In this world, murder is not an aberration. Order didn't exist before this particular victim was killed, and it's not going to exist after the killer is caught. Justice isn't really possible; the most you can get is "some justice."
"It's Chinatown, Jake," Gittes's cop pal reminds him at the end of Chinatown, when it's clear that the villain will get away with his crimes, and the point is that it's all Chinatown. In this world, the cops aren't amiable bunglers; they're corrupt and actively hostile to any truth that could upset the rotten apple cart. Even if the killer is hauled away in handcuffs or blown away by a well-aimed .44, the idyllic, peaceful, orderly world represented by the English village is very, very far away.
This world demands a different detective from the cerebral, scientific Great Detective. An investigator going head-to-head with a villain this violent had better be able to use violence himself if necessary. The scientific method isn't much use if the evidence will never see the inside of a courtroom because the cops are corrupt and won't arrest anyone with too much power. Other qualities are called for in this type of mystery, and the hard-boiled detective embodies those traits.
Yes, I'm going to quote Chandler. Here it comes: "Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid." That phrase lies at the heart of the American hard-boiled tradition, and it's as alive in Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone and Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins as it ever was in the old Black Mask days.
Tough private eyes started out as white American males. Women were faithful, warmhearted secretaries, long-suffering girlfriends, and red-lipsticked femmes fatales. Nonwhite males and females appeared as walk-on characters at best. Today's shamuses come in both genders and all races. The great wrong place is no longer just the American city; a sense that officialdom can be bought pervades the world. Justice is hard to come by, as some sensational jury verdicts have shown, and the sensibility of the private eye reflects that cynical approach to reality.
With the widening of the circle, new perspectives entered the field. It's all but impossible to read books set in Los Angeles during the forties and fifties without filtering them through Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins series, which illuminates the dark heart of racism that permeated the LAPD. V.I. Warshawski and Kinsey Millhone walk those mean streets with the same incorruptible courage shown by Philip Marlowe, yet because they're female they bring a different sensibility to the art of private investigation. Marcus Didius Falco wears a toga instead of a trench coat, but his anachronistic presence in ancient Rome allows us to see that long-dead world through very modern eyes.
Non-P.I. detectives who act like private eyes even though they wear a badge (Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch, Ian Rankin's John Rebus) or have a law degree (John Lescroart's Dismas Hardy) or do social work (Abigail Padgett's Bo Bradley) provide another twist on the hard-boiled genre. It's the worldview that makes a hard-boiled story, not the fedora. It's the attitude that Harlan Cobens Myron Bolitar, sports agent, brings to his cases that makes him an integral part of this subgenre.
The essential whodunit bones are still there, but with a twist. The hard-boiled story provides us with bodies, not just a single body. Instead of the small circle of suspects being confined to a small community, there are subterranean connections between the victim and perpetrator that the detective must uncover. The villains make active attempts to silence the detective by force rather than throw him off the scent with false clues. A world of random violence instead of stability leads to the impossibility of restoring order to a place that never had order to begin with.
The Procedural
Somewhere along the line, mystery writers realized that murders weren't actually being solved by gifted amateurs with independent incomes or by seedy private eyes with bottles of rye whiskey in their desk drawers. Real cops did real work and, at least occasionally, came up with the killer. Like Sherlock Holmes, these detectives used science, like the Hard-boiled Dicks, they used violence when necessary. Unlike the cops in St. Mary Mead, they weren't bunglers; unlike the cops in Bay City, California, they weren't corrupt.
The antecedents of the classic whodunit and the hard-boiled detective story are both fairly clear, but who invented the police procedural is shrouded in mystery. Was Sergeant Cuff of Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone (1868) the first fictional cop we readers were meant to identify with and view as a real detective? Or was it Sergeant Friday of the LAPD who galvanized mystery buffs into finally giving official police their due?
One major difference between the traditional police procedural and the other two strains of detective story is that the police are not loners. One individual does not solve the crime in a vacuum; it takes a squad, working together and sharing information, to do the job. Ed McBain's wildly successful 87th Precinct books are the perfect example; the precinct is the star, not a single detective. Reginald Hill's British procedural center on Superintendent Andy Dalziel and his subordinates Chief Inspector Peter Pascoe and Sergeant Wield. They each interrogate different witnesses and provide pieces of the final solution to the crime, as well as bringing very different sensibilities to bear on the event.
The police solve crimes the old-fashioned way: by wearing out shoe leather canvassing witnesses and comparing their stories, by using science to connect fragments of evidence to a particular suspect, and by exploiting the power to arrest. The reader goes along for the ride because he is fascinated by the actual details of crime solving, not just the intellectual pyrotechnics of the Great Detective or the tough-guy tricks of the Hard-boiled Dick.
The procedural celebrated the police, but it also whitewashed them (pun intended). They were cast in the mold of Sgt. Joe Friday, speaking in terse syllables and devoted to justice for all. Surely there were no racists in Friday's police department, surely no one working with him ever abused a suspect or coerced a confession or planted evidence or hushed up a crime because a perpetrator was politically connected. Friday and his partners didn't even use bad language, and not only because they were television cops and had to pass the censors. They were straight-arrow stand-up guys with all the emotional depth of wood.
