How to Write a Mystery

by Mystery Writers of America

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  Introduction

  LEE CHILD

  Let’s get the jokes out of the way first: “Every successful mystery novel must have two specific attributes. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.” “What’s the difference between a thriller and a mystery? An extra zero on the advance.” And so on, and so forth.

  In fact, the attributes a successful mystery must have are many and various, and the successful mystery writers in this book explore them in depth. The question of definition is equally complex. What actually is a mystery? The word means different things to different people. Publishers, editors, reviewers, and genre buffs tend to infer an exact specification, narrow enough to be precise yet broad enough to include several even more precise subcategories. By contrast, I have known several older folks, all very well educated, who call anything south of, say, Haruki Murakami a “mystery.”

  Publishers, editors, and reviewers need to be precise, and genre buffs like to be, but writers don’t have to join them. I write without a plan or an outline. The way I picture my process is this: The novel is a movie stuntman, about to get pushed off a sixty-story building. The prop guys have a square fire-department airbag ready on the sidewalk below. One corner is marked Mystery, one Thriller, one Crime Fiction, and one Suspense. The stuntman is going to land on the bag. (I hope.) But probably not dead-on. Probably somewhat off center. But biased toward which corner? I don’t know yet. And I really don’t mind. I’m excited to find out.

  I think most writers are like that. And they should be, because most readers are. Or, nowadays, most consumers. Mystery Writers of America was founded around the slogan “Crime doesn’t pay. Enough.” We acknowledge commercial realities, because we’re all subject to them. The demand for story is still huge. But the supply is growing. In the old days, movies and TV competed with books for leisure time, but they didn’t really scratch the same itch. Now, quality long-form narrative television gets dangerously close.

  Therefore we need to write better than ever. And we should feel free to use the whole airbag. “Mystery writers” is a noble and evocative term, but we shouldn’t think it limits us. Far from it. From day one, MWA was all over the map. We need to keep it that way, fluid and flexible—and better than ever.

  You can make a start on figuring out how by reading this book. It’s all here. I’m deeply grateful to all the contributors—and I think you will be, too, eventually—and to those who worked hard behind the scenes. A lot of people gave up a lot of time. Why? Because they want you to be them, twenty years from now. Hopefully even better. They’re telling you how. Weird, I know. Maybe that’s one of the attributes. A successful mystery novel must be written by a good human being. Plus one other thing. Unfortunately, no one knows what it is.

  The Rules and Genres

  Neil Nyren—The Rules—and When to Break Them

  Carved in stone or gentle suggestions: what are the rules in the mystery genre, why do they matter, and when don’t they matter?

  Meg Gardiner—Keeping It Thrilling

  Nine things your thriller needs to be lean, mean, and exhilarating.

  Naomi Hirahara—Insider, Outsider: The Amateur Sleuth

  The point, and point of view, of your accidental detective.

  Rachel Howzell Hall—Finding Lou: The Police Procedural

  Are you a cop, or do you just play one on the page?

  Alex Segura—The Mindset of Darkness: Writing Noir

  It’s about character: the flawed protagonist and letting your characters fail.

  Charlaine Harris—Crossing the Genres

  Mixing your mystery with a vampire, a talking cow, or a love interest?

  Jacqueline Winspear—The Historical Mystery

  Time, place, and the past.

  Tess Gerritsen—The Medical Thriller

  Playing on the reader’s real-life fears and hunger for insider knowledge.

  Gayle Lynds—Researching the Spy Thriller

  Or: Why can’t I just make it all up?

  The Rules—and When to Break Them

  Carved in stone or gentle suggestions: what are the rules in the mystery genre, why do they matter, and when don’t they matter?

  NEIL NYREN

  Everybody loves lists, and the crime fiction world is no exception: the ten books if you love historical thrillers; the twelve books for fans of Agatha Christie; the five psychological suspense novels you need to read right now; the best books of the year, of the decade, of the century. And, of course, the lists of rules for how to write them all.

