Find the genre that feels most right to you and keep in mind that it can (and very well might) change as you write and revise.
My novel, Unremembered, changed genres about three times while I was writing it. It started out as a Dude with a Problem (girl survives a plane crash with no memories—huge problem!) Until I decided not to reveal how she survived the plane crash until the very end. That’s when it became a Whydunit (what really happened to this girl and why?). Finally, I realized that she’s wasn’t an “ordinary” hero. She had extraordinary abilities. She was special. That’s when I discovered that the point of the novel was her coming to terms with who she is and how she differs from the rest of humanity. And so it remains to this day a Superhero story.
It’s also important to note that individual books within a series can have different genres.
For instance, The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins solidly fits into the Dude with a Problem camp. Innocent hero thrust into the action without asking for it, life-or-death battle. But the second book in the series, Catching Fire, is clearly an Institutionalized story. As a victor, Katniss is now a “naif” (aka a newcomer) in the system. The big question of the novel is: What will she do about it? And the answer to that question is that she “burns it down” (or at least sets it on fire). And book three, Mockingjay, is a Superhero story. It’s about Katniss coming to terms with her special status as the “Mockingjay,” the leader of the rebellion, and going up against her self-made nemesis, President Snow.
So if after reading the following chapters you feel the burning urge to argue one genre over another, here’s my advice: Take a deep breath, relax, and channel that energy into a more worthwhile endeavor—namely, figuring out what’s going to make your story work.
Because isn’t that, after all, why you bought this book?
Whydunit
Detectives, Deception, and the Dark Side
WARNING! THIS CHAPTER CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR THE FOLLOWING BOOKS:
Memory Man by David Baldacci, In the Woods by Tana French, And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie, The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins
Agatha Christie once wrote, “Very few of us are what we seem.”
Appearances can be deceiving. Truth can be slippery. Secrets are inevitable. This is why in almost any bookstore you’ll find an entire section dedicated to a type of book we call the mystery.
We turn to stories to find out more about ourselves. And we turn to mysteries to find out more about the dark side of ourselves. What evils lurk inside human hearts? What sins are we, as a species, capable of committing? And most important, Why?
If we look closely at what makes good mysteries so compulsively readable, it’s not the who, but the why. It’s the reason behind the crime, more than the criminal, that captures our interest and keeps us turning pages. In Agatha Christie’s classic And Then There Were None, although we’re dying to find out which of the ten guests on Soldier Island is killing people, it’s the motive behind these deaths—the theme of judgment—that really fuels the story and resonates with us.
In The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, the organization responsible for Jacques Saunière’s death is not as interesting as the reason he was killed and the secret he was killed for. It’s the why, not the who.
Why would someone commit such atrocities?
And what does that say about who we are as humans?
Those are the two questions at the heart of the Save the Cat! story genre called the Whydunit.
Whether you’re writing a classic murder mystery (like an Agatha Christie), a detective mystery (like the Harry Bosch series by Michael Connelly or the Dublin Murder Squad series by Tana French), a political mystery (like the Camel Club series by David Baldacci or the Jack Ryan series by Tom Clancy), or an amateur sleuth mystery (like The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown or In a Dark, Dark Wood by Ruth Ware), all Whydunits share a common core. They all center around a crime that has been committed and a dark secret that lies at the heart of it. And it’s your job as the writer to keep the reader guessing at every turn. Because regardless of whether your Whydunit detective is an amateur who’s never solved a mystery or a private eye who’s “seen it all,” in the end the reader is your true gumshoe. It’s the reader you have to wow with each shocking turn of the cards—clues and reveals set to detonate like bombs at just the right moment, stopping the story in its tracks and sending the mystery in a new direction. And it’s the reader who must be forever changed by what you ultimately reveal about human nature.
Every Whydunit is like a series of increasingly dark rooms that we readers must walk through. We’re not sure what we’ll find at the end—or who. But we’re along for the ride because we know it’s going to answer the fundamental question behind every good mystery: Why?
If you think your novel fits into the Whydunit category, you’ll need three key ingredients to ensure its success: (1) a detective, (2) a secret, and (3) a dark turn.
Let’s take a look at each of these ingredients in more detail.
The detective of your story can truly be anyone. It can be someone who’s seen a thousand dead bodies or someone who’s never seen a single one. But two things must be true of this person: They must be wholly unprepared for what they’re getting into (regardless of their job and/or experience), and they must have a reason for being dragged into this mess. Again, why this hero for this plot? The connection can seem random at first, but if you don’t marry your hero to your plot—or your detective to your mystery, in this case—your reader will leave the novel saying those dreaded words: “Yeah, so?”
Think about Amos Decker, the detective hero of the Whydunit novel Memory Man by David Baldacci. At first, the murder of his entire family (which starts off the story) seems completely unrelated to the school shooting that happens over a year later. But ballistic evidence soon reveals that it’s the same perpetrator behind both crimes, making Amos much more important in the investigation.
