How to Write a Mystery

by Mystery Writers of America

  The primary challenge in writing noir is the ability to let go—to allow your characters, through their own actions, to dig themselves deeper into the holes they’ve created, and to allow them to fail—and to understand that a dour narrative arc can still be engaging, emotionally challenging, and even more realistic than the tidy, well-plotted narratives we’ve come to expect from mainstream cinema and literary blockbusters. Noir is also not always about bad people doing even worse things—it’s often stories about inherently good people tempted by evil, or innocents dragged into the darkness by forces outside of their control—like Burt Lancaster’s murdered ex-boxer in Robert Siodmak’s The Killers, based on Ernest Hemingway’s short story.

  Noir is not a place for happy endings or convenient resolutions. It feeds off the gray areas and darkness in the world, and man’s (and woman’s) primal urges, whether they be sexual or other vices—think of Frank and Cora as two of the three points on the love triangle that’s central to James M. Cain’s classic noir novel The Postman Always Rings Twice. When writing noir, the most impactful character—though not always the protagonist—is the presumed innocent, the normal person going about their daily life who finds themselves yanked into something big and dangerous. Suddenly out of sorts, the personal imbalance leads our character to make rash decisions, and the consequences of these choices help shape who the character will become. Queenpin, the noir masterpiece by Megan Abbott, is a prime example of the trope: we follow a young woman’s slow descent into the underworld, watching as she gradually becomes an expert at the game of deception and double-crosses, unseating her mentor and boss. The novel deftly flips noir tropes, because of Abbott’s own expertise in noir, and serves as a showcase in how to invert the elements of noir while still holding true to the general tone and feeling that noir requires—a dark, despondent, and desperate energy that only increases as the characters spin out of control, unable to hang on, but unsure of what happens if they don’t.

  The best advice I can share with someone looking to write a true noir, not just a crime novel and not just a hard-boiled tale featuring bad people, is to immerse yourself in film noir and the noir works of past masters like Cain, Thompson, Hughes, and modern neonoir believers like Abbott, James Ellroy, and Scott Phillips. On a technical level, as we’ve discussed, noir plots follow the same arc—things are okay, temptation arises, temptation is taken, bad decisions are made, things get worse, things get out of control, the end. It’s not a clean, three-act structure and it’s certainly not one that concludes with everyone sated and every thread tucked in its place. Noir is messy, noir is dark, noir is sexy and painful, and noir is real. In a dangerous world that’s more gray than black or white, noirs reflect our darkness—creating an eerie beauty that can arise only when all hope is gone.

  HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN

  You stare at your blank page. You type Chapter 1, simply so there’s something there. You think: I have no idea what comes next. You reassure yourself it’s fine, there are many other people who write without an outline. But how do they do that? Here’s the secret. Writing “without an outline” is not really quite true. You do have an outline. You’re writing a book. A book is a story. A story has a format and an arc: beginning, middle, end. A story has a character you care about, with an escalatingly high-stakes problem that demands to be solved. The good guys should win, and the bad guys get what’s coming to them. And in the end you want some form of justice, and to change the reader’s world. And what makes it even more logical, you’re writing a certain genre: a mystery, a thriller, a police procedural. When you type the words “Chapter 1,” even though you don’t know what will happen in the plot, you know what kind of book you’re writing. With that crucial decision, you’re making a contract with yourself, and with your readers, that a specific type of book is on the way. Now. Tell that story in the way it needs to be told.

  There’s a moment in the writing process when you wonder: Am I finished? Is this manuscript as powerful and polished as it can be? Then you worry: How can I be sure? Try this random walk method of editing. Pick a page of your manuscript, any page at all. Remember, even though you’re writing a whole book, each page must be a perfect part of your perfect whole, and that means each individual page must work. So, page by random page, use this quick checklist of what to look for: First, is something happening? Is there forward motion? Or are you reading an entire page of people yammering, or someone mulling something over, or an elaborate description of turning left on Maple Street then turning right on Elm? Next, check the page for intent and motivation. Ask yourself: Why is this scene here? What work does it do? Does it advance the plot or reveal a secret or develop the character’s conflict? Do your individual characters behave the way a real person would behave? Are they true to themselves? Then examine your technique. Too many dashes? Repeated words or clichés? And finally, look for poetry. Does the rhythm of the sentences change and flow? Is your writing as seamlessly naturally beautiful and specific and strong as it can be?

  And here’s a final secret. I always know when I’m finished, because I forget I’m editing, and realize I’m simply reading the story. It’s not my story anymore, it’s its own story. And then I think—done.

  Crossing the Genres

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

  CHARLAINE HARRIS

  Though the blending of mystery with fantasy, science fiction, and/or romance is done quite often now, this multipronged approach was rare and held in deep suspicion only a couple of decades ago.

  Mystery writers were warned about a list of things they must not do:

  Don’t kill a child.

  Don’t kill a cat.

  Don’t let the detective solve the mystery by supernatural means, and don’t let your sleuth, professional or amateur, use supernatural means in the investigation of the crime. If there was a supernatural clue, perhaps delivered in a séance, there had to be a human agency behind it… à la Scooby-Doo.