  W. Somerset Maugham famously said, “There are three rules for the writing of a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.” That hasn’t stopped people from making them up anyway. In 1928, American detective author S. S. Van Dine published “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories.” In 1929, British author (and theologian) Ronald Knox created his “Ten Commandments for Detective Fiction,” later known as the “Decalogue.” In 1973, suspense writer Brian Garfield produced “Ten Rules for Suspense Fiction.” In 2001, Elmore Leonard provided his ten rules of writing to the pages of the New York Times.

  The lists are useful for writers of crime and suspense fiction, and well worth absorbing, although some of the earlier ones are, let’s say, problematic (Knox’s rule number 5 reads: “No Chinaman must figure in the story.” What?). They’re useful because if you’re just starting out, you need to have some sense of what you’re doing—what the conventions are, what the subgenres are, what generations of crime writers have found that works or doesn’t work. The rules and conventions give you a solid footing. After that, though, anything goes. Anything? Yes. Because they’re not holy writ (the “Commandments” notwithstanding). The beauty of being a writer, the pure joy of the creative act, comes when you take those conventions and smash them, reinvent them, twist them into brilliant pretzels.

  We’ll get to that, but first you need to figure out just what the heck it is you’re writing, so let’s look at some of the subgenres of crime and suspense fiction and see how they sort out.

  The most basic division—and the question that comes up all the time—is: Just what is the difference between a mystery and a thriller? The latter term is thrown around all the time, sometimes indiscriminately, because publishers feel that thrillers tend to have the bigger market, and so they’re happy to slap it on all kinds of books, but at the very core, the difference is this:

  Mysteries are about a puzzle. A crime is committed, usually murder, and the protagonist has to weave their way through clues and suspects to finally arrive at a solution. It’s a more cerebral endeavor, and the key question is “Who did it?”

  Thrillers are about adrenaline. Something bad happens, with the certain promise that more—and probably even worse—bad things will happen unless the protagonist can prevent them. The stakes can be intimate (one person’s life) or huge (the fate of the world), the protagonist can be an ordinary person or a superhero. Whatever the case, it’s the suspense that drives the book, the chase, the scramble, and the key question is “What happens next?”

  Many books are pure mystery, many books are pure thriller—but as you know from your own reading, it’s much more common for a book to have elements of both. Traditional mysteries can be filled wi
th suspense, headlong thrillers can be tied to enigmatic puzzles—there’s your first lesson on how the genres explode.

  All the subgenres flow from there. Here are just some of them:

  The crime novel: Some people use this term more broadly to mean any novel involving crime—in the UK, “crime” encompasses pretty much anything in the realms of mystery, thriller, and suspense—but more specifically as a subgenre, it’s a novel more about the criminal than the law enforcer, and often told from the criminal’s point of view. It can be light (Donald Westlake) or grim (James M. Cain) or nestled nicely in between (Elmore Leonard).

  The police procedural: This is the cop book, whether that cop is alone, part of a team of police, or in an even broader law-and-order network of detectives, medical examiners, sheriffs, ADAs, and the like. The police procedural looks at how a cop solves a crime and sometimes at the protagonist’s home life as well, which is often not a bed of roses. Many great writers inhabit this territory—Ed McBain, Joseph Wambaugh, Michael Connelly, and Don Winslow, just to name a few, plus the classic Scotland Yard cops of Ngaio Marsh, Ruth Rendell, and P. D. James; the Navajo cops of Tony Hillerman; the South African cops of James McClure; and, of course, more Scandinavians than you can shake a stick at (not that I’d advise shaking a stick at them—many, many terrible things happen to the people in Scandinavian crime novels).

