How to rite Killer Fiction (7 page)

Each particular means of death yields its own special clues. Gunshots give us bullets or fragments inside the body; ballistics can tell us the make of gun. Powder burns determine how close the shooter was to his victim. Knives have edges—and those edges are straight or serrated, single- or double-edged, belong to a short or long blade.

Your detective, whether police or private, needs to make use of forensic clues. In
Chinatown
, the discovery that a man who supposedly drowned in a freshwater reservoir had salt water in his lungs leads Jake Gittes to the truth that the man really died in a pond filled with salt water.

Acts of Concealment
Wanda worked hard to conceal her motive, her access to the means of death, and her opportunity to commit the murder. But she didn't stop there: she decided to go one step further and implicate her family in the crime, planting evidence that will incriminate her brother, sister, and mother. For example:

When Wanda slips into the study to poison the port, she takes with her a diamond comb belonging to her sister,Winnie. She drops this comb under her uncle's desk, where it will be found by Inspector Dim, who will immediately accuse the money-hungry Winnie of the crime.

But how did she get that comb in the first place? Did she steal it from her sister's bedroom, and, if so, what else did she take and what did she leave behind? Winnie's room becomes a secondary crime scene, and another opportunity for clue-creation.

She took strands of hair. Winnie's comb had a few stray strands remaining in it, and they came along with the comb. Then Wanda put the comb in the pocket of her tweed skirt. When she pulled the comb out to plant it in the study, a stray hair stayed behind. When Lord Bright gets the gardener's evidence that he saw something orange in the study on the afternoon the port was poisoned, his lordship remembers that Wanda wore her orange jumper (that's British for sweater) with a brown tweed skirt. He checks the pocket of that skirt and finds a peroxided blond hair that could only belong to sister Winnie. He deduces that Wanda stole and planted Winnie's comb.

Now take each of the other suspects and play the same game. Everywhere Wanda went and everything Wanda did to a) commit the crime, and b) cover up the crime by implicating others, become a fertile source of clues.

Clues in the Private Eye Novel

The classic whodunit involves murder within a small circle of suspects. The private eye novel, set in "the great wrong place" that is the city,
theoretically
involves a much larger world in which anyone could have committed the crime. If we were dealing in reality, any citizen of Los Angeles could have killed our victim, for any reason or for no reason at all. It's Chinatown, Jake.

But the private eye novel isn't any more real than the country-house cozy. It's an "existential romance," a pseudo-realistic vision that is considerably more stylized than truly authentic. We readers love the illusion of looking upon naked, gritty urban reality while at the same time we are comforted by the presence of a detective who carries a banner of honor into the moral swamp.

The private eye combs the city for clues and suspects, and often hops a plane to New Jersey or drives to Vegas to track down a lead. This helps us believe the notion that we are reading realism, that the murderer could be anybody anywhere. Yet when the murderer is revealed, he'd better not be a faceless hit man from Detroit or a passing wino. He'd better be someone we've met or at least heard about before. He'd better be someone we suspected or should have suspected all along and not a bolt from the blue.

Instead of occupying more or less the same space at the same time, as in the traditional mystery, the private eye story gives us suspects who seem on the surface to have nothing in common. The private eye travels to the lowest depths of the city and then interrogates a suspect in a six-million-dollar beach house. One of the pleasures of this kind of mystery is figuring out what connects the two characters in the disparate settings. The connections are usually subterranean, running deep underneath the public lives of the characters like underground sewers.

The private eye picks up few threads and does little apparent ratiocination. Instead, she's more likely to do hands-on investigative research in the public records office, hunting for old birth and death certificates, articles of incorporation, real estate records—tangible proof of links between characters in the distant or not-so-distant past.

The straight-line narrative is still useful here, but less so than in the traditional mystery, since the murder appears so much more open-ended. There are no locked rooms, few phony alibis, and the "frame" is likely to consist of little more than a phone call to some poor sap who gets caught standing over the body bleating, "But he was already dead when I got here!"

Clues in the Police Procedural

If the private eye novel is less realistic than it appears to be, the police procedural is equally fantastic when compared to the truth about police investigations. For one thing, even the 87th Precinct novels fail to capture the fragmented quality of real life detective work. One detective doesn't devote his entire workday to a single case, and one detective doesn't work alone.

Not only do cops come in pairs or teams, but the investigative functions are divided among crime scene technicians, coroners, fingerprint experts, blood and body fluid experts, forensic entomologists, document experts—a whole host of scientists whose job is to back up the street investigators. The cops themselves question witnesses; that's their primary contribution to the case. Their interrogations are backed up by facts discovered through science, but they themselves don't do the science.

In the real world, the killer really could be anyone. There's no playing fair in real life, no small circle of suspects or even subterranean links among a small group. All these
may
be present, but in reality, the killer just might be a passing stranger or a serial killer with no rational motive. As mystery readers, if we want that much reality, we'll read true crime. Fictional police procedurals give the reader the illusion of following real cops through real cases, but they usually edit reality to fit our preconceptions. As with the other forms of the mystery, we'll be introduced to a set of suspects and a case will be made against each in turn. At the end of the book, one of them will be revealed as the true murderer and the others will have been changed in some way by the fact of the investigation.

Whichever subgenre you choose, you'll need to plant clues for your detective to find, and a step-by-step account of the murder and the cover-up is the best way to develop those clues.

EVERY NOVEL needs some kind of structure. At the very least, a story starts at the beginning, moves through the middle, and ends at the end.

What kinds of things need to happen in the beginning of the mystery novel, in the middle, and at the end in order to give the reader the satisfaction she wanted when she bought the book?

Arc One: The Beginning (The Setup)_

The beginning of any novel is the setup, in which the reader is introduced to the characters, the setting, and the situation that will dominate the rest of the story. Many cozy whodunits begin by introducing the suspects
before
the murder is committed. We meet an eminently murderable citizen, and we see that citizen interacting with a number of people he aggravates to the point at which they mutter something about how "he's gonna get himself killed one of these days."

That's the way Carolyn G. Hart's
The Christie Caper
begins. We spend Arc One wondering what new outrage cozy-hating mystery critic Neil Bledsoe will perpetrate next, and how long it will take someone to succeed in killing him. Several attempts are made, but our intrepid sleuth Annie Laurence Darling, owