The Elements of Mystery Fiction: Writing the Modern Whodunit

by Tapply, William G.

  “Sure, okay. See, I guess I—well, really, to tell you the truth, I just sort of want to, um, be alone.”

  This exchange is “realistic,” but it’s not readable. Effectively written dialogue creates sparse and clear speech that wastes no words and yet sounds authentic. But simply eliminating the redundant and inarticulate parts is not enough; it produces flat, lifeless dialogue.

  For example:

  “Not tonight.”

  “Okay.”

  “Do you understand?”

  “No.”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “Try me.”

  “Okay. I want to be alone.”

  “You mean, you want to be apart from me.”

  “Yes.”

  It’s impossible to read this exchange without losing track of which character is which, of course, but otherwise this dialogue is sharper and easier to read. The message comes across clearly, cleanly, and concisely. But it lacks impact. It fails to suggest the powerful mixture of emotions that the characters must be feeling—emotions that were more strongly conveyed in the first version.

  One way to correct this is to write dialogue in which the characters talk about their feelings. They can reassure each other of their love and tell each other of the pain and conflict they are feeling. Unless handled with extreme restraint, however, direct expressions of emotion tend to sound maudlin and overblown and inconsistent with the characters’ personalities. They do not ring true.

  For example:

  “I’m sorry. It hurts me so much to have to say this to you. I’m very fond of you. I love you. Don’t ever forget that. It’s been wonderful, what we’ve had. I’m just very confused right now. Please understand.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I’ll be fine. It hurts. A lot. But I’ll manage somehow.”

  Here the writer has taken the easy way out by having the characters say exactly what they are feeling and thinking. There is no drama in a conversational exchange that tells rather than shows.

  Another form of telling rather than showing in dialogue substitutes highly expressive verbs and descriptive adverbs for the characters’ own expressions of emotion:

  “I’m sorry,” she murmured sadly.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he growled through clenched teeth.

  “Tonight I need to be alone,” she whispered tearfully. “Just tonight,” she sobbed. “Okay?” she asked hopefully.

  The characters’ emotions in this version are absolutely clear. The expressive verbs (“murmured,” “growled,” “whispered”) and the descriptive adverbs (“sadly,” “tearfully,” “hopefully”) leave no doubt in the reader’s mind.

  The problem here is that the writer has intruded on the scene to explain what is happening in the characters’ minds. The reader is yanked out of the point-of-view character’s shoes. The author has intervened to remind readers in no uncertain terms that there is indeed a diligent writer at work, controlling their reactions by telling them what’s going on and interpreting it for them—and, in the process, depriving them of the opportunity to gather clues and use their imagination. When that happens, readers don’t identify or empathize with the characters; they remain passive observers. The intrusive writer has destroyed the potential emotional impact of the scene by overexplaining it.

  Truly effective dialogue, like all writing, must show without telling. It works, like an effective film scene, through pictures and dialogue alone. The writer must remain invisible. What is not stated shows as much about the characters as what they say and do.

  In addition to the spoken words themselves, dialogue writers have two other tools. The first, attribution, should be used sparingly. Its primary purpose is simply to prevent the reader from getting the speakers confused. Not every statement requires attribution. The most useful attribution is “said” because, in dialogue scenes, an occasional “he said”—without an explanatory adverb—works as an invisible signpost. It registers, but does not intrude on the reader’s involvement in the scene.

  Attributions should be inserted into dialogue where they are least intrusive and noticeable—normally in the first natural pause in the spoken sentence. In this way, the attribution contributes to the rhythm of the dialogue without calling attention to itself.

  Note how the placement of the attributions is less noticeable and enhances the rhythm better in the second of the following two pieces of dialogue:

  “Tonight I need to be alone. Just tonight. Okay?” she said.

  I said, “You got it.”

  Or:

  “Tonight,” she said, “I need to be alone. Just tonight. Okay?”

  “You got it,” I said.

  The second tool in writing good dialogue is what stage actors call “business,” the combination of gesture and body language that are incidental to the main action—the conversation—but that suggest feelings and contribute visually to the audience’s understanding of the scene. Actors know that the smallest gesture, if well-timed and carefully chosen, can communicate a great deal, whereas elaborate and overblown gestures and actions are distracting and intrusive. Writers, like actors, should avoid overacting.

  In dialogue, a piece of business can be used instead of attribution, thereby doing double duty. In the following example, there is no need for the attribution “she said,” because the character’s actions make it perfectly clear who’s speaking:

  She put her arms around my neck and her cheek on my shoulder. “It’s complicated.”

  The judicious use of attribution and business frees the writer from having to intrude on the scene to tell the reader, “There was a long moment of silence,” or, “He hesitated briefly before he continued.”

  Here’s how Carl Hiaasen combines sparse dialogue, attribution, and business in what is essentially an interrogation scene in his novel Native Tongue:

  Joe Winder wanted to talk about what happened in Tallahassee. “I read all the stories,” he said. “I went back and looked up the microfiche.”

