The Elements of Mystery Fiction: Writing the Modern Whodunit

by Tapply, William G.

A prologue and an epilogue can give symmetry to a mystery, but they can also make it appear that the writer is striving to be “literary.” If you are tempted to add a prologue and/or an epilogue as an afterthought, scrutinize your reasons. Most well-told stories don’t need either.

  A story about an escaped convict who murders the jurors who sent him to prison ten years earlier, for example, might benefit from a prologue in which the convict’s original crime is dramatized. If the storyline involves the murder (or was it suicide?) of a disabled Vietnam veteran, try a prologue that recounts the circumstances under which the vet was wounded.

  In Rick Boyer’s Pirate Trade, his narrator, Doc Adams, explains in a prologue called “Lightship Purse” the origin of the baskets crafted by Nantucket natives and the significance of the ivory medallions on their lids. The reader needs this information to understand the story that follows.

  James Lee Burke opens Black Cherry Blues with a dream sequence that establishes the foreboding mood of the novel and introduces the reader to the tortured mind of Dave Robicheaux, the first-person narrator.

  If your prologue sets a mood, reveals a character trait, gives important information, or introduces a theme echoed in the story itself, it is likely to work for you. If it does none of these things, delete it.

  Epilogues typically explain what happens to characters after the story has ended. Minette Walters ends The Sculptress with this epilogue:

  At 5:30 on a dark and frosty winter morning the Sculptress walked free from the gates of her prison, two hours earlier than the time announced to the press. She had sought and obtained permission to slip back into society well away from the glare of publicity that had surrounded the release of other celebrated cases of wrongful imprisonment. Roz and Sister Bridget, alerted by telephone, stood outside in the lamplight, stamping their feet and blowing on their hands. They smiled in welcome as the Judas door opened.

  Only Hal, sheltering ten yards away in the warmth of the car, saw the look of gloating triumph that swept briefly over Olive’s face as she put her arms around the two women and lifted them bodily into the air. He recalled some words that he’d had stencilled on his desk when he was still a policeman. ‘Truth lies within a little and certain compass, but error is immense.’

  For no apparent reason, he shivered.

  This epilogue, which takes place a significant time after the story itself has ended, is necessary to give the reader a sense of completion. In this case, what happens to Olive Martin after the story itself ends contains a hint of irony and foreboding. The epilogue in The Sculptress is dramatically satisfying. It leaves something for the reader to speculate about: Is Olive Martin really innocent?

  Chapter 9

  Building Conflict to

  Make Scenes Work

  All forms of fiction—films, stage plays, novels, short stories—unfold in an ordered sequence of events or scenes, the purpose of which is to move the story forward. In mystery fiction, each scene is a turn along the maze of the sleuth’s journey of detection. If you neglect to account for even one of those turns, your reader will become immediately—and hopelessly—lost.

  Every scene should have a function. Test its validity by asking yourself: “If I omitted this scene completely, would the story still make sense to my readers? Would my hero still get to the same place at the end?”

  If your answer is yes, you should omit the scene.

  While moving the story forward through time and space, scenes perform other functions as well. They introduce new characters. They expand and complicate the personalities and motivations of old characters. They establish setting and mood. They develop subplots, clues, red herrings, and false trails. They amuse, sadden, excite, confuse, clarify, educate.

  Scenes dramatize events that are motivated. Accident, coincidence, and luck, while common enough in real life, do not move invented stories believably. Readers want to know why events occur. They demand cause-and-effect logic. The law of stimulus-response operates in well-motivated novels and short stories. For everything that happens there must be a reason. Readers may not immediately know what that reason is; in fact, not knowing impels them to continue reading. They trust that explanations will eventually emerge, and they read on, seeking clues that will help them understand the stimuli that produced the responses they witnessed. If those explanations never appear, or if the only explanation is luck or coincidence, readers feel cheated.

  Scenes should create the illusion of taking place in real time. Action is played out step by step. Dialogue scenes unfold word by word, fight scenes blow by blow, love scenes caress by caress. No significant piece of action is omitted in a scene. As readers witness these events, the illusion becomes their reality. They are there.

  You can, and sometimes should, summarize actions: “O’Donnell, the bad cop, questioned the woman for an hour. Then Napoli took over. He played the good cop. He got nothing out of her, either.” Or, “They scratched and punched and pulled each other’s hair, and then the two women fell to the floor exhausted.” Or, “We kissed and stroked each other long into the night.”

  But while summaries do important storytelling work, they do not create the illusion of observed events for readers. Summaries are not scenes.

  Every character in mystery fiction, as we have seen, wants something important that he doesn’t have, cannot get without struggle, and is willing to take risks to gain. The sleuth, the truth-seeker, struggles to solve the mystery, while the villain does everything he can to escape detection. Every other character has a direct or indirect stake in the story’s outcome. Tension and suspense come from characters whose goals conflict with each other.

  A scene can be defined as a closely connected sequence of actions in which one or more characters working toward an important goal encounter obstacles, struggle against those obstacles, achieve some kind of resolution, and end up with new problems. The new problems lead to new efforts to achieve their goals, which are dramatized in subsequent scenes, and so on to the climax.

  Every scene, therefore, contains goal, obstacle, conflict, resolution, and new obstacle. Eliminate any one of these elements and your scene falls flat.

  Let’s analyze a typical scene in mystery fiction, this one from The Sculptress by Minette Walters. Roz, a writer and the story’s protagonist, has agreed to write a book about Olive Martin, a convicted murderess. Roz visits Olive in prison and then does some background research on the unspeakably violent murder of the woman’s mother and her sister. Roz is repelled. She cannot bear the thought of spending more time with Olive and writing about it. She decides to tell Iris, her agent, that the deal is off:

  She seized the telephone and dialled Iris’s number. “Have I signed anything on the Olive Martin book? Why? Because I damn well can’t write it, that’s why. The woman scares the bloody shit out of me and I am not visiting her again.”

  “I thought you liked her.” Iris spoke calmly through a mouthful of supper.

  Roz ignored this comment. “I’ve got her statement here and the pathologist’s report, or his conclusions at least. I should have read them first. I’m not doing it. I will not glorify what she did by writing a book about it. My God, Iris, they were alive when she cut their heads off. Her poor wretched mother tried to ward off the axe. It’s making me sick just thinking about it.”

  “OK.”

  “OK what?”

  “Don’t write it.”

  Roz’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “I thought you’d argue at least.”

  “Why? One thing I’ve learnt in this business is that you can’t force people to write. Correction. You can if you’re persistent and manipulative enough, but the result is always below par.” Roz heard her take a drink. “In any case, Jenny Atherton sent me the first ten chapters of her new book this morning. It’s all good stuff on the inherent dangers of a poor self-image, with obesity as number one confidence crippler. She’s unearthed a positive goldmine of film and television personalities who’ve all sunk to untold depths since gaini
ng weight and being forced off camera. It’s disgustingly tasteless, of course, like all Jenny’s books, but it’ll sell. I think you should send all your gen—sorry about the pun—to her. Olive would make a rather dramatic conclusion, don’t you think, particularly if we can get a photograph of her in her cell.”

  “No chance.”

  “No chance of getting a photograph? Shame.”

  “No chance of my sending anything to Jenny Atherton. Honestly, Iris,” she stormed, losing her temper, “you really are beneath contempt. You should be working for the gutter press. You believe in exploiting anyone just as long as they bring in the cash. Jenny Atherton is the last person I’d allow near Olive.”

  “Can’t see why,” said Iris, now chewing heartily on something. “I mean if you don’t want to write about her and you’re refusing ever to visit her again because she makes you sick, why cavil at somebody else having a bash?”

  “It’s the principle.”

  “Can’t see it, old thing. Sounds more like dog in the manger to me. Listen, I can’t dally. We’ve got people in. At least let me tell Jenny that Olive’s up for grabs. She can start from scratch. It’s not as though you’ve got very far, is it?”

  “I’ve changed my mind,” Roz snapped. “I will do it. Goodbye.” She slammed the receiver down.

  This scene moves the story. Roz’s reluctance to become involved with Olive Martin is crucial to the story’s development. On the other hand, unless she does continue to visit Olive, there is no story. Roz begins with the goal of abandoning the story. Iris, knowing how Roz will respond, cleverly creates the obstacle of readily agreeing and suggests that Jenny Atherton, Roz’ rival, can take over the project. Now Roz faces a conflict: If she gives up the project, Jenny will get it; if she continues her interviews with Olive Martin, she will be forced to deal with a person who repels her. Roz resolves the conflict by staying on the project, which creates a new obstacle for her: Now she must continue her research into a story that she finds highly offensive.

  The scene does other work besides committing the reluctant Roz to write about Olive Martin. It characterizes Roz as uncertain in her convictions, sensitive and emotional, and easily manipulated—all traits that become important later in the story. The scene emphasizes Roz’ powerful response to Olive Martin. And it shows that Iris knows how to get her way with Roz.

  The law of stimulus-response motivates the characters in this scene. Roz calls Iris to beg off the project. Iris responds by readily agreeing—which, as Iris expects, causes Roz to respond by changing her mind.

  The scene gives the illusion of taking place in real time. It contains no summary of events or condensation of time. The conversation between Roz and Iris is played out in its entirety. The attributions in the dialogue and the descriptions of the characters’ actions appear to consume all of the pauses in the conversation. Thus readers sense that it takes them as long to read the scene as it would take actually to witness it.

  Building bridges

  A work of fiction is not constructed entirely of scenes. Some events should be summarized, as we have seen. The passage of time between events needs to be suggested, and the consequences of a scene sometimes need to be pondered.

  The bridges or transitions between scenes take various forms:

  1. Summary of intervening events. What happens between the scenes may be uninteresting, unimportant, or unproductive. It does not contain the conflict elements that would make it a scene, but it still needs to be accounted for. In Cruel and Unusual Patricia Cornwell simply writes: “I tried Marino and he wasn’t home or at headquarters.” Nothing more is needed.

