How to Write a Mystery

by Mystery Writers of America

  9. Wait, you’re saying this is all true? Every single word? The answer should be yes, but you will run across some dissent on this point. Much has been written about invented dialogue, composite characters, and other artistic liberties. Writers are very good at justifying their own choices, for both good and ill. One writer’s “thought experiment” is another’s horseshit. It probably boils down to this: if you stretch the truth, you’ll be challenged on it. There’s a guy in Peoria who’s been collecting information on your story since the Nixon administration. He’s out there and he’s waiting for you.

  10. My uncle once gave a shoeshine to John Gotti. I have a neighbor who served on the O.J. jury. My mother kept a scrapbook during the Patty Hearst kidnapping. Why don’t you write a book, and we’ll split the profits? One day, someone will come up with a polite answer for this one. Maybe it’s you. If so, will you please get back to me?

  CAROLE BUGGÉ

  Often our best characters come from a place so deep within us, a force so universal, that it feels spooky, uncontrolled, eerie. Let it happen—if you have an experience like that, consider yourself lucky. More often, I suppose, characters are a hodgepodge of traits from people we know or have seen—or even other fictional characters. We imbue them with life by giving them the inner life of our own unconscious or conscious mind.…

  Setting in a mystery story is never just setting. It is mood, foreshadowing, suspense, and anticipation—in some stories it is virtually a character in its own right.…

  A lot of people seem to think that writing dialogue is a gift; either you have it or you don’t. I disagree. I believe that perhaps more than any other skill in writing, you learn to create good dialogue exactly the same way you get to Carnegie Hall: practice, practice, practice.…

  Anyone who says they find writing plots easy is either a liar or a fool. It’s gritty, sweaty work, and it’s what separates the men from the boys, the women from the girls, and the professionals from the wannabes. It goes by other names—structure, story, narrative through-line, story line—but it is the single most important element in the commercial (and often critical) success of a book in the crime genre. To paraphrase Vince Lombardi, plot is not the most important thing, it’s the only thing. All the pretty prose, marvelous metaphors, and captivating characters in the world will not make up for the lack of a good story.

  The Writing

  Lyndsay Faye—On Style

  The writer’s voice, or, cooking with cadence, rhythm, and audacity.

  Jeffery Deaver—Always Outline!

  The why and the how of planning it out first.

  Lee Child—Never Outline!

  The argument for spontaneity.

  Laurie R. King—The Art of the Rewrite

  Turning your raw first draft into a clear, compelling story.

  Deborah Crombie—Plot and the Bones of a Mystery

  Bringing together all the elements of your novel so it stands strong.

  Frankie Y. Bailey—Diversity in Crime Fiction

  Enriching your novel by writing characters, not categories.

  Allison Brennan—The Protagonist

  Your hero: the one we relate to, the one who drives the story.

  T. Jefferson Parker—The Villain of the Piece

  Your hero in reverse: the forces that create a vivid villain.

  Craig Johnson—Supporting Characters

  The chorus of voices that backs up your protagonist.

  Greg Herren—Writing the Talk

  Dialogue that sounds true, reveals character, and draws in the reader.

  William Kent Krueger—Setting

  Your most versatile element: backdrop, player, and the all-pervading sense of place.

  Catriona McPherson—Humor in Crime Fiction

  Funny mystery, or mystery with fun: why, how, and when to stop?

  Caroline & Charles Todd—Writing in Partnership

  Two writers with one voice: how we learned to collaborate.

  Max Allan Collins—Tie-Ins and Continuing a Character

  Playing in someone else’s sandbox.

  On Style

  The writer’s voice, or, cooking with cadence, rhythm, and audacity.

  LYNDSAY FAYE

  Why Style?

  To someone who doesn’t read genre fiction, the notion of authorial voice in an airport paperback might seem superfluous. Aren’t the simple mechanics of clues and deductions paramount? Why dither around with style when a mystery novel depends on plot twists? Isn’t that like asking whether any one airport doughnut tastes significantly different from another airport doughnut? Aren’t they equally formulaic to assemble and easy to swallow?

  Devotees of both mystery novels and doughnuts know different. Take this hapless airport noob, lock him in a kitchen with whole milk, active yeast, sugar, flour, eggs, butter, and fry oil, and ask him to make something even approximating the quality of ten identical airport doughnuts. Then stick the chucklehead in an office with a laptop, relevant reference books, and a Wi-Fi password, and request he produce a bestselling police procedural. He’ll have about the same amount of luck. It looks easy; it’s the hardest thing in the world. We know that there are myriad doughnut flavors—and as many styles in the mystery genre as there are mystery authors writing them.

  Naturally, the subtle hints and bald thrills sprinkled throughout your plot are crucial, the same way flour is essential in a doughnut. But try making a doughnut without sugar (or honey, or molasses, or erythritol if you’re feeling particularly unhinged). You’re going to have a lousy doughnut. Narrative voice is equally crucial. Writers can mistakenly suppose they are born with their own innate sense of style—doesn’t that just mean the way I naturally sound? And sure, if you’re the Mozart of historical thrillers, then please hang an oil portrait of yourself above your Carrara marble desk with my blessing. But let’s assume instead what is far likelier: you’re the Julia Child of the legal suspense novel world, and like Julia you published your first book when you were thirty-nine, after a great deal of practice.

