The Elements of Mystery Fiction: Writing the Modern Whodunit Read Free

officers, private investigators, lawyers, district attorneys, forensic pathologists, newspaper reporters—those who get paid specifically to investigate murders) to schoolteachers, housewives, teenagers, and other amateurs. They can be female or male, gay or straight, old or young, rich or poor. They work in big cities, suburbs, rural areas, and the wilderness in every state and virtually every nation in the world.
    Mystery novels by Tony Hillerman, Sue Grafton, Dick Francis, Barbara Michaels, Robert Parker, Patricia Cornwell, and many others regularly appear on the best-seller lists. Hundreds of other talented writers produce a popular mystery novel every year or two. Many critics contend that some of the very best novel and short-story writers in America and England these days are those who produce mystery fiction.
    Every year dozens of “first mysteries” are published. Periodicals such as Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine are devoted exclusively to short mystery fiction. Editors and publishers continually search for the next popular writer, the next blockbuster mystery novel.
    The basic elements of mystery fiction remain constant.
    Mystery variants
     
    If the story’s driving question is not “Who did it?,” and if detection is not the central action of the story, it is not, technically, a mystery. Today’s best-seller lists are often top-heavy with high-suspense titles in which the plot’s momentum comes from different questions, typically: “Will the bad guy succeed in carrying out his sinister plan before the good guy can stop him?” John Grisham, Mary Higgins Clark, and Tom Clancy, among many others, have made these “thrillers” enormously popular. Crime and justice are central issues in these novels. Since clues, detection, and puzzle-solving frequently play important, if secondary parts of their plots, many of the principles of mystery fiction apply equally to them.
    The reader as participant
     
    Contemporary mystery fiction invites readers to join the sleuth in the quest to solve a compelling puzzle. Modern readers will not settle for the role of spectator. They want to participate in your story.
    Give your readers credit. Assume they are as smart as you are. “No one can write decently,” said E. B. White, “who is distrustful of the reader’s intelligence, or whose attitude is patronizing.”
    The most important advice I can give you is this: Always think of your audience. Write for your readers. Never deprive them of the chance to participate .
    As we have seen, modern readers expect fair play. You cannot withhold vital clues from them. Everything of consequence that your sleuth encounters must also be encountered by your readers. Unless readers have the evidence, they cannot fairly participate in the solving of the puzzle.
    On the other hand, readers don’t want to be guided through the puzzle’s solution. They want only a fair chance to solve it for themselves . They don’t want to be given more information than the sleuth has. That would give them an advantage over him, which also violates the rule of fair play. Readers resent having clues explained to them by an all-knowing author as much as they resent having clues withheld from them.
    Invite them to walk beside your hero or heroine, seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and feeling along with your sleuth. No more, no less.
    Showing without telling
     
    For mystery writers, the golden rule is: Show, don’t tell . Give your readers the same kinds of sensory impressions they use in their own lives to interpret their world. Then let them draw their own conclusions. When you explain or elaborate for your readers, you deprive them of the opportunity to participate.
    Let your readers encounter your story’s characters and situations as they experience their actual lives. When you meet and interact with other people, you observe their behavior and then you interpret it. People’s actions and words are