The Elements of Mystery Fiction: Writing the Modern Whodunit (3 page)

If a woman slams her fist on a tabletop or curses loudly or clenches her teeth, you might conclude that she’s angry. You might be wrong. In fact, she might be trying to make you
believe
she’s angry when, in fact, she is trying to manipulate your emotions or make you believe something that isn’t true. You can’t be sure. You have to consider the clues—the observed behavior and everything else you know about that person—to arrive at your best interpretation. In actual life, no narrator stands at your shoulder whispering in your ear, “That person is angry” or “She’s only pretending to be angry.”

Just as you
show
your readers the characters in your stories, so should you create settings for them.
Show
your readers a restaurant with a jukebox playing a Patti Page tune, candles in Chianti bottles, and red-and-white-checked oilcloth tablecloths, then allow them to draw their own conclusions about the place. Do not
tell
them, “The restaurant had an old-fashioned ’50s atmosphere.” Readers can—and want to—deduce that for themselves.

Words such as “sad,” “manipulative,” and “old-fashioned” tell readers more than they want to know. Let them draw their own conclusions, the way they do in real life. Otherwise you’ll turn your readers into passive spectators—and turn them off.

Make your story a series of experiences for your readers. Give them sensory impressions.
Show
them some significant details of people and places, but resist the impulse to tell them what those details mean. Write scenes in which characters act and interact, and put your readers in the middle of those scenes. Allow them to participate, to interpret, to draw conclusions, and to fill in the blanks. Trust them to think for themselves. Respect their intelligence.

Showing without telling gives contemporary readers what they want from a mystery story—a fair chance to participate in the puzzle’s solution.

Chapter 2

Finding Your Story

The question writers are most often asked by non-writers is: “Where do you get your ideas?”

Typically, writers reply, “Why, ideas are everywhere. The newspapers. Television. Cocktail party conversation. Dreams. The problem isn’t finding ideas. The problem is recognizing those that can be converted into a story, and then knowing how to create that story.”

Sometimes they just smile and say, “Serendipity.”

The most honest answer to the question is: “Ideas come from inside my head. If you want a story idea, that’s where you have to look.”

Sure, there are plenty of ideas. But the workable idea, the one that will sustain a compelling mystery plot, is rare and precious. To recognize a good idea and develop it into a story requires a lot of hard, critical thought and planning.

Sometimes writers are fired by the inspiration of what strikes them as a good idea and are so eager to begin writing that they don’t stop to think. They rush to their keyboards and begin writing. They expect their idea to sustain them. They are devastated when, after a few pages or a few chapters, they run out of steam. Their idea did not sustain them, because they failed to nurture and develop it into a fully imagined story.

Planning your story requires more than the inspiration of a good idea. The creative process that precedes actual writing is unique to each writer. Here’s how I do it:

Brady Coyne, the lawyer-sleuth hero of my mystery series, likes to ponder difficult cases from the banks of a trout stream or the little balcony off his waterfront apartment in Boston. The process is identical to what I, his creator, go through trying to think up puzzles for him to solve:

That, as well as I can state it, is how I think through a story idea. It’s a process of disciplined free association, at once random and purposeful. If anyone watched me do it, they’d accuse me of daydreaming.

I do it on long automobile trips. I tend to miss highway exits when I’m driving. During conversations, I find myself saying, “Excuse me. What were you saying?” Sometimes I lie on my bed and stare at the insides of my eyelids. Now and then I scribble a note about a character or a place or an event on a scrap of paper. Periodically I enter my notes into my computer. I build scenes around them and explore them and try to see where they lead.

More often than not they take me to a dead end. I expect that and keep at it. A good idea is worth working for.

An idea isn’t a plot, and a plot isn’t a story. An idea is a spark that ignites the individual creative imagination. It can usually be stated in a simple declarative statement, such as, “An elderly woman dying of cancer yearns to reconcile with her estranged daughter before she dies.”

Or, “The owner of a million-dollar stamp, thought to be the only one of its kind in existence, is contacted by someone who claims to possess a duplicate of that stamp.”

You may not find either of these ideas particularly promising. But I did, and I developed each of them into a novel. An idea that excites me may not strike your imagination, for the obvious reason that you and I have different interests and experiences.

An idea sets off a complicated chain reaction, a sequence of imagined events which the writer converts into scenes populated by imaginary people. That is a plot. When the writer puts it all onto paper, it becomes a story.

In their search for ideas, some mystery writers hang around with newspaper reporters, or sit in courtrooms, or lurk in barrooms, or ride with police officers. I know one writer who tunes in the afternoon television talk shows. He claims he’s gotten several story ideas from the oddball people interviewed by Oprah and Jerry Springer.

Always be alert for ideas. Read compulsively and eclectically. Eavesdrop shamelessly. Visit new places. Study people. Engage strangers in conversation. And when you get an idea that excites you, resist the powerful temptation to sit down immediately and start writing. Instead, find a quiet place where you can practice the discipline of controlled free association.