  It could take a thousand tries to perfect your doughnut recipe. It could take the proverbial ten thousand hours to find your voice. But both are achievable goals if you have passion for your craft.

  If you take one piece of advice from my letter of encouragement, let it be this: You will find your personal voice only by writing. You can read style guides; you can sleep with them under your pillow for osmosis, commit genocide on adverbs and emulate your literary heroes. Your innate self, that lyrical rhythm that stamps your brainprint on your work, will emerge as you type and sweat and, yes, bleed on the page. I’ve been recognized as unmistakably myself in works that did not have my name on them at all, by people who heard my voice in them. But I’ve also, in the course of more than twenty years, written in the literal multiple millions of words.

  Finding your style takes time. If your very first doughnut was the airiest confection in the history of baking, that, my friend, was a fluke. But here are some suggestions to guide you along the way.

  Authorial Voice versus Character Voice

  Your authorial voice, as mentioned, is the watermark by which we infer, Aha! You and none other wrote this book, the way you would recognize your mom’s voice and speech pattern versus your boyfriend’s on the phone. “I just love Laura Lippman novels” you might say, as opposed to “I loved What the Dead Know.” Or “My dream is to sound like Mary Higgins Clark,” rather than “My dream is to create an updated version of Where Are the Children?” Once you’ve developed a voice, it’s going to be vanishingly close to impossible for you to shake it. The science of writing style is called stylometry, and a computer program called the Java Graphical Authorship Attribution Program provided weighty evidence that J. K. Rowling wrote The Cuckoo’s Calling and christened herself with some shiny new initials.

  Character voice, on the other hand, is the way your imaginary friends sound. While I intend to focus on authorial voice as the more ephemeral of the two—I mean, sweet baby in a
manger, we all know that our characters need to sound distinct—there are many ways to enliven voices if you feel like you aren’t writing a three-dimensional being. Such as:

  Backstory: Every character needs a backstory, no matter how minor they are. Well, that’s not quite true. The dude pumping gas with a cigarette in his mouth while your protagonist flees to Tijuana can get away with saying “I didn’t know anyone listened to the Stone Temple Pilots anymore” when your hero pays up, and we don’t have to know anything about that guy’s relationship with his invalid mom.

  Specificity: The reason I pulled off the above is because I actually used highly specific details to give Gas Station Man a voice without a backstory; he’s careless about smoking around petroleum products but a snob about music, and a bit of a tool. He’s probably a drummer. He isn’t deep into customer service, so he likely hates his dead-end job. But for anyone with around five to ten lines or more, it’s your job to know the basics of where they came from.

  Observation: Listen to the real humans around you, especially ones with distinct voices, and ask what makes their tones so memorable. As a professional actor for ten years, I was trained to do this so I could craft onstage characters; on-page characters are made richer by the identical process of observation and analysis. Take notes. What sort of slang did that barista use, and how? Are your stepdad’s sentences short or rambling? Pointed or poetic? The school of human culture is much cheaper than a graduate degree: make use of it.

  Pastiche, Fan Fiction, and the Sincerest Form of Flattery

  Let’s say I was completely mistaken and you do want to update Mary Higgins Clark’s classic Where Are the Children? You have contractual permission from her estate and a deal with a publisher and you’re raring to go. Or perhaps you want to write a Charles Dickens riff and have no fear of copyright law. Is it possible to emulate other people’s styles to any degree of accuracy?

  Yes. My first novel, Dust and Shadow, is a Sherlock Holmes pastiche pitting him against Jack the Ripper, and I’ve since written eighteen published short stories about Holmes. And this section is applicable to more than just imitative works; if you write historical fiction, you’ll want to sound historical, just as we want our cops to sound like police officers and the wizards in our mystery-fantasy crossover stories to sound like real-life wizards.

  There is a difference between what we think a heightened style sounds like and the way people actually talk. Both need to be incorporated for your Regency laundress heroine to work. Taking Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as my example, since I know him best, plentiful Sherlock Holmes stories written by modern authors assume that because the setting is Victorian, every sentence needs to sound relentlessly nineteenth century. They are in error. Granted, sometimes Sherlock Holmes talks like this:

  “My dear fellow,” said Sherlock Holmes as we sat on either side of the fire in his lodgings at Baker Street, “life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peer in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outre results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.”

  —“A Case of Identity”

  That there paragraph was a sublime invocation of the complexity of London life, an ode to the bizarre, a prose poem, the declamation of a fully justified egotist, an opinion confided to a trusted companion, and a glancing reference to Shakespeare’s Hamlet—all at once. It was, in short, a lot. However, sometimes Sherlock Holmes sounds like this:

  “I’ll be back some time, Watson,” said he, and vanished into the night.

