The Elements of Mystery Fiction: Writing the Modern Whodunit

by Tapply, William G.

  In Billingsgate Shoal Rick Boyer’s oral surgeon protagonist, Doc Adams, visits his friend Moe Abramson:

  Soon I was reclining in a two-thousand-dollar belting leather Eames chair, watching the thirty-gallon aquarium. Two cardinal tetras chased each other from territory to territory. Small iridescent schools of neon tetras and zebra dianos winked about under the fluorescent light. A Mozart concerto hummed and danced in the background.

  An office featuring a big aquarium and Mozart’s music can reveal as much about a character—even before you meet him—as his dress, manner of speech, or physical appearance.

  Compare what Moe Abramson’s office reveals about him with what you might deduce about the man whose apartment Carlotta Carlyle enters in Linda Barnes’ A Trouble of Fools:

  I breathed in a considerable amount of air and was surprised to find it sweet. The place was clean. Pat’s flat was a shabby affair, Spartan, the final resting place of a fussy old flirtatious bachelor. Probably a virgin. A faded print couch anchored one wall. Blowsy off-white curtains framed the windows. A framed picture of Jesus hung on the wall over the sofa, a crucifix next to it. A threadbare easy chair with a fat dented cushion faced off against a huge color TV. The furniture wasn’t arranged with conversational groupings in mind. It was set up for one man watching TV alone.

  The secret of a successfully rendered setting lies not in piling detail upon detail. Boyer highlights just three details of Moe Abramson’s office—the Eames chair, the aquarium, and the Mozart concerto. Barnes focuses on the furnishings in Pat’s apartment. And yet in both cases a few carefully chosen details enable readers to color in these settings from their own imaginations.

  Think of your settings as characters in your stories. Settings need not be passive; they can act and interact with your characters. Rainstorms cause automobile accidents. Snowstorms cover footprints and stall traffic. The bitter cold of winter kills homeless people in a city park. Water released from a dam raises the level in a river and drowns a trout fisherman.

  As you plan your stories, your setting may, at first, be vague and arbitrary. The storyline usually comes first, since it involves character, conflict, motive, detection, and resolution. But as the story begins to grow in your imagination, you’ll discover that you need to place it somewhere specific, and as that happens, you’ll think of ways that the various elements of setting—place, weather, time of year, and so forth—can give your plot its distinctiveness.

  For the general storyline, it may be enough to know that a dead body must be found in Chapter One. Once you decide where your tale will take place, however, you should spend time there. Search out particular places where the events in your story can occur. Visit them often enough to absorb their sounds and smells, their colors, their details. Hang around. Talk to the local people. Walk up the alleys.

  Learning the skills of observation will make you a better writer. Look at the places you visit through the lens of a camera. Photographs will help jar your imagination when you’re at your typewriter or word processor. If you have an artistic bent, make sketches. Carry a tape recorder and record your observations.

  As many details as you gather for your setting, however, avoid extended descriptive passages, because no matter how poetic and original you make them, and no matter how much you might admire the elegance of your own prose, these kinds of passages risk becoming self-indulgent. If they’re too long, they will stall the momentum of the action and threaten to bore your reader, who is eager for the story to continue.

  The key to creating effective settings in mystery fiction lies in finding the few telling details that will hint at all of the others. Be spare and suggestive. Look for a water stain on the ceiling or a cigarette burn on the sofa. Note the odor of mildew or the rattle of a loose windowpane. If you find the right details, your readers will draw the conclusions you want them to without losing track of the story itself.

  Chapter 7

  Getting It Started: Setting

  the Narrative Hook

  The next time you visit a bookstore, do what most fiction writers do in public settings: Watch the people. Find a browser and study the way she selects a book to purchase.

  Something compels her to pull a book from the shelf. Perhaps it’s the color of the jacket, or a familiar author’s name on the spine. Maybe it’s an intriguing title. Whatever her reasons, she now holds a book in her hands. She examines the front cover. That may be enough to cause her to replace the book and choose another.

  But if she continues to hold onto that book, she probably flips it over and looks at the back of the jacket. If the author’s picture or the blurbs that scream “Amazing!” “Irresistible!” “A real page-turner!” don’t put her off, she opens the book and reads the “flap copy,” which is generally a plot summary designed as a come-on.

  So far, all of the bookselling work has been done by the publisher (except possibly the creation of the title, although publishers often reject the writer’s title if they don’t think it will grab that browser’s attention). Of course, if the author has been published before, his or her name alone might be enough to sell the book.

  Potential buyers, at least initially, really do judge books by their covers.

  But they do not fork over credit cards for book covers. Watch your browser. If she’s still holding that book, she’ll next turn to the first page, and she’ll start reading. This is the writer’s moment of truth. Now that potential book buyer is judging the author’s work. Keep watching her. Does she quickly shut the book and replace it on the shelf? Or does she lean against the wall and turn a page or two, then smile and sigh and tuck the book under her arm? If so, she’s hooked.

