How to Write a Mystery
Page 21
And please remember: your character can’t “hiss” a phrase that contains no S.
You Must Remember This
Always read your dialogue out loud. If you stumble over words or the rhythm sounds wrong, keep talking it out until you get the words right. Get inside the head of the character speaking—why would they say this? What is their goal? What is the purpose of this conversation? Can you plant a clue here? Thinking about these things will help you work out how the dialogue should sound and how precisely your character would say what you need them to say—and how the other characters will respond.
Some of the best examples of dialogue writing in crime fiction are Gregory Mcdonald’s Fletch novels. The stories are told, from beginning to end, almost entirely in dialogue—practically no setting or sense of place or speech tags: the books are mostly the characters talking. They are a master class in writing dialogue. Try writing your scene that way and see if it still works.
Another great exercise is to simply write the dialogue in your scene as if you are writing a play, but with no stage directions or staging details. The goal is to get across everything you need to get across with simply the words the characters are speaking.
Good dialogue is one of the pillars holding up any story. Making that pillar strong will not only place your story firmly in the real world, it will tell your reader all they need to know about your characters, ensure that the pages keep turning, and guarantee that your story will stay in that reader’s mind for a long time.
BRADLEY HARPER
Dialogue is an ancient Greek stage direction, meaning “action through words.” One of the first critiques I got from an agent, looking at my neatly printed manuscript, was “There’s not enough white space,” meaning there was too much narrative description and not enough dialogue.
Dialogue opens up the tight-knit block of words we are accustomed to in textbooks, and allows your story to breathe through verbal exchanges between your characters. Frequent doses of white space make your work less intimidating and help your reader speed along through your story.
STEPHEN ROSS
Subtext is your friend.
Subtext is not written, it is implied. It is the underneath, the feelings and intuition, the unspoken meaning. Even a shopping list can have subtext.
Milk
Bread
Eggs
Hammer
Shovel
Quicklime
Champagne
Subtext is one of the writer’s tools of magic.
Setting
Your most versatile element: backdrop, player, and the all-pervading sense of place.
WILLIAM KENT KRUEGER
I’m not easily won over. But I confess that I’m in love with James Lee Burke and his New Iberia. I’m also in love with Tony Hillerman and his Navajo country. And with Margaret Coel and her Wind River territory of Wyoming. And Cara Black and her Paris. And Walter Mosley and his Watts. A visceral sense of place is the key to my heart.
In my own work, I write profoundly out of a sense of place. Setting is the cornerstone of so much of what occurs in my stories and in the stories of those authors whose work I most admire. What we all have come to understand, I believe, is that setting is one of the most powerful and versatile elements in a story. I try to think of the setting not just as a backdrop for what’s going to occur, but also as an integral player in the action, motivation, atmosphere, and emotion of a story.
But first, let’s take a look at what I’m talking about when I use the word “setting.”
Setting Is Place
Broadly speaking, setting is the whole of the environment in which a story takes place. It’s Raymond Chandler’s L.A., Carl Hiaasen’s Florida, J. A. Jance’s Cochise County. It’s the stage on which most of the action is going to be played out. As such, it will be created with both broad strokes and specific, telling details. Take a look at how Tony Hillerman suggests the vast reaches of the northern Arizona landscape in his classic novel Dance Hall of the Dead:
The sun was low now. The clouds in the west had risen up the horizon and were fringed with violent yellows. Slanting light was turning the alkali and alichi flats in the valley below from white and gray into rose and pink. Seventy miles southwestward, another cloud formation had formed over the dim blue shape of the White Mountains. This great vacant landscape reminded him of Susanne’s remark about it being hard to be a Navajo if you minded being lonely.
On another level, setting is where the current scene, the immediate action of a story, is occurring: a booth in a busy diner, a clearing in a dark forest, a kitchen in a quiet home, a sterile interview room in a police station. Each scene will have its own unique character apart from the larger stage and most probably require a closer eye to specific detail. Check out this bar scene from Craig Johnson’s The Dark Horse, in which he suggests much of the timbre of the place through a depiction of its clientele:
There were a couple of old ranchers sitting in the gloom at one of the tables, two younger fellows playing eight-ball near the boxing ring, and a large, surly-looking individual in a two-day beard, sunglasses, and a stylish black straw hat at the other end of the bar. He was talking to an elaborately tattooed young woman who held his arm and pressed her hip against his. I smiled and nodded toward them, and they smirked at me.
On the most basic level, setting is the constant grounding of your reader in the immediate moment: a waitress refilling a coffee cup, the jostle in a subway car that interrupts a conversation, the cries of children from a playground that takes a character out of some reverie and back to the present action in a park.
So, first and foremost, setting is a sense of place.
Setting Is Character
Setting is an essential character in a story. Like any human character, it involves a unique physicality. The physique of Nancy Pickard’s Kansas is very different from that of Sara Paretsky’s Chicago—the one a vast undulating landscape, the other an imposing wall of concrete, steel, and glass. Settings have individual faces, just as humans do. The Bighorns of Craig Johnson’s Absaroka County present a ruggedly beautiful countenance, well in keeping with the mythic ideal of a western hero’s chiseled profile, while the face of Savannah, Georgia, in John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is as genteel as a powdered southern belle.
Human characters have voices. It’s no surprise that settings do, too. I’m positive that if you blindfolded a reasonably intelligent person and set them down in Tony Hillerman’s Navajo country, the voice of that place would give it away. The whisper of the wind across a wide-open landscape. The scratch of tumbleweed across a lonely road. The howl of a coyote or the screech of a desert owl. Now think about the voice of a place like Dennis Lehane’s Dorchester. Consider what that voice would be like and how uniquely different from Hillerman’s desert. These voices communicate very quickly the nature of the setting.
People have a scent to them, sometimes pleasant, sometimes not so much. So do settings. The clean, high desert air of Michael McGarrity’s New Mexico is very different from the heavy, humid air of Randy Wayne White’s Florida, laden as it is with the salty scent of the ocean and the fetid backwater bouquet of swampland.
And here’s an important one: settings have personality, just like humans. Consider the difference between Michael Connelly’s Los Angeles and James Lee Burke’s New Orleans. Connelly’s L.A. is new, glitzy, fast-paced, cutting-edge, and oh so cool, man. Burke’s New Orleans is old, laid-back, calm, and patient, though in a menacing sort of way.
Every attribute that we ascribe to the human characters in a story applies as well to the setting.
Setting Is Motivation
Used correctly, setting ought to contribute to the “why” of a story. The actions should rise naturally out of the place in which they occur, and that place ought to have a part in the reason for the story. The snuff movie industry in Lawrence Block’s A Dance at the Slaughterhouse exists in large measure because of the complex and often corrupt
nature of New York City. The child abduction in Dennis Lehane’s Gone, Baby, Gone takes place because of parental neglect in working-class Dorchester. Many of my stories rise out of issues that occur in the interface of two cultures in northern Minnesota, white and Ojibwe. I’ve written about Indian gaming casinos, about the battle over hunting and fishing treaty rights, the influx of the drug and gang cultures on the reservation, the sexual trafficking of vulnerable Native women and children. Think of the stories of Tony Hillerman, Margaret Coel, C. J. Box. The nature of these stories depends enormously on that quintessential western setting. Do you remember the final moment at the end of Chinatown? The cop turns Jake Giddis away from the horrific scene of the brutal shooting and says to him, “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.” That says it all.
Setting Is Atmosphere
I love Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca for many reasons, but perhaps most of all for the heaviness of the story, its moodiness, and for the pervading sense of menace, which is due in large measure to the nature of Manderley, the isolated estate of Maxim de Winter. The place itself casts a pall across every thought, every action. Without that atmosphere, the story would be as flat as a glass of day-old champagne. Think about Hiaasen’s Florida. Only within the surreal atmosphere of the landscape Hiaasen paints can a character like Skink, the roadkill-eating former governor of the state, believably exist.
Creating a Sense of Place
First, the one huge don’t: don’t deliver a travelogue. Nothing will kill the pace of a story as quickly as that. Think of creating your setting in the same way you create every other character in your story. Generally speaking, when you introduce a character, you’re not going to give your reader a long paragraph or two of description. You’re more likely to take your time and spread out the salient details over many pages until you’ve gradually revealed the full nature of that character. It’s the same with setting.
In creating a sense of place, less is often more. Let the telling detail suggest the larger whole. Take a look at Walter Mosley’s description of Bone Street in Watts, in his novel White Butterfly:
Bone Street was local history. A crooked spine down the center of Watts’s jazz heyday, it was four long and jagged blocks. West of Central Avenue and north of 103rd Street, Bone Street was broken and desolate to look at by day, with its two-story tenementlike apartment buildings and its mangy hotels. But by night Bones, as it was called, was a center for late-night blues, and whiskey so strong that it could grow hairs on the glass it was served in. When a man said he was going to get down to the bare Bones he meant he was going to lose himself in the music and the booze and the women down there.
With a very few succinct details, Mosley offers not only a telling physical description but also a keen sense of the unique character of the place and its atmosphere.
As much as possible, use all the senses in what you offer a reader—and here again we get to the idea of place as a character. Think about the voice of the setting, the unique scent, the textures. Pull the reader in not just visually but sensually as well.
Using Sense of Place
As I said earlier, setting is one of the most versatile elements in any story. It can be employed to accomplish any number of necessary tasks.
Setting can be an effective way in which to enter a story. I modestly offer one of my own openings, this from my novel Blood Hollow: January, as usual, was meat locker cold, and the girl had already been missing nearly two days. Corcoran O’Connor couldn’t ignore the first circumstance. The second he tried not to think about.
He stood in snow up to his ass, more than two feet of drifted powder blinding white in the afternoon sun. He lifted his tinted goggles and glanced at the sky, a blue ceiling held up by green walls of pine. He stood on a ridge that overlooked a small oval of ice called Needle Lake, five miles from the nearest maintained road. Aside from the track his snowmobile had pressed into the powder, there was no sign of human life. A rugged vista lay before him—an uplifted ridge, a jagged shoreline, a bare granite pinnacle that jutted from the ice and that gave the lake its name—but the recent snowfall had softened the look of the land. In his time, Cork had seen nearly fifty winters come and go. Sometimes the snow fell softly, sometimes it came in a rage. Always it changed the face of whatever it touched. Cork couldn’t help thinking that in this respect, snow was a little like death. Except that death, when it changed a thing, changed it forever.
What I hoped to accomplish with this opening was threefold: to introduce the motivating situation—a girl is lost in the wilderness in deep winter; the setting itself—the great Northwoods of Minnesota; and the emotional timbre of story.
Setting can also be a wonderful way to end a story. Here’s one of my favorite endings of all time, from James Lee Burke’s Black Cherry Blues: Neither sleep nor late-night thunderstorms bring them back now, and I rise each day into the sunlight that breaks through the pecan trees in my front yard. But sometimes at dusk, when the farmers burn the sugarcane stubble off their fields and cinders and smoke lift in the wind and settle on the bayou, when red leaves float in piles past my dock and the air is cold and bittersweet with the smell of burnt sugar, I think of Indians and water people, of voices that can speak through the rain and tease us into yesterday, and in that moment I scoop Alafair up on my shoulders and we gallop down the road through the oaks like horse and rider toward my house, where Batist is barbecuing gaspagoo on the gallery and paper jack-o-lanterns are taped to the lighted windows, and the dragons become as stuffed toys, abandoned and ignored, like the shadows of the heart that one fine morning have gone with the season.
You don’t need to have read everything that precedes this ending to appreciate the power of the prose and the profound emotional sense of place with which it leaves the reader.
Setting grounds the reader. A novel is composed of scenes, so it’s important to ground the reader in each scene, to bring the setting down from the global to the specific. You don’t need to waste a lot of time on this, just offer the reader very specific and telling details. Here’s a great example from Raymond Chandler’s The Little Sister, suggesting the nature of Marlowe’s office: The pebbled glass door panel is lettered in flaked black paint: “Phillip Marlowe.… Investigations.” It is a reasonably shabby door at the end of a reasonably shabby corridor in the sort of building that was new about the year the all-tile bathroom became the basis for civilization.
Setting can reinforce or underline a character’s emotional or psychological state. Fog, rain, sun, or wind can suggest a great deal more than just the weather. An empty street or a dark alley or a silent house can be more than just the space through which your character moves physically. It can suggest the emotional landscape as well.
Setting helps create suspense. In the genre, this is a classic use of setting. In my novels characters often find themselves isolated in a forest, with every shadow suggesting menace. In a city, there are the dark corridors of the alleyways, or there’s the fog that obscures the street. There’s the empty house with the sounds that suggest it’s not so empty. It’s difficult to imagine creating suspense without using the setting to full advantage.
In summary, setting is the most versatile element in any story. It contributes significantly to a reader’s whole experience. In addition to unique characters or clever plot, a powerful setting, that sense of having actually been there, will linger in the reader’s memory a long while. A story without a solid sense of place is like a ship lost in some anonymous sea, and who would want to embark on that kind of journey?
THOMAS B. SAWYER
Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon is the paradigm, still the seminal modern detective novel, for several reasons—most significantly in that unlike the more traditional mysteries (and Falcon is indeed a mystery—who killed Sam Spade’s partner, Miles Archer, as well as Captain Jacobi of the La Paloma, and gunsel Floyd Thursby?) there were no clues, and almost no emphasis on suspects. Instead, Hammett took the reader on a journey, involving a bunch of m
arvelously colorful characters in pursuit of a MacGuffin, and at the end, and happily without the tedious old-hat convention of the drawing-room climax, we did indeed get our closure about who did what to whom. But—and this further differentiated it from all the others—we almost didn’t care who the murderer was, so interesting were the journey, the people, and their stories. That was our approach to Murder She Wrote, which ran for 264 episodes over 12 years.
Humor in Crime Fiction
Funny mystery, or mystery with fun: why, how, and when to stop?
CATRIONA McPHERSON
This essay is not funny. I will be quoting what I believe to be funny lines and referencing what I believe to be funny ideas, but when you dissect these things they deflate from giggly bubbles of delight to flat slabs of fact. It’s inevitable. Forgive me.
Why Be Funny?
The first question is whether to have humor in your mystery at all. It is still perfectly respectable to write serious, even solemn crime fiction. Unlike writers of action movie scripts, we have had no Die Hard to change the game forever. In fact, if your aim is to make a living as a writer, avoiding humor is a good start. Comic mysteries are not, generally, the big breakout New York Times bestselling books. But neither are most of the somber ones.