Connie Shelton is the author  of the Charlie Parker mystery series, the ninth of which is due out in  Fall '05. She has conducted numerous writing and publishing workshops and was senior editor at Intrigue Press for five years. She has been a
Long Ridge instructor for 3-1/2 years.

 

 

 

 

 

Writing the Whodunnit

By Connie Shelton 

 

            Most of us have early memories of hours spent reading Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys. We graduated to Perry Mason and Sherlock Holmes. We thrived on Sam Spade, Travis McGee or Kinsey Milhone. We love mysteries. They entertain, challenge, and keep us turning the pages. Now we want to write one.

Somehow, when we begin to write a mystery, though, nothing seems as simple as it did when we were able to pick up a book and see how John D. Macdonald or Sue Grafton did it. Whether you’re working on a full-length novel or a long short story (many of the mystery magazine markets allow up to 12,000 words), you still need certain elements to make the story work.  Let’s take a look at the modern mystery and see how it’s constructed.

            Mysteries for the adult markets today nearly always involve a murder. Why? Because murder is the most serious of crimes. Readers today are more sophisticated than their counterparts a hundred years ago. No longer is it enough for the crime to consist of blackmail, thievery or adultery. Those can be factors, of course, and often are. But the real crime, the one readers want the detective to solve, is murder.

            A mystery-writer friend of mine says that she always begins developing her story ideas by asking herself the question: What’s important enough to kill for? I can’t stress enough the importance of this question, because without motivation the rest of your story will fall flat. Everything else in the mystery story hinges around this question. This becomes The Story Problem. The answer to it will determine who will be your victim, your suspects, and your killer.

            Sex, money and power are typical reasons for murder. Sex—love triangles and all their inherent complications will always provide motive. Money—a bank robbery gone wrong, an angry nephew cut out of the will, someone watching a little old lady visit the ATM—face it, people kill for money. Power—someone needs to get his rival out of the way; the second-in-command wants to take over by offing the boss; the Germans want to take over Poland. When power is desired strongly enough, somebody’s going to die.

            Once you’ve answered the question about what’s important enough to kill for, you can start to put people into the situation. At the core of every mystery are: Victim, Killer, Sleuth. Victim and killer are going to be determined by the Story Problem. Let’s take a look at your choices for Sleuth.

            The professional – cop, detective, federal agent, private investigator, insurance investigator, arson investigator (someone who is working on the crime because it’s his/her job)

            The amateur – can be a doctor or lawyer, or the little old lady next door (someone who’s working on the crime outside his/her regular job). There are caterers, teachers, archaeologists, scholars, CPAs, social workers, Park Service employees, and scads more in current mystery fiction.

            It’s easy enough to figure out why the professional sleuth is there. He or she is being paid to do this. We’ve all watched enough television to know why the police are on the scene and pretty much what they do when they get there. Using an amateur sleuth gets a little more tricky. You have to come up with a compelling reason for that person to get involved. See my article on Creating the Mystery Character for more ideas on how this works.

            Okay, you’ve figured out the major players. Now it’s time to start putting it together. That’s called Plot. Plot consists of Beginning, Middle and End. In the mystery, these are fairly easily delineated. Of course you’ll always find exceptions, but here’s generally how it goes.

            Beginning – In the first section, the crime is committed and the characters are introduced. The body is found on the floor, the police show up. The house burns down, the arson investigation team shows up. The client approaches the private eye and hires her to locate a missing relative. The National Park Ranger stumbles over a body on a remote hiking trail. You get the idea.

            Middle – The middle of a mystery is where the detective begins detecting. Clues are discovered and analyzed, the crime lab goes to work, the private eye starts asking questions on the street. Suspects begin to emerge. Several people will have had motives but none yet emerges clearly as the killer. Here’s where the writer plants clues (facts that are true) and red herrings (leads that turn out to be false). Remember, suspects will lie, evidence may have been falsified. This is the stage of the story where the writer deepens the puzzle and makes the sleuth work for the answers.

            End – The sleuth will begin to eliminate suspects, will start to put together the picture of what really happened at the time of the crime. There may be an Aha! Moment when the sleuth is pretty sure she knows the killer’s identity. In the Murder She Wrote TV series, there was nearly always such a moment when the light dawned for Jessica Fletcher. Remember those? But, the writer doesn’t yet blurt out the answers—not yet. That’s saved for the Confrontation Scene.

            The Confrontation Scene is where the police corner the killer, the arson investigator gets that final piece of evidence and presents it to his chief suspect, the amateur sleuth points the finger. The confrontation frequently involves danger. In real life, the police may have their suspect in an almost-sterile interrogation room and they say, “We know you did it.” At which time the killer breaks down and confesses (although in reality he’s more likely to call for his lawyer).

In fiction, though, we want the confrontation to be full of action and to put our good-guy in danger. Stretch this out and don’t make it easy on your protagonist. Make him work for that confession, the arrest, or even the death of the killer. We writers tend to like our protagonists and not want to cause them harm so we let them off too easy. Don’t do it! It’s okay for the good guy to come out broken and bloody, as long as the bad guy comes out in even worse shape.

Among the absolutely inviolable rules of mystery writing are that the writer must play fair with the reader. Clues that lead to the solution MUST have been planted ahead of time. The guilty party MUST be introduced early in the story. No sneaking in a surprise piece of evidence after the killer has admitted to the crime, no bringing a new character onstage at the finale. The clues can be obscure and the killer may have appeared completely innocent (after all, you don’t want the reader to have figured out the ending before he’s halfway through). But you have to be fair and at least give your reader the chance to figure it out.

Above all, readers want to feel that justice has prevailed. Even if it’s not a happy ending, a sense that the Right Thing happened is important to our sense of closure. As a writer you can’t afford for readers to follow your entire story to the end, then throw the book away because the ending disappointed them.

Readers deserve the experience of a satisfying ending, one that provides justice and one in which the reader was only a step or two behind your sleuth in figuring out the solution to the crime. Ideally, you want the reader to reach the end of the book and slap his forehead with the exclamation, “I should have spotted that!” Now that’s a good mystery!

 

For further reading:  Writing the Modern Mystery by Barbara Norville; How to Write Killer Fiction by Carolyn Wheat