Mystery versus Suspense. Do You REALLY Know the Difference?
Well, the modified quote from Alfred Hitchcock is a good place to start, MORE or LESS. (Heh. Basically, he had movie instead of book and audience instead of reader). MYSTERY is when the reader knows LESS than the characters in the book. A mystery plays to the intellectual, to the “little gray cells”. In a mystery, facts are unknown and it’s a puzzle to be solved a little bit at a time. You could use the blossoming of a flower as a metaphor for clues revealed or peeling layers of an onion, but I prefer layers of a parfait, like …