  2. Indication of elapsed time. Whether it’s a few minutes, hours, or even months or years, you must keep your readers informed about the passage in time between scenes. For example, in F Is for Fugitive, Sue Grafton accounts for a hunk of time this way: “After supper, I snagged a jacket from my room and headed down the back stairs.”

  3. Analysis of the ramifications of the preceding scene. Pause before the next scene to interpret and consider the implications of the scene that has just ended. Periodically in mystery fiction readers need to stop, stretch, and take a deep breath. Things have been moving fast. There’s a lot to ponder for both the sleuth and the reader. Before you move forward to the next scene, you should help your readers understand what’s happened so far and how the last scene affects the story. Here’s how Dick Francis does this in Straight:

  Perhaps I had been imagining things: but I knew I hadn’t. One could often hear more nuances in someone’s voice on the telephone than one could face to face. When people were relaxed, the lower vibration of their voices came over the wires undisturbed; under stress, the lower vibrations disappeared because the vocal cords involuntarily tightened. After Loder had discovered I would be inheriting Dozen Roses, there had been no lower vibrations at all.

  4. Consideration of future actions. What should the sleuth do next? How can he use what he’s learned in the preceding scene? What are his alternatives? Unless you share your sleuth’s thinking with your readers, they will feel unprepared for the next scene. In Skinwalkers, Tony Hillerman uses this bridge:

  Leaphorn put the memo aside. When the more normal working day began, he’d call Largo and see if he had anything to add. But now he wanted to think about his three homicides.

  Bridges can be as brief as a phrase or sentence, or they can go on for several paragraphs. Their purpose is to move the protagonist smoothly from one scene to the next. Bridges are not always necessary or desirable, and sometimes you can omit them entirely by starting a new chapter or inserting a line break, then beginning the next scene directly. In many cases you can trust your readers to fill in the gap between the two sequential scenes without explanation. The next scene logically comes next, and readers can follow along without being told what has happened or how much time has elapsed between them.

  The bridges that connect scenes are by their nature passive and introspective. They are summaries that come directly to the reader from the story’s narrative point of view. They do not take place in real time, and they lack all of the other elements of scenes.

  All fiction needs bridges. But keep them to a minimum, keep them brief, and keep them focused. When writing bridges, it’s tempting to theorize, philosophize, speculate, recapitulate, rhapsodize, and expound. When you do too much of this, your story’s momentum grinds to a halt. Mystery readers don’t pick up your book to learn your views on life and love and death. They care about your story’s characters and their problems.

  Chapter 10

  Dialogue: The Lifeblood

  of Mystery Fiction

  Because your sleuth can’t be everywhere at once, she cannot witness all of your story’s crucial events. If she actually saw the crime as it was committed, of course, then there would be no mystery. For the same reason, she cannot overhear conversations in which the culprit reveals his motives, divulges his plans, or confesses his guilt.

  That’s why dialogue between the protagonist and other key characters is so important in mystery fiction. Although the hero or heroine must be active and participate in and witness many events firsthand, it’s largely through conversations with others that the sleuth (and the reader) gathers clues. Thus the primary method for information-gathering in mystery fiction is the interrogation, although it’s rarely a simple matter of asking questions and receiving answers. The sleuth understands that the various people she encounters have their own agendas. Some characters refuse to cooperate. Some become belligerent. Some lie or withhold information. Others distort the truth for their own private, and sometimes subconscious, reasons. These lies and distortions can create new directions for investigation, some of which may prove productive while others turn out to be false trails and dead-ends.

  Sometimes characters divulge key information without intending to—information that becomes significant only later, after other clues have been collected.

  More than other forms of fiction, the mystery ca
lls upon dialogue to perform multiple tasks, such as delineate character, create conflict, build tension, establish mood, present clues, suggest false trails, and give momentum to the story. An effective dialogue scene can accomplish all of these jobs in a few seemingly simple and straightforward exchanges. Because of the special importance of dialogue in mystery fiction, the writer simply must master the art of recreating conversations that are clear, entertaining, and realistic while performing the vital clue-gathering function.

  Writing dialogue that sounds real

  The conversations that we engage in and overhear in real life tend to be repetitious, semi-articulate, and boring. Transcripts of such conversations, while authentic, would make tedious reading, and the writer who tries to recreate them literally risks writing muddy and hard-to-read dialogue.

  In real life, for example, this is how a woman might try to explain to her male friend that she doesn’t want him to spend the night with her:

  “I don’t—that is, well, I’m sorry, but.…”

  “I, um, I mean, you sure? That I can’t stay?”

  “Well, not, you know, not tonight, I think. Just, not tonight.”

  “Yeah, well, okay, I guess.”

  “You do—um, do you understand?”

  “Well, I guess not really, I don’t.”

  “It’s, like, well, sort of confusing.”

  “Can you, I mean, why don’t you try to, ah, explain it to me, huh?”