  The hard-boiled detective and noir novels: These are two distinct subgenres, though often inhabited by some of the same characters and tropes. The hard-boiled detective—think Chandler, Hammett, and Ross Macdonald, and their spiritual children Sue Grafton, Sara Paretsky, Walter Mosley, and Robert B. Parker—often has unorthodox methods that suit them well, and is not averse to bending or breaking the law in pursuit of justice. That’s the critical point, however: deep down the protagonist has a very moral center, and is trying to do the right thing, often against steep odds. In noir, however, everybody is compromised, criminal and cop alike; the system is corrupt; and no matter what you do, the outcome is often lose-lose. It’s a bleak world, which I find intoxicating, but, hey, to each their own taste. Jim Thompson, W. R. Burnett, James M. Cain, Dorothy B. Hughes—try any of them.

  The psychological thriller: This subgenre is very big. There’s crime and there’s violence, often within families or small groups, but the stakes are often more mental and emotional than physical. The protagonist may be the victim or the perpetrator or both, but she (it’s more often a she) is a little or a lot unstable, often an unreliable narrator, and the trick is often to uncover just what is really happening to whom. A subgenre of this subgenre is the domestic thriller, which is purely within the family—secrets and lies between a married couple, siblings, parents and children, and so forth. Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train and Megan Abbott’s Dare Me are good examples of psychological thrillers; Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl and B. A. Paris’s Behind Closed Doors specifically of domestic thrillers. And for a devilish twist on the domestic thriller, check out Samantha Downing’s ridiculously entertaining husband-and-wife murder team in My Lovely Wife.

  The traditional and cozy novels: These are also separate subgenres, though with similarities at times. The traditional mystery is in the classic format—a crime, usually murder, disturbs a community; a police officer or amateur sleuth investigates, searching for clues, interviewing witnesses and suspects, and narrowing down the field until the killer is unmasked and the community restored. This is the territory ruled over by the greats such as Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Josephine Tey, Ellery Queen, Ngaio Marsh, and many others. In the cozy, the setting is usually rural or small-town, the violence most often occurs offstage, the sex and profanity are minor to nonexistent, and the investigator is usually an amateur and most often a woman whose interests lie elsewhere—knitting or baking or antiques, say. See Joanne Fluke, Diane Mott Davidson, M.C. Beaton, and Katherine Hall Page.

  The international and spy thrillers: These genres often overlap. The action is on the world stage, something big is at stake, an individual (sometimes a professional, sometimes an ordinary person) or group of individuals must penetrate to the heart of the plan, often against a ticking clock, often against overwhelming odds. The situation is sometimes black-and-white, good versus evil. Other times, there are considerably more shades of gray, with the outcome more ambiguous, the protagonist often disillusioned (if they had any illusions to begin with). Masters at all this are too many to count, but I’ll single out John le Carré, Daniel Silva, Len Deighton, Ken Follett, Alex Berenson, Eric Ambler, and Frederick Forsyth. The political thriller could be grouped in here, too—there is a governmental power struggle or scandal or corruption or conspiracy. The protagonist may be an outsider who unravels it all, or an insider fending off a power grab or worse—assassination, overthrow, a false flag provocation for war—from outside. See Vince Flynn, Brad Thor, David Baldacci, Fletcher Knebel. You could also put in this general category the military and technothriller novels, featuring international military action and potential conflict of all kinds, suffused with a deep knowledge of hardware, tactics, and the military heart and mind. Tom Clancy is the king here, but he has a host of troops, including Dale Brown, Stephen Coonts, Larry Bond, and W.E.B. Griffin.

