The Elements of Mystery Fiction: Writing the Modern Whodunit

by Tapply, William G.

  Then Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler created their sleuths, Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe. These two American writers introduced mystery readers to the “mean streets” and the flesh-and-blood people who inhabited them. They created the “hard-boiled” mystery, in which gritty settings, three-dimensional characters, true-to-life dialogue, irony, mood, style, and pace were grafted onto the classical detective puzzle.

  In other words, Chandler and Hammett gave us novels, mysteries that qualified as genuine works of literature, not merely clever puzzles.

  Today’s mystery shelves are packed with a rich variety of novels. Contemporary mysteries come in all sizes, styles, themes, and moods—the classic private-eye puzzles of Sue Grafton and Robert B. Parker, the dark brooding novels of James Lee Burke and Lawrence Block, the medical mysteries of Patricia D. Cornwell and Michael Palmer, the police procedurals of Ed McBain and William J. Caunitz, the small-town domestic tales of Katherine Hall Page and Charlotte MacLeod.

  But regardless of their genres and sub-genres, contemporary mysteries all contain the same elements:

  1. The puzzle. The important question that drives the plot of every mystery novel and short story is: Who did it? Who committed the crime (generally murder)? At the beginning, neither the reader nor the story’s protagonist knows the answer.

  2. Detection. The investigation of the crime constitutes the story’s central action. When the puzzle is solved, the story ends.

  3. The sleuth as hero. The protagonist is the character who solves the puzzle, generally through his intelligence, perseverance, courage, physical strength, moral conviction, or a combination of these qualities.

  4. The worthy villain. The antagonist, generally the murderer, tests the limits of the sleuth’s abilities. The villain is clever, resourceful, and single-mindedly intent on getting away with his crime. He makes the puzzle a supreme challenge for both the sleuth and the reader.

  5. Fair play. All of the evidence uncovered by the sleuth, in the form of clues, is equally available to the reader. The climactic revelation presents no evidence that hasn’t already been disclosed in the course of the story.

  6. Realism and logic. Everything fits, makes sense, and could happen the way it’s depicted in the story. Mystery stories take place in actual places, or fictional places that seem real. They are populated with characters who resemble real people. Readers care about these characters, engage them emotionally, and feel as if they know them.

  In the years since Hammett and Chandler, thousands of literary murders have been solved by hundreds of sleuths in every corner of the globe. There are so many different styles and approaches to the contemporary mystery that terms such as “police procedural,” “private eye,” “hard-boiled,” “soft-boiled,” and “cozy,” just to name the most obvious, have evolved to help classify them. There are series and non-series mysteries. They take place in the present, in historical eras, even in the future. They are wry and witty, dark and violent, philosophical and urbane.

  Fictional detectives range from professionals (police officers, private investigators, lawyers, district attorneys, forensic pathologists, newspaper reporters—those who get paid specifically to investigate murders) to schoolteachers, housewives, teenagers, and other amateurs. They can be female or male, gay or straight, old or young, rich or poor. They work in big cities, suburbs, rural areas, and the wilderness in every state and virtually every nation in the world.

  Mystery novels by Tony Hillerman, Sue Grafton, Dick Francis, Barbara Michaels, Robert Parker, Patricia Cornwell, and many others regularly appear on the best-seller lists. Hundreds of other talented writers produce a popular mystery novel every year or two. Many critics contend that some of the very best novel and short-story writers in America and England these days are those who produce mystery fiction.

  Every year dozens of “first mysteries” are published. Periodicals such as Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine are devoted exclusively to short mystery fiction. Editors and publishers continually search for the next popular writer, the next blockbuster mystery novel.

  The basic elements of mystery fiction remain constant.

  Mystery variants

  If the story’s driving question is not “Who did it?,” and if detection is not the central action of the story, it is not, technically, a mystery. Today’s best-seller lists are often top-heavy with high-suspense titles in which the plot’s momentum comes from different questions, typically: “Will the bad guy succeed in carrying out his sinister plan before the good guy can stop him?” John Grisham, Mary Higgins Clark, and Tom Clancy, among many others, have made these “thrillers” enormously popular. Crime and justice are central issues in these novels. Since clues, detection, and puzzle-solving frequently play important, if secondary parts of their plots, many of the principles of mystery fiction apply equally to them.

  The reader as participant

  Contemporary mystery fiction invites readers to join the sleuth in the quest to solve a compelling puzzle. Modern readers will not settle for the role of spectator. They want to participate in your story.

  Give your readers credit. Assume they are as smart as you are. “No one can write decently,” said E. B. White, “who is distrustful of the reader’s intelligence, or whose attitude is patronizing.”

  The most important advice I can give you is this: Always think of your audience. Write for your readers. Never deprive them of the chance to participate.

  As we have seen, modern readers expect fair play. You cannot withhold vital clues from them. Everything of consequence that your sleuth encounters must also be encountered by your readers. Unless readers have the evidence, they cannot fairly participate in the solving of the puzzle.

