|
1.
Start your story as close to the crime as possible.
There is nothing like a body dropping to get a reader’s attention. This
is what I call the shoot-first-and-answer-questions-later policy.
Background and establishing character relationships can happen in later
chapters. Most good novels pose a question in the early chapters that
carries through the whole book. For mysteries, the question is
Whodunit? Assuming that the crime is a murder, that question cannot be
asked until someone dies.
If the needs of the story make
it impossible to start with the crime,
there should be at least the threat of a crime or the early stages of
one being set up in the first chapter. My first Bargain Hunter mystery,
Death of a Garage Sale Newbie,
begins with a woman leaving a cryptic message on her friend’s answering
machine in which she says she has discovered something dangerous from
the past and that she is afraid. In later chapters, the woman who made
the phone call disappears and is ultimately found murdered.
2. Create false
suspects by giving every important character a secret.
Part of writing a good mystery involves people doing suspicious things
even if they didn’t commit the murder. A secret can be as small as a
character having a crush on someone or writing a novel on company time.
Or the secret can be bigger, like a character who doesn’t want people
to know he has done time in prison, or she is having an affair.
Characters who have something to hide will do things that make them
appear to be guilty, thus creating the red herrings that a good mystery
usually has.
3. Plot twists often
rise out the greater crime and the lesser crime.
As with all good novels, a twist at the end of a mystery makes for good
story structure. Usually, a plot thread leads the reader to believe
that a certain character is guilty. At the end of the book, that
character may even be arrested. The twist comes when a different
character turns out to be the culprit. To play fair with the reader, it
may be that the character first presumed to be the guilty party has
been committing a lesser crime like embezzling, or maybe he has been
helping or covering for the real murderer, anything that makes them
look guilty.
The important thing in creating
the twist is to lay the ground work so
that when the real killer is caught, the reader hits her forehead with
the heel of her hand and says, “I should have seen that.” One of the
tricks I use in creating the plot twist is to write the rough draft of
the novel as though Suspect A is guilty. In the rewrite, I will look
back to see which other character had the means, motive, and
opportunity to commit the crime, or with some revision could have had
the means, motive and opportunity. In the rewrite, Suspect B becomes
the guilty party.
|
4.
Remember the rule of
three.
Mystery readers are used to picking up on buried clues, but they don’t
like to feel that something was so buried there was no way they could
have noticed it. At the same time, flashing neon signs that says This
is a Clue is an insult to the reader’s intelligence. If a clue is going
to become the thing that breaks the case or moves the mystery forward
significantly, bring it up in the story at least three times,
preferably in different ways, maybe once in dialogue and another time
through description. The best clues are the ones that seem innocent and
benign at the time and don’t take on significance until other parts of
the mystery fall into place.
5.
A sleuth who has a personal stake in solving the crime makes for a more
compelling story.
Although police detectives and private investigators are motivated to
solve a crime because their paycheck depends on it, giving a sleuth a
stronger reason to find the murderer creates more story tension. When a
female detective is called in to investigate a murder in a girl’s dorm,
you have created an interesting premise. When the detective’s sister
was recently the victim of an assault in that same dorm, you have
created a compelling premise.
For an amateur sleuth, having a
personal stake is almost a necessity.
In my first Bargain Hunters mystery, the personal stake for the head
Bargain Hunter Ginger was that her best friend is murdered and the
police are willing to write it off as an accident. In book two in that
series, Death of a Six Foot Teddy Bear, Ginger is a
suspect in the crime. In Sue Grafton’s T is for Trespass
P.I. Kinsey Millhone finds herself solving an identity theft case
because her neighbor, the closest person she has to family, is one of
the affected victims.
|
