The Elements of Mystery Fiction: Writing the Modern Whodunit (6 page)

And so on and on and on. By now your readers have completely lost track of your story and are likely to set your book aside.

Don’t allow the biographies you’ve composed to limit your imagination and creativity. If, once your story is underway, you find that your characters begin saying and doing unexpected things, don’t resist them. Characters often do “come alive” in the story as they never do in sketches and biographies.

Characterization through scenes

In real life, the more we listen to people talk and watch them act, the more we know about them. The same is true in fiction.

Mystery readers prefer to learn about fictional characters the way they get to know real people: by watching them and listening to them.

Everything characters say or do is a clue to their personalities, their life histories, and the forces that motivate them. As they act and speak in scenes, your characters will gradually acquire depth and complexity. Good writers reveal what their characters are like by showing them in action.

In a mystery story, of course, things are never what they appear to be. For example, suppose your readers first meet a character named Harry when he enters a tavern. He straddles a stool, nods to the bartender, and says, “Gimme a Bud.”

A moment later Mr. Rowan appears. He slides onto the adjacent barstool, adjusts the crease in his pants, and says, “Excuse me, bartender, but what do you have by way of German beers?”

In this simple scene readers will find clues to the education, experience, taste, appearance, and attitudes of two characters. Readers will expect conflict between these two, and as the scene develops they will learn more about them.

As you show Harry and Mr. Rowan interacting with other characters in this and in later scenes, readers may gradually deduce that the crude Harry, in fact, is a philosophy professor, while the well-dressed and cosmopolitan Mr. Rowan is a Mafia hit man. That process of discovery and surprise is what makes mystery stories compelling for readers.

Chapter 4

The Lineup: Villains,
Victims, Suspects, and
Other Characters

In mystery fiction, although several characters might have valid motives for committing a murder, only the villain did it. He kills for compelling—but rarely obvious—reasons, and then uses his considerable intelligence to avoid being detected. He presents a supreme challenge to the detective. He makes no mistakes. He never panics. He leaves no blatant clues behind. He never acts guilty. He lies convincingly. He misdirects anyone who might begin to suspect him. He’ll do anything—including committing more murders—to avoid being nabbed.

It’s even money he’ll get away with it. It will take a clever, resourceful, and determined sleuth—and reader—to identify him and bring him to justice. When you write mystery fiction, if you make it easy, you make it boring.

Readers should meet the villain early in the story. At this point, of course, only the writer knows who the villain is and what he or she has done, or is about to do. For the mystery writer, the rule is this: Make the villain one of the crowd, neither more nor less prominent than any of the story’s other characters.

Only with the climactic revelation do you transform the villain from an ordinary character into one of great complexity. After all, who’d have suspected that she was capable of all those murders?

Beginning writers tend to worry that unless their villain acts guilty, or appears evil, or has a transparent motive, or is obviously stronger or craftier or more unscrupulous than the other characters, they are not playing fair with their readers. Resist the temptation to throw in clues for your readers’ benefit while withholding them from your heroine or hero. And never allow your sleuth to miss a clue that is obvious to your reader. That’s giving the reader an unfair advantage—and mystery readers don’t want an advantage over the sleuth.

If your readers lose respect for your sleuth, you’ll lose your readers.

A worthy villain challenges your hero or heroine and leaves the story’s outcome in doubt. Match a determined sleuth against a resourceful and clever and equally determined villain and you’ll have your readers hooked.

Suspects and red herrings

In the course of pursuing her investigation, your sleuth encounters a variety of characters who are linked to the victim and could have had the means, motive, and opportunity to commit the murder. The more legitimate suspects your story has, and the longer you keep them under suspicion, the more complicated and challenging your puzzle will be.

Don’t disappoint your readers by exonerating too many suspects too quickly. Remember: Only one is the actual villain. All the rest are “red herrings,” characters who, despite appearances, are innocent and whose main function in the story is to misdirect the reader’s attention. But don’t introduce red herrings for the sole purpose of misleading your readers. Every character should have a crucial part to play in the story, offering information of some kind that either helps your sleuth gather clues or misdirects her (and your readers). All characters, however minor, must have motives and goals that connect to the victim and the events of the story.

You can test the validity of a suspect by asking this question: If I omitted this character entirely, would my story collapse?

Your answer must be “yes.” Otherwise you’re not playing fair.

Victims

In some stories, a character’s simple function is to trigger the mystery by getting murdered. The sleuth may begin by investigating this murder, but soon more complicated questions arise, and the victim turns out to be a minor character whose significance fades as the story develops.

More often, however, a murder victim has secrets that provide the murderer with a motive. The connection between the victim’s secret and the murderer’s motive is the solution to the puzzle.

Mystery fiction typically begins with the discovery of a corpse. The victim is already dead, and readers never get to know him directly. Even in stories where the murder occurs after readers have met the victim, they don’t know everything about him. An important part of the sleuth’s investigation becomes the painstaking piecing together of the victim’s backstory, which comes in bits and pieces of information, often seemingly contradictory, filtered through the memories and motives and lies of other characters.

