The Elements of Mystery Fiction: Writing the Modern Whodunit

by Tapply, William G.

  Book-length mysteries are, in all respects, novels. A mystery novel, just like a “literary novel,” should be populated with fascinating multidimensional characters. It should ask important moral questions. Mystery fiction, every bit as much as the mainstream variety, can explore the complexity of the human spirit and the irony of the human condition. The best ones do exactly that.

  But mystery fiction offers a bonus. The bonus is the puzzle.

  Here’s how I constructed the two stories that became my eleventh Brady Coyne novel, Tight Lines:

  I decided to explore the difficult and intense relationships that inevitably develop between psychiatrists and their patients in the course of psychoanalysis. Patients, in some cases, fall in love with and may attempt to seduce their analysts, whose professional ethic requires them to resist powerful temptations while continuing to treat their patients. This doctor-patient relationship was the idea for my story.

  Sometimes psychiatrists succumb to temptation. “What if,” I thought, “a psychiatrist had an affair with his beautiful female patient?”

  And, because my story had to be a mystery, I next asked: “What if that patient were murdered?”

  The storyline that resulted went this way: Mary Ellen Ames worshipped her father, who died when she was in college. Mary Ellen cut off ties with her mother and proceeded to engage in a series of love affairs with older men, many of them married. She became involved with drugs and had a homosexual encounter. After several years she decided to seek psychiatric help. She chose Dr. Warren McAllister, a middle-aged psychoanalyst who reminded her of her father, gradually seduced him, and then threatened to expose him to his wife and his professional associates if he didn’t agree to marry her.

  I thought hard and long about Mary Ellen Ames and Warren McAllister and his wife. I created Mary Ellen’s lovers—the married college professor, the bookstore owner who supplied her with drugs, the suspended Boston policeman who lived in a trailer, the troubled young woman who lived in Mary Ellen’s apartment building. I gave Mary Ellen’s mother a story, too. She lived alone in the Ames family mansion. She was suffering from terminal cancer and wanted to reconcile with her estranged daughter before she died.

  From this lineup of characters I selected a murderer.

  Then I was ready to write a detailed narrative summary of this story, complete with all of the characters’ life histories, personalities, and strongly felt needs and desires. The process took me several weeks of difficult and frustrating trial-and-error thinking.

  Only when I felt I knew this story thoroughly did I begin converting it into a mystery novel which, I knew, would be propelled by the puzzle question: Who killed Mary Ellen Ames?

  Because I have a series character, my lawyer Brady Coyne had to serve as the puzzle-solver. So the first question I had to answer was: How would Brady get involved with the case?

  I decided that Susan Ames would ask Brady, her family lawyer, to track down her daughter. The story of detection was underway.

  Then came the puzzle’s development, the unfolding of clues, false trails, and red herrings. Brady tries to track down Mary Ellen. He learns where she lives, but she hasn’t been home in more than a week. He convinces the building’s superintendent to let him into Mary Ellen’s apartment, where he finds a bottle of prescription medicine. This leads him to Dr. McAllister, the psychiatrist, who eventually confides in Brady that he’s been having an affair with Mary Ellen but insists that he doesn’t know where she is.

  Eventually, Mary Ellen’s body is found in a New Hampshire pond. Based on the medical examiner’s report, the police call it an accidental drowning, but Brady has his doubts. By now, he’s encountered some of the people in Mary Ellen’s life, all of whom could have a motive for murdering the young woman.

  As Brady investigates, the stakes grow higher. What began as a search for a missing woman becomes a desperate race against time and a murderer who will kill again. Ultimately, Brady finds himself endangered.

  And so forth, to the ultimate revelation.

  I wrote a narrative summary of this story of detection, too, taking elements of the first storyline and placing them into the second. I laid out the story’s various turning points—the opening scene with the dying mother, Brady’s encounters with each of the people in Mary Ellen’s life, the discovery of Mary Ellen’s body. I converted facts from the first story into clues, dead-end trails, false suspects, and misleading assumptions.

  As the story took shape, it transformed itself into a sequence of scenes, each of which moved the story forward, introduced new information, raised new questions, complicated the puzzle, and jacked up the stakes.

  When I summarized all of the scenes, I was ready to write the book. I knew my story. I had direction and purpose.

  Of course, some things changed. As the characters began to participate in actual scenes, they came to life. I discovered that some of them had depths and contradictions and motivations I hadn’t originally imagined, which suggested modifications in the plot. I was receptive to changes, but skeptical, too; I considered them carefully before incorporating them into my story.

  In the end, when the solution to the puzzle was revealed, I hoped that readers could say that everything fit together, the clues were fair, and they knew as much as Brady did. They had experienced my story as a participant, not a mere spectator. I also hoped they would then say, “I should have figured it out for myself. But it fooled me.”

  The case of the short story

  The elements of mystery short stories are no different from those of novels. No matter how short, every story has a plot, a setting, and characters. It contains a combination of narrative and dialogue. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

  To say that a short story is the same as the novel except that it is shorter, however, is to ignore some fundamental differences between the two forms. The short story makes special demands on the writer.

  Some of these demands are relatively obvious. The short story involves just a few characters—perhaps only one or two. It typically uses only one setting and a single point of view. It occurs over a short period of time—often as a single event that unfolds without interruption. Descriptions are spare. Characters and settings are drawn with a few deft strokes. Every detail must serve a purpose. Dialogue is spare and to the point.

  In other words, nothing is wasted in the short story, which typically runs from 1,500 to 5,000 words—twenty or more times shorter than an average novel. Regardless of the story’s length, the writer must strive to make every paragraph, every sentence, every word serve a purpose. Rarely can the short story accommodate extended descriptive passages or flashbacks, rambling dialogue, extraneous secondary characters, or subplots. Short stories can be difficult and time-consuming to write, but they are meant to be read in a single uninterrupted sitting. The short story contains a single, focused narrative purpose.

  The “purpose” of the short story is to dramatize just one point, which can usually be stated as the story’s theme: Crime doesn’t pay (or, crime sometimes does pay); a crisis will bring out the best (or the worst) in people; revenge is sweet (or bitter); love conquers all (or hatred conquers love). The story is written with the single-minded aim of dramatizing its point. It teaches a lesson in human nature, it contains a moral, it offers an insight.

  The payoff of the mystery short story comes in the form of a surprise or twist at the climax. It gives the reader a “punch.” The entire story is written to dramatize the meaning of that climactic revelation.

  Anything that does not contribute to maximizing the impact of the punch should be eliminated.

  The punch of most mystery short stories dramatizes the simple theme that things are not what they appear to be. In the classical whodunit story, for example, the most likely suspect is innocent (although in the focused, economical short story, the actual villain may not be revealed if that is not the story’s point). Other mystery storylines focus on the discovery of an unexpected motive for murder,
or the surprising meaning of a single puzzling clue, or the unforeseen relationship between the villain and the victim, or a revealing event in one character’s past.

  Things are not what they seem. Dramatizing what they actually are is the story’s point. It offers the reader a new insight—into human nature, into the ironies of life, into the meaning of love, or hate, or death, or greed. After reading an effective short story, the reader should stop for a moment and think, “Ah, yes. I never thought of it that way before.”

  The short story contains the same structural elements as the novel:

  1. Situation—Virtually all fiction of any length focuses on an interesting character with a problem. A detective is hired to solve a crime. A murderer attempts to escape detection. A husband seeks to find his missing wife. A compulsive gambler seeks to win back everything he’s lost. Short-story situations can be less dramatic and highly charged than those that move novels. The situation in a short story is often commonplace, something that the average reader can identify with. But the situation must be important to the story’s protagonist, whose goal (to resolve the problem) gives momentum to the story.

  2. Complication—The situation creates the story’s motivation. It forces the character to act to achieve his or her goal. This action produces more and greater problems. Obstacles arise in the form of a new situation and/or another character (the antagonist) who opposes the protagonist.

  3. Climax—The protagonist arrives at the crisis, the turning point in the action, the moment when he or she must make the right decision or fail to achieve his or her goal.

  4. Resolution—If the protagonist took the right actions, the problem is solved. If not, the problem remains unresolved, or even more complicated than it was at the beginning, depending on the point the story is making. In any case, the story’s resolution must relate directly to the situation it began with, and it must result directly from the actions of the protagonist.

  You can achieve interesting short-story effects by altering the natural chronological order in which these structural elements occur. For example, you can begin with the climax (the moment when the protagonist must decide whether to break into his boss’s office or walk away) or even the resolution (the protagonist is being pronounced guilty by the jury), then tell the rest of the story as flashback. Or you can use the complication (the protagonist is confronted by the antagonist) as your narrative hook.

  Many mystery writers find the short story form, with all of its constraints and demands, more difficult than the novel. They think in terms of novel-length fiction, and when an idea attracts them, they develop and complicate it for the novel form. Others are drawn to the focus and discipline of the short story. Most writers, however, agree that the short-story form forces them to write well, and for this reason alone, even if your goal is to publish a novel, you should try to write short stories.

  Chapter 3

  The Protagonist: The Sleuth

  As Hero or Heroine

  An editor rejected my first novel with these words: “I think it would take something really unusual to convince us to take on a new mystery series—an Armenian/Jewish plumber who solves cases by listening at people’s drain pipes, or something like that.”

  The point, of course, was this: Publishers—and readers—look for unusual and fascinating protagonists. In fact, in mystery fiction appealing sleuths are at least as important as clever storylines.

  A compelling protagonist can sell an ordinary plot. Characters make stories seem real. Readers invest their emotions in characters, not plots. They experience strong feelings—happiness, sadness, anger, worry, fear—because they care about what happens to the characters.

  In the case of mystery fiction, the character readers care most about is the sleuth.

  A mystery plot is basically the story of the hero or heroine’s problems. The most compelling problem, of course, is the puzzle, the “whodunit” question. Mystery storylines are driven by the process of detection. The story belongs to the detective. The sleuth is the one with the problem.