Or think of how shocked The Da Vinci Code’s Robert Langdon is when he’s brought into the Louvre in the middle of the night and finds a dead man lying naked on the floor, next to a cryptic message written with the man’s own blood. It’s not your everyday occurrence for a symbologist. But, as Langdon soon learns, the part of the message that was erased by police included his name. He’s definitely involved. But why?
Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None has an interesting twist on the detective ingredient. Although all the guests on Soldier Island are desperately trying to figure out who the murderer is before they become the next victim, the true detective in the story is—the reader! True, we are always the ultimate detective of every Whydunit, but in this case, we are the only one!
What all detectives have in common, however, is that they are not prepared for this case, regardless of how many cases they’ve solved before. Because if this case in this novel doesn’t show them something they’ve never seen before, then what’s the point? If the secret that is ultimately unveiled is something your hero or detective has dealt with before, then what’s the mystery?
Which brings us to our second ingredient. As the detective unravels the clues, and you, the author, continue to turn over the cards, the secret is finally revealed. This secret is why we search for the truth to begin with. It’s the heart of the Whydunit. It’s what we find in the last dark room. It’s not just the who and the why. It’s the what, where, and when, too! It’s what keeps the reader guessing until the very end. The bait that pulls us through the entire story. Because we (and the detective) need to know. We need to find out what really happened to Harriet Vanger in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson. We need to discover what the Priory of Sion is hiding in The Da Vinci Code. We need to find out what happened to Jessica in that wood in In the Woods by Tana French.
And you, the author, need to make sure the secret is a good one.
The secret often starts out sma
ll but grows as the detective digs deeper into the case and uncovers more clues. In Memory Man, we first learn that the same gun was fired at both the murder of Decker’s family and the recent school shooting. But as author Baldacci continues his skillful turning of the cards, the secret grows, and we soon discover that the murderer is actually targeting Decker specifically and trying to send him a message through both homicides.
In And Then There Were None, one death turns to three deaths turns to seven deaths! The plot (and the secret!) thickens with each dead body that turns up.
But as the secret grows deeper, so does the detective’s desire to solve the case, which leads to their dark turn, the third ingredient of a Whydunit. The dark turn is the moment when the hero breaks or abandons the rules (either their own or society’s) in pursuit of the secret or the truth.
Like when Amos Decker in Memory Man heads off on his own to confront the killer by himself in the third act, without backup and without sharing his latest breakthrough with the other agents working the case, a huge violation of police investigation rules.
The rules broken can be moral, societal, or personal. The point is to show how this case has affected your detective. They’re now doing things they’ve never done before—going to places they’ve never gone before—all in pursuit of this secret. But ultimately it’s almost always that dark turn that leads the hero to the theme that will transform them.
And it’s what makes the novel worth reading.
Another popular (although not required) element found in many a Whydunit is the case within a case. The detective will sometimes start out investigating one mystery, only to find it intricately linked to another (often a case that was just ending at the start of the novel). We see this prominently in In the Woods by Tana French. The novel starts out in 1984 in a small Dublin town. Three kids go out to play in the woods. Only one comes back: Rob Ryan, who later becomes a detective sent to investigate the disappearance of a young girl in the same town. It’s no surprise that as author French turns over the cards, the cases start to blend together, and our detective’s involvement in the old case starts to blur his view of the new case. Even if the old case is never solved (as in In the Woods), it’s usually this case within the case that reveals the story’s theme and teaches the detective some type of lesson about themselves.
In the end, the detective, the secret, and the dark turn all serve one inherent purpose: to show us something about the dark side of human nature. We leave novels like Memory Man, In the Woods, And Then There Were None, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo feeling satisfied that we’ve solved the mystery and that the hero has been transformed by it, but also feeling just the slightest bit uneasy. Yet, it’s this very unease, this little nugget of truth about ourselves, that keeps us reading and that has made the Whydunit one of the most classic and widely read story genres.
To recap: If you’re thinking of writing a Whydunit novel, make sure your story includes these three essential ingredients:
A DETECTIVE: whether that’s a professional, an amateur, or even the reader! It just needs to be someone with a case on their hands. A case that they are not fully prepared for (whether they realize it or not!).
A SECRET: the key to unraveling the whole thing. What is inside the last, darkest room of our hunt for the truth? It should illuminate something about the dark side of humanity. Something we didn’t think was possible before the case began.
A DARK TURN: the moment when the hero or detective finds themselves so deep into the mystery that their own rules, morals, and/or ethics are compromised. The hero must do something (usually in the second half of the novel) that somehow breaks the rules or threatens their integrity or even their innocence. These are the harrowing stakes of a good mystery. And the dark turn is why readers care about this particular case. Because the pull of this secret has become so strong, even the straightest arrows are helpless against it.
