The Elements of Mystery Fiction: Writing the Modern Whodunit

by Tapply, William G.

  A variation of the omniscient is the point of view that consistently keeps readers at arm’s length from all the story’s characters. The all-seeing narrator reports only what is observable and refrains from entering any character’s mind.

  The neutral narrator reports the Michael Blake-Sarah Benjamin scene this way:

  Michael Blake pushed open the glass door. Sarah Benjamin was sitting at the patio table. Her glasses were perched low on her long aristocratic nose. She was studying a stack of papers. She wore a bulky sweatshirt and baggy blue jeans. There were deep creases in her craggy face.

  “Sarah,” said Blake gently.

  She raised her eyes over her glasses without lifting her head. “Well, hello, Michael,” she said with a soft smile. “Come sit.”

  He went over and sat across from her. She held her bony hand to him and he took it.

  “You’ve been avoiding me,” she said.

  “Nonsense,” he replied.

  In this example, the creases in Sarah’s face and her bony hand simply describe her. They no longer work to hint at Michael’s fondness for Sarah or his concern about her deteriorating health.

  Unlike the omniscient, the neutral point of view is really no point of view at all. Because it forces readers to observe each character through a one-way mirror and prevents them from entering any character’s mind, they are unlikely to care deeply about any of them.

  Second person

  In the second person, the narrator is someone called “you.” Instead of a character being the story’s protagonist and narrator, “you” are.

  For example:

  You take a deep breath and push open the door. You see Sarah sitting at the patio table. She’s not looking well, you think.

  “Sarah,” you say.

  With this point of view, you hope to convince your reader to become a character in your story. But readers know they’re not pushing open doors and speaking to Sarah.

  Avoid the second-person point of view, if only because it’s so unusual that it calls attention to itself. It strikes the reader as a facile stylistic trick. To be effective, writing should be invisible. It should allow readers to submerge themselves in the story by identifying with a single sympathetic character. Second-person narration keeps reminding readers that they’re being toyed with by a writer who’s trying awfully hard to be clever. It gives them no character to connect with.

  A short story might sustain a second-person narrator. But I know of no mystery novel that’s done it successfully—or of any serious writers who’ll admit that they’ve even tried.

  Chapter 6

  Setting: The Scene

  of the Crime

  No matter what your sleuth is doing—driving a car through the night, interviewing a suspect, waiting in an office, getting beaten up, watching television, or lying in bed thinking—she always has to be somewhere.

  You can’t have a scene without a setting.

  Setting is more than place

  Setting is more than geographical place. It comprises all the conditions under which things happen—region, neighborhood, buildings, interiors, climate, weather, topography, flora, fauna, time of day, season of year. It involves not just the scenery, but also the sounds and smells and textures of places.

  Successful mysteries have been set in every imaginable city and region in the world. Big cities such as New York, London, Boston, Detroit, and Los Angeles are popular. Sara Paretsky has put Chicago on the mystery map. But increasingly such writers as Tony Hillerman and Jake Page are invoking the richness of the American Southwest. Carl Hiaasen and Edna Buchanan are among the many who set their mysteries in Florida. Dana Sabenow writes about Alaska and Patricia Cornwell about Richmond, Virginia. Philip R. Craig’s novels take place on Martha’s Vineyard; Brendan DuBois writes about New Hampshire’s few miles of seashore. All of these settings work because the authors know them. What’s really important is being so familiar with your settings that you can invoke the defining details that will bring them to life and be useful in your stories.

  Your settings must strike your readers as realistic. A true-to-life setting persuades readers to suspend their disbelief and accept the premise that your story really happened. The easiest way to do this is to write knowledgeably and confidently about real places.