The best way to create a complex mystery plot from a single exciting idea is to keep asking yourself: “What if?” Here’s an example of how this works for me:

The idea for my first novel,
Death at Charity’s Point
, came from the news story of a fugitive from the law who, after several years of living quietly under an assumed identity, a pillar of his little rural community, decided to turn himself in.

What if
, I asked myself, someone in this fugitive’s little community had uncovered his true identity? And
what if
he didn’t want to be brought to justice?
What if
he committed murder to protect his secret?

This struck me as a promising idea for a mystery novel. I stated it for myself in the form of a premise: “A former ’60s radical, wanted by the FBI and living under an assumed identity, commits murder to protect her secret.” I then bombarded the premise with more what-if questions.
What if
the murder appeared to be a suicide?
What if
the victim’s elderly mother refused to believe her son would take his own life?
What if
she engaged the family lawyer to investigate?
What if
the murderer committed more murders?
What if
she targeted the lawyer for death?

Asking those “what if” questions often felt random and unproductive. For every useful answer, dozens led nowhere. But I kept asking them until I believed I had a coherent story. Then I created and revised outlines, wrote character sketches, and explored possible settings.

The source of my idea had been televised nationally. But as far as I know, no one else used it as the basis for a mystery novel. It worked for me because it merged with that unique entity that is my imagination, which is the product of my peculiar history, personality, and life experiences.

And if it had happened to inspire someone else, their novel would without doubt have been unrecognizably different from mine.

The formula that generally works for me is: character + problem = story idea. The character is usually either a murderer or the victim of a murderer. That character’s story becomes the basis for the novel. But it’s not the novel itself.

The two stories of the mystery

Mystery fiction, remember, tells a tale of detection. It’s a puzzle. It raises the “whodunit” question and sets the sleuth off on her quest. Along the way she encounters clues until she—and the reader—have learned enough to solve the puzzle.

Before you write this story of detection,
you must first write the story of the murder itself
. It’s a chronological tale. It begins with the relationship between the victim and the murderer, explains the murderer’s motive, and develops through the planning and execution of the deed.

What clues will you scatter along the way? What other innocent characters are associated with the victim? Might they, too, have motive, means, and opportunity to commit murder? How has the culprit covered his tracks? What are the relationships among all of these characters? Where does the story take place? How do elements in the setting contribute to the story’s events?

Answering all of these questions will give you a story of murder.

Write a narrative sketch of this straightforward tale. Tell it chronologically. Populate it with husbands and wives, lovers and ex-spouses, business acquaintances and estranged friends. Compose the life story of your victim. Be sure he has plenty of potential enemies. Then do the same for your murderer.

This sketch could itself be the plot for a novel. With fascinating multidimensional characters, complex relationships, a powerful underlying moral question, a touch of irony, and intense conflicts, it might even make a very good suspense novel or thriller.

But because this is the story of the villain and his victim, it’s not yet a mystery. The mystery story belongs to the sleuth.

To create a mystery, you must convert the linear murderer-victim story into a puzzle and create a puzzle-solving hero. This is the specific challenge for the mystery writer. You must invent two stories for every one you write. First you must think up the story of the crime. Only then can you write your mystery novel,
which is the story of that crime’s detection
.

Book-length mysteries are, in all respects,
novels
. A mystery novel, just like a “literary novel,” should be populated with fascinating multidimensional characters. It should ask important moral questions. Mystery fiction, every bit as much as the mainstream variety, can explore the complexity of the human spirit and the irony of the human condition. The best ones do exactly that.

But mystery fiction offers a bonus. The bonus is the puzzle.

Here’s how I constructed the two stories that became my eleventh Brady Coyne novel,
Tight Lines
:

I decided to explore the difficult and intense relationships that inevitably develop between psychiatrists and their patients in the course of psychoanalysis. Patients, in some cases, fall in love with and may attempt to seduce their analysts, whose professional ethic requires them to resist powerful temptations while continuing to treat their patients. This doctor-patient relationship was the idea for my story.

Sometimes psychiatrists succumb to temptation. “What if,” I thought, “a psychiatrist had an affair with his beautiful female patient?”

And, because my story had to be a mystery, I next asked: “What if that patient were murdered?”

The storyline that resulted went this way: Mary Ellen Ames worshipped her father, who died when she was in college. Mary Ellen cut off ties with her mother and proceeded to engage in a series of love affairs with older men, many of them married. She became involved with drugs and had a homosexual encounter. After several years she decided to seek psychiatric help. She chose Dr. Warren McAllister, a middle-aged psychoanalyst who reminded her of her father, gradually seduced him, and then threatened to expose him to his wife and his professional associates if he didn’t agree to marry her.

I thought hard and long about Mary Ellen Ames and Warren McAllister and his wife. I created Mary Ellen’s lovers—the married college professor, the bookstore owner who supplied her with drugs, the suspended Boston policeman who lived in a trailer, the troubled young woman who lived in Mary Ellen’s apartment building. I gave Mary Ellen’s mother a story, too. She lived alone in the Ames family mansion. She was suffering from terminal cancer and wanted to reconcile with her estranged daughter before she died.