How to Write a Mystery

by Mystery Writers of America

  Since an attempt at comedy that misses is a great deal worse than a book with no planned laughs at all, the next question to ask yourself—and answer honestly—is “Can I do it?” Ask someone else if you don’t know. But hope you don’t get the feedback Cassandra Mortmain receives in Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle, from her father no less: that her writing “combined stateliness with a desperate effort to be funny.” Ouch. (Incidentally, that novel is one of the best accounts of writing and writer’s block you could wish for.)

  Finally, at this planning stage you need to ask yourself what the humor—should you choose to include it—is for. Does this seem too obvious to need an answer? Would that it were so. Wide reading in the genre indicates otherwise. Humor is supposed to make you laugh. Out loud. Make you wreck your mascara with helpless tears and snort so hard you hurt your uvula. Humorous mysteries should be embarrassing to read on the bus, and annoying for the people who live with you and get sick of having bits read out to them while they’re trying to read a book of their own. In short, humor is not the same thing as whimsy. It’s not comfort. It’s not cute. It doesn’t make readers feel warm inside. Ideally it makes them feel warm outside, because it makes them pee.

  What’s Funny and What’s Not

  So you’ve decided to be funny and you’re sure you can pull it off. Here comes a big decision, though perhaps not the one you think. You can write farce, satire, or slapstick. You can be broad, goofy, or dry. You can use epigrams, absurdities, or irony. Or all nine. And more. But you don’t need to know what your humor is, except funny. Someone else—a loved one, beta reader, developmental editor—will tell you after it’s written. If they don’t know, call it “quirky.” (It’s worth noting that the hardest humor to pull off in writing is slapstick. Descriptions of physical comedy are not reliably funny. If yours are, I tip my hat to you.)

  The decision you do need to make at this stage is the location of your line. We’re not all Ricky Gervais, thank God. But neither are we all Mr. Rogers, thank God. I’m a medium-size fan of warm humor that celebrates shared experience and invites everyone to see life’s lighter side, but I laugh hardest at humor with a bite. And the truth is that any joke that makes one person laugh hard is going to offend another. If you’re going to write this stuff, you need to be okay with offending people and taking your lumps, without argument, if they complain.

  Note that I’m saying “offend,” not “hurt.” I’ll happily offend anyone’s sensitivities about politics, sex, or superstition; I’ll puncture vanity and blow a raspberry at pomposity. But I won’t—knowingly—hurt anyone by reminding them of their powerlessness in the face of bigotry or oppression. That’s my own borderline. Yours might be different. You might find it hilarious to degrade the powerless and bully the weak. If so, and even though we’ve never met, I don’t like you.

  Where Does the Funny Go?

  Once you’ve identified your personal line between comedy and cruelty, there are still questions of taste to be addressed. When is it a good idea to introduce laughs and when should we resist it? Can a death scene be funny? A murder? Absolutely. Elmore Leonard wouldn’t write them any other way and Oyinkan Braithwaite has taken up the baton in her biting black comedy My Sister, the Serial Killer. You have to park most, perhaps all, of your empathy to appreciate wit this scabrous—but it’s worth it.

  A morgue scene and for sure a funeral scene lend themselves to comedy even more easily. Any time there’s an expectation of dignified solemnity, humor becomes almost unavoidable, in writing as in life. (This is why the only good sex scenes are about bad sex, whereas good sex causes some of the worst writing ever published.) Again there’s a difference between giving offense and causing pain. Personally, I can’t imagine a funny rape scene and think squeezing a laugh from an account of child abuse would be the ultimate punching down. As before, though, you find your line and you take your lumps.

  There’s a second aspect of locating the humor in your book: Is the book funny or is the stuff the book’s about funny? Jeff Cohen’s Asperger’s Mysteries are funny books about serious stuff. No one in his fictional world is laughing, even though we the readers are wearing our coffee. The danger with locating the humor outside the world of the book in this way is that it can tip into cruelty in less skilled, or less knowledgeable, hands than Cohen’s.

  But a far greater danger comes when the humor is inside the world of the book—when the characters themselves find their own lives funny. At worst, this can end up like those skits and bits where the only people enjoying themselves are on the stage, laughing too hard to notice the audience squirming. One simple way to avoid that is never to refer to your characters laughing. It’s a specific and well-advised application of good old “show, don’t tell”: show us what’s cracking them up, by all means, but don’t tell us about it. If we’re laughing, we’ll work out that they are. A related “show, don’t tell”—and even more of a classic—forbids us to signal a funny line of dialogue via the speech tag.

  “Do you shave under your arms?” he asked.

  “Well, I shave under one of them,” she quipped.

  is a sad waste of a decent joke.

  How to Help the Funny Happen

  So, you’ve decided whether, and you believe you can. You’ve pledged to cause actual laughter, you’ve found your tone and your line, you’ve got a bead on where humor would best fit, and you’ve positioned it inside or outside your fictional world. Now what? What are the basic tricks of the trade to have in your tool kit?

  Surprise!