  Editors and agents evaluate manuscripts the same way that browsers evaluate published books. They read the first sentence, fully prepared to stop there. They believe that a dull or awkward or confusing first sentence portends a dull or awkward or confusing book. But if they’re not discouraged, they’ll read the entire first paragraph—again, perfectly willing to reject that manuscript if they aren’t moved to keep reading.

  An opening that compels editors—and book buyers—to continue turning the pages is absolutely essential for the unknown writer who wants to be published. It’s not enough, of course. A good beginning does not make a good book or guarantee a sale.

  But the converse can be considered a truth: A bad start virtually guarantees rejection.

  The narrative hook

  Opening a book is like meeting a stranger. The first impression makes all the difference. How do the first lines greet the reader? Do they smile softly and seductively? Do they open a trap door and drop the reader into a strange and mysterious new place, or do they crack open a window shade and offer a glimpse? Do they charm readers with their wit? Do they reach out and grab the reader by the throat, or do they politely take the reader’s hand and invite her to join them? Do they scream of danger and mystery, or do they enfold the reader in a warm and comforting embrace?

  Opening lines can be inviting and irresistible; they can also be awkward, offensive, or dull. They are the window to the book’s personality. If the book’s beginning doesn’t hook readers, they will not read on.

  Not any old hook will do. Dramatic, stylized, or otherwise attention-grabbing beginnings are effective only if they draw your reader into the story. That’s why it’s called a narrative hook.

  An effective narrative hook promises a compelling story populated with fascinating characters. You’ve got only a few sentences—a couple of paragraphs at the most—to make that promise.

  Many different kinds of narrative hooks are available to the mystery writer:

  1. The middle of a scene. The classical device of beginning in medias res (in the middle of things), when executed effectively, drops readers into a situation. They will want to read on to discover both how that situation developed and how it resolves itself. By then they will be hooked on the story.

  For example, here is how Ed McBain begins Ghosts:

&
nbsp; They might have been ghosts themselves, the detectives who stood in the falling snow around the body of the woman on the sidewalk. Shrouded by the swirling flakes, standing in snow three inches deep underfoot, they huddled like uncertain specters against the gray facade of the apartment building behind the slain woman.

  Who is this dead woman? What happened to her? Who are the detectives? Can they uncover the mystery of her death? Such questions are implicit in these two opening sentences. The trap door has opened and readers have fallen in. They will read on.

  2. A vivid glimpse of setting. Readers are generally fascinated

  with places. A memorable picture of a place will pull readers into the narrative.

  In Billingsgate Shoal, Rick Boyer’s Doc Adams greets his readers:

  Two and a half miles directly offshore from our cottage in Eastham, Massachusetts on Cape Cod, lies Billingsgate Shoal. It appears on nautical charts in a color between that of either land or sea. This is because Billingsgate is a sunken island and is visible only briefly, in all its soggy splendor, twice a day at tide’s farthest ebb.

  These opening sentences give readers a peek at a place they’d like to know better. The lines work because readers are confident that the narrator knows exactly what he is talking about. The details are precise and specific and absolutely true. Readers feel they are in good hands, and they also believe that the place Doc Adams describes has relevance to the story that will follow. Billingsgate Shoal seems like a vaguely mysterious place. Things can happen there.

  Also important is the early signpost that a character has engaged the reader in a conversation. With the phrase “our cottage,” Boyer establishes his first-person point of view in the first sentence. So in this brief, rather straightforward descriptive beginning, a great deal is promised. Readers want to hear more.

  3. A tidbit of interesting information. Tell readers something they probably don’t know, and promise them that this information will be relevant to the story that follows. Readers love to learn new things from novels. Here is an example from my novel, The Spotted Cats:

  In Zambia the leopard is called Nyalubwe. In East Africa the natives call him Chui, and farther south he’s called Ingwe. But everywhere—in Africa, in Asia, in parts of Europe and the Middle East—the leopard is the same animal: a perfect killing machine, the most efficient mammal predator—aside from man—on earth.

  This kind of beginning works best when the information is both specific and arcane. Don’t tell readers what many of them are already likely to know. The informational opening succeeds when the information itself hints at danger or mystery and the narrative voice is confident.

  4. A snatch of dialogue. Dialogue is immediate. Stories that open with dialogue accomplish several things at once: They introduce the point-of-view character and at least one other; they create an in medias res sense that the reader has entered an ongoing scene; they suggest conflict and hint at mystery and drama; and they characterize the players by what they say and how they speak.

  Blanche on the Lam, Barbara Neely’s Agatha Award-winning first novel, begins this way:

  “Have you anything to say for yourself?” The judge gave Blanche a look that made her raise her handbag to her chest like a shield.