  If a writer did use supernatural elements, perhaps the appearance of a ghost or a creature that rose from the dead, the book was slotted into the category of “woo-woo.” (Like the sound a spirit makes, “Wooooo… wooooo.”) If you wanted to be a serious mystery writer and keep the respect of your peers, that categorization was something to be avoided at all costs.

  But writers will be writers. Our minds don’t stand still but keep freewheeling through the universes in our heads. It’s possible to love mysteries and yet get tired of (or bored with) the rules, whether they’re Father Knox’s Ten Commandments or S. S. Van Dine’s Twenty Rules. There may come a day when you want to keep yourself entertained by introducing a vampire to the mix of characters—or a sorcerer, or a talking cow.

  Though this may sound like spontaneous fun—a lot of us write to keep ourselves entertained—you had better put in some serious work beforehand if you want to make other genres blend harmoniously and richly with your mystery.

  Don’t experiment in adding elements to the mystery genre because you think the supplemental genre is “hot” right now. That way lies madness… or more usually, a lot of mediocre books. When I first decided to take the plunge, there was no such field as “urban fantasy.” And my first cross-genre book was a hard sell; my excellent agent worked on selling Dead until Dark for two years. (Thirty-second printing now—neener neener neener.) Pushing a cross-genre book these days is much easier, as long as you’ve taken a fresh approach.

  Decide on mixing genres because you have read and respected books that are not mysteries. And you should have read a lot of them, whether westerns or sci-fi, horror or romance.

  Especially when it comes to the romance genre. Don’t assume that you understand the rhythm of a romance novel unless you’ve read ten, or twenty. The course of true love never runs smooth, and you should know where the bumps in the road are going to make their presence known. There are numerous specialized romance niches, too: Amish love stories, gay love stories, men who fall in love wit
h women who have babies by other men. The romance field has embraced the paranormal world with fervor. Lions and tigers and bears (oh my!) get together and get it on. Lonely vampires meet their human mates. Aliens abduct human women all the time, and find them irresistible.

  No matter the genre, do your homework. If you’ve become interested in fantasy, watching a few vampire movies is not enough research. You need to familiarize yourself with the lore behind the mythic creature, examine that lore, make it your own. For example, in their earliest written adventures, vampires could not cross running water. In these days of cars and buses, you’d better think about that particular bit of myth very carefully. That’s not to say you have to follow all traditions blindly—not at all. But if all your vampires love to swim, you’d better have an explanation ready.

  If you’re fascinated by hard-wired science fiction, and you decide to set your whodunit on Mars, learn everything about Mars you can. If your characters are humans, they have to have some credible way to survive in the Martian environment. Create your own history of the Mars colonization, the culture that grew there afterward, the way people must live to make the new planet work. Industries? Banking? Justice system? Go in depth to make this world believable, or there’s no point at all in setting your book there. The cool factor lies not in setting a mystery on another planet, but in making it the only place your story could have had the same ending.

  Just a note: You can go overboard on planning your world and its society. I knew a woman who’d worked on her world for five years… and hadn’t written a word of the book all this world-building was for.

  I am often asked what the next big thing will be in the bookselling world. The writers who ask this want to jump on a preexisting bandwagon. I don’t scorn any way a writer gets published. If you can see a wave cresting and you can produce a great book that has all the trademarks that are popular, good for you. In general, books that are written to cash in on a trend are not as successful (in the sense of being fresh and original) as the books that started that trend, which were books written from the heart. This is as true in cross-genre novels as it is anywhere else.

  To promote what you’ve written, you’ll need to attend conventions you’ve never been to before. Science fiction conventions are different from mystery conventions. Romance conventions are different, too. If you have a low tolerance for cosplay and filking, or if you don’t believe in highly organized writing panels or discussions about alien sex and three-ways, at first such gatherings may strike you as strange or ludicrous. Get over it. Mystery conventions will feel like the staid middle-aged ladies who wear pearls and pumps in comparison.

  So: Love the genre you want to include in your work. Learn the lore. Do your due diligence. Create your own bandwagon.

  I just wrote some books set in an alternate-history America, specifically in the west. I then found out there was a whole subgenre called weird west. And that was what I was writing. And I was welcomed into a fold I hadn’t even known existed. I felt like the first person landing on a strange planet who gets off the spaceship to discover there are already footprints in the dust.

  And finally… know where you’re going. Are you writing a mystery that has elements of the weird and eerie? Are you writing horror with an underlying puzzle? Are you working on a romance where sparks fly up while an investigation goes on? Are you examining another world via a trip through its criminal justice system? You should have a fixed goal. It’ll help you enjoy the daily fun house that’s the life of a novelist.

  KATE WHITE

  An agent friend of mine, who once worked as an executive at a major publishing house, says she’s always blown away by people who decide one day that they want to become an author but think it’s just something you do, rather than something you have to learn how to do. “People who’ve had success in one field,” she explains, “like law, or medicine, or true crime writing, often have a hard time accepting that if they’re going to write fiction, it means starting at zero again. They don’t think they should have to.” But they do.

  The Historical Mystery

  Time, place, and the past.

