To reveal or not to reveal, that is the question. The unofficial detective, whether P.I. or amateur, always confronts the issue of whether, when, and how to let the police in on what he's discovered. Note that I'm not talking about sharing speculations with the cops but behaving like a good citizen and letting the police know that there's vital evidence over here.
P.I.s like to grab that diary and run. They like to make anonymous phone calls about the body in the tub, then hotfoot it to Fresno to talk to a witness before the cops find out that witness even exists. Working outside the law, sometimes deliberately getting in the way of the law, is part of the code.
The amateur is different. We're less likely to go along with flat-out obstruction of justice if the detective is a normal person. We have a bias toward letting the official police do their jobs—so long as those official police are seen as good guys.
So one way to justify withholding evidence is to present the reader with cops who are either on the take or criminally stupid. Perhaps they've arrested The Wrong Man, in which case they not only won't be interested in evidence pointing to someone else, they'll deny that the evidence is evidence at all. If they're on the take, not only will they refuse to believe the evidence; they might even destroy it to preserve their wrongheaded theory. So why bother giving it to them?
Detecting: Reasoning
The detective detects. Part of the detecting is the Q&A, another part is collecting physical evidence, and a third, very important, part is thinking about what she's learned. Thinking is a vital middlebook act in mysteries.
But thinking isn't visual or dramatic or, let's face it, inherently interesting. So how does the mystery writer make it worth reading?
Add a second character, a sidekick, a person with whom the detective can shoot the breeze, air his opinions, bounce ideas back and forth—in short, a Watson.
But won't scenes where the detective and his Watson mull things over become just another talking heads scene? What are some ways to add spice to those inevitable "It could have been George; but what about Martha, she hated him, too" scenes?
• Could the detective and the sidekick argue about who's right? Archie Goodwin often disapproves of Nero Wolfe's suspicions, and we enjoy their byplay more because Archie's not a fawning pushover.
• Some sidekicks do a bit of detecting of their own. When Anne Perry's Inspector Pitt sits down to dinner with his wife, Charlotte, they both have information to share because they've both interrogated different people during the day. (One reason why they investigate in different spheres: the mores of the Victorian Age. Pitt is the official police detective, but the secret, shared world of women is one he cannot penetrate. He needs the information Charlotte can discover by being a woman and a member of the upper class. The key to detective duos is giving each a separate skill or sphere.)
• The Golden Age detectives act out the crime, reconstructing the walk to the train station in order to determine if the witness lied about how long it took. Adding physicality to a whodunit scene is always a good idea.
• Try not to put all the speculation in one big scene. Let the detective rethink his position every time he learns something new. This is what the Law and Order cops do as they race from place to place, and it gives context to the individual interrogations.
• Other Golden Age ideas that shouldn't be abandoned are the written timeline, the hand-drawn map, the diagram of the room showing where everyone was standing at the time of the murder; in short, the raw data that feeds the detective's speculation. Let the reader see these and she will engage more fully in the act of detecting.
Annie and Max, the detective duo in The Christie Caper, do their thinking the old-fashioned way—and Dame Agatha would surely have approved. They create homemade maps of the attempted murder scenes, lists of suspects and where they were at the relevant times, and have discussions where they compare notes and speculate on the murder.
One important aspect of the Thinking sections of the mystery is that anything the clever reader could come up with by way of explanation must also be considered by the detective if she is to live up to the name. Catering to Nobody introduces Goldy Bear and her preteen son, Arch, a troubled boy with a penchant for Dungeons and Dragons. When Goldy learns that her son hated his grandfather, the victim of the attempted poisoning, she allows herself a moment to wonder if her own child could have slipped the poison into the man's coffee. She discards the theory, but at least the reader realizes she's aware of the possibility. Had Davidson ignored Arch as a suspect, the reader would have felt superior to Goldy instead of those two steps behind that the writer wanted'us to be.
Midpoint
Arc Two ends—where? What marks the Midpoint of the book, the beginning of Arc Three?
Something should. The danger is that the middle continues with detection, with Q&A, with speculation, all of the same variety and intensity as in Arc Two. This is what reviewers mean when they say a book sags in the middle.
So what changes?
A second body is always good—but only if the body is more than a body.
Only if the second body changes everything does it really make a good Midpoint.
How does it change everything? In The Christie Caper, the body changes everything because, contrary to the reader's expectation, it isn't Bledsoe's. The man we love to hate, the man whose murder we've been expecting since page one is still alive and breathing and someone else, someone we gave no thought to, is lying dead instead.
The second body, or in this case, the first successful murder attempt, changes everything by knocking the detective's theory into a cocked hat. For this to happen, the detective has to have a theory in the first place, and he has to be pretty well convinced of it, or knocking it down won't mean much to him. Setting up the impact of the second body, then, requires that our detective have done a fair amount of work in Arc Two, that he's eliminated some suspects and zeroed in on others, and that he's got what he thinks is a clear picture of events. He's narrowed the suspects to one or two, he's proved certain alibis and uncovered certain motives. He's exposed lies and revealed inconsistencies, and he's feeling pretty good about himself.