Joseph Wambaugh, though not a mystery writer in his early years, broke down the blue wall and let the reader see a more realistic police force. His cops weren't super-detectives, they were a mixture of profane, scared, macho, racist, compassionate, alcoholic, ambitious, burned out, loyal, and human. Above all, they were human.
James Ellroy went farther than Wambaugh in portraying the LAPD of the fifties as corrupt, violent, racist, and cunning—from top to bottom. Walter Mosley, writing a private eye series, nevertheless shone a harsh spotlight on institutional racism.
Today's police mysteries are not all procedurals. Some who detect under the auspices of police departments are actually loner private-eye characters with a badge; others are traditional detectives using traditional methods of detecting. But all bear some mark of Wambaugh's influence, because all now acknowledge that police forces and the men and women who work in them are far from perfect.
The biggest news in the world of procedurals is that they aren't confined to police anymore. Patricia Cornwell and Kathy Reichs hit the best-seller's list with medical examiner procedurals, which track the day-to-day efforts of today's forensic scientists to solve complex murder cases. Television's CSI takes us behind the scenes of a big-city crime scene unit and makes the most minute, painstaking matching of hairs and fibers seem like an adventure.
Other People's Troubles _
Perhaps the major alteration in the world of the mystery novel was the gradual shift from the detective's concentration on other people's troubles to the present-day expectation readers have that the detective, whether amateur, private eye, or police officer, will grow and develop in the course of solving the crime.
Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple, Nero Wolfe, Lew Archer, Perry Mason—these characters remained the same from the first day they appeared in print until their last story. Even in cases where they professed to have a strong personal
connection to a victim or suspect, they didn't experience the kind of anguish today's detectives go through. The focus was on the case itself and the people involved in the case; the detective was an outsider whose essential core remained untouched. Some of them didn't even age (Hercule Poirot must have been 110 by the time he "died").
Whether your detective is a librarian who solves crimes on the side, a homicide detective on an Indian reservation, or a big-city private eye, she will probably go through more personal changes than the classic detectives named above.
Why? Because that's what today's readers are looking for. "Other people's troubles" were enough for Lew Archer, whose creator saw him as a transparent window through which he could examine the social structure of Southern California society. Today's readers want more about the detective's inner struggles and outer realities. They expect to see growth and change from one book to the next, and some level of acknowledgment of the effect past events had on the character's development to date.
Some mystery writers are producing books that are as much novels as detective stories. Minette Walters, Val McDermid, and Elizabeth George are some of the authors whose books cross genre lines into mainstream. Sarah Smith and James Ellroy (in his later books) are two whose novels are crime-based but whose sales transcend the usual genre expectations.
Write What You Read _
Whom do you love? If your finished book were to be favorably compared to the work of another writer, who would you want that writer to be? This is a vital question, and something the aspiring writer should start thinking about as soon as possible, because how can you hit a target if you don't know where the target is?
Writing what you read means reading critically. It means trying to figure out, if you don't already know, exactly what it is you love about the books you love. Is it the character development, or do really tricky plots appeal to you? Are you someone who falls in love with exotic locations? Is humor essential to your ideal of a great book? Whatever wins your heart as a reader is what you need to write, because you will know by instinct and long years of loving exactly what it is that your ideal reader wants from you, and you can give it freely, without sweat or second-guessing.
"IT'S NOT the crime, it's the cover-up." This isn't just a Washington truism; it's the essence of the novel of detection. The killer kills, and even if we the readers see the death itself, we have not seen the murder. The most significant action of the entire book takes place offstage. What do I mean by that?
Cover-ups_
Picture the scene: the English country house, the greedy relatives gathered around the dinner table while Uncle Sebastian, the rich patriarch, lifts his glass of port to his lips. He drinks, he cries out and grabs his throat. Choking and gagging, he falls to the floor and within minutes is dead as a doornail, the scent of bitter almonds on his blue lips.
We saw the death. We did not see the murder, for we didn't see the killer putting poison into the wine bottle or smearing it around the edges of the wineglass. Or, if we did, we saw a shadowy figure creep into the study and lift the port from its accustomed place. We saw a hand reach out to take the special glass that only Uncle Sebastian used. We did not see whose hand it was, because that would give away the game.
Cover-Up One: It Wasn't Murder
The killer kills, but not wanting to be caught, he conceals his identity. He may also choose to conceal the fact of murder itself. Thus many mysteries begin with a death the police refuse to classify as murder.
"It couldn't have been suicide—she never took pills!"
"She couldn't have drowned! She was an Olympic-level swimmer!"
"Dead! He's not dead, he's in Borneo."
The killer has killed, but he has created a cover story that results in the police refusing to investigate the death as a crime. The detective's first act of detection, then, is to discover and prove that the death was deliberate murder.
This is a wonderful device for the amateur detective, since it gets the police out of the way and allows the detective free rein, at least for a while. It also gives the detective a realm of investigation that doesn't directly focus on specific suspects, meaning the investigation has two distinct parts: the "was it murder" section, and the "whodunit" section. Since the big bad middle of any book is a challenge to fill, this is a great way to make sure there's enough material to go around.
An interesting variant on this is the Murder-that-isn't-a-murder. Here we have someone missing, presumed dead, presumed murdered, but either we have no body or we have a body that's been misidentified. This time the detective's job is the opposite: to prove that a death the police think is the murder of Sir George is really the death of a transient, while Sir George is alive and well and drinking margaritas in Cabo San Lucas.
The Wrong Murder is another useful device. In this gambit, some poor soul ends up dead and the police spend several chapters hunting down people with a motive to kill that individual, whereas our detective realizes that the murder was a mistake and the intended victim is still walking around and still vulnerable. (Whenever a mystery reader sees a character putting on someone else's coat, little bells go off in our heads and we're ready to bet that a Wrong Murder is about to be committed.)
What all of these devices do is clear the way for a non-police detective to investigate an aspect of the case that the police aren't interested in. The amateur can establish her detective credentials by first proving that the death was murder before embarking on the larger task of bringing the killer to justice.
Cover-Up Two: Some Other Dude Did It
The second murderer's trick is to allow the death to look like murder and to frame someone else for the crime. Now the police are in the act from the outset, so the killer must divert suspicion from herself and plant clues leading to another. (Of course, once the cops in the earlier situations realize the death is murder, the killer needs a backup plan that will involve the same things.)
Back when I worked for the Legal Aid Society in Brooklyn, we called this the Two-Dude Defense, or Some Other Dude Did It. It was purely amazing how many guys in Brooklyn were just standing on street corners chillin' when "two dudes" ran up and shoved a loaded gun or a stolen radio into their innocent hands. Before they had time to think, the cops rolled up on them and caught them red-handed.
My clients in Brooklyn seldom got away with the SODDI defense, but your murderer will give the cops a good run for their money with it. The killer not only kills, not only conceals his own guilt, but actively plans to have someone else take the fall.
One important element of all these approaches to the cover-up is that the murderer is not a passive observer of the detective's actions. She is plotting against the detective every step of the way, playing a high-stakes game of chess, shoving clues in front of the detective to divert suspicion away from her and toward another suspect.
Real Reality and False Reality
The murderer creates the reality of a dead body, and then creates a "false reality" to cover it up. For a long time, the detective, like the police and the other characters, sees only the "false reality." Gradually, through investigation, the detective is able to separate the truth from the fabrication.
This is the funhouse part. Like the funhouse at the old-fashioned amusement park, we encounter mirrors that distort images, passageways that lead us down blind alleys, surprises that pop out at us from seemingly uninhabited places, and misdirection designed to keep us walking around in circles. The detective is just as baffled as the official police—at first.
The "false reality" usually has two parts: the minimization of the killer's motive, opportunity, or access to means; and the maximization of someone else's motive, opportunity, or access to means.
Starting with the first of these, the killer works hard to conceal her motive to kill Uncle Sebastian. She pretends she has money of her own, so no one knows she's waiting as eagerly as everyone else for the old coot to die and leave her a legacy. She pretends to have forgiven him for stopping her marriag
e to the unsuitable suitor. At the same time, she takes great pains to remind everyone, including the police, that her brother needs money, that her mother never forgave Uncle S. for what he said to her last Boxing Day.
But that's just motive, and that's not enough to put the noose around someone's neck. Our killer needs to create the illusion that she couldn't have killed her uncle, no matter how much motive she had. Then she needs to show the police that other people could have done it, and in fact, left clues behind telling the world that they did do it.
A great many of the Golden Age detective stories depend upon alibis, for an ironclad alibi is the best way in the world to prove you couldn't possibly be the killer. Show the police you were in Detroit on the fatal day and they can't nail you for a death in Philadelphia. Show them you were receiving an award from the mayor at the time the victim was shot, and they'll have to look for someone else as the killer.
Thing is, you the writer have to figure out just how someone can commit murder and then make it look as if they were somewhere else at the time. You have to put yourself in the killer's shoes.
The Straight-Line Narrative
The late California crime writer Collin Wilcox called this "the idiot plot," but, believe me, it isn't for idiots. Anyone who wants to craft a sound, tight, well-constructed mystery is advised to write the crime from the murderer's point of view. In other words, the writer first creates "the real reality" and then creates the "false reality" that the killer uses to cover her tracks.
Let's take Uncle Sebastian's poisoning as an example. Let's say that his niece Wanda committed the crime. Here's how a straight-line narrative starring Wanda might look:
Wanda lives with her Uncle Sebastian, a cold, cruel man who treats her very badly and makes fun of her mousy looks. She accepts this until she meets a man named Hosmer Angel, who wants to marry her but worries about having enough money to start his own business. Wanda assures him she'll inherit enough money for both of them, but then Uncle Sebastian finds out about Hosmer and says he'll cut her out of his will if she even thinks about marrying him.
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