What is the difference in pacing between thriller and mystery genres?

Question

I know mystery novels focus on unraveling a puzzle and something unsolved, and that thrillers are more about heightened excitement and suspense. I'm curious what the difference in pacing is. If you have written/read for either or both genres, what have you noticed? How have you approached it?

Answer 1

Horror vs Terror

200 years ago, Anne Radcliffe debated the distinction between Horror and Terror.

According to wikipedia:

horror being more related to being shocked or scared (being horrified) at an awful realization or a deeply unpleasant occurrence, while terror is more related to being anxious or fearful.

As a writer (THE #1 gothic horror author of her day), she decided Terror was superior at wringing emotions from the reader.

It's about Time

My own paraphrase:

• Horror is the feeling about something bad that already happened.
• Terror is the feeling that something bad will happen.

Based on that utilitarian definition, one of these is Horror; the other is Terror...

• "Someone died in this room 200 years ago..."
• "Someone in this room will die tonight..."

Mystery vs Thriller

I think the same idea applies to Mystery and Thriller.

• Mystery is an incident in the past.
• Thriller is an incident that is unfolding.

The blur of their genres is probably... pacing.

Mystery is used to give stories room to breathe, to slow the pace and consider how things fit together. Even after a major twist, the pace slows to ruminate over what has changed. Clues are reconsidered. Character actions are reviewed. The knowledge of in-story events becomes richer as it's unpacked, turned over, and repacked. Mystery slows the pace, and expands the story.

Thriller is used to remove (good) options. The MC loses agency and is forced to react to sudden predicament changes. They are funneled into problematic situations. The plan goes wrong, meanwhile danger lurks closer. Thriller narrows the story into immediate action with no time to think. The pace quickens as suspense builds, and there are fewer directions the story can go.

Answer 2

There is a lot of overlap between the two genres and some books fall into both.

In their most distinct extremes, the mystery is

• slow-paced,
• focused on the person and life of the sleuth and
• their attempts to solve the riddle, and
• there is no danger as the crime has already happened,
• the main emotions elicited in the reader are curiosity, intellectual stimulation, empathy with the sleuth, and comfort,

while the thriller is

• fast-paced,
• focused on the (personality of the) antagonist and
• preventing him or her from commiting a(nother) crime,
• there is continual danger and
• often a ticking clock and
• the most extreme stakes such as the life of a person or the destruction of the whole world,
• the main emotions elicited in the reader are fear, anxiety, and suspense.

Mystery: Miss Marple. Thriller: Armageddon. The titles alone make the differences between the genres abundantly clear.

Answer 3

+1 Ben, his answer covers most of it.

Watch detective series on PBS, or the various takes on Sherlock Holmes (like "Elementary"). Or even the old "Columbo" (although that wasn't like most mysteries, we knew who was guilty from the start, the mystery was how does Columbo prove it).

Another one on TV now is Elsbeth; this is another sherlockian mystery series, with a quirky woman detective, much like Columbo she intentionally seems disorganized and scatter-brained, but she's actually brilliant.

Often the mystery grabs the reader with a hook, the actual crime, or the crime scene investigation of a gruesome murder. The pace there is often fast. You need to get the reader excited about the crime and mystery.

But then the pace slows down as the detective has a "cold start", or perhaps only one clue that there even was a crime -- maybe the death looks accidental, or like a suicide, but our detective finds one clue that makes no sense...

Towards the end, things may get exciting again. The guilty party may engage in more crimes, even trying to kill the investigator, to get away with their crime.

So some mysteries start at a high exciting pace in Act I (first 25%), slow down in Act II (next 50%) as the detective starts cold and has to get up to speed, one clue at a time.

In Act III (25%) the detective is certain they know, but struggle to prove it -- and then we have a fast denouement in the second half of Act III that the criminal did not see coming.

The Series "House" was a medical mystery version of this; we begin with somebody deathly ill from unidentified causes (high pace), the investigation is relatively slow with a lot of false starts, and then BANG Act III.b House knows what must be done and breaks every rule of medicine in his way to get it done.