Who was this person? What did he do and know? Who’d want to kill him?

You must know the answers to these questions before you begin writing. Next to your hero or heroine, your victims—even if readers first meet them as dead bodies—are often the most important and interesting characters in mystery fiction.

Write the life story of your victim before you begin to write your story of detection. Make it rich and complicated and unusual. Give him or her friends and lovers, opponents and enemies. Above all, give him secrets.

Remember, something absolutely fascinating happened to this character: He got murdered.

Sidekicks, lovers, and friends

Holmes has Watson, Nero Wolfe has Archie, Travis McGee has Meyer, Spenser has Hawk. Every mystery sleuth, like every real-life person, has relatives and lovers, casual acquaintances and best friends, adversaries and enemies. These secondary characters make your sleuth’s life full and complex and interesting. Most of them serve several functions at once.

Mystery heroes cannot be in more than one place at a time. They also need sounding boards, trusted friends in whom they can confide, allies who can offer them insights and interpretations, raise doubts, and worry about them. Archie Goodwin, for example, does Nero Wolfe’s leg work. Meyer is an economist who can explain complicated business and financial matters to Travis McGee. Hawk opens doors into Boston’s criminal netherworld for Spenser. Police officers have their snitches and their fellow officers. Reporters have their sources.

The growing and shifting relationships between sleuths and their acquaintances help define them and make them human and accessible to readers. These secondary but important characters offer material for the subplots that deepen and define your sleuth, who may, for example, be a bold and decisive investigator but a hesitant and flawed lover, or who may find himself torn between family commitments and the demands of his investigation.

Relationships and interactions among friends, family members, lovers, business associates, and even rivals will help to define and complicate and individualize your sleuth and add texture to your story. If secondary characters do none of these things, they don’t belong there.

Minor characters

Some characters appear once or twice to serve specific story functions. The taxi must have a driver. The gangster has his bodyguard. The politician has a press agent, the business executive a receptionist. When you draw these characters on your pages you can sketch them with a couple of quick strokes, since you know they’re unimportant.

But wait. Your readers don’t know that these characters aren’t, in fact, key players. The Senator’s press agent could be the one who hired the hit man to bump off the woman who was blackmailing his boss. The bodyguard might turn out to be an undercover police informant. The receptionist might actually be the CEO’s mistress.

Shrewd mystery readers trust no one. Everybody’s a suspect. They know that a seemingly minor character can turn out to be the villain.

Don’t disappoint them.

You can’t—and shouldn’t—create elaborate backstories for every taxi driver and waitress who accepts a tip from your hero. Don’t exaggerate their importance, and don’t introduce them for the sole purpose of complicating your plot and misleading your readers. Play fair. You know they’re minor.

But recognize every character’s potential as a suspect. Make those quick descriptive strokes and snatches of dialogue memorable enough to stick in your reader’s mind.

Mystery readers, like writers, enjoy creating and discarding scenarios. Don’t deprive them of their fun.

Creating memorable secondary characters

Mystery readers understand that bartenders and secretaries, cousins and stepdaughters, auto mechanics and family doctors—and, in fact, every character who steps onto the page—
could
be a suspect. Readers look for clues to the mystery’s solution in these characters. They understand that hastily and carelessly drawn characters, besides being uninteresting, do not make valid suspects. If you ignore the potential of minor characters by making them flat, one-dimensional cut-outs, you will not only write lifeless stories, but you will also deprive yourself—and your readers—of a rich source of suspects.

If all of your characters except the bad guy are caricatures, readers will solve the case too easily. If none of your minor characters is carefully drawn, they will all be instantly eliminated as suspects by discerning readers. In neither case have you fully exploited the opportunity to create the complexity that mystery readers love.

Give even your minor players the depth and texture to be possible suspects. Take care to draw none of them as transparently and one-dimensionally good or bad. Let your readers interpret them with some uncertainty.

The case of the whistling janitor

Your protagonist enters the lobby of an office building, looking for information. He notices a janitor. Who would know the people who work in this building better than a janitor? Who would be in a better position to have seen or overheard things that can help your sleuth?

At this point, your shrewd reader thinks, “Yes, and who would have a better opportunity to commit crimes here?” Your janitor thus becomes an instant suspect if you introduce him cleverly. Only you know for sure whether he’s a red herring or the actual villain. Be careful not to give it away too easily. Let your reader wonder about this janitor.

You might proceed this way:

Inexperienced writers tend to confuse detailed physical description with deep characterization. In this passage, the writer draws a clear picture of the janitor’s physical appearance. But it is a flat, one-dimensional, rather typical portrait that opens no window into the man’s character or life.

He’s a cliché who offers no surprises, no different from the bubble-headed blonde, the whore with the heart of gold, the wine-guzzling panhandler, or the unscrupulous used-car salesman. Readers yawn at clichéd characters. They’ve met them before.

Some writers go to the other extreme, writing exaggerated physical descriptions in their effort to create memorable minor characters. They might introduce our janitor this way: