How to Write a Mystery

by Mystery Writers of America

  So, now you have this messy but fun chart. What do you do with it?

  Taking the incidents from the beginnings of the columns on the chart and interweaving them allows me to block out the first few chapters of a book. From there I can see how things are developing, what I’ve already covered, what needs to happen next. This is simpler, but just as applicable, for a single narrative viewpoint. It also lets you see if you’ve left out points that are necessary for the logical conclusion of your story. If, for instance, in order to solve the crime, your detective must learn early in the story that one suspect drinks only black coffee, you will be sure to include that.

  I write in filmic, discrete scenes—a slice of action, then a break—which is one device that can boost your story’s narrative tension. If a scene ends on a high point, the reader will want to turn the page to see what happens next. Narrative tension, however, is not the same as plot—it is a means of pulling your reader through your plot. Think of it as your novel’s connective tissue, holding the bones together. Narrative tension is of course produced by your big questions, who did it or why, but it can also be generated by many small things. Will your character be late for an important meeting? Will a lost dog come home? Will Reacher find a toothbrush and a change of clothes?

  But what if you’ve done all of these things and you reach the middle of the book and you’re still… stuck? It’s easy to write yourself into a box where the ideas you’ve developed about your story seem like the only options. It helps to remind yourself that this is fiction, not reality, and that it’s your story. Play a little game of “What if? And then?” with yourself. Go back to the major turning points in your story, and sketch out a different alternative. Maybe there was another reason the baby was left on the church doorstep, or maybe your original murderer is not the culprit at all. Just allowing yourself to push the boundaries you yourself have set can open things up and get your story going again.

  And when all else fails, remember to raise the stakes! Readers don’t read mysteries just for the puzzle. You have to give them emotional engagement. How does the solution of the case impact your protagonist, and what are the consequences for your characters? If your reader stays up until the wee hours to finish your book, it will be because they care what happens to the characters you’ve created.

  So get out your map, and remember to enjoy the journey through your novel! Because if you are having fun, you can be sure that your reader will be, too.

  TIM MALEENY

  A great plot isn’t propelled by things going as planned, but by things going horribly wrong.

  Great opening lines, like great stories, don’t start at the beginning. They start in the middle of the action and dare the reader to catch up.

  Suspense is what happens when ordinary people find themselves in extraordinary circumstances.

  Love your characters, but treat them like dirt.

  ROBERT LOPRESTI

  When a new friend learned that I have a full-time job and also write fiction, she asked: “How do you find the time?” I gave my usual answer with a shrug: “If you write a page a day, at the end of the year you have a novel.” That does not mean you have a first draft ready to send to a publisher. My stuff tends to go through at least five edits, and more often ten. Because I know that no sentence in my first draft is likely to go through the editing process unscathed, I give myself permission to write in a rush, dumping words from my brain onto the keyboard as fast as possible. As bestselling mystery writer Harlan Coben said: “You can fix bad pages. You can’t fix no pages.”…

  Should I outline my book or fly by the seat of my trousers? I’d like to offer an alternative. I call it the Rising Island method. Picture a mountain range stretching for many miles, but all of it underwater. Now the mountains start to rise. A few peaks start breaking the surface, appearing as isolated islands. Time passes and more islands break the surface, and they start to link together until finally the entire mountain range is visible. The mountain range is my novel. The highest peaks are the parts I know best. I start by writing the book’s high points (ha ha) and each new chapter teaches me about the sections still to come. The islands slowly begin to show their shapes.…

  If you write fiction you have probably considered the motives of your characters. But what about the motives of your readers? If you want them to finish your book—and especially if you want them to buy your next one—you have to make them care about what you write. You have to give them a reason to turn the page. You have a lot of competition for their attention.

  Diversity in Crime Fiction

  Enriching your novel by writing characters, not categories.

  FRANKIE Y. BAILEY

  Let me be candid: If you write crime fiction with diverse characters, you are opening yourself up to criticism. Sooner or later you are going to put your foot in it, and someone—a reader or another writer—will call you out on what you “got wrong.” This complaint may not be about a factual error. Instead, you may be accused of being tone-deaf or too lacking in understanding to provide nuance or cultural context. This may happen even if you have done your research.

  As writers, we find “doing diversity” challenging, because our desire to have control over our characters and to tell a good story doesn’t make us omniscient. Neither are we above the fray. We have our own agendas. We bring all of our conscious and unconscious (implicit) biases, all our irrational beliefs and feelings about other people, to our work. Writers—good writers—are curious about other people and their lives. But we may still feel superior or uneasy or repulsed. We make choices about whether we will deal with our feelings on the page or ignore the existence of the people we find problematic.

  You may consider the whole “diversity thing” a made-up, left-leaning political issue that creates unnecessary tension between groups. In that case, you are probably going to skip the rest of this chapter.

  On the other hand, you could accept the challenge of meeting the issue head-on and working with other writers to normalize fiction that reflects the world we live in. What I am inviting you to do in this chapter is to look around you and listen and think about how you might be more inclusive in your fiction. If nothing else, it may get you out of any writing rut that you’ve fallen into.

  With that said, let’s turn to some suggestions about how you might approach the issue of diversity. Diversity takes many forms—including race/ethnicity, nationality, gender, class, sexuality, age, physical and mental status, education, religion, politics, region of the country, and military status. Often, we stumble even trying to find the language to describe these differences.

  But when we write, we have characters, setting, and a plot. We need to weave aspects of diversity through all of these elements of our stories.

  Intersections

  Humans are complex creatures. No single inherent or acquired trait defines us. We are the products of nature and nurture. How people view us and how we view other people can be understood from the perspective of what law professor Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw describes as “intersectionality.” That is, how we interact with and perceive one another is based on overlapping systems of privilege and oppression. Concepts such as race, gender, and class are socially constructed in the course of human interaction. However, such concepts both reflect and sustain the power of dominant groups to ascribe traits to others from a position of privilege. In our society, to describe someone as “a white, suburban wife and mother” speaks not only to demographic categories but to assumptions that those categories have meaning. That meaning is in contrast to “a Black single mother from an inner-city neighborhood.” Although the two women are both mothers, one is viewed through the lens of her “whiteness” and her suburban setting, the other through the lens of her “mother-headed household” in a neighborhood that was once known as a “ghetto” but is now described in coded language. Most of us have stereotypes about who these two women are and how they live. We have a problem in real life and in our fiction when these ster
eotypes lead us to view people who are unlike ourselves as an unknowable and threatening “other,” as “them” or “those people.”

  That is the challenge we face as writers. Crime fiction is one of the genres—along with historical fiction, horror fiction, sci-fi, inspirational fiction, and romance—that has much to say about how we interact with one another. As writers, we explore issues of “crime” and “justice,” both slippery concepts dependent on time and place. Recognizing diversity and normalizing inclusiveness in our works may be a difficult process for some of us. We can begin by simply embracing awareness.

  Characters and Subgenres

  When you begin to populate your short story or novel, there will be some obvious characters based on the subgenre. Characters in a cozy novel will differ from those in a hard-boiled noir or police procedural or thriller. In the 1920s and ’30s, during the “golden age” of the classic detective story and the birth of tough-guy crime fiction, the characters who were not white males or females were often walk-ons. These characters were so minor that they were often nameless. They were “invisible” as they performed a function such as serving a meal. They also sometimes appeared as thugs and criminals. Sometimes these minor characters were not physically present as individuals. Instead, their group was referenced in the form of an artifact or a turn of phrase. For example, in Agatha Christie’s 1939 novel, now known as And Then There Were None, all the characters are white. But this is the third title the book has carried: the first two referenced racially offensive children’s rhymes. The first edition of the book also contained a racial slur used by two of the characters to refer to something suspicious. Of course, Christie was not alone. See Raymond Chandler and other hard-boiled writers. During this era, blackface was still acceptable in films, and characters casually thanked one another for being generous, gracious, or honorable by saying “That’s mighty white of you.”

  This is our legacy, but you now have options as you cast your short story or book. We’ll get to setting and plot in a moment, but let’s begin with subgenre. If this is your first venture into the idea of diversity, no one expects you to jump in feet first. In fact, that would probably be a risky thing to do. But you can take a cue from television shows and movies and introduce diverse characters in secondary roles—the guy in the forensics lab, the judge who presides over the trial, the neighbor who drops by, the math teacher—and in bystander roles—a woman on the subway reading a book, the man pushing a baby in a carriage, the student putting up a poster about a rally, the cabdriver who suggests a restaurant.

  To come up with your cast of characters, you can figuratively and literally draw from a hat. Suppose you’re writing a cozy, and your protagonist is a dog walker. You feel comfortable writing from her point of view. She is like you and the people you know well. Fine. But she has clients who pay her to walk their dogs. Who are these people? Toss some diversity options into your hat. Yes, I do mean this literally. Write some casting options down on slips of papers. Put the slips of paper in a container, shake, and draw out one at a time.

  I know this sounds like a less than elegant approach to incorporating diversity. But it is easy, and it will get you started. Or keep you going when you start to overthink this and panic.

  Okay, you pull out one of the slips. A Black male. You don’t know anything else about him yet, but you do know that he has a dog and it needs walking. You also know that stereotypes are the death of good fiction. So, maybe he’s at home but he doesn’t have the time or ability to walk his dog during the day. Maybe he has a home office and is seeing his tax clients, or he’s writing his tell-all memoir, or he has a chronic illness. Maybe all your protagonist knows is that he isn’t at home during the day, but she doesn’t know what he does. If your dog walker’s clients are among the victims or suspects, then you will need to learn more about him. But you might also want to think about his dog. Certain breeds of dogs are stigmatized, too. For example, a pit bull or Rottweiler. In books, these dogs are often the bad guy’s dog of choice. But maybe your character is like the bodybuilder who was featured in a news article talking about the Chihuahuas that he loves—since a Chihuahua saved his life. Maybe your protagonist’s Black rap musician client has a collie because he grew up watching Lassie. Or, if he does own a Rottweiler, is his dog vicious, or a well-socialized canine that he adopted as a puppy?

  Remember, you don’t need to announce what you’re doing or have your dog walker lecture your reader. Cast your characters matter-of-factly, allow all of them to have a range of possibilities, and then keep moving.

  Of course, if you want to point out a character’s implicit biases, you can do that. For example, there is a moment in the 1974 film adaptation of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three when Walter Matthau, the Transit Authority protagonist, goes to meet the NYPD inspector he has been communicating with over the phone about the hijacking of a subway train. Matthau looks surprised when the door of the police car opens, and he sees that the inspector is African American. He stammers, “I thought… I don’t know what I thought.” That’s it. No response from the inspector—and they get down to business. But the scriptwriters have given the audience an opportunity to check their own assumptions.

  Are there types of clients that your dog walker avoids? Clients she takes only because she really needs the money? Clients she has come to believe are unreasonably demanding?

  Who are her other clients? Back to the hat. A veteran whose wife has died? A mother with an autistic child? A rabbi? The possibilities are endless, but you don’t need to make every character a nod at diversity casting. You can start small—a character or two—as you begin to explore opening up the world of your fiction.

  Settings and Diversity

  There are some settings that limit the diversity of your characters. For example, a male maximum-security prison, an Arctic expedition, a Navy SEAL team, and a SWAT team are all more likely to have males than females. How would the presence of a woman change the dynamics? What about Harlem in the 1920s and ’30s? This was the Jazz Age and the Great Depression. What characters might your protagonist encounter on a trip uptown to Harlem one evening?

  In many stories, in genres from westerns to mystery, sci-fi to mainstream literature, an “outsider” arrives. Having your protagonist visit a place as a tourist or as someone who has taken a job or come to find someone or something offers an opportunity to have your character interact with people who are different from them.

  Depicting settings by focusing on the details rather than with generic descriptions can be powerful. Suppose your protagonist is driving up to a “trailer park.” What he focuses on tells us as much about him as about the people who live there. Walking downtown, does he “see” the homeless woman who calls out to him? Does he pause because he notices the kitten curled up in her lap or the little boy huddled beside her? What does he do? If you’re clever, what he sees in a setting could even jog his memory or send his thoughts about the case off in another direction.

  Plotting and Research

  If you are a plotter, you will have thought about how diversity fits into your plot before you begin to write. If you are a pantser who plunges in and powers through your first draft, you may go with whoever walks through the door. In either case, writing with awareness that you want to find opportunities to diversify your cast of characters and settings makes it more likely that this will happen. This may mean that in the beginning, you will have to spend more time preparing to write if you are a plotter, or more time revising your first draft if you are a pantser. In either case, you may need to do some research.

  Social scientists often quote C. Wright Mills about the “sociological imagination.” Mills made the argument that we exist within a social world. Who we are and who we become is shaped not only by our personal characteristics but also by what occurs in the world around us. For example, if we talk to our grandparents, we might discover that their beliefs about thrift and waste were similar to those of other men and women who survived the Gr
eat Depression. If we look at women who came of age during the women’s movement of the 1960s, we might find that even those who did not take part in marches or protests describe themselves as feminists. Therefore, Mills encouraged us to exercise our imagination in understanding how social forces shape our lives.

  Biographies and autobiographies of real people illustrate how the events of an era affect the lives of individuals. You can incorporate this into your fiction writing. Whether your book is set in the present, the recent past, or long ago, a timeline of major events during that era (available online, library, or bookstore) will also be a useful reminder of what you might have forgotten. You can begin with a list of world events—then move closer to country, region, state, city. Maybe you’re interested in specific events. There are timelines for those as well—music, culture, riots. Where were your characters during 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina or the Covid-19 pandemic? How did this affect their lives? Your police officer? The man she is arresting? What are they bringing to the encounter?

  When you have your list of events, go and do some research. The internet is helpful for a first look. You may dig deeper later, but right now you are looking at events that your characters would remember—because they were traumatized, or excited, or it was the best day of their life. What about the family or the community that your characters are or were a part of?

  How did those people feel about this event?

  Suppose you find one event that had a local impact in a real place. Could you use what happened in that place as inspiration for an event in your fictional setting? Were people involved who might inspire your depiction of your fictional character? Newspaper and magazine articles are a valuable resource.