  “Then you know all there is to know.” Skink was on his haunches, poking the embers with a stick. Winder refused to look at what was frying in the pan.

  He said, “All this time and they never found you.”

  “They quit searching,” Skink said. A hot ash caught in a wisp of his beard. He snuffed it with two fingers. “I don’t normally eat soft-shell turtle,” he allowed.

  “Me neither,” said Joe Winder.

  Hiaasen manages to convey a great deal about the two characters in this simple dialogue scene without describing them. We sense the tension between Winder, who seeks information, and Skink, who is reluctant to give it to him. The scene is highly visual, yet the reader never loses track of the conversation.

  In the following fragment of a straightforward interrogation scene from A Is for Alibi, Sue Grafton mingles business with dialogue to create a memorable character:

  “Are you Sharon Napier?” I asked.

  She looked up. Her eyes were rimmed with dark lashes, the green taking on an almost turquoise hue in the fluorescent light overhead.

  “I don’t think we’ve met,” she said.

  “I’m Kinsey Millhone,” I said. “May I sit down?”

  She shrugged by way of consent. She took a compact out of her pocket and checked her eye makeup, removing a slight smudge of shadow from her upper lid. Her lashes were clearly false, but the effect was flashy, giving her eyes an exotic slant. She applied fresh lip gloss, using her little finger, which she dipped into a tiny pot of pink. “What can I do for you?” she asked, glancing up briefly from her compact mirror.

  “I’m looking into the death of Laurence Fife.”

  Some dialogue pitfalls

  1. Windbags. Avoid rambling monologues, long speeches, and one-sided lectures. Try to keep dialogue exchanges terse and to the point. Never allow the reader to lose track of the setting or of the fact that there are at least two participants in the dialogue scene. If your scene requires one character to talk at length while the oth
er remains essentially passive, find ways to break up the speech. Your second character might interrupt and tell the speaker to get to the point. A waitress might appear to take their dinner order. Or the speaker himself might pause to relight his pipe, sip his drink, or scratch his head.

  Eyeball your dialogue scenes. If a page of dialogue is solid print from margin to margin, it’s too dense. Break it up. A page of readable dialogue should have a lot of white space and ragged margins.

  2. Crowded scenes. As a practical matter, dialogue scenes with more than two participants are cumbersome for the writer and confusing for the reader. For one thing, when three or more characters are talking, every statement requires attribution or business to clarify who’s speaking. More important, the dynamics among several speakers are multiplied geometrically. Two characters constitute a single well-focused relationship. With three characters, there are three relationships for you and your readers to keep track of. When each of four characters interacts with the other three, there are six separate relationships to follow, and with five characters there are ten, and so on.

  Three-character dialogue scenes can be managed if one of the characters—usually your point-of-view protagonist—plays the role of observer or mediator, thus keeping the focus on the dynamic between the other two participants. In general, avoid dialogue scenes involving more than three characters.

  3. Exposition through dialogue. In real life, people do not tell

  each other what they both already know. Your fictional characters shouldn’t do it, either. It’s not an effective way to feed information to the reader.

  For example:

  “You’re a big guy,” he said. “You must be at least six-two and, what, two-forty? I’m just a shrimp. I’m only five-seven and I weigh one-fifty soaking wet. And you’ve got all those scars on your face and those mean shifty eyes.…”

  Or:

  “We’ve been through a lot together, Joe. You and I were in the Marines together. We trained at Parris Island before they shipped us to Chu Lai in ’68. We shared a hooch. We saved each other’s butt a dozen times. We took our R and R in Australia. And we fell in love with the same woman. That Aussie, Wanda, from Sidney. The tall blonde who was addicted to crossword puzzles and cocaine. She had that old boyfriend, remember? Pete. Yeah, that was his name. Pete Thompson, the air-conditioner repairman, who.…”

  Scenes such as these do not ring true. In fact, it sounds like poorly disguised exposition—the writer’s crude attempt to convert straight narrative into dialogue.

  4. Bores. In real life, most of the conversations we overhear—or

  engage in ourselves—are aimless and mundane. The writer’s challenge is to create dialogue that seems true-to-life but is never boring. Strive for wit, irony, and cleverness. Scintillating dialogue emerges naturally from fascinating characters—and vice versa. Give each of your characters a distinctive speaking voice and style. Remember: Boring dialogue makes boring fiction.

  5. Dialogue for its own sake. Trying to write clever or amusing dialogue for its own sake, on the other hand, is self-indulgent. Unless your dialogue advances the story, readers will quickly decide that those witty characters are talking to hear themselves talk and to amuse each other, and that the writer is just showing off.

  6. Dialect. Because it requires readers to “translate” it, dialogue heavy with dialect is distracting. It tends to distance readers from the characters and the movement of the plot. Moreover, faithful reproduction of dialect risks parody and can be interpreted as insulting and demeaning.