  Mood, theme, and character

  Mystery writers appeal to all of their readers’ senses to establish their story’s setting and mood. James Lee Burke, in Black Cherry Blues, evokes a section of Baton Rouge this way:

  The rain clattered on my truck cab, and the wind was blowing strong out of the southwest, across the Atchafalaya swamp, whipping the palm and oak trees by the highway. West Baton Rouge, which begins at the Mississippi River, has always been a seedy area of truck stops, marginal gambling joints, Negro and blue-collar bars. To the east you can see the lighted girders of the Earl K. Long Bridge, plumes of smoke rising from the oil refineries, the state capitol building silhouetted in the rain. Baton Rouge is a green town full of oak trees, parks, and lakes, and the thousands of lights on the refineries and chemical plants are

  regarded as a testimony to financial security rather than a sign of industrial blight. But once you drive west across the metal grid of the bridge and thump down on the old cracked four-lane, you’re in a world that caters to the people of the Atchafalaya basin—Cajuns, redbones, roustabouts, pipeliners, rednecks whose shrinking piece of American geography is identified only by a battered pickup, a tape deck playing Waylon, and a twelve-pack of Jax.

  In this passage, Burke’s narrator focuses on his physical surroundings—the colors and sounds and the people who are part of the place. Although Burke does not directly describe any sense impressions other than “clattered” and “thump,” it’s easy to smell the refineries and chemical plants and to feel the dampness of the southwest wind that blows in from the swamp.

  In a film or a stage play, the setting is always visible to the viewer, and conversations, actions and setting are available simultaneously. Complex settings do not distract from other components of the scene. In a book or short story, however, all that’s visible is what the writer presents in words. A powerful paragraph of description such as Burke’s does not interrupt the story’s flow. Longer—or less adept—descriptive passages, on the other hand, can cause readers to lose touch with the story’s characters and action.

  The writer’s challenge is to integrate setting into a scene’s other components, such as dialogue and action, so that it is vivid without interrupting or intruding on the events. Here is how Sue Grafton’s narrator, Kinsey Millhone, describes the motel she has just entered, in F Is for Fugitive:

  I moved to the counter and peered to my right. Through an open door, I caught a glimpse of a hospital bed. There was the murmur of voices, but I couldn’t see a soul. I heard the muffled flushing of a toilet, pipes clanking noisily. The air was soon scented with the artificial bouquet of room spray, impossibly sweet. Nothing in nature has ever smelled like that.

  Several minutes passed. There was no seating available, so I stood where I was, turning to survey the narrow room. …

  Here the descriptions are short, so that the reader’s attention remains on Kinsey. The smells and sounds of the motel are carefully woven into the scene without distracting readers from their focus on Kinsey and her reason for being there.

  Opening scenes with setting

  Films typically begin with an “establishing shot.” The camera pans across a crowded restaurant or a mountain range or a city street to fix the viewer in a place before the action begins. Coming at the beginning, establishing shots do not interrupt ongoing action or distract the viewer.

  Mystery writers can use the establishing shot to equally good effect. The following passage, for example, begins Chapter One in Peter Hoeg’s Smilla’s Sense of Snow:

  It’s freezing—an extraordinary 0-degree Fahrenheit—and it’s snowing, and in the language that is no longer mine, the snow is ganik—big, almost weightless crystals
falling in clumps and covering the ground with a layer of pulverized white frost.

  December, darkness rises up from the grave, seeming as limitless as the sky above us. In this darkness our faces are merely pale, shining orbs.…

  Here Hoeg uses an establishing shot of the dominant element in the setting, the snow. Then he pans quickly to the cemetery (“the grave”) before establishing that other people (“our faces”) are present in the scene.

  Lawrence Sanders begins The First Deadly Sin this way:

  There was quiet. He lay on his back atop a shaft of stone called Devil’s Needle, and felt he was lost, floating in air. Above him, all about him stretched a thin blue sac. Through it he could see scribbles of clouds, a lemon sun.

  He heard nothing but his own strong heart, the slowly quieting of his breath as he recovered from his climb. He could believe he was alone in the universe.