  On the other hand, readers don’t want to be guided through the puzzle’s solution. They want only a fair chance to solve it for themselves. They don’t want to be given more information than the sleuth has. That would give them an advantage over him, which also violates the rule of fair play. Readers resent having clues explained to them by an all-knowing author as much as they resent having clues withheld from them.

  Invite them to walk beside your hero or heroine, seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and feeling along with your sleuth. No more, no less.

  Showing without telling

  For mystery writers, the golden rule is: Show, don’t tell. Give your readers the same kinds of sensory impressions they use in their own lives to interpret their world. Then let them draw their own conclusions. When you explain or elaborate for your readers, you deprive them of the opportunity to participate.

  Let your readers encounter your story’s characters and situations as they experience their actual lives. When you meet and interact with other people, you observe their behavior and then you interpret it. People’s actions and words are clues to their inner feelings, attitudes, philosophies, and motives. You draw conclusions about others based on the clues they present to you. If you see a man crying, you might conclude that he is sad, or frustrated, or angry, or even happy. You take into account the context of his behavior and everything else you know about him—including the possibility that he might lie to you. Then you make your interpretation. You have no all-knowing narrator to tell you, “He is crying tears of joy” or “He is depressed because he killed his friend.”

  If a woman slams her fist on a tabletop or curses loudly or clenches her teeth, you might conclude that she’s angry. You might be wrong. In fact, she might be trying to make you believe she’s angry when, in fact, she is trying to manipulate your emotions or make you believe something that isn’t true. You can’t be sure. You have to consider the clues—the observed behavior and everything else you know about that person—to arrive at your best interpretation. In actual life, no narrator stands at your shoulder whispering in your ear, “That person is angry” or “She’s only pretending to be angry.”

  Just as you show your readers the characters in your stories, so should you create settings
for them. Show your readers a restaurant with a jukebox playing a Patti Page tune, candles in Chianti bottles, and red-and-white-checked oilcloth tablecloths, then allow them to draw their own conclusions about the place. Do not tell them, “The restaurant had an old-fashioned ’50s atmosphere.” Readers can—and want to—deduce that for themselves.

  Words such as “sad,” “manipulative,” and “old-fashioned” tell readers more than they want to know. Let them draw their own conclusions, the way they do in real life. Otherwise you’ll turn your readers into passive spectators—and turn them off.

  Make your story a series of experiences for your readers. Give them sensory impressions. Show them some significant details of people and places, but resist the impulse to tell them what those details mean. Write scenes in which characters act and interact, and put your readers in the middle of those scenes. Allow them to participate, to interpret, to draw conclusions, and to fill in the blanks. Trust them to think for themselves. Respect their intelligence.

  Showing without telling gives contemporary readers what they want from a mystery story—a fair chance to participate in the puzzle’s solution.

  Chapter 2

  Finding Your Story

  The question writers are most often asked by non-writers is: “Where do you get your ideas?”

  Typically, writers reply, “Why, ideas are everywhere. The newspapers. Television. Cocktail party conversation. Dreams. The problem isn’t finding ideas. The problem is recognizing those that can be converted into a story, and then knowing how to create that story.”

  Sometimes they just smile and say, “Serendipity.”

  The most honest answer to the question is: “Ideas come from inside my head. If you want a story idea, that’s where you have to look.”

  Sure, there are plenty of ideas. But the workable idea, the one that will sustain a compelling mystery plot, is rare and precious. To recognize a good idea and develop it into a story requires a lot of hard, critical thought and planning.

  Sometimes writers are fired by the inspiration of what strikes them as a good idea and are so eager to begin writing that they don’t stop to think. They rush to their keyboards and begin writing. They expect their idea to sustain them. They are devastated when, after a few pages or a few chapters, they run out of steam. Their idea did not sustain them, because they failed to nurture and develop it into a fully imagined story.

  Planning your story requires more than the inspiration of a good idea. The creative process that precedes actual writing is unique to each writer. Here’s how I do it:

  Brady Coyne, the lawyer-sleuth hero of my mystery series, likes to ponder difficult cases from the banks of a trout stream or the little balcony off his waterfront apartment in Boston. The process is identical to what I, his creator, go through trying to think up puzzles for him to solve:

  I drank and smoked and thought. The breeze came at me from the sea, moist and organic. The bell buoy out there clanged its mournful rhythm. From behind me came the muffled city noises—the wheeze of traffic through the night-time streets, the occasional punctuation of siren and horn, the almost subsonic hum and murmur of dense human life.

  I remembered the Vermont woods, and my picnic with Kat, and how the birds and bugs and animals and river sounded, and how the pine forest smelled, and how my rainbow trout never missed his mayfly.

  And while one part of my mind registered all of these surface things and wandered freely on its own associations, a different part of it looked for pattern and purpose in three North Shore murders, and a third part watched what was going on and tried not to judge it or guide it.

  That, as well as I can state it, is how I think through a story idea. It’s a process of disciplined free association, at once random and purposeful. If anyone watched me do it, they’d accuse me of daydreaming.