  In the mystery, things happen because the protagonist makes them happen. Your heroine is the story’s catalyst. She is active, not reactive. She doesn’t sit around waiting for things to happen to her. She works hard to uncover and interpret clues—they are never given to her gratuitously. She is not passive. She desperately wants to solve the puzzle, and she strives passionately to do it. She has goals and she struggles against powerful obstacles to achieve them. She takes risks, confronts threats, and doesn’t quit.

  Things are never easy for the heroine or hero.

  Make your readers worry about your protagonist and you’ve got them all the way to The End.

  The mystery is a quest story. The sleuth strives to uncover a villain who doesn’t want to be uncovered and will do anything—even murder the sleuth—to prevent it. The mystery builds tension and suspense as the sleuth confronts danger in pursuit of the quest.

  The sleuth typically has many of the characteristics of the mythical hero—purity of purpose, courage, conviction, and single-minded commitment to ideals. John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee, for example, thinks of himself as a crusader. In The Dreadful Lemon Sky, MacDonald writes:

  It is unseemly to feel festive about checking out the death of a dead friend. But there is something heartening about having a sense of mission. A clean purpose. A noble intent, no matter how foolish. … Ahead, some murky mystery locked in the broken skull of a dead lady. The knight errant, earning his own self-esteem, holding the palms cupped to make a dragon trap.

  The stories of most successful mystery writers similarly hinge on their hero or heroine setting off to solve a mystery with a “sense of mission,” a “clean purpose,” and a “noble intent.” Robert Parker’s Spenser is clearly a hero from the Travis McGee mold. So, in their own ways, are Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone, Sara Paretsky’s V. I. Warshawski, Lawrence Block’s Matt Scudder, and many others.

  Think of your sleuth as a noble—but human and accessible—knight errant. Make your mystery stories journeys—for your hero or heroine, for your readers, and for yourself.

  This is the storyline of virtually every successful mystery story: The sleuth has big problems, and as the story unfolds, these problems grow bigger and more baffling and dangerous. But the sleuth perseveres.

  Readers convert the sleuth’s quest into a question: Will he or she succeed? Make readers care, keep them in doubt, and you’ll keep them reading.

  Mystery heroes and heroines can be many things—lawyers, hairdressers, children, or Armenian plumbers—but they cannot be weak-willed, passive, or indecisive. Sleuths make things happen. They do not wait for things to happen to them. They succeed because they’re aggressive and stubborn—not because they’re lucky.

  Mystery protagonists, in other words, are not wimps.

  Auguste Dupin and Sherlock Holmes weren’t wimps, nor were Nero Wolfe or Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe or Travis McGee, Perry Mason or Mike Hammer. Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone and Sara Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawski aren’t wimps. Neither are Tony Hillerman’s Jim Chee or Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta or any of Ed McBain’s cops at the 87th Precinct.

  Idiosyncratic, yes. Distinctive, definitely. Flawed, human, and accessible. Some heroes and heroines welcome physical confrontations, while others prefer mental contests. But none of them is a wimp.

  Study these and other protagonists of successful mystery fiction. I guarantee you’ll find them all strong-willed, capable, smart, admirable, persevering, and likeable—the kind of people that readers respect, identify with, and root for. Mystery sleuths know what they’re after, they want it badly, and they take risks to achieve it.

  This does not mean that heroes and heroines must be bigger than life. If they never fail, or if they’re know-it-alls, the outcome of their quest will never be in doubt, and your story will lack tension and suspense. They can—and should—have blind spots, quirks, and weaknesses which they must struggle to overcome. Their human l
imitations make them appealing to readers and complicate their quest.

  The sleuth you create is as important to the success of your story as the plot.

  First you must give him or her a job.

  The professional sleuth

  The professionals who get paid specifically to solve murders include homicide cops, private investigators, criminal lawyers, prosecuting attorneys, newspaper or television reporters, and forensic pathologists. Their motivation is never in doubt. They investigate murders because that’s how they earn a living, and they do it relentlessly and well because they are committed and talented.

  The professional sleuth is an otherwise ordinary person whose job happens to involve investigating murders. He may be an overweight recovering alcoholic with an ex-wife who haunts him for alimony and estranged children he never sees and colleagues who refuse to cooperate with him. She may live in a run-down trailer park, be pestered by an amorous vacuum-cleaner salesman, suffer from menopause, smoke mentholated cigarettes, own an ancient Volkswagen with bad brakes, and live on Diet Coke and Tums.

  Professional sleuths persevere regardless of their problems. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be effective fictional heroines and heroes.

  For one thing, they need the money. That’s a good start, but it’s not enough. Other powerful motivations such as loyalty, anger, love, or fear drive them.

  The higher the stakes for your sleuth—the more he or she stands to gain or lose—the more compelling your story will be, and the faster your reader will turn the pages.

  The writer whose sleuth is a professional has a built-in solution to the problem of how to get the story’s quest underway. Chapter One opens when an elderly man walks into the office, slumps into a chair, and says: “My wife is missing. I’ll pay you to find her. I’ll pay you whatever you want.”