  Finally, he stood and looked around him. Waves of foliage lapped at the base of his stone; it was a dark green ocean with a froth of autumn’s russet. He could see the highway, the tarred roofs of Chilton, a steel ribbon of river uncoiling southward to the sea.

  Sanders’ opening scene, like Hoeg’s, depends largely on description. But neither of the scenes is static. Something is happening. In Hoeg’s beginning, the narrator’s distinctive observations, plus her use of an unusual foreign word, draws readers into the story that will unfold. In the scene by Sanders, readers are acutely aware that the scenery is being presented through the eyes of the point-of-view character, who has just climbed to the top of this rock. Besides establishing specific seasons and locations, both scenes introduce readers to the characters’ narrative voices and, by their observations, give hints about their personalities and interests. The two scenes also establish certain expectations in the reader and set the tone for what follows. In this way, even relatively straightforward narrative descriptions, when presented through the point of view of the protagonist, can serve many purposes.

  It’s not a good idea to postpone the action until you’ve set the stage in every scene. You might want to open with a snatch of dialogue or a glimpse of a character. But you must quickly give the reader a sense of where and when the scene is occurring. You can integrate a fuller description of the setting into the action of the scene later, so that the separate parts of the scene work together unobtrusively.

  Here, for example, is the way Eileen Dreyer begins the prologue to her novel A Man to Die For:

  Control your impulses, her mother had always said. Stifle your urges, the church echoed. She should have listened. The next time she had an urge like this one, she was going to lock herself in a closet until it went away.

  “Honey, why are we here?”

  “I have to make a stop before I take you home, Mom.”

  A stop. She had to report a crime. Several crimes. That wasn’t exactly a run to the local Safeway for deodorant.

  Gripping her purse in one hand and her mother in the other, Casey McDonough approached the St. Louis City Police Headquarters like a penitent approaching the gates of purgatory. It seemed amazing, really. Casey had been born no more than fifteen miles away, but she’d never visited this place before. She’d never even known precisely where it was.

  A stark block of granite that took up the corner of Clark and Tucker, the headquarters did nothing to inspire comfort. Brass grillwork protected massive front doors and encased traditional globe lamps that flanked it. …

  In this opener, Dreyer uses four short paragraphs to introduce two characters and to create a feeling of urgency before letting readers know where the scene takes place. Delaying significantly longer could risk making readers feel disoriented.

  Making settings authentic

  You must get actual places precisely right. One sour note and you risk losing your reader’s trust.

  A friend once recommended that I read a book that was set in Boston. In the first chapter was a reference to Newbury Street—except it was spelled N-e-w-b-e-r-r-y. This writer can’t be trusted even to get place names right, I thought. How can I believe this story?

  I closed the book and didn’t pick it up again.

  Making settings absolutely authentic requires research. No matter how many times you’ve been there, it’s a good idea to go back to the places you intend to write about. Observe the people, listen to the sounds, sniff the smells, absorb the colors and textures, talk with the people you meet. Note the vivid images that define the place. Look for the striking details that make it unique and distinctive and that will enable you to bring it to life for your readers.

  Here’s how Patricia Cornwell leads her readers into a morgue in Cruel and Unusual:

  Inside the morgue, fluorescent light bleached the corridor of color, the smell of deodorizer cloying. I passed the small office where funeral homes signed in bodies, then the X-ray room, and the refrigerator, which was really a large refrigerated room with double-decker gurneys and two massive steel doors. The autopsy suite was lit up, stainless steel tables polished bright. Susan was sharpening a long knife and Fielding was labeling blood tubes. Both of them looked as tired and unenthusiastic as I felt.

  Visiting your local morgue may not be your idea of fun. But it’s necessary if you want to describe it with the authority that Cornwell has here. Don’t rely on your imagination or what you’ve seen on television to give you the telling details or the smells and sounds of a place. If it’s worth writing about at all, it’s worth getting absolutely right.

