The Scooby Doo Problem

[owlectomy]

The trouble with writing mystery/suspense-ish stories where the main characters are teenagers is that you very quickly run into questions like, why aren't the police involved? And what kind of bad guys are so completely incompetent that they can be foiled by meddling kids?

It's not a problem of age, strictly speaking -- it's a problem of not being a part of the power structure, not having any authority to arrest anyone or interrogate anyone or get a warrant to search anywhere. But it's a problem of age, too, because it's harder to command respect even outside of the power structures, and harder to go unnoticed in a lot of places, and you've had less time to get competent at various things.

You can solve this by having relatively small and toothless mysteries, but then it's hard to make them compelling.

I think Josh Berk's mysteries handled this quite well by giving the main characters small yet emotionally important mysteries to solve while the murder stuff mostly falls to the police to handle. But it's not a solution that works everywhere.

On the other hand, there are also situations where it can be advantageous to be underestimated, and not taken seriously...

Comments

[torachan]

To be honest, I am already suspending so much disbelief about other stuff when it comes to most mysteries that a teenage sleuth is not a problem for me. I guess it depends on the story, though, and if it were a really realistic story (as opposed to, say, the Kindaichi mysteries, where the fact that he's been at the scene of like a hundred murders is much more unbelievable than the fact that he's in high school) I might wonder about the protagonist's age.