What is the appeal of the mystery genre?
To me, it's two-fold: first there's the ability to engage with and grapple with the text as the characters confront the crime, and then there's the feeling of catharsis when the curtain is pulled back and all the pieces fall into place. My ideal mystery novel features an interesting problem to sink your teeth into, and a clever solution that requires brilliance to grasp but is so elegant you feel you should have seen it yourself.
That is not the kind of mystery we're going to be discussing today.
Instead, I'd like to introduce you to the wonderful little subgenre known as the baka-mystery, literally "idiot mystery," abbreviated as baka-mys. While the goal of a normal mystery is to provide an intelligent solution to a logical problem, a baka-mystery attempts to do the opposite, aiming for a conclusion you'll never see coming not because it's so brilliant but because there's no way the answer could ever be anything that stupid.