  Laughter is our response to pleasurable surprise. Humor lies in misdirection, in the subversion of expectations, in the act of leading someone up a path that ends not at all where they were expecting to go. One of my favorite jokes from one of my favorite comics is Paul O’Grady, as Lily Savage, saying, “We were poor, but we were shoplifters.” Such a neat switchback on the last word in that short sentence. “I haven’t dated in a while; it’s time to dip my toe back in the socket” is another one. A great way to get humor in your writing, then, is to search for clichés and subvert them.

  It’s as Easy as One, Two, Guess What

  Our dedication to trinities is so strong that even when we’ve only got two things to say, we make up a third one: sex and violence and all that fun stuff; dogs and cats and what have you. The little word “etc.” wouldn’t get a quarter of the work without our commitment to threes. Inevitably then, humor needs threesomes. A priest and a rabbi in a bar are wasting their time and ours. So if you’re going for funny and one line alone seems to be missing the mark, add another two. The examples of this are so numerous that picking one is a challenge, but here’s Kellye Garrett introducing her heroine in the debut Detective by Day Mystery, Hollywood Homicide:

  My skin was what Maybelline called Cocoa and L’Oréal deemed Nut Brown, while MAC had bypassed all food groups to call it NC50.

  This follows the rule of threes, “NC50” is a good twist, and Garrett—an African American woman—gets in that nice upward punch at white writers who still describe characters of color by cracking out the cookbook.

  The rule of three plays a part in running gags as well. If you want one of these to work, you need to time the first three hits to get the gag lodged in the reader’s mind without annoying them. The first hit needs to be early on in the book. The second hit should be not too far behind, before the memory of the first one fades. But then, ideally, you’ll have a pause. Because the third time a running gag turns up should be a surprise, one that leaves the reader laughing not only at the joke but also at themselves for not seeing it coming. The memory of being satisfactorily hoodwinked buys goodwill for later hits. In my last book, I set up a running gag on page 36, revisited it briefly on page 54, then landed it on pages 108, 138, 176, 209, 256, and 260 in a 280-page book, making the gags shorter and, I hope, funnier each time.

  Finally, on the subject of threes: a trio of characters talking to one another is a great boost to humor. A head-to-head dialogue can
be funny, of course, but with three participants the scope is greater for non sequiturs, misunderstandings, and parallel conversations, wildly at odds. If your humorous dialogue in some scene or other feels a bit flat, and the story allows it, try adding a third voice, with a different agenda, to derail the other two.

  The Old Ones Are Okay

  I’m going to go right ahead and assume you’ve already parked your ego and donated your dignity before you started writing humorous mysteries. So perhaps you’re not too proud to use traditional setup lines. I’m a big fan of them:

  I wouldn’t say he was dead… I’d say the great-grand-maggots of the first generation of blowflies who’d feasted on his corpse were dead too.

  Not to be hyperbolic… but that restaurant has such poor ambience, I usually get it to go and eat at the DMV.

  Narco said it was the biggest bust since… [I’m going to leave that one for you to complete. I went straight to Dolly Parton.]

  These hoary old lines are good news for two reasons. They’re familiar and comfortable; if you’re going for laughs of recognition based on shared experience, they can help you. But, more important, they telegraph cheese. The very fact that they are hoary sets the reader up for a bad joke to follow. If you manage to land a good joke—twice the twist for your money.

  Leave on the Laugh

  It occurred to me that I might have put this section—on timing—too late in the essay and perhaps I should move it up. But that made me laugh, so here it is. Good timing is essential to humor. We all know that. In writing, one of the most important elements of timing is to make sure the final bit of the funny sentence—the last word, or at least the last phrase—is where the laugh comes. This is because when we’re interpreting language, spoken or written, we hold ourselves in check until we’ve got the whole thing to work on. So, if the joke’s in the middle and the sentence trails on after it, the laugh might die unlaughed. Watch out particularly if the funny line is dialogue and you’ve got a speech tag. That little “he said” will kill the joke deader than disco. Consider ditching the tag, if you can. If you can’t, try splitting the line so the tag isn’t at the end. This overrides the usual advice to “omit needless words.” Full disclosure—I don’t think that’s good advice anyway: it pays no attention to rhythm. Compare:

  “How many people have you slept with?” the therapist asked.

  “It depends what you mean by ‘people,’ ” she replied.

  with:

  “How many people have you slept with?” the therapist asked.

  “Um, lemme see,” she said. “It depends what you mean by ‘people.’ ”

  Forty-Nine Shades of Grey and One That’s More Taupe, Actually

  My final piece of advice about finding the funny is to commit to detail, detail, detail. Writing in general terms instead of specifics is one of the worst manifestations of one of the worst writing habits. You want your readers to know that your (white) detective hero ate Mexican food for lunch? Don’t tell them that; show them that. Say he ordered menudo because he thought it was pozole and had to hide the tripe in his jacket pocket because he didn’t want to look like a wimp in front of the pretty waitress. If only he hadn’t visited a suspect with a dog that afternoon…

  Another way detail is your friend is that all that extra material—include needed words!—pushes the punch line further from the setup, creating space for expectations to grow, thus making the payoff funnier (as long as you’re clear on what the funniest element is so you can place it last). Compare these two versions of the same joke:

  This murderer was worse than most. He’d stabbed a guy to death on a white rug and that’s just rude.