  —“The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton”

  Novices weaken their manuscripts by attempting to impose a particular style on each and every sentence, especially when emulating someone else or an era not their own. The reader’s eye can’t process too much embellishment; your already sweet doughnut has now been drowned in syrup. Conversely, being too timid with style, fearing criticism for attempting adventurous prose, will result in a baked good resembling a hockey puck. A short, unadorned statement will put a period on a rhapsodic passage better than any punctuation. And after a paragraph of clean, efficient exposition, we want to feel the sharp nails of the wind’s fingertips brushing our necks.

  Be audacious with your style. Be simple with your sentences, too. Just don’t attempt to do either one constantly.

  Anachronism: Unless you’re Hilary Mantel and doing it on purpose throughout, don’t do it. Simply consult an etymology site if you’re unsure, et voilà, your circa-1832 grandmother won’t describe mauve drapes (mauve as an artificial dye was invented in 1859).

  Regionalism in place and time: There are as many versions of English as there are places it’s spoken, and when mastering a foreign style, the devil is in the details. Narrator John Watson would far more likely write the attributive “said he” than “he said.” A Brit would say “They took him to hospital,” not “They took him to the hospital.” A detective might use words like “vic” or “perp,” but that depends on the person and the setting. Study texts from the place or time in question, write down the metaphors used, note linguistic quirks. This sort of research is hard work, a delightful pastime, and—once again—about as costly as a walk in the park.

  Jargon: It matters. We want people who are talking shop to sound authentic. If you’re a retired Tennessee civil rights lawyer writing a thriller from the POV of an active Tennessee civil rights lawyer, then hot diggity, you’re not going to have to work very hard. If I myself were embodying that narrator, conversely, it’s my job to read every book I can get my hands on written by Tennessee civil rights lawyers, and take heed accordingly.

  Suppose you have no wish to directly imitate anyone. You want to create characters based on your personal history and passions? That’s absolutely marvelous. But meanwhile, there is nothing wrong with trying on a beloved author’s style like a designer coat and seeing where it gets you, or with being honest about hero worship. It gives you a starting point; it gives you a launchpad. There are going to be people who urge you to be pure, create your voice from some mystical combination of the void and your life experience. This is, to put it mildly, ripe horse pucky. Every novel written in the modern day is in some fashion inspired by a novel written in the past.

  If you’d never read a novel or short story and adored it, why on earth would you want to do something as eviscerating as write one? The point is, the training wheels are going to come off at some point. They have to—eventually it’s your heart that needs to be put through the meat grinder and smeared on your keyboard. But if you need that initial blueprint while you learn what works for you and what doesn’t? Take it, and take it with pride.

  As for the authors who might inspire you and whether they mind being imitated, it is their greatest privilege to galvanize a fledgling writer. If it isn’t, then they are scurrilous cads, and ought to be writing apology notes to every novelist who ever lit a fire in their own souls.

  On Music, Rhythm, and Humor

  It’s impossible for me to talk about style without talking about musicality and sense of humor. Both are supposed to be tied to your nature—you’re either born funny or not, born with a sense of pitch or not. They’re also supposed to be tied to your nurture—you’re more musical if there was a piano in the house, you’re funnier if you were forced to make people laugh so they wouldn’t waterboard you in the toilet again.

  Both are actually innate to every human on the planet, albeit in widely divergent forms. Both can also be honed.

  When I talk about the musicality of style, I mean that both music and personal voice are based in sound and rhythm. Sentences vary in length, words can be mellifluous or grat
ing, consonants and vowels can blend or clash, and you can hear some sort of tune in every sentence, even if they’re not all Top Forty hits. Take a pair of sentences I wrote for copper-star policeman Timothy Wilde (sentences I still joke about, because it was my second novel and I peaked too soon):

  Hope, I’ve discovered, is a sad nuisance. Hope is a horse with a broken leg.

  —The Gods of Gotham

  Timothy is a laconic little pessimist when he’s not being an incurable romantic. These sentences, though, illustrate what I mean by musical rhythm and tone. The first flows in an easy, conversational way. If you broke it into emphases, it might look like:

  ba, ba da-da-da, ba da da da da

  It’s not particularly memorable and serves to launch what comes after it. But the second sentence is extremely tuneful:

  ba da da da ba da da da da

  In fact, it’s not far off from the ubiquitous “shave and a haircut, two bits” knock, is nearly identical to the verse beat of “Prince Ali” from the Alan Menken Disney classic Aladdin, and even alliterates with the symbiotic one-syllable words hope and horse. I’ll never write a better set of independent clauses, so they make me furious.

  Style is musical, and musicality can be learned, or at least improved. What kind of music do you enjoy listening to? Are you a Schubert fan? Radiohead? Carrie Underwood? There’s no right or wrong answer, and isn’t that glorious? Why do those sounds appeal to you? Are there others you dislike, and why might that be? What song lyrics do you admire most? Listen to some Elton John before writing your circa-1975 mob drama, or scour YouTube for basic music tutorials and pop music theory demonstrations. Following this advice, like my previous, is every bit as expensive as zoning out to your favorite band, be it the Beatles or They Might Be Giants.