How to rite Killer Fiction

by Carolyn Wheat

  Crossovers_

  Are there books that succeed as both a mystery and a suspense novel at the same time? Presumed Innocent, by Scott Turow, comes as close as any book I've ever read to doing just that.

  How?

  First: the mystery was solid. It was complex enough to satisfy a mystery fan; it had clues and suspects and red herrings—all the things a whodunit aficionado is looking for in a good read. Turow took the reader into the funhouse of mystery, showing us distorted images and confusing pictures of what might have been until we were just as befuddled as he wanted us to be.

  Second: the hero was in personal danger, not from a villain out to kill him, but from the legal system that put him on trial for killing his lover. Turow took us on the roller-coaster ride that is the hallmark of suspense; one chapter we were up, we felt Rusty was innocent and was going to win his case; the next chapter we were convinced he was on his way to the chair—and what was more, we believed he deserved to be.

  Both the mystery and suspense aspects of the book were given equal weight in the writing—and that's not something most writers in the genre can pull off. One thing that helped Turow is the intellectual nature of criminal trials. He wasn't trying to balance the essentially cerebral function of detection with physical derring-do; instead, the detective/ suspense hero's skills as a lawyer were tested to the full by the courtroom battle.

  Another road to crossover success is the one paved by Elizabeth George, whose A Traitor to Memory weighs in at a hefty 710 pages. This length comes about because George is literally writing two books in one: a straightforward police procedural mystery about a death in the present day, and a psychological suspense novel centering on events from the distant as well as the recent past. The result is a kaleidoscope of plot, subplot, sub-sub-plot, character arcs, turns and twists, emotional resonance—it's a book you fall into and emerge from a week later, blinking at the light as if you'd been in a cave. Its 710 pages are the result of an intensely disciplined writing mind, and Ms. George wrote at this length only after publishing shorter books.

  My advice to beginning writers who want to write the next best-selling crossover book: Don't. My advice is to stick to one side or the other of the equation, to go into the funhouse or to step on the roller coaster and not try for both in the same book. It can be done, but it's difficult. And the reason it's difficult is that you are combining two different dreams.

  There are suspense elements in many mysteries, and some top-notch suspense writers add mystery elements to their plotlines, but this is not the same as attempting a true crossover. Writing two books in one is a very difficult proposition, and one that demands an almost obsessive attention to structure.

  Different Dreams, Different Choices_

  So enter the funhouse of mystery and see how the twists and turns of the mazelike passageways disorient you. Move on to the roller coaster and take the plunge into terror. Then decide which you enjoyed more, and choose that experience as the main focus of your book.

  The rest of this book will explore the ways the writer makes the dream happen for the reader; it will follow the distinction between suspense and mystery, detailing the specific techniques that will best create each kind of dream. And it will discuss how to switch gears from mystery to suspense in order to add spice to the mystery, and how to plant mystery elements in the suspense novel that will add to its intellectual enjoyment.

  Write What You Read_

  Who's your favorite author, the one you turn to after a hard day at work, a day spent with three kids down with chicken pox, a day of dreary drizzle? Is it a classic whodunit in modern dress, a Carolyn G. Hart, a Margaret Maron, a Robert Barnard? Or is it a hard-boiled private eye—a Grafton, a Pronzini, a Paretsky, a Robert B. Parker? It could be that police or forensic procedurals like those of Patricia Cornwell, Ed McBain, or Kathy Reichs are your security-blanket reads.

  Or is suspense your favorite escape? Perhaps Mary Higgins Clark, Barbara Michaels, or Dick Francis sweeps you away. Or maybe it's the techno or legal side of the thriller, with Clancy or Grisham, Crichton or Ludlum. Maybe it's the potent mix of suspense and mystery, as delivered by Jonathan Kellerman, T. Jefferson Parker, or Elizabeth George.

  The major reason to identify your favorite kind of book is so you can read like a writer. As you read your favorite author, ask yourself what it is about the book that brings you into the story, what keeps you turning the page. Identify the particular pleasures of the book, and try to figure out exactly how the writer created those pleasures on the page. When you come to write your own novel, you'll find that the techniques your favorite writer used are accessible to you as well.

  WE ENTER the funhouse of mystery, and the first question many ask themselves is: What the heck is a funhouse?

  Ah, youth. Sometimes called the Crazy House, the funhouse was a mainstay of old-fashioned carnivals and midways, the kind of amusement parks people went to before Walt Disney discovered Anaheim. Check out some old newsreel footage of Coney Island if you want the full picture, and this is what you'll see:

  Welcome to the Funhouse_

  It's dark inside. You enter through a giant clown's head with an open mouth that becomes a door. Once inside, things happen without warning. You turn a corner and a skeleton pops out of the wall, stopping inches from your face. Maniacal laughter comes out of nowhere, and blasts of cold air meet you when you enter another corridor.

  Nothing is what it seems. You're in a maze, where a wrong turn leads you to a blind alley, a dead end. You encounter floors that move unexpectedly, shift and tilt and have you sliding backwards, grabbing at the walls. Skulls on springs jump at you and taunting Joker-like voices dare you to take the next pathway.

  You walk into the hall of mirrors and become part of the entertainment. Distorting mirrors make you look like a plump dwarf one minute, a skinny giant the next. Rows of mirrors one after another create an

  infinity effect that makes it seem as if you'll never get out of the funhouse, that you might be trapped in a place of dangerous illusion forever. When you want to leave, you're led down corridors that go nowhere, diverted back to where you've already been, guided through a maze that ends (at least this is how it ended at my childhood amusement park, Sandusky's Cedar Point) with a huge polished wooden slide. Attendants give you a tiny rug to sit on and then push you down, down, down the slick surface to the ground floor and out into the sunlight where you blink as if you've been inside for a week.

  What does this have to do with murder mysteries?

  It's been forty years or more since I experienced the Cedar Point funhouse (for some reason, they just don't exist anymore, not the way they used to), and it still remains in my mind the most powerful metaphor I can think of for the well-plotted detective story. Things come out of the blue; the detective walks down dead-end pathways and finds the truth obscured by distractions and distortions. Even the detective herself seems distorted, changed, by the act of investigating the crime.

  Just when the detective thinks she has it all figured out, someone puts her on a slick slide to nowheresville, and she's back on the street with nothing.

  A Little Mystery History_

  The idea of the detective all but preceded the reality. Mystery's founding father, Edgar Allan Poe, set his 1841 short story "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" in Paris because Paris, unlike most major cities of the day, actually had a police force with a detective division. Poe called his story "a tale of ratiocination" and introduced the amateur detective who reasoned rings around the official police investigator, bringing logic and science to bear on the problem of crime.

  In Poe's stories and in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes adventures, the amateur detectives use scientific methods, while the police prefer using street informers and beating confessions out of the usual suspects. The detectives, C. Auguste Dupin and Sherlock Holmes, are the ones on their knees picking up threads and hairs, and they see beyond the obvious in ways the stolid, less-educated police detectives can't.


  Poe bequeathed the mystery writer two very important principles: "the impossible made possible"—the Locked Room Mystery (as exemplified by "The Murders in the Rue Morgue"), and "the obvious made obscure" ("The Purloined Letter.")

  These principles embody the funhouse experience: What you see is most emphatically not what you get. In "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," we're introduced to the first of many fictional murders that seem inexplicable. The room is locked; the windows are high and too small for a person to have entered. Yet there are dead bodies inside; the thing happened even though it couldn't possibly have happened.

  The police are baffled—and baffled police are always good for the amateur detective—because they can't, in that most nineties of cliches, think outside the box. A person couldn't have scaled the walls and entered the room—but what if the murderer isn't a person? (No, we're not talking supernatural agencies here; if you don't know who committed the murders in the Rue Morgue, find a collection of Poe stories, because some things you have to experience for yourself.)

  Locked Room Mysteries aren't the only venue for the "impossible made possible" strain of mystery plot construction. Any murderer who fakes an alibi is creating an "impossible" situation—nobody can be in two places at once—and making it "possible." In the same vein, a killer who creates the illusion that his victim is alive after the murder has been committed also makes the impossible possible.

  The second principle, "the obvious made obscure," is another linchpin of the detective story. In "The Purloined Letter," Dupin is called in when the French police fail to find an important letter they know is hidden in an apartment. They've lifted floorboards and axed into walls, they've taken apart the stove and looked inside every book in the library, but they haven't looked in the one place that seems too obvious, too stupid, too mindless to constitute a successful hiding place.

  "Hide in plain sight" will be one of the main methods of clue concealment we'll discuss later in this book. It's your job as the mystery writer to create clues leading to the identity of the murderer and then to conceal those clues in a way that fools the reader without making a fool of him.

  That Was Then, This Is Now_

  "Okay, so Edgar Allan Poe invented the detective story and got an award named after him. What docs that have to do with my writing a mystery novel in the twenty-first century?"

  Plenty, if only because that original template for the tale of detection is imprinted on the brains of everyone who ever reached for a library book because it had a little red skull stamped on the spine. The mystery reader opens a book with certain expectations, and the writer who knows what those expectations are can give the reader what she wants in a way that delights and surprises her.

  What's happened to the mystery since Holmes hung up his deerstalker and started keeping bees? For one thing, it split into three distinct strands, all of which are still very much in evidence on the bookstore shelves.

  The Classic Whodunit

  Poet and mystery reader W.H. Auden called it "the dialectic of innocence and guilt." Today's fans call it the "cozy," meaning no disrespect but expressing perfectly that feeling readers of the traditional mystery get when they pick up a new whodunit, go home and make tea, and wrap themselves in a physical quilt as well as the metaphoric quilt of a story they know will have a happy ending.

  The happy ending—okay, "happy" may be going too far—the positive ending, the ending that brings justice to bear on a violent situation, the ending where reason triumphs over evil; that's the ending classic readers are looking for.

  Why? Because ever since Poe, the classic tale of detection has meant restoring order to a world that was once well ordered but lost that serenity through violent death.

  Auden calls the scene of the crime before the murder is committed "the great good place." It is the English village, the manor house, the theater, the university, the monastery, any place that thrives upon stability and hierarchy. Into this idyllic world step not one, but two undesirables: the killer and her victim. The killer rids the great good place of the victim; it's up to the detective to flush out and remove the murderer and restore goodness.

  Subgenres of the traditional mystery include:

  The Regional Mystery The old-time traditional whodunit placed little emphasis on setting except insofar as it furthered the puzzle itself. The grand country house could be in any part of England, the sinister university or the bedeviled

  theater could be anywhere in Britain, the U.S., or New Zealand—we weren't reading for a travelogue or for insight into local culture.

  Tony Hillerman helped to change all that. His mysteries took place on Navajo lands, and the land itself was a major factor in creating the circumstances and the means for murder. The people and their culture were important to the solution of the mystery, which could not have been solved by an outsider without knowledge of Navajo myth and mindset. Even though Hillerman's detectives were police officers, the experience of reading about an exotic place and seeing it through the eyes of someone with deep understanding of the place and its people whetted mystery readers' appetites for more of the same, only different.

  When Margaret Maron wrote The Bootlegger's Daughter, her first Deborah Knott mystery, she changed her setting from the New York City of her Sigrid Harald police procedurals to the rich soil of North Carolina, sweeping that year's awards in the process. Soon mysteries were set in Alaska (Dana Stabenow, Sue Henry, John Straley), in national parks (Nevada Barr), and in the formerly hidden world of Orthodox Jewry in New York and Los Angeles (Faye Kellerman, Rochelle Krich). More and more writers found Native American connections and set their books among the Cherokee (Jean Hager), the Arapaho (Margaret Coel), the Ute (James Doss), and the Pima (J.A. Jance).

  The keys to writing a successful regional mystery are choosing a region interesting enough to engage the reader and making sure the mystery itself isn't swamped by description and portraits of local eccentrics. Those of us unlucky enough not to have grown up in the Alaska bush or the Louisiana bayou have another option: turn back the clock.

  The Historical Mystery "The past is a foreign country," L.P. Hartley wrote in The Go-Between. "They do things differently there." Using an exotic setting for your traditional mystery may involve choosing a location you can't get to by train or plane. Through mysteries, you can visit ancient Egypt (Lynda Robinson), ancient Rome (Steven Saylor, Lindsey Davis), Victorian England (Anne Perry), the 1920s (Annette Meyers, Carola Dunn), medieval Europe (Sharan Newman, Ellis Peters). You can meet historic figures such as Houdini (Barbara Michaels, Daniel Stashower, Walter Satterthwaite), the Prince of Wales (not the current one; Queen Victoria's oldest son) (Peter Lovescy), or Jane Austen (Stephanie Barron).

  Some authors choose history because they love a certain period and want to share their deep understanding of it with readers. Others frankly admit that one of the charms of history is that it lacks DNA testing. In a world without modern forensics, the amateur, be he monk or prince, has as good a chance of success as the official investigating body. By removing today's scientifically inclined police from the scene, they essentially recreate the conditions under which Dupin and Holmes first flourished.

  Comic Relief

  Playing it for laughs has been part of the mystery tradition even before Craig Rice, the screwball comedy queen of the forties, and humor spans all three of the major subgenres. Joan Hess combines humor and regionalism in her Maggody series, while Parnell Hall injects hearty doses of laughter into his Stanley Hastings P.I. series. For a wonderful sendup of the old country house mystery, James Anderson's Affair of the Bloodstained Egg Cosy is a must, while Lawrence Blocks more recent Bernie Rhodenbarr books give us sly variations on some of the oldest tricks in the traditional mystery book.

  The only caveat about using humor: to paraphrase the old actor's saying, "Killing people is easy; comedy is hard."

  You Gotta Have a Gimmick Take a stroll through your local bookstore to check out the mystery shelves and you'll see what I
mean by a gimmick. If talking cats (Carole Nelson Douglas, Rita Mae Brown) aren't solving crimes, then cooks who provide the reader with recipes do the job (Diane Mott Davidson, Jerri-lyn Farmer). Herbalist-detectives (Susan Wittig Albert) give advice on how to dry and use oregano, while crossword puzzle mysteries (Parnell Hall) provide double the pleasure for the word addict. Some of the strictest rules of the old school are broken by authors using ghosts (Nancy Atherton's Aunt Dimity's Death) and psychics (Martha Lawrence's Elizabeth Chase series) as detectives.

  The trick is not to allow the gimmick to replace a solid mystery core. The culinary detective must not only cook, she must detect. The psychic detective must do more than just wait for inspiration from the beyond.

  The "Dark Cozy"

  The classic whodunit has been called a comedy of manners, but in

  America, broader social commentary has been part of the genre ever since Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson, the first book ever to use fingerprints as a mode of detection (well before their use crept into real-life police work). Today's traditional mysteries go deeper than the Golden Age writers ever thought about going and today's writers use the form to explore social and personal problems.

  Nancy Pickard deals with mental illness in I.0.U. Margaret Maron examines the bitter heritage of Southern racism in Home Fires. Minette Walters (The Ice House) delves deeply into the psychological torment beneath placid middle-class facades.

  It may even seem that the traditional lines have blurred. There are cozies that bite and private eyes who cry.

  The American Hard-Boiled Detective Story

  If Agatha Christie's St. Mary Mead is "the great good place," as Auden insists, then the American urban landscape constitutes "the great wrong place." This is the San Francisco of Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade, the Los Angeles of Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald, the Florida of Elmore Leonard, the New York of Lawrence Block's Matt Scudder.