  We haven’t even touched upon so much else. Historical mysteries and thrillers constitute a rich and varied field that stretches from Steven Saylor’s first-century-BC Rome, to Ellis Peters’s twelfth-century England, to Laura Joh Rowland’s seventeenth-century Japan, to Anne Perry’s Victorian England, to the various twentieth-century wartimes and interwar periods of Jacqueline Winspear, Charles Todd, Philip Kerr, and Alan Furst. There are the medical thrillers of Robin Cook and Michael Crichton; the legal thrillers of John Grisham and Scott Turow; the financial thrillers of Paul Erdman, Christopher Reich, and Stephen Frey; the ancient conspiracy thrillers of Dan Brown; the technological wonders and warnings of writers such as Daniel Suarez, Ernest Cline, Andy Weir, and Crichton again (nano and cloning and AI, oh my!); the romantic suspense of Jayne Ann Krentz, Nora Roberts, Linda Howard, Sandra Brown, and Julie Garwood; the forensic cases of Patricia Cornwell and Kathy Reichs; the environmental and eco-danger territory that has been explored by Carl Hiaasen, Karen Dionne, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, Nevada Barr, and C. J. Box.

  Name a subject, and there’s a subgenre for it. Each of them has its own rules and conventions—and all of them have had authors who have gaily subverted them, combined them, reimagined them, and created something altogether memorable.

  If you were asked to name the most classic murder mystery author of the twentieth century, many of you would immediately think of Agatha Christie—yet Christie was delighted to break the conventions when it suited her. One of S. S. Van Dine’s twenty rules was “There must be but one culprit, no matter how many murders are committed.” In Murder on the Orient Express, however, Christie made everybody the culprit, a whole group of murderers taking revenge on a criminal.

  The number one rule in Elmore Leonard’s ten was “Never open a book with weather”—but Tony Hillerman’s brilliant Listening Woman opens with a 247-word aria of weather, describing the howling wind as it crosses the landscape and swirls around three key characters. It’s incredibly compelling, and draws you into the book just as swiftly as any gunshot or murder.

  One of the primary rules for many of us in publishing when considering a crime novel submission has always been “Someone has to be likable, or else the reader can’t identify.” Then Gone Girl came along and absolutely obliterated that dictum. Tell the truth: Did you actually like either the husband or the wife in Gone Girl? No. How about the girl in The Girl on the Train? No again. Those books seem to have done all right, though—and they forever changed the category of psychological suspense.

  Other writers have mashed the subgenres up. Rex Stout combined the traditional mystery-solving of Nero Wolfe with the hard-boiled private eye narration of his legman, Archie Goodwin. Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad books have taken the police procedural
and imbued it with all the character complexities of psychological suspense (as did P. D. James and Ruth Rendell before her). Carl Hiaasen combines the environmental thriller with comic noir. Lyndsay Faye’s trilogy set in 1840s New York City gives us the police procedural as historical thriller. Tom Clancy took the military thriller, wedded it to the political novel, filled them both up with technology, and the technothriller was born.

  Still other authors have gone a step further and mashed up entire genres—crime fiction with science fiction, horror, or the paranormal. Charlaine Harris mixed mystery with the supernatural and the romance novel to create the Sookie Stackhouse series. Andy Weir’s Artemis blends science fiction with the heist novel. Stephen King’s 11/23/63 is a political thriller by way of time travel. Lauren Beukes’s The Shining Girls does the same for the serial killer novel—that’s how the man finds his victims. One of the most compelling books of recent years, Ben H. Winters’s The Last Policeman, is a police procedural that follows a local detective’s murder investigation under the shadow of an asteroid due to wipe out Earth in six months—a circumstance that changes everything. One of my favorite books, Martha Grimes’s Send Bygraves, depicts a Scotland Yard detective trying to solve an extraordinarily spooky series of small-town murders—in a 108-page illustrated poem. Stuart Turton’s ingenious 2019 novel, The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, depicts a very traditional Christie-like isolated-manor-house-with-many-suspects mystery with one key difference: the protagonist is stuck in an endless time loop, and every day he wakes up in the body of a different suspect. How did the author even think of that? I don’t know, but I’m glad he did.

  Mind you, cross-genre books can be tricky. Those categories exist for a reason. Publishers know how to pitch them, bookstores know where to shelve them, reviewers know if the book’s in their preferred wheelhouse, consumers know if it’s a kind of book they’ve always liked.