  On the other hand, you can’t ignore the fact that some characters speak in dialect and have distinctive verbal habits. The trick is to suggest dialect rather than replicate it. For example, let your teen-aged characters begin some (but not all) of their sentences with their favorite throwaway word, “Like.” Your Down East lobsterman might mutter “Ayuh” occasionally (but not every time he speaks), and your Midwesterner can pronounce the nation’s capital “Warshington.” If your city-dwelling African-American character says “ax” when he means “ask” and “yo” when he means “yes,” your readers will fill in the rest for themselves.

  In the following exchange from Black Cherry Blues, notice how James Lee Burke underplays the dialect and speech patterns of the Cajun character Batist:

  “Them people that make the movie, they put it in that box, huh, Dave?” he said.

  “That’s right.”

  “Then how it get up to the antenna and in the set?”

  “It doesn’t go up to—”

  “And how come it don’t go in nobody else’s set?” he said.

  “It don’t go out the house,” Alafair said.

  “Not ‘It don’t.’ Say ‘It doesn’t,’” I said.

  “Why you telling her that? She talk English good as us,” Batist said.

  7. Four-letter words. In real life, some people use certain words and phrases habitually, some only under certain circumstances, and some not to all. For dialogue to be technically realistic, some characters may need to use four-letter words, depending on their personality, their background, and their role in your story.

  Most contemporary best-selling mystery fiction includes characters who use this language. Four-letter words help delineate the characters who use them and, by contrast, characterize those who don’t.

  There are readers, however, who are so offended by certain words that they refuse to read books in which this language appears, no matter how realistically. Writers must choose between the rock of authenticity and the hard place of automatic elimination of sensitive or conservative readers from their fan clubs.

  Fine-tuning your ear for dialogue

  If editors and readers comment that your dialogue sounds stilted and false, the following exercises may help you to fine-tune it:

  1. Read and analyze those writers whose dialogue sings. Ed McBain, Robert Parker, Sue Grafton, Lawrence Block, Sara Paretsky, George V. Higgins, James Lee Burke, and Elmore Leonard are among our contemporary masters. In fact, there are very few successful mystery authors who don’t write effective dialogue.

  2. Listen to films or television dramas with your eyes closed. Try to “hear” the emotions and unspoken agendas of the characters. Visualize their gestures and behavior from listening to their speech.

  3. Read your own dialogue aloud. Even better, have somebody read it to you. Your ear will pick up the false notes that your eye may miss.

  4. Eavesdrop on real-life conversations. Listen for the pauses, hesitations, repetitions, and verbal habits that real people use. Then sit down at your keyboard, close your eyes, and try to “hear” those conversations. First try to reproduce them verbatim. Then edit what you’ve written, adding attribution and business, until it flows smoothly and sounds authentic.

  Sparkling, true-to-life dialogue is the foundation of mystery fiction. The trickiest plot twist, the most dynamic cast of characters, the most vivid setting, and the most hair-raising action will not ring true unless your characters talk like real people.

  Chapter 11

  Getting It Right:

  Rewriting and Revising

  When I completed my second mystery novel (the first one having been retired to the attic), I circulated a synopsis and three sample chapters and received my share of rejections. So when the editor asked to see the entire manuscript, I was, naturally, elated, and I shipped it to New York by return mail.

  Several weeks later I received this letter: “We think you are a good writer. But you’ve made several typical beginner’s blunders. The plot lacks originality. The story lacks suspense. We knew who the culprit was right away. We can’t offer you a contract for your book in its present form, but if you’d be willing to rewrite it, we’d be interested in looking at it again.”

  Rewrite it? I thought. I had just spent more than a year writing, rewriting, and revising that book until it was, I believed, the very best I could make it.

  And now they were telling me it still wasn’t good enough. />
  I read and reread that letter. I had arrived, I realized, at a crisis in my writing career. If I could rewrite the book to that editor’s satisfaction, I’d be on my way.

  If I couldn’t, I would probably never write a publishable novel.

  It seemed that clear-cut to me.

  It took me a year to untangle the original storyline and rework it, to reimagine the characters, to refine the book’s narrative voice, to discard old scenes and to think up new ones. It was the most difficult job of writing I have ever undertaken.

  But the new version of my book was accepted and, in due course, published. It even won an award. And since then, I’ve published nineteen more mysteries featuring Brady Coyne, the first-person narrator of that first one.

  Writing the original—flawed—version of that book had been hard.

  Rewriting it was agonizing.

  But getting it accepted, signing a contract, receiving a check in the mail, and eventually, holding a slick hardcover edition of my book in my hand—all of that was a great deal of fun.

  The experience taught me what it meant to be a writer: You must be prepared to sit in front of a keyboard when it’s the last thing you want to do, and do it regularly, day after day, for as long as it takes to string together thousands upon thousands of perfectly chosen and ordered words that will grab the reader and refuse to let go.