  “Your Honor … I’m sorry. … I …”

  “Sorry? It most certainly is sorry! This is the fourth, I repeat, the fourth, time that you’ve been before this court on a bad-check charge. Perhaps some time in a jail cell will convince you to earn your money before you spend it, like the rest of us. Thirty days and restitution!”

  In this brief conversational exchange, Neely creates two characters and establishes a problem. It’s an efficient and compelling way to begin a book.

  5. A dramatic moment. Begin at the beginning—the precise moment when the puzzle presents itself. If it happens suddenly, and if its implications are powerful, you will instantly hook your readers.

  Here, for example, in the single compelling opening sentence of Darker Than Amber, John D. MacDonald grabs his readers’ attention:

  We were about to give up and call it a night when somebody dropped the girl off the bridge.

  Similarly, Edna Buchanan begins Contents Under Pressure this way:

  I stopped to listen. So did a detective and several patrolmen, frozen in motion. One cocked his head and held his walkie up to his ear. The morning had started out as a slow news day, but that could change in a heartbeat. It was happening now.

  What happens next? Readers will feel compelled to find out.

  6. An appealing narrative voice. You don’t need high drama or clever wordplay or other tricks to capture your readers’ interest. Promise them that they’ll be keeping good company on their journey through your story, and they’ll want to keep reading.

  Here, in A Beautiful Place to Die, Philip R. Craig’s Martha’s Vineyard detective J. W. Jackson invites readers to join him:

  The alarm went off at three-thirty. Outside it was as black as a tax collector’s heart. Smart me had stopped at the market the night before for doughnuts, so I was on the road as soon as I filled my thermos with coffee. I rattled through Edgartown without seeing another soul and went on south toward Katama. The air was sharp and dry, and the wind was light from the southwest. Maybe it would blow the bluefish in at last. They were two weeks late, or at least two weeks later than the year before. The heater in the Landcruiser didn’t work too well, so I was a bit chilly for the first few miles.

  It’s a quiet, confident, friendly beginning. Jackson, the narrator, is not out to impress us. Come along, he seems to say. Sit here beside me in my Landcruiser. I expect we’ll have some fun.

  The most dramatic question raised in this opening paragraph is whether the bluefish will be in. There is no hint of danger, no puzzle, no apparent conflict or tension. And yet Craig’s straightforward prose lures readers into his story. Readers can’t help liking this narrator and his down-to-earth attention to doughnuts and coffee and his car’s heater. They look forward to spending more time with him. They are hooked.

  The promise of the narrative hook

  The simple job of your story’s first sentence is to persuade your readers to read the second sentence, which will lead them to the third, and so on. But no matter how catchy, the beginning of your story will fail unless the promises it makes to your readers are fulfilled.

  In every opening you make implicit promises to your readers that:

  1. Events described in the first scene are relevant to the story that follows.

  2. Characters who appear in the opening are significant players in the story.

  3. The mood created in the beginning foreshadows events to come.

  4. The narrative voice will sustain itself all the way to the end.

  5. Conflicts hinted at early will be resolved as the story develops.

  6. Themes established at the beginning will be expanded and explored through the story’s events and characters.

  A flashy, attention-getting opening that fails to fulfill these promises can make readers feel deceived and cheated. Don’t promise what you cannot or do not intend to deliver.

  Remember: It’s not any old hook. It’s a narrative hook. The job of the opening is to lure readers into your story. After that, the story must do its own work.

  Begin at the beginning—not before

  Commonly, inexperienced writers feel compelled to begin their stories with reams of background information. They feel they must share those character biographies they worked so hard to create, or they compose detailed summaries of the events that preceded the story itself. They write long descriptions of setting or some aimless dialogue that is intended to help readers “get to know” the characters.

  The story itself may finally get underway in the second or third chapter. But readers may not be there to enjoy it. One of the surest ways to bore readers and cause them to stop reading is to tell them what they don’t have any reason to want to know.

  You may need to warm up by writ
ing your way to your story’s actual beginning. Fine. Do it. Just be sure to delete it once you find the place where your story really starts.

  Stories should open at a significant moment. Begin with characters in meaningful situations. Readers do not need to know who the characters are, where they came from, what happened to them earlier, or what they want. Readers don’t yet care about your characters’ previous lives, and they don’t need an explanation of what’s going on. Not yet.

  Never give readers information before they want it. If your opening scene introduces compelling characters in conflict, readers will read on to learn more about them. The promise of fuller understanding is a powerful hook.

  Begin at the beginning. Never earlier.

  Chapter 8

  Structuring the Story:

  Building Tension

  You’ve done all your preliminary work. You’ve come up with an original idea; your characters live in your imagination; you’ve decided on a point of view; you’ve found a vivid setting; and you’ve sketched out key scenes.