  JACQUELINE WINSPEAR

  I’m always amused when I see the novels of Jane Austen included in lists of “best historical fiction,” because Jane Austen was not a writer of historical fiction. If she were she would have been writing stories set in the Stone Age, Medieval Britain, or the reign of Elizabeth I. Jane Austen was a popular contemporary novelist with a sharp eye and a dagger wit who used her insightful observations of others to inform her novels, peppering the narrative with colorful characters, revealing dialogue, and insightful social detail. She just happened to have lived a couple of centuries ago, leading us to confuse the history and the writer—yet Jane’s skills as a social commentator and expert storyteller give us a good starting point when discussing the historical mystery. The best historical mysteries are written as if the author were of the time, not simply looking back.

  The historical mystery is a narrative form that brings together the historical novel and the mystery novel. Both are successful literary traditions in their own right, offering the writer a broad landscape for developing an engrossing story that blends a great idea with a personal interest in a given historical era—most writers of fiction craft their stories based around something they’ve observed, overheard, read about, or experienced that has given rise to a certain curiosity that I think of as the “kindling” for their story. That kindling, the raw material with which writers of historical mystery start the fire, is no good on its own. It needs fuel, a match and a good blast of air to get it going. Research gives us the fuel, elevating our characters and a sense of time and place with detail, while at the same time underlining the integrity of the narrative—and if there’s one thing that readers of historical fiction look for and want to feel as they read, it’s a certain underpinning of authenticity in the story. Slap a Band-Aid™ on a character at a time before adhesive dressings were commercially available and no matter how many dates you might have right, someone will let you know about the one incorrect detail. In addition, getting that snippet right gives you a golden opportunity to enhance a sense of time and place with a description of dressing a wound in, say, the 1800s. As writer Rhys Bowen says, “The most important thing with any historical mystery is to get everything right.”

  Mastering the “historical” is crucial, because if you want to write mystery and you have a sense of what it means to weave a compelling plot, get the details right and you’re home and dry. Oh, but the devil is in those details, and a successful historical mystery depends on engaging, realistic characters along with a balanced amount of period detail—and that includes dialogue—drawn together in a plot that is not only believable but reflects the era. In other words, your job is to render the reader a curious, attentive, excited, and emotionally involved time-traveler.

  As writers, we can base the research component of our fire upon what marketing people call “primary” and “secondary” research—primary we do ourselves, and secondary is the work of others, perhaps a book or an academic paper. My primary research has involved walking miles across London to trace the path of a killer in a story I was working on. I have pored over old maps to get details right, and though the city has changed dramatically, I have learned that much can be gleaned from remembering to look up as I make my way along the street—I might be alongside a modern retail outlet, but if I cast my eyes above the plate-glass windows, I can see the telling architectural details from, say, the 1930s. Primary research might involve speaking to people who lived through a certain era, whereas secondary research could be listening to audio of people recounting their experiences during that same time period. Whether in print or through headphones, I am immersing myself in an authenticity of locution. My grandmother would not have said, “See you in a minute.” She would have said, “I will see you presently.” Small details, yes, but all building blocks of character, time, and place. If you’ve only ever used a cell
phone, it would behoove you to get an old or reproduced telephone with a dial and a receiver and feel what it is like to try to make a call in an emergency. Feel what it’s like if you have found that dead body and you want to call the police, or to try to stop a crime happening—and you’re dialing away and it seems to be taking ages… yet perhaps not really, because you don’t expect a faster service; after all, you’re in 1925 and you’re used to this type of telephone. And if the telephone hasn’t yet been invented, feel the terror when you cannot summon help and there is a dark stranger lurking outside the back door.

  If your story isn’t set within living memory and you cannot find your “live” research subjects, then you must go to the research of the day—novels, poems, old paintings, and photographs. Author Laurie R. King suggests, “Diaries and letters give a better picture of actual life and language than memoirs and biographies, because they’re immediate.” With mystery, especially, we want that immediacy, and certainly it can be gained from our own experience, but with a caveat—you must remember the old adage “The past is another country.”

  Imagine this: It is a few days before Christmas in late 1970s England, on a dark, clear, freezing-cold evening. I can feel my cheeks glowing and my fingertips getting colder inside my gloves. I am losing the feeling in my toes, but I am happy—thrilled and excited by the season and this evening. I am twenty-three years old and warm inside, because I am walking along the street with my boyfriend, an army officer who has just arrived home on leave from a war zone. We are on our way to a gathering in the town, the community coming together to sing carols and drink a hot toddy or two while sharing the blessings of the season. We are laughing, joking, at last together after months apart, when a car backfires on the street as it passes. In a split second I am flat on my face behind a parked car and he is holding me down to protect me. I can feel his whole body shaking, and in that moment I realize that he is no longer with me on the way to a cheery holiday sing-along but guiding his men as they patrol a street where they could be cut down and killed in an instant. His automatic reaction has shocked me into the world he keeps from me with his cheeky smile and wicked sense of humor. I will remember this moment, and several decades later, long after we have both moved on in life and wouldn’t know each other if we passed in the street, I will dredge it up from my past to get inside the head of a character who has been to war—though his soldiering was during a different time and a different conflict.