The Elements of Mystery Fiction: Writing the Modern Whodunit

by Tapply, William G.

  It’s work. Writers are like everybody else. Much of the time they’d rather play than work.

  On the other hand, if it were easy, everyone would write books. Most people don’t, although a great many people say they would like to, and almost everyone is envious of those who do.

  Thousands of unpublished manuscripts languish in desk drawers and attics and closets, and for every one of them there are thousands of first chapters and half-finished novels. Writing is like exercising: It begins with a burst of inspiration and good intentions, but it’s sustained through all the pain and self-doubt and imperceptible progress and failure by hard-nosed commitment and steely discipline.

  It’s a hard job, and there’s no avoiding that fact. If you want to write mystery fiction, be prepared for it.

  But because it’s hard, it’s correspondingly satisfying.

  Peter De Vries said it all: “I love being a writer. What I can’t stand is the paperwork.”

  On writing well

  A mystery story that fails to present intriguing characters, a fascinating world, and a suspenseful and complex puzzle, no matter how well it’s written, will rarely be published.

  The converse, however, is equally true, especially for the beginning writer: A clever storyline, unless it’s well written, will not sell a book.

  There are exceptions to both of these truths. Marvelous writing occasionally sells flawed stories, and fast-paced page-turners that are executed crudely sometimes get published.

  You should derive encouragement from these exceptions. “I can write better than this,” you should say. Or, “I can create a better story than this one.”

  But never think that agents, publishers, and readers of mystery fiction don’t care about craftsmanship. Nowadays few editors have the time or the inclination to fix your verbs, cut your scenes, or sharpen your images. You’ve got to be your own editor. Take pride in your writing. Examine every word and phrase. A well-written manuscript deprives agents and editors of one reason to reject it.

  A detailed analysis of the elements of good writing is beyond the scope of this book. But here, briefly, are some of the important principles of effective mystery writing:

  1. Good writing does not call attention to itself or the writer. Flowery language, convoluted sentences, and ten-dollar words may cause the reader to think, “My goodness, this writer is awfully clever.” But if the writing distracts the reader, it fails to do its job.

  2. Good writing tells the story. It invites the reader to become

  immersed in the lives, problems, and goals of the characters. That’s its job.

  3. Good writing engages the reader’s feelings. It evokes an emotional response. It makes readers care about the story’s characters and what happens to them.

  4. Good writing comes from strong, active verbs. Test the effectiveness of your prose by circling your verbs. How many times have you used “was” and “were” and other forms of “to be,” or equally flat and flabby intransitive verbs such as “seemed” and “appeared”? Change them. Convert instances of the passive voice into the active form. In good writing, active verbs make things happen. Inactive verbs shift the burden to adjectives and adverbs, which are inherently passive.

  5. Good writing shows. It does not tell. It emphasizes scenes where events occur. It minimizes exposition, explanation, description, and summary. Instead of telling us that a character is sad or angry or frightened, good writing shows us the character’s behavior and allows us to draw our own conclusions. Telling relies on adjectives and adverbs; showing comes from active, vivid verbs.

  6. Good writing is concise and clear and efficient. It wastes no words. It does its job quietly. As Elmore Leonard advises, “Leave out the parts that people skip.”

  7. Good writing, in other words, is invisible. It appears so effortless that readers don’t notice it. Good writing is a sleight-of-hand trick. It gives the illusion of ease and simplicity.

  Writers work hard to create that illusion. “Easy reading,” said Nathaniel Hawthorne, “is damned hard writing.”

  After the first draft

  Dorothy Parker once said, “I can’t write five words but that I change seven.”

  “Nothing you write,” said Lillian Hellman, “if you hope to be any good, will ever come as you first hoped.”

  Writing a novel or short story is like sculpting a statue. The first draft gives it shape and proportion. But it inevitably needs refining and polishing.

  The first revision. Once you’ve written the first draft of any piece of fiction, put it aside. Work on something else and try not to think about it for several weeks. Then read it over with a fresh eye. Try to judge it the way a reader—or an editor—might. Look for the boring parts, the inconsistencies, the dangling plot threads, the pointless subplots. Try to think about all of the elements that make stories work for readers. You’ll undoubtedly have to rewrite some scenes, delete others, and add new ones. Think about tempo and rhythm, plot development, character motivation.

  Be alert to inconsistencies and errors of fact. Pay close attention to the details. Fiction readers bring to stories a “willing suspension of disbelief.” They want to enter the world you have created, and they are prepared to accept the reality of that world and the characters who inhabit it. But a single error or inconsistency, no matter how small, can destroy that willingness to suspend their disbelief. Mystery readers know their guns and poisons and forensics. Mystery writers must know at least as much as their readers. Never confuse a revolver with an automatic or a shotgun with a rifle or gauge with caliber.

  Here are four rules that will help you avoid losing readers because of small errors in detail:

  1. When possible, write about what you know. Choose settings where you have lived, or at least visited. Give your characters—especially your protagonists—your own profession and hobbies. Use your life experiences as the basis for plots and character conflicts.