  This murderer was worse than most. He’d stabbed a guy to death on a rug that cost five thousand dollars plus out-of-state tax and shipping and only came in white. That’s just rude.

  So the bad news is nothing’s easy. Even the rule of three is a guide, not a guarantee. You need to balance it with the competing rule that sometimes more is more and far too much is barely enough. I’m going to leave you with a quote from Lane Stone’s debut, Current Affairs, where she’s discussing what her trio of retired Georgia beauty queens agree are the rules of golf:

  You can pick up your ball if you have to go to the bathroom, if you make a bad shot, if the snack cart comes by, if you’re too hot and you wish the snack cart would come by, if you either get or remember you need to make a phone call and you have to sneak your cell phone out of your bag, if you forget how many strokes you’ve taken, if you have taken too many strokes, if you thought you had taken your turn and you hadn’t, if you just then notice another player is wearing a new outfit, if a famous actress dies, or if the stock market dips.

  I read that seven years ago and laughed my teeth out. I laughed them out again copying it right now. The only written joke that makes me laugh more is P. G. Wodehouse—and who else could finish off an essay on literary humor?—describing a hangover by saying “a cat stamped into the room.”

  JAMES W. ZISKIN

  Over the years, I’ve learned a few lessons about writing. They might be of use to you:

  1. On motivation:

  Scheherazade told stories because her life depended on it. What motivates you?

  2. On craft:

  Make “realism” in your fiction an illusion of realism. If your story is “realistic,” your main character is probably circling the block three times before finding a parking spot.

  Make it memorable or make it economical.

  Challenge every sentence, every noun, every verb, every adjective, and every adverb.

  3. On research:

  Know what you don’t know.

  4. On writing sex:

  As in real life, a lot of people do it, but not everyone does it well.

  Remember that your mother is going to read your book.

  Writing in Partnership

  Two writers with one voice: how we learned to collaborate.

  CAROLINE & CHARLES TODD

  We considered a writing partnership because we had different interests but share a love of the mystery and of history, and wanted to see if we could actually write a mystery together, combining our talents. The idea began when we stumbled across a real historical mystery while visiting a battlefield, and we were intrigued by it.

  It took us more than a year to learn how to collaborate.

  We quickly discovered that there isn’t a simple, single way to go about it, no one-size-fits-all. Instead, each partnership must work out their own method.

  That said, there are certain things that are common to every collaboration.

  Before we talk about those, we need to touch briefly on different forms of collaboration. For instance, there’s a professional agreement such as those between James Patterson and another established author, with a body of contracts and legal considerations with established precedents. Nonfiction collaboration can fall into another category, where expertise of a different sort is involved, often depending on the professional standing each partner may bring to the table and how this background will be used in writing the book. A History of Forensics, for instance, might be written by two professionals in the field, a pathologist and a police officer who give different points of view. True crime could fit into this category, where an author and, say, a police officer collaborate on the description of a crime. Two writers might work together to write about an event in military history, or it might be one soldier’s experience in a war and the collaborator’s knowledge of that war’s background.

  Then there is ghostwriting, where a celebrity or war vet or sports figure tells their story to someone who writes it from interviews. Often the name of the celebrity takes precedence, while the writer is either listed as “with” or not recognized at all. Again, this involves a very different agreement and process. The ghostwriter makes the story coherent, knowing how to bring the most interesting material to light in exciting and marketable fashion. The collaborators might share in the royalties, or the writer
could be paid a fee. Sometimes this work is arranged through publishing houses eager to capitalize on a newsworthy personality. In short, these are generally arranged, for specific purposes.

  But let us return to two people who decide to write a mystery together. They could have some experience as writers, or none at all. They could be husband and wife, sisters, cousins—or even strangers who find they have enough in common to work together. This is what we have been doing for some twenty-five years without killing each other.

  In their Dutchman series, “Maan Meyers” used one method of collaboration—Martin was a terrific researcher, while Annette was the writer. Husband and wife, they put their individual skills to work. Martin did the research and helped with the outline, while Annette did most of the writing. “Emma Lathen,” who incidentally kept their collaboration a secret early on, wrote about Wall Street banker John Thatcher, but divided their duties. One of the pair, who knew more about banking and loans, did the Thatcher arc of the story, while the other told the story of the client coming to Thatcher for help. Where these overlapped, they worked out the scenes to suit. These are just two examples of the way others have chosen to divide their partnership.

  Both of us wanted to write, not divide duties, and so we came up with a scene-by-scene method of talking, testing, then putting down what we visualize as the way a scene would take shape. Once satisfied there, we move on to the next scene, deciding what it’s about, who is in it, where it should take place, and how it advances the plot. Since we don’t outline, that keeps the process manageable. Throughout the book, we have shared research, character development, plot and plotting, even the writing of dialogue. It is truly a two-person effort from start to finish. Our library consists of duplicates of every book we have found on our subject and every bit of information we’ve collected. We can both write battle scenes and we can both describe the emotional problems of our characters, because we have shared the setting and the backstory of those characters.