The impact of Body Two is that the one or two suspects he's focused on couldn't possibly have committed this crime. One good reason for being unable to kill Victim Two is that the prime suspect is Victim Two. Another good reason is that Victim Two apparently has no connection to Victim One, and yet they were both clearly killed by the same person. Or Victim Two is a person no one has an obvious motive to kill, yet there he is, dead, and his death is a reproach to the detective for not having solved the crime.
Emotional resonance can be added by having the second body be that of a person we actually liked. This gives the detective even more motivation to get to the truth of the matter.
Does the Midpoint event that changes everything have to be a second body?
No, but it helps. The essence of the Midpoint is that shift from one investigational direction to another. Being warned off the case might change everything if the warning comes from someone who shouldn't have a deep interest in the original murder. Violence or danger to the detective in and of itself is not really a Midpoint event if all it does is add more pressure without changing the direction of the investigation. The essence of Midpoint—of the shift from Arc Two to Arc Three—is that the detective must double back, must rethink, must re-examine everything he's already done.
And if the writer has done his job, the detective is not only back to square one, but also worse off than he was when he began the investigation. For one thing, he probably knows now that at least one of the witnesses he questioned was lying. He may even know which one—the one lying on a slab at the morgue. How will he get the information that witness had now?
Arc Three: Waist-Deep in the Big Muddy_
Law and Order moves to the lawyers for its Arc Three, and what usually happens is that a case that seemed straightforward suddenly develops more holes than the Titanic. A conf
ession is thrown out, physical evidence is suppressed, and the person we thought was guilty turns out to be covering up for the real killer.
Back to Square One—or is it? Isn't it "back a couple of steps before Square One"? Because now the cops need evidence independent of that smoking gun the judge suppressed. The best evidence they had is gone; the witnesses they already talked to aren't likely to change their stories without a lot more pressure being put on them. That's the essence of Arc Three in the mystery: to make the solving of this crime seem a complete impossibility thanks to the Midpoint development. In Law and Order, because of its unique structure, that development is usually a legal twist. In an ordinary mystery, it has to be something else.
Arc Three often involves revisiting the witnesses already questioned in Arc Two. But we question them now with a greater sense of intensity and we know things we didn't know in Arc Two. We perhaps apply more pressure to get the answers we want—if there's a danger of the detective crossing the line to force people to talk, now is when he will cross that line. The straight-arrow cop becomes Dirty Harry and the Dirty Harry cop goes ballistic.
Violence escalates. The murderer uses violence to silence witnesses and to intimidate the detective. Our police detective goes too far in his interrogation of someone with connections and is taken off the case. The private eye gets fired by his own client, who now seems eager to forget the whole thing.
Subplot s coalesce with the main plot. Arc Three is where the detective figures out what astute readers have suspected all along: those two seemingly unrelated cases he's been working on are connected in some subtle, subterranean way. This happens in Catering to Nobody, and the realization of that connection changes everything, and forces Goldy to re-examine all she's learned and deduced from the beginning.
That's part of the funhouse effect. What looked "normal" in the mirror is really a distorted picture of reality. What seemed authentic was bogus; what seemed a lie was only the truth in a thin disguise. Now that we know the entire truth, everything that went before becomes suddenly clear. When Jake Gittes finally understands Evelyn Cross Mulwray's anguished cry, "She's my sister and my daughter!" it all falls into place. What seemed murky is now both clear and terrible, worse than anything Gittes imagined, and yet completely believable in terms of what we know about Noah Cross.
Challenge to the Reader
Ellery Queen, one of the great detective writers of the Golden Age, introduced a device called Challenge to the Reader. When Ellery the detective character finally figured out who did it, he'd shout, "Eureka!" and jump out of his chair, ready to confront the criminal. End of chapter, and, by the way, Plot Point Two.
Queen didn't start the next chapter on the next page. Instead, he inserted a one-page Challenge to the Reader, which said that the reader was privy to all the clues Ellery had unearthed, and invited the reader to put the book down, rethink everything he'd read, and match wits with the Great Detective.
In other words, the Challenge gave readers a chance to pause and think before turning the page and finding out the solution.
Did it work? Did millions of readers—and Queen was a best-seller in his day—actually put down their books and stare at the ceiling, hoping for enlightenment? Did they jot down clues, make little maps of the crime scene, flip the pages back to reread certain sections of the book before arriving at their well-reasoned conclusions?
I have no idea.
What I do know is that if you catch an episode of Murder; She Wrote, there will be a scene in which Jessica Fletcher jumps from her chair, eyes wide, says, "I know who killed him!" and races off to confront the killer.
Cut to commercial.
That's the Challenge to the Reader. Not only are you supposed to run to the refrigerator or the bathroom, you're supposed to think for a minute about whom you suspect and whom you think Jessica suspects and why. It's the writer's way of playing fair with the reader, of saying, "You have the clues; now solve the crime."