  2. When you’ve got to do research, be thorough. Inevitably, you’ll have to explore foreign worlds. Your story will require you to create characters such as medical specialists whose work you don’t understand. You’ll need to know precisely how a government bureaucracy, or a court, or a hospital deals with a situation that arises in your story.

  Library and Internet research, of course, is essential. But take the next step. Solicit the help of professionals. If your story needs a scene with a forensic pathologist, interview a forensic pathologist. Ask her exactly how the situation in your story would be handled. After you write the scene, ask her to read it for you. Encourage her to identify every problem, no matter how minor. Most people enjoy contributing to the creation of a novel or short story and are flattered to be asked.

  3. Don’t try to impress your readers. Having completed all of this research, it’s tempting to use it all. This typically produces long-winded and pointless passages where you show off all of the fascinating material you’ve worked so hard to master. Examine these sections carefully and be prepared to cut. Your story isn’t a catch-all for everything you know and have learned. If it doesn’t move your story forward, the passage doesn’t belong.

  Sometimes you’ll find your story needs a major overhaul on its first revision. Sometimes it just needs fine-tuning. But it will always need something.

  The second revision. After you’re confident you’ve got the shape of the story right, and after you’ve double-checked it for technical accuracy, it’s time to put a shine on your manuscript. Go back to the beginning and examine each word and punctuation mark, each sentence and paragraph. Hack away flabby adverbs and adjectives, look critically at every verb, listen to your dialogue. Try for absolute clarity in your prose and delete any self-indulgent flights of literary fancy, aiming to follow Samuel Johnson’s advice: “Read over your compositions and, when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.”

  Some writers find this polishing process tedious, but most enjoy it. At this stage, you’ve already done the h
ard part. You’ve invented a complicated story and all of its elements. You’ve assembled all of the elements into a novel-length manuscript. This tinkering and refining is your reward.

  When you’ve finished this final polish, you should believe you have written a perfect story.

  Mentors. But, of course, you can’t completely trust your own judgment. So when you feel that you cannot possibly improve your manuscript, ask someone else to read it—someone whom you absolutely trust to tell you the truth, an experienced writer and reader who understands the kind of fiction you write, who has a sharp eye and ear, and who knows that you want the unvarnished truth. You must not ask for praise from your mentor. You want honest criticism.

  Friends and relatives are unlikely to serve as effective mentors. They don’t want to hurt your feelings (except for those who might, for various reasons, be eager to take a swipe at your ego). If you’re fortunate, you’ll know somebody—ideally a professional writer who is also a careful reader and astute editor—with whom you can exchange criticism. If you don’t have a mentor, consider paying somebody to criticize your work. It’s better to hear criticism from a mentor at this stage, when you can do something about it, than to be rejected by a publisher.

  John Irving has said, “It’s my experience that very few writers, young or old, are really seeking advice when they give out their work to be read. They want support; they want someone to say, ‘Good job.’”

  It’s my experience that those “very few” writers who really do seek advice are the ones who are most likely to succeed. A pat on the back and a hearty “Good job” are not very helpful.

  Mentors often see flaws that you can’t see because you are too close to your story. Don’t automatically and uncritically change everything your mentor finds fault with. But consider all the suggestions and criticisms.

  The last word

  Now your story is finished. It is, you honestly believe, the best you can possibly make it. You’ve nurtured it and fought with it, cried with it and laughed at it. It’s time to make the final copy and send it off.

  It can be a scary time. Erica Jong once admitted, “I went for years not finishing anything. Because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged.”

  Those living characters, that clever puzzle with all its neat clues, all those vivid places and dramatic events and significant themes that have occupied your consciousness for a year or more—all are abruptly gone. “Writing a book,” said Daphne Du Maurier, “is like a purge; at the end of it one is empty … like a dry shell on the beach, waiting for the tide to come in again.”

  Sending off a manuscript can leave you feeling empty. The only cure is to start writing something else. And if your story or novel fails to sell, keep writing anyway. Writers write. Many successful authors have trunks full of early manuscripts they could not—or didn’t even try to—sell. If they’d allowed their early failures to discourage them, they never would have kept at it.

  Writing is a non-stop learning process. Write regularly and write often. Practice your craft. The more you write, the better you’ll become. And when you hold that first copy of your own book in your hand, you’ll know that it’s been worth every agonizing moment.

  Chapter 12

  Writing the Mystery Series

  Philip R. Craig

  I published my first novel (Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn) in 1969, when I was 35. Then, for 18 years, I wrote novels no one wanted to buy. In 1987 I decided to write one that would sell. You’d think I’d have tried that earlier, but I hadn’t; instead I wrote books that I (but no one else) thought were interesting. Hearing of my new plan, my daughter gave me the names of two famous novelists (who will not be identified here) and said,

  “Dad, these people make millions of dollars. Do what they do.”

  Spurred on by her advice, I went to a yard sale and bought two books by each of the writers she recommended. My wife and I each read one.

  We didn’t like them. My wife hoped we wouldn’t have to read another one, but I said, “We’re not doing this for fun. It’s research. Besides, I’ve always heard that every writer writes at least one bad book. Maybe, as fate would have it, we just happened to read their bad ones.”

