1. The initial riddle posed by The Woman in White is the apparition on a lonely country road at night of a distraught young woman dressed in white, being chased by mysterious pursuers. In plot terms what is interesting about the complex story which follows is the way this original haunting feminine figure gradually differentiates into three, who are all sisters. The original version, Anne, is simply a weak, helpless victim, who has been incarcerated in a mental asylum by two evil villains, Sir Percy Glyde, a baronet, who is engaged to Anne’s sister Laura, and his fat, smooth, sinister friend Count Fosco. They have done this because Anne has discovered an appalling secret about Sir Percy, which he is determined should remain hidden. Laura is stronger than Ann, but the two ‘monster-figures’ then manage to get her also consigned to the asylum. The key to the story then becomes the third sister Marian, stronger and shrewder than the others, and it is she who, as a fully ‘active’ heroine, eventually outwits the two villains and puts them to rout. Sir Percy’s awful secret, which Marian also discovers, is that he had been born out of wedlock, and is not really a baronet at all. While trying to destroy the evidence for this, he accidentally burns himself to death. Fosco is murdered by an Italian secret society which he has betrayed. In plot terms, the story is thus a combination of Mystery and Overcoming the Monster, and Marian presents us with an unusual pre-modern example of a feminine ‘monster-slayer’. The way the ‘anima-figure’ in the story develops through three stages, from the original helpless victim Ann into her final manifestation as the tough and resourceful, but still feminine Marian may recall those folk-tales such as The Three Billy Goats Gruff, where we see a hero-figure progressively becoming stronger through three incarnations, until he is powerful and mature enough to overcome the monster.

2. Another Hollywood director who conspicuously relied on elements of the Mystery plot in many of his films was Alfred Hitchcock. Rear Window (1954), for instance, was a straightforward detection mystery in which the hero, a magazine photographer (played by James Stewart) confined by injury to his New York apartment and seeking diversion by spying on his neighbours, is convinced he has seen one of them committing a murder, although there is no sign of the body. Despite initial scepticism, first from his girlfriend, then from his friend in the New York police department, his deductions eventually prove correct and the murderer confesses. A more complex mystery inspired Hitchcock’s most popular film, Vertigo (1958), in which the hero ‘Scottie’ (again played by Stewart) is a San Francisco policeman forced into retirement because, following his failure to stop a colleague falling from a roof, he suffers acutely from vertigo. He is commissioned to investigate the strange problem afflicting the wife of a rich friend, who seems to imagine she is the reincarnation of a beautiful and tragic nineteenth-century ancestor who had died young. Stewart falls in love with the wife (Kim Novak) and is led by her to an old Spanish mission station south of the city, which she seems to recall from her previous life. When she ascends the church tower, he is slow to follow her because of his vertigo and sees her falling to her death. Traumatised by his inability to prevent this tragedy, he undergoes hospital treatment but then thinks he sees the dead woman’s near-exact double (also Kim Novak). He woos her and gradually comes to suspect that she is the same woman. Having dressed her in the same clothes, he takes her back to the same church. By now he has unravelled the mystery. He had in fact been set up by the husband to provide cover for a murder. The woman he saw falling from the tower had been the man’s real wife; the woman played by Kim Novak was his mistress. On the first occasion, when she climbed the tower before him, the husband had already been hiding up there, ready to throw his wife (dressed in identical clothes) off the tower. He had relied on an attack of vertigo to ensure that Scottie would not have been able to climb high enough to see the truth of what happened. He and his mistress had then, unseen, made their escape. When the hero takes the mistress back up the tower, to confront her with the part she had played in this murder, she is so dismayed that, quite accidentally, she falls to her death. But it is never explained why the hero was not asked to identify the original victim’s body, at which point the truth would have come out much earlier. But then of course there would have been no story.

3. Another great work of literature based in part on the Mystery plot was Dostoyevsky’s final novel, The Brothers Karamazov. We know from the opening paragraph of this long book that it is to be a murder story, involving the death of Fyodor Karamazov, a rich, bullying, debauched landowner. He has had three sons by two young wives, both now dead, but has all but abandoned them. In a way reminiscent of a folk tale, two sons are negative, in opposing respects, the third positive. Dmitri is like his father, a physically strong, drunken bully. Ivan has gone to the opposite masculine extreme, by retreating into the mind, cut off from feeling and reality by his over-dependence on the intellect. The third son, Alyosha, selfless, loving and devout, lives in a monastery with his spiritual mentor Father Zossima (who eventually dies). There is also a shadowy fourth son, Smerdyakov, born from a short-lived illicit affair between old Karamazov and ‘stinking Lizaveta’, a sad social outcast. From their tortured relationships with their father, it seems that both Dmitri and Ivan might well be tempted to kill the old monster, and when the murder actually takes place, Ivan is at least partly complicit to what has happened (although, as a good intellectual, he has been careful to distance himself from the nasty physical realities of the crime). But it is Dmitri who behaves most suspiciously, and who is therefore arrested and put on trial. Even though the court is presented with evidence that the true murderer was Smerdyakov, the most shadowed son of all, rejected and mentally unstable, this is dismissed, because Smerdyakov had then committed suicide. Dmitri is thus wrongly found guilty. The son who had not been strong enough to prevent any of this happening is Alyosha, the story’s hero. But now that his Dark Father is dead, he can set off on the road to Self-realisation by following in the footsteps of his ‘light Father-figure’, Zossima. At the end of the story, to confirm this image of the Self at last emerging from all the surrounding darkness we also see the condemned but innocent Dmitri, purified by his sufferings, preparing to escape to start a new life in America.