Popular Whydunit Novels Through Time:
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
The Secret of the Old Clock (Nancy Drew series) by Carolyn Keene
Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier
And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin
A Is for Alibi (Kinsey Millhone series) by Sue Grafton
The Black Echo (Harry Bosch series) by Michael Connelly
Along Came a Spider (Alex Cross series) by James Patterson
One for the Money (Stephanie Plum series) by Janet Evanovich
The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
In the Woods (Dublin Murder Squad series) by Tana French
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
Ten by Gretchen McNeil
The Cuckoo’s Calling (Comoran Strike series) by Robert Galbraith
The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins (beat sheet following)
Memory Man (Amos Decker series) by David Baldacci
In a Dark, Dark Wood by Ruth Ware
All the Missing Girls by Megan Miranda
Watch the Girls by Jennifer Wolfe
THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN
BY: Paula Hawkins
STC GENRE: Whydunit
BOOK GENRE: Mystery/Thriller
TOTAL PAGES: 323 (Riverhead Books Paperback Edition, 2016)
This instant blockbuster by Paula Hawkins debuted at number one on the New York Times best-seller list and went on to become a hit movie starring Emily Blunt. The Girl on the Train successfully uses a popular mystery-novel device, “the unreliable narrator,” to pull you into the story and leave you guessing until the very end. But like so many great mystery novels, the most compelling question of the story is not who killed Megan Hipwell, but why. And that’s what makes this page-turner such a fantastic example of a successful Whydunit novel.
1. Opening Image (pages 1–2)
This book opens up, not surprisingly, on a train. It’s a fitting Opening Image, as so much of this book will take place on a train. We meet Rachel, aka “the girl on the train,” one of three female protagonists and our primary hero of the book.
We soon learn that Rachel is obsessed with other people’s lives—a flaw, introduced on the second page, that will drive the entire story.
2. Theme Stated (page 1)
On page 1, Rachel says, “My mother used to tell me that I had an overactive imagination; Tom said that, too.” The book’s theme is reality, how easily it can be manipulated, and how the three protagonists—Rachel, Megan, and Anna—refuse to accept it. It’s not until Rachel learns the theme of accepting reality and comes face-to-face with the biggest truth of them all, that she finally solves the A Story mystery as well as the B Story (internal) mystery of her own life.
3. Setup (pages 2–38)
Rachel’s status quo world is bleak. In the first 12 percent of the novel, Paula Hawkins effectively introduces Rachel’s things that need fixing:
Rachel is an alcoholic who drinks (and blacks out) way too much.
Rachel lives in a fantasy world, making up stories about the wonderful life of a couple she’s named “Jess” and “Jason” who live at 15 Blenheim Road in Witney.
Rachel can’t get over her ex-husband, Tom, who happens to live three doors down from “Jess” and “Jason” with his new wife, Anna (whom he had an affair with while still married to Rachel).
Rachel has frequent blackouts in which she calls Tom (sometimes even stopping by his house), and he and his new wife are getting sick of it.
Rachel’s roommate is losing patience with her and her drinking.
Rachel has already lost her job because of her drinking and rides the train every day only to avoid telling her roommate.
Also in the Setup is where we first meet our second protagonist, Meg
an (eventually revealed to be “Jess”). Megan’s chapters are all told in flashback, starting a year earlier and steadily leading up to the present. Here, in only a few short pages, we learn that Megan’s life is nothing like the fantasy Rachel has conjured up for her. She’s restless and deeply troubled (we will soon learn by what), she’s seeing a therapist, and her marriage is not perfect. In the first Megan chapter, we’re introduced to the mysterious “him,” a character who will continue to play a role in the story and whose identity will keep us guessing. Here is where Paula Hawkins first starts to use her great powers of misdirection to keep us in suspense and show us that, in this world, nothing is what it seems.
4. Catalyst (pages 38–41)
Although there’s a smaller inciting incident on page 29, when Rachel sees “Jess” (Megan) kissing another man (effectively shattering her idealized view of her favorite couple), the real Catalyst of this story comes when Rachel wakes up on a Sunday morning—after blacking out from drinking—to find a lump on her head, blood in her hair, bruises on her legs, and vague memories of going to Blenheim Road the night before.
Now the real fun of The Girl on the Train begins. Did she go there to pay her ex-husband and his new wife another drunken visit? Or did she go there because earlier, when she saw “Jess” kissing another man, she swore, “If I saw that woman now, if I saw Jess, I would spit in her face. I would scratch her eyes out”? (page 31).
Rachel also vaguely remembers a red-haired man with her on the train. He will prove important, but for now, he’s just another detail lost in the black void of her memory, along with—well, everything else that will make up the pages of this masterfully plotted thriller.
Save the Cat! Writes a Novel Page 10
