk to three strangers seated around her, and that becomes the start of a friendship with her fellow library patrons. But they soon learn that the woman who screamed was found dead, and each has their own secrets that might be connected to the dead woman.
The outer story is about a writer who is writing the story of Winifred and is sending chapters to a fellow writer friend in Boston. You only get the responses from the writer friend who is very invested in the story…maybe too invested.
The Proof of My Innocence by Jonathan Coe
Phyl is at loose ends after graduating from college. She’s back home with her parents and working at a service job at Heathrow Airport in London when an old family friend Christopher Swann enters their lives. He tells them about his research into a right-wing faction in the U.K. known as the Processus Group, and about his plans to attend a super-exclusive conference called TrueCon for ultra right-wing politicians. Then Phyl and her family learn that Chris has been murdered, so Phyl and Chris’s adopted daughter Rashida decides to solve the murder. The book jumps from subgenre to subgenre, from satire to cozy mystery, and more. It’s a commentary on the mystery novel, but it’s also a critique of national politics in the U.K. that will resonate with U.S. readers, too. It’s not to be missed.
Fair Play by Louise Hegarty
This one is a fun revamping of the closed-circle mystery: everyone is gathered in a country mansion and then someone is killed. It’s unlikely anyone from the outside world did the crime, so the killer must be one of the friends. Abigail is putting together a big birthday bash for her brother Benjamin. They’ve rented a fancy Airbnb for New Year’s Eve that will have a 1920s Murder Mystery at the center of it. But someone takes the murder mystery concept too far…and Benjamin ends up dead. But that’s just the start. The book splits into two narratives; one explores all the ways that the people assembled could have killed Benjamin and why; the other follows Abigail as she figures out how to move on from her brother’s death.
Strange Pictures by Uketsu, translated by Jim Rion
This book is so delightfully weird that it deserves a place on this list. At the heart of the story, there are nine childlike drawings that seem harmless and innocent on their own. But as the reader goes through four seemingly unconnected stories, the pictures expose a terrible crime.
Those images are the heart of the work, making the reader constantly question what they know and referring back to the images at hand to understand what is going on. Plus, another book by Uketsu titled Strange Houses has just come out.
You Are the Detective: The Creeping Hand Murder by Maureen Johnson and Jay Cooper
American novelist Roy Peterson has been murdered. He and six other people received mysterious letters inviting them to a townhome, and they all have secrets they are desperate to keep hidden. No one knows how the murder was done. Now you’ve been brought in as the detective and are charged with figuring out who the murderer is and how they killed Roy Peterson. It’s by definition aware of its construction as you review photos, interview transcripts, and more to make a determination. Plus, I simply love a book told in second person. Maureen Johnson is the writer behind the amazing YA mystery series Truly Devious and Your Guide to Not Getting Murdered in a Quaint English Village, which is also illustrated by Jay Cooper.
Alter Ego by Alex Segura
Last but not least, we have the incredible quasi-sequel to Segura’s award-winning Secret Identity and the graphic novel the Legendary Lynx. You don’t have to read Secret Identity to read Alter Ego, but it definitely enriches the experience.
Comic book artist and filmmaker, Annie Bustamante gets the opportunity to bring alive her favorite comic book hero: the Lethal Lynx. But it’s not ideal circumstances. She’s been hired by Bert Carlyle, whose father started Triumph Comics and owns the franchise, and he insists that she work with a disgraced filmmaker.
Getting your dream job doesn’t mean it’s a dream come true. Annie finds her vision for the comic moving further and further away from her at the same time she gets threats about digging too deep. What makes this metafiction is the Lethal Lynx itself. Both Alter Ego and Secret Identity have images from the comic…and there’s also the graphic novel The Legendary Lynx by Segura and illustrated by Sandy Jarrell. It’s a story within a story with the added bonus that it’s framed as a re-release of the comic from the 1970s. Chef’s kiss! (Alter Ego was also one of my favorite books from 2024).
So that’s a journey through some recent metafiction mysteries. I look forward to seeing more in the future! If you want more metafiction books, check out my post on books that break the fourth wall. If you want more books with unusual narrative structures, check out this list about ergodic fiction.
English (US) · 