  I do it on long automobile trips. I tend to miss highway exits when I’m driving. During conversations, I find myself saying, “Excuse me. What were you saying?” Sometimes I lie on my bed and stare at the insides of my eyelids. Now and then I scribble a note about a character or a place or an event on a scrap of paper. Periodically I enter my notes into my computer. I build scenes around them and explore them and try to see where they lead.

  More often than not they take me to a dead end. I expect that and keep at it. A good idea is worth working for.

  An idea isn’t a plot, and a plot isn’t a story. An idea is a spark that ignites the individual creative imagination. It can usually be stated in a simple declarative statement, such as, “An elderly woman dying of cancer yearns to reconcile with her estranged daughter before she dies.”

  Or, “The owner of a million-dollar stamp, thought to be the only one of its kind in existence, is contacted by someone who claims to possess a duplicate of that stamp.”

  You may not find either of these ideas particularly promising. But I did, and I developed each of them into a novel. An idea that excites me may not strike your imagination, for the obvious reason that you and I have different interests and experiences.

  An idea sets off a complicated chain reaction, a sequence of imagined events which the writer converts into scenes populated by imaginary people. That is a plot. When the writer puts it all onto paper, it becomes a story.

  In their search for ideas, some mystery writers hang around with newspaper reporters, or sit in courtrooms, or lurk in barrooms, or ride with police officers. I know one writer who tunes in the afternoon television talk shows. He claims he’s gotten several story ideas from the oddball people interviewed by Oprah and Jerry Springer.

  Always be alert for ideas. Read compulsively and eclectically. Eavesdrop shamelessly. Visit new places. Study people. Engage strangers in conversation. And when you get an idea that excites you, resist the powerful temptation to sit down immediately and start writing. Instead, find a quiet place where you can practice the discipline of controlled free association.

  The best way to create a complex mystery plot from a single exciting idea is to keep asking yourself: “What if?” Here’s an example of how this works for me:

  The idea for my first novel, Death at Charity’s Point, came from the news story of a fugitive from the law who, after several years of living quietly under an assumed identity, a pillar of his little rural community, decided to turn himself in.

  What if, I asked myself, someone in this fugitive’s little community had uncovered his true identity? And what if he didn’t want to be brought to justice? What if he committed murder to protect his secret?

  This struck me as a promising idea for a mystery novel. I stated it for myself in the form of a premise: “A former ’60s radical, wanted by the FBI and living under an assumed identity, commits murder to protect her secret.” I then bombarded the premise with more what-if questions. What if the murder appeared to be a suicide? What if the victim’s elderly mother refused to believe her son would take his own life? What if she engaged the family lawyer to investigate? What if the murderer committed more murders? What if she targeted the lawyer for death?

  Asking those “what if” questions often felt random and unproductive. For every useful answer, dozens led nowhere. But I kept asking them until I believed I had a coherent story. Then I created and revised outlines, wrote character sketches, and explored possible settings.

  The source of my idea had been televised nationally. But as far as I know, no one else used it as the basis for a mystery novel. It worked for me because it merged with that unique entity that is my imagination, which is the product of my peculiar history, personality, and life experiences.

  And if it had happened to inspire someone else, their novel would without doubt have been unrecognizably different from mine.

  The formula that generally works for me is: character + problem = story idea. The character is usually either a murderer or the victim of a murderer. That character’s story becomes the basis for the novel. But it’s not the novel itself.

  The two stories of the mystery

&nbs
p; Mystery fiction, remember, tells a tale of detection. It’s a puzzle. It raises the “whodunit” question and sets the sleuth off on her quest. Along the way she encounters clues until she—and the reader—have learned enough to solve the puzzle.

  Before you write this story of detection, you must first write the story of the murder itself. It’s a chronological tale. It begins with the relationship between the victim and the murderer, explains the murderer’s motive, and develops through the planning and execution of the deed.

  What clues will you scatter along the way? What other innocent characters are associated with the victim? Might they, too, have motive, means, and opportunity to commit murder? How has the culprit covered his tracks? What are the relationships among all of these characters? Where does the story take place? How do elements in the setting contribute to the story’s events?

  Answering all of these questions will give you a story of murder.

  Write a narrative sketch of this straightforward tale. Tell it chronologically. Populate it with husbands and wives, lovers and ex-spouses, business acquaintances and estranged friends. Compose the life story of your victim. Be sure he has plenty of potential enemies. Then do the same for your murderer.

  This sketch could itself be the plot for a novel. With fascinating multidimensional characters, complex relationships, a powerful underlying moral question, a touch of irony, and intense conflicts, it might even make a very good suspense novel or thriller.

  But because this is the story of the villain and his victim, it’s not yet a mystery. The mystery story belongs to the sleuth.

  To create a mystery, you must convert the linear murderer-victim story into a puzzle and create a puzzle-solving hero. This is the specific challenge for the mystery writer. You must invent two stories for every one you write. First you must think up the story of the crime. Only then can you write your mystery novel, which is the story of that crime’s detection.