On a couple of memorable occasions, Ellery even slipped in a third solution.
Why Endings Fail _
What kinds of mystery endings disappoint readers?
• The "eenie, meenie, miney, moe" ending in which the murderer could have been any one of the suspects and seems to have been chosen at random for the final "honor" of being the truly guilty party. The revelation of the true killer should give the reader a jolt of recognition: yes, this is right, it all becomes clear to me now. The reader wants a sense of inevitability about the killer's identity. It had to be X; it could only have been X.
• The emotionally unsatisfying ending. A killer has been unmasked but true justice hasn't been done. This is okay in a hard-boiled detective tale whose premise is that justice is impossible, but if we're in cozyland where stability and order are supposed to be restored by the detectives solution to the crime, we won't be happy without some justice. By the same token, dry, arid exposition won't do the trick; we need some emotional resonance to our endings to be fully satisfied today.
• Failing to tie up all the loose ends. It is the detective's job not just to solve the murder but to unravel all the threads, explain everything that needs explaining, rip the masks off the phonies, expose all the lies, cut through all the disguises, tell all the secrets. Smart modern writers unravel a few of these lesser knots along the way, saving the big one, the murder, for the end. But all needs to be explained eventually; you don't want the reader wondering who left the upstairs bedroom window open or why the headmaster lied about playing golf.
• Ambiguity. Mystery readers want certainty in an uncertain world. We don't mind existentialist angst and nihilistic dystopias in our hard-boiled reads, but even those have a certain clarity about them. What we hate is not knowing what really happened. Some top-selling psychological mysteries leave us unclear as to the final identity of the killer and suggest a kind of "group guilt" that ultimately turns off hard-core mystery readers.
• The killer just wasn't important enough throughout the story. He's not chosen at random exactly, but he was sufficiently obscure that the reader scratches her head and says, "Him? I can barely remember him" when he's declared the murderer.
• The author gave us a tricky setup with multiple complications throughout the big bad middle and now the solution is as simplistic as a child's drawing. The payoff doesn't pay off.
• "God in the killer's lap" solutions that depend upon the killer having a lot of good luck all along the way. Coincidence piles upon coincidence until any shred of believability is lost.
• The detective fails to detect. The killer reveals herself to the sleuth
instead of the other way around. Sheer dumb luck catapults the so-called detective into a leap of logic that just happens to be true.
• Sudden violence takes the place of logical reasoning and honest investigation. Less jarring in a private eye novel, this can be off-putting if the book has heretofore been a mild cozy and now we're hip-deep in blood.
The Action Ending_
If you choose confrontation, accept the fact that it will come as a surprise only to those readers who are entering the world of mystery for the first time. The confrontation scene is a set piece by now, although it still needs to be set up so that your detective appears brave rather than foolhardy. The truth is, we readers crave the action ending, no matter how many critics carp when V.I. Warshawski heads off to that abandoned factory on Chicago's South Side in the next-to-last chapter, so we're ready to suspend disbelief. We just don't want to suspend our entire grip on reality. We want it to be believable that this detective places herself in the position of confronting this killer. We even seem willing to swallow yet another killer-tells-all-just-before-plugging-detective-between-the-eyes scene, again flying in the face of critical opinion. Yes, it's ridiculous that the killer sits on the edge of the cliff expounding upon his own guilt instead of plugging the detective squarely between the eyes and heading to Peru, but the fact is, the detective's coming back for the next book in the series and the killer isn't, so we read on, no matter how many times we've read this scene in the past.
How can you set your confrontation scene apart from all the others? Short answer: you can't. But you can add to its power by setting it in a very interesting—and, of course, highly dangerous—location. It also helps if your detective goes to the confrontation thinking she's prepared, only to find out otherwise when the time comes. She's armed, but someone takes her gun. She's alerted the police, but they don't respond. She thinks she's confronting a mere witness, but the truth is, he's the killer.
The confrontation section in a modern mystery is a mini-suspense novel. You need to switch gears from the puzzle to the roller-coaster ride, to shelve logic and reason and go straight to visceral emotion. You will want to swing the pendulum between safety and danger, between trust and distrust, in exactly the same way the suspense novelist does. The only difference is that she does it for an entire book; you will do it for two or three chapters.
One of the hallmarks of suspense writing is the slowing down of time to an agonizing pace that emphasizes every minute. If you have a ticking time bomb in the background, now is the time to let it tick as loudly as possible, reminding the reader of exactly how many seconds the detective has left before the worst will happen. Read Mary Higgins Clark's A Stranger Is Watching—which involves a real time bomb ticking in the basement of Grand Central Station; a time bomb which will kill not only our heroine but a child—and watch how she shows every one of those seconds ticking away as our heroine extricates herself from her bonds. We feel every tug of the rope that ties her, we see the blood trickling down her arms, we experience her agony of despair as she tries and fails to loosen her bonds.
That's what you want in your confrontation scene. The rest of the book may involve the highest levels of ratiocination since the late, great Ellery, but for the confrontation chapters, go for pure adrenaline. Slow down the filmstrip and milk the situation for every ounce of terror. Let the detective feel every possible emotion from deepest despair to exhilarating hope as she struggles with a killer bent on eliminating her.
What, then, is the difference between a suspense ending and a mystery ending with suspense overtones? Suspense is its own reward; we don't care in a suspense novel if we know from page one who the villain is. In a mystery, we can keep the puzzle going even through the confrontation; it's no less satisfying if the detective is shoved into the autoclave by an unknown killer than if he's already identified the villain as Evil Doctor X. The suspense is just an extra on the menu; the main dish is the whodunit.
The Coda_
Linda Barnes closes Snapshot with a seder. To this traditional Jewish ceremonial dinner her detective Carlotta Carlyle invites a decidedly untra-ditional family. Carlotta's friends Gloria and Roz (who wears a pink T-shirt that says "Will work for sex"); Roz's new boyfriend, a mobster named Sam Gianelli, Carlotta's Little Sister Paolina and her Colombian family all sit around the table. Now that the crime has been solved, the unorthodox group that surrounds Carlotta has become even closer and they celebrate that closeness with a ceremonial dinner.
The cozy coda shows that the fabric of society has been rewoven after it was torn by the victim and his killer (according to W.H. Auden, the victim was as much a disrupter as the murderer). We see order restored, peace preserved, sheep safely grazing, ordinary life moving along in its ordinary way without the threat of violent death.
Since mysteries now choose to explore aspects of the detective's personal life, the intensely personal coda has become important. Not only has Jenny Cain solved a murder in I.O.U., she has reconciled in some way with her mentally ill mother. Not only did Matt Scudder face down ruthless killers in Eight Million Ways to Die, he also faced his own alcoholism. Some detectives find a meaningful relationship; others end one.
The Meta-Novel _
I first heard the term "meta-novel" at a writer's conference in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The idea is that even though
each book in a series stands alone, when read collectively they form one big ongoing novel about the main character. Each book represents its own arc: in book one of the series we meet the character and establish a meta-goal that will carry him through further books, in book two that meta-goal is tested, in book three—you get the picture.
It's All One Big Book
Looked at this way, every book about Kinsey Millhone, from A Is for Alibi to the latest letter of the alphabet, constitutes one big novel with a lot of different episodes, kind of like a television series. As we read through the series, we learn more about Kinsey and we deepen our connection to her so that even minor conflicts in later books mean something to us because we know her so well and we're aware of exactly what pushes her buttons. When something big happens, such as finding lost family members in J Is for Judgment, it resonates because we're fully aware of her orphaned childhood.
I always think of M*A*S* when this topic comes up. Remember the episode that focused on the dreams of the regular cast members? Hot Lips Houlihan, who was always searching for love, dreamed that she was a bride—only her white dress was covered in operating room blood.
Klinger, who longed to return to his home town of Toledo, Ohio, dreamed he was on a train going home—only every place in town he wanted to see was boarded up and closed down. Each dream took each character far inside himself, and each dream was understandable and moving because we had known these characters for so long. The thirty-minute episode could go as deep as it did because it followed several years of character exploration.
The same can be true of series characters whose tests become more meaningful when we've seen them through earlier crises. Nancy Pick-ard's detective heroine, Jenny Cain, solved mysteries about other people's troubles in the early books. Dead Crazy brought us face to face with mental illness, and we learned for the first time that Jenny's mother had a mental problem. Not until I.O.U., the seventh book in the series, did Jenny directly confront that past issue, and by that time, we'd seen her grappling with ever-darker social problems. In a sense, the first book in the series (Generous Death), which introduced us to Jenny and her world, was Arc One of the meta-novel. All the six books leading up to I. O. U. constituted Arcs Two and Three, in that Jenny honed the investigative and emotional tools she would need to excavate the truth of her mother's life and death. Had Pickard even been able to write I. O. U. as the second book in the series, it wouldn't have had nearly the impact upon the reader that it did as book seven because we weren't as invested in Jenny early on.
Multiple Protagonists and the Meta-Novel
Elizabeth George uses five main characters as protagonists, which would be far too many for the reader to handle if she didn't allow some to shine in the foreground and the others to recede into the background of each book. For example, in A Traitor to Memory, Lynley and Havers are in the forefront, while Helen and St. James are used sparingly. Other books center on St. James and Helen, with Lynley and Havers as lesser characters, and Deception on His Mind takes Havers away from London into an adventure all her own.
S. J. Rozan alternates between her two protagonists, Bill Smith and Lydia Chin. The first book in the series, China Trade, was told in Lydia's first-person viewpoint. The second, Concourse, used Bill as its protagonist and told the story in third person. This device allows us to see the meta-arc of their developing relationship through two different pairs of eyes.
Reginald Hill gave Sgt. Wield a personal subplot and one of the pleasures of his Dalziel-Pascoe series has been the evolution of the stoic sergeant from walled-off character with a deep secret to a warmer, more open human being. Carole Nelson Douglas says of her Midnight Louie series that it will ultimately consist of twenty-seven books with overarching story arcs of nine books each. Earlene Fowler s quilt series often brings characters from previous books back into detective Benni Harper's life, as does Abigail Padgett's Bo Bradley series.
Starting a mystery series means thinking beyond book one. It means creating characters compelling enough to pull readers along through many adventures and rich enough to deserve a loyal following.
WE LOVE to be scared, whether it's on a thrill ride or at a scary movie. Suspense novels add a human dimension to the basic excitement of being scared on purpose in a controlled environment. When we read a book by Mary Higgins Clark, Tom Clancy, or John Grisham we identify with the main character, whose life is thrown into turmoil by forces beyond his control, and we experience all the emotions that character feels, whether good or bad. We're afraid when he's afraid; we're confident when he's confident. We go along for the ride, secure in the knowledge that when the ride is over we'll be back on level ground, exhilarated and safe.
The Roller-Coaster Effect _
It doesn't matter whether you love, hate, or fear them: you know what it means to ride a roller coaster. Your heart pounds, your palms sweat, your body tenses and then relaxes, your mouth opens and screams come out. You fear for your life one second, then laugh with delight the next as you remind yourself it's only a ride. You clutch frantically at the person next to you, and you sigh with relief when it's all over—then buy a ticket and stand in line for the next trip.
The thing to keep in mind about a roller coaster is that it's a manufactured experience. Trained engineers carefully plan every hairpin turn, every death drop, every slow-down and speed-up to produce the precise effect you're leeling as vou hurtle along.
Just as the engineer plans the roller-coaster rider's thrills, so, too, does the suspense writer calculate and produce the effects her writing induces in her readers. Some writers dislike being reminded that they're in charge of creating the reader's experience. They prefer to think of the characters as taking over and writing the story, or they like to believe that an unseen hand reaches in and makes the story work.
Perhaps when you've written eight to ten books, your subconscious mind can take over and produce a state-of-the-art thrill ride of a novel, but I think letting your unconscious write your books is like asking a group of nine-year-olds to design the next roller coaster at Disney World. The kids know what they like, but only a real pro can create that experience for them.
A Little Suspense History_
If the mystery genre has one parent in Edgar Allan Poe, then suspense fiction has both a mother and a father. The mother of suspense fiction is the gothic novel best represented by Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, and its father is the spy novel, early examples of which are Erskine Chalders's The Riddle of the Sands and W. Somerset Maugham's Ashenden stories.
Gothic Roots
Before Bronte there was Mrs. Radcliffe, whose Mysteries of Udolpho figures in Jane Austen's gothic parody, Northanger Abbey. The early goth-ics featured ghosts, haunted houses, and mysteries from the past, and were heavy on atmosphere and passion. The heroine was a woman alone, without family to help her, and she was in love with a man whose cryptic cruelty toward her only fueled the flame of her desire. The emphasis was on the personal and the emotional, the setting was a single house with a troubled past, and the heroine's bravery often earned her the love of the unavailable man at the heart of the mystery. Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White and The Moonstone are at heart gothics with elements of police procedure (which was very new at the time) thrown in.
Espionage Roots
The spy genre took a very different approach. The problem presented wasn't one of a single woman and a single man in a single house; it involved the fate of the entire free world. Like the gothic heroine, the spy never knows whom to trust, but unlike her, he's been thrust into a larger world and must operate within the customs of various countries. Even though there's one protagonist we care about, there are usually several other characters whose viewpoints we see and whose plotlines we follow until they converge for the final confrontation/crisis. Personal crisis and individual emotion were very far down on the list of priorities in this kind of book—until John Le Carre wrote The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.
Suspense Today
Most of today s suspense novels arise out of one or the other of these traditions. Romantic suspense, relationship suspense, romantic intrigue, suspense with supernatural overtones all derive from gothic forebears. Thrillers, whether medical, techno, political, or international intrigue, are all variants on the spy genre because they involve issues larger than the emotional lives of individuals. One hallmark of both strands of the suspense skein is the ordinary person thrust by forces beyond her control into a larger world that she doesn't understand.
Descendants of the Gothic Tradition_
Just as the modern category known as "Regency Romance" follows the template laid down by Jane Austen in Pride and Prejudice, the classic gothic mirrors Jane Eyre. A young woman comes, alone, to a big house in a remote and very picturesque location. She is a governess, a poor relation, a servant, a ward—someone powerless and without friends or family to turn to.
The owner of the house is a mercurial man with oversized moods. The girl dislikes him, fears him, slowly grows to like and then love him, and all the time mysterious events have her wondering what evil lurks in the house. If there are children, her duty is to protect them from this man, and from the dread secret he hides.
Dread secrets will be revealed. The man will confess his love and explain why he can't return her love even though he has feelings for her. She will bring light into this dark place and free him from his past. He will raise her to his own social level. Sunlight will pour through the narrow gothic windows of the old house and the shadow will be dispelled forever.
You think this genre died in 1945?
Think again. Victoria Holt, Barbara Michaels, and Ruth Rendell writing as Barbara Vine have done very well with it, adapting the classic form to more modern times yet retaining its emphasis on atmosphere and setting.
Romantic Suspense
So strong is this subgenre that while I was waiting for a plane, I walked into the airport bookstore and found that eight out of ten of the best-selling titles were essentially romantic suspense reads. A woman comes home to a small town from the big city for some reason: lost job, divorce, widowhood. She finds a place to live and meets friends, but mysterious, disturbing things begin to happen. She's threatened and she doesn't know why. Her presence has stirred up old ghosts. Menacing phone calls, strange sounds in the night, people she thought she knew making cryptic but clearly hostile remarks—and she has no idea why.
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