  So we read the other two books. We didn’t like them, either.

  The problem was that both writers over-wrote by explaining things that didn’t need explaining. For instance, instead of just saying the villain narrowed his eyes as he faced the hero in the showdown, or describing how the femme fatale lowered her eyelids as she faced the hero in the boudoir, both authors gave us a whole paragraph explaining what those expressions meant. They presumed their readers were idiots who couldn’t figure it out for themselves.

  I didn’t plan to copy that technique, but I did notice something I thought might be useful: In both writers’ books there was a recurring pattern of events and characters—a formula, you might say. Here it is: [1] The hero is ruggedly handsome, in his thirties, and worldly and competent enough to survive attacks and solve crimes; [2] The heroine is beautiful, bright, in her twenties, and not quite as worldly as the hero; [3] The story is set in an exotic locale such as Cannes, or Istanbul, or up the Amazon River—someplace where, unlike your home town, interesting events might actually happen; [4] There are two plots—the love plot involving the hero and heroine, and the crime plot that might be as simple as murder or as complex as a cartel seizing the oil resources of the Middle East and demanding all the gold in Fort Knox as ransom; [5] There is big money involved, apparently because Americans, in spite of their voiced interest in the poor and underprivileged, are really more interested in reading about the rich and famous; [6] The two plots become entwined and justice and righteousness triumph in the end; and, [7] There is at least one steamy sex scene involving the hero and the heroine.

  I told myself that I could do all that, and I did. I made my hero (J.W. Jackson) an ex-cop so he could solve crimes; I created a beautiful woman (Zee); I set the tale on Martha’s Vineyard, a place I knew well and which is considered by many to be an exotic locale; I used murder as the crime, since it’s never really out of fashion; I threw in a background story about drugs to take care of the Big Money requirement; I tied the love plot and the crime plot together and had justice and righteousness triumph; and, I wrote (badly) a semi-steamy sex scene.

  I then found an agent who was willing to look at my manuscript, and to my considerable surprise (remember, I’d spent two decades writing novels that no one wanted to publish), she said she thought she could sell it.

  Sure enough, Scribner’s bought the book and it hit the bookstores in 1989. A Beautiful Place to Die, my second published novel, appeared exactly 20 years after my first one. I was then 55 years old, and I remember joking with my wife: Wouldn’t it be great if it was the first book in a series.

  I had absolutely no reason to think that would happen, of course. But when I got my first copy of the book, I read this phrase on the cover right under the title: “A Martha’s Vineyard Mystery Introducing Jeff Jackson.”

  A Martha’s Vineyard Mystery? Introducing Jeff Jackson? Those words implied more books to come…although no one had told ME about it. That was the first of many times that I have been the last to learn something important about the future of my books.

  As it turned out, A Beautiful Place to Die was, indeed, the first in a series of novels that have become known as The Martha’s Vineyard Mysteries. Scribner’s has published the hardcovers, and Avon has published the paperback editions. My agent, Jane Otte, and my editor, Susanne Kirk, have guided and sustained me through the production of a new book every June, so that now, all these years after the publication of A Beautiful Place to Die, I may actually be qualified to comment on some aspects of writing series fiction.

  To do that I’ll refer to my own books and describe how I’ve dealt with some of the issues I’ve encountered.

  First, a generalization: The author of series fiction must write each successive story in such a fashion that it w
ill be interesting to both first-time readers and those who have read previous entries in the series. The writer must give the new reader enough background information about the characters and setting of the story without boring past readers by repeating too much of what they already know.

  Now for some concrete examples of issues:

  1. Chronology. You can build the passage of time into your stories, or you can pretty much ignore it. All of Sue Grafton’s stories take place about the same time, but Robert Parker’s hero, Spenser, grows older with each novel. In my books, time passes, although not as fast as in my life. Whichever way you decide to address the passage of time, be careful to use proper chronology. Don’t make your character 25 years old in one book and 45 in another that takes place the next year. If she gets shot in an early book, she should carry the scar—and the memory—in later ones.

  2. Essential information about characters and their circumstances. When you write a series of stories featuring recurring characters, you must give new readers essential information about those characters, but you don’t have to tell them everything. In my novels, a cast of regulars has evolved, and when one of them appears, I have to introduce him or her to readers who haven’t read earlier books in the series. I do this as briefly and indirectly as possible, and usually only if it makes a difference in the current book.

  I make it clear for readers that J.W. Jackson, the narrator of my series, is an ex-cop who retired to the Vineyard to escape police work by having someone—usually someone who wants his help—mention it in conversation.

  In earlier books I gave so little information about J.W.’s background that my editor suggested that I provide more. I didn’t want to do that all in one book, so I’ve scattered pieces of his personal history here and there throughout many books. He’s a Vietnam veteran who was wounded on his first patrol; he was raised in Somerville, Massachusetts, by his widowed father, who was a fireman killed by a collapsing wall; he has a sister who lives in Santa Fe, etc.