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Comment by mannykannot | Hacker News Reader

I am not sure that the archetypical detective or mystery story would fit easily into this framework, as there are two concurrent stories: the misleading one that the author is stringing you along with, and the 'real' story as revealed in the denouement. The signature element of this style is that the 'facts' presented as part of the former are still there, but viewed differently, in the latter.

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Talking about detective stories and unusual narrative structures, I've really liked the American series 'Columbo' with Peter Falk while growing up. It's very popular in my country (Hungary, there's even a statue of him in Budapest), not sure about elsewhere.

It turns the typical detective story to its head. You see the murder and who does it as the first thing in the episode. The rest is how the detective intuits it and then most importantly the psychological battle and clever tricks required to corner the murderer and prove it was him.

Columbo was pretty well-known in the nineties, so much so that it was referenced in contemporary hip hop songs as a byword for ‘cop’ or ‘detective.’

https://youtu.be/aaPQsYqNDnY (NSFW, language)

Maybe Columbo has "From bad to worse" shape. The main protagonist isn't the detective, but the murderer. He starts badly - with a murder - and then it's downhill from there.

“Oh, just one more thing...”

agreed, seems like there are story shapes yet to be discovered. i wonder what the graph of the hard-boiled detective story would look like given your description... the shape-shifter story shape?

The primary difference seems to be that a detective story does not have a protagonist: the reader does not know everything the main character knows.

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