Both Carolyn G. Hart and Diane Mott Davidson, whose books are firmly in the classic whodunit tradition, use Challenge to the Reader. In Catering, Goldy realizes who the killer is and reveals her suspicion to the investigating police officer on p. 279. She doesn't share her conclusion or the reasoning supporting it with the reader until p. 284 when she gathers all the suspects together. The Christie Caper follows a similar pattern. Annie reviews her notes on p. 293 and sees a discrepancy. "A false note," she muses. "If that was false, what else might be false?" She has her solution on p. 294, but doesn't reveal it until p. 299, giving the reader a chance to play the game and come up with the false note and its meaning.
Once you've introduced your Challenge to the Reader, it's your job to lay your solution to the crime before your reader. The ending is so important to the reader's experience that it gets an entire chapter of its own.
ENDINGS ARE HARD. Once upon a time, in the Golden Age, it was enough for the Great Detective to know. Ellery Queen gathered all the suspects together in the drawing room and proceeded to spend seven or eight closely reasoned pages expounding his theory on who had done what and why, clearing up any loose ends along the way. (I once saw a New Yorker cartoon that parodied this scene by showing the Great Detective as a parrot sitting on a perch with all the suspects in front of him.) Occasionally the disgruntled suspect pulled a gun and made a break for it, only to be subdued by the burly Sergeant Velie, but action wasn't the essence of the scene.
Across the water, Lord Peter Wimsey conducted his expository scene in a tete-a-tete with the murderer, then quietly withdrew to permit the killer an "honorable way out": pistols for one in the library. Sometimes Dr. Gideon Fell decided the killer was a better man than his victim and played judge and jury, leaving the official solution of the crime to the police he knew were incompetent to solve it.
Knowing was enough. Justice in terms of courtrooms and jury verdicts was decidedly secondary.
No one expected the Great Detective to wrestle the killer to the ground and pluck the loaded gun from his hand, or to plug the killer between the eyes.
But we do tend to expect action endings from Kinsey Millhone and Matt Scudder. We won't be satisfied with V.I. Warshawski calling the
cops and going home for a hot bath; we want her on the scene dodging bullets. When Hercule Poirot confronted twelve killers at once, we had no reason to fear for his safety; that wasn't how the game was played. But put Elvis Cole on the Orient Express, and we won't be happy if all he does is talk. In the Second Golden Age, we want our detectives to go mano-a-mano with the killer; knowing is no longer enough.
The result is that the scene in which the detective confronts the killer has become as cliched, as predictable, as the old-fashioned drawing-room gathering. We can see it coming a mile away; the amateur detective who grows herbs for a living and who ought to turn the matter over to the police is heading for an abandoned building to meet the man she's sure is the killer. He's armed; she's not—and if you have any doubt about which of them is going to prevail, you haven't done enough reading. She, after all, is on her fourth book of a series.
So one question to ask yourself when you're about to confront your own ending: does the detective absolutely have to go one-on-one with the killer?
The Non-Action Ending_
No. It is still possible to write a satisfying mystery novel without a physical set-to between detective and killer. Take a look at Margaret Maron's Southern Discomfort. Instead of confrontation, we have a horrified realization that tragic misunderstandings led to murder. We have a ripple effect that touches everyone connected with the mystery and is more powerful by far than a simpler, more violent, ending could have been. Similarly, Sue Dunlap in Rogue Wave gives us emotional resonance and poetic justice without resorting to the traditional wresting-the-gun-from-the-killer's-hand scene.
Sometimes the revelation isn't so much a matter of who the criminal is as why he did what he did. Unusual motives that ring true in terms of character can be found in Robert Barnard's Fet
e Fatale and Reginald Hill's Ruling Passions. The story behind the murder is a major reason why Minette Walters, P.D. James, Elizabeth George, and Val McDermid sell so many books.
Hill, a grandmaster of the genre, uses other interesting devices to vary the predictability of the whodunit ending: in Pictures of Perfection, he opens the book with a gunman shooting at a crowd of people at a garden fete (another fatal fete!). He then backs the story up so that it concludes with the same shooting, and only then do we find out not only what was behind the shooting but also who lives and who dies. In a similar vein, Hill's Bones and Silence creates ongoing suspense throughout the mystery by showing letters to a police officer from an unidentified suicidal woman. Only at the end do we find out who this woman is and whether or not she succeeds in her tragic effort to take her own life.
The Two-Layered Ending _
Another traditional twist is the two-layered ending (for example, The Tragedy ofY by Ellery Queen). The detective apparently solves the crime, produces evidence of one actor behind the events—only to discover a second layer, a second culprit, another mind behind the murders. This ending is used to great effect in If Ever I Return, Pretty Peggy-0 by Sharyn McCrumb, and Time Expired by Sue Dunlap. It satisfies our mystery-lover's longing for a complex puzzle while deepening emotional resonance through the connections between the two minds.
Two-layered endings don't always mean two murderous minds at work. One of Ellery Queen's hallmarks was the "public consumption" solution, delivered with full flourishes in front of the police, and the "just-between-us" solution given to the victim's family. We readers believed the first one, and then were told we'd had the wool pulled over our eyes and now we'd learn the truly true truth.
How to rite Killer Fiction Page 6