  In many cases, researching settings is not unpleasant. For example, you should make it a point to eat in every restaurant you write about, no matter how familiar it already is to you, at least twice—once just before writing the scene to fix it in your mind, and once again afterward to make sure you’ve gotten it right. This is not hard work.

  Invented settings

  Don’t feel limited to using actual places if doing so will alter the story you want to tell. An invented setting can still ring true for your readers. Ed McBain fabricated the 87th Precinct and the city where it lies. Katherine Hall Page invented the Massachusetts town of Aleford, and Sue Grafton’s Santa Teresa is a fictional place, too. Those who write about actual places commonly invent restaurants, businesses, and residences in them. Readers will readily accept the invented places as real provided they resemble actual places.

  If the setting you need exists, use it; if it doesn’t exist, make it up, but make it true.

  Milieu

  In addition to all of the physical elements of place, setting includes the cultures and professions and other activities of your characters. Horse-racing lore is as much a part of Dick Francis’ novels as the racetracks themselves. Forensic medicine is a vital part of the settings in Patricia Cornwell’s stories. Police procedure is integral to the settings in the works of William Caunitz, Joseph Wambaugh, Ed McBain, and other writers whose main characters are police officers. Sports such as professional baseball and college basketball have served as background for novels by Robert Parker. The traditions and ceremonies of the Navajos are important in the reservation settings in Tony Hillerman’s stories.

  A setting can be another historical time. Steven Saylor’s short stories, for example, take place in Caesar’s Rome. Ellis Peters’ Brother Cadfael novels are set in medieval Europe. Carole Nelson Douglas, among others, writes Sherlock Holmes pastiches set in Victorian London. Max Allan Collins’ Nathan Heller series revisits famous American crimes. Robert K. Tanenbaum’s Butch Karp, New York City Assistant District Attorney, works in the 1970s. In all cases, the stories are convincing because the authors exhaustively research the historical period they’ve chosen to write about. A single mistake in the customs, technology, speech patterns, or dress of the times can destroy the willingness of knowledgeable readers to believe your story.

  An authentic milieu helps convince readers that your story is real. It can also appeal to readers’ curiosity. Everybody likes to learn something new, and when readers can learn while they’re absorbed by an e
ntertaining mystery story, they like it even better.

  Settings that work overtime

  Your setting is more than just a backdrop for the action of your story. The conditions under which the action occurs can actually do double or even triple duty for you. Setting creates mood and tone. The places where characters live and work give clues to their personalities and motivations. Place, weather, climate, season of year, and time of day can cause things to happen in a story just as surely as characters can.

  Shakespeare and Conan Doyle understood how setting can establish mood and foreshadow events. The “dark and stormy night” had its purpose, as did the spooky mansion on the remote moor or the thick fog of a London evening. Contemporary writers use thunderstorms and abandoned warehouses and barrooms and the back alleys of city slums in the same way.

  Modern readers are sophisticated, however, and writers have to keep up with them. Obvious settings can too easily become literary clichés. If you misuse or overuse them, they lose their punch.

  Never underestimate the power of going against stereotypes. Seek subtlety and irony. Murder can be committed anywhere, anytime. When it happens on a sunny May morning in a suburban backyard, for example, or in a church or school or hospital, the horror of it is intensified.

  Carefully selected details of setting delineate the characters who populate it. The pictures or calendars that hang on the office wall suggest the interests and personality of the person who works there. Look for the small details that tell readers about a character before they even see him or her: a policeman’s desk littered with half-empty styrofoam coffee cups or cigar butts or used tea bags or chewing gum wrappers; the absence of a family portrait on the desk of a corporate CEO; the music that’s played on a lawyer’s phone line while your protagonist is on hold; a week’s worth of newspapers piled on an elderly widow’s front porch; a specimen jar containing a smoker’s lung sitting on the desk of a forensic pathologist; a bag of golf clubs in the corner of a politician’s office; or a stack of old Field & Stream magazines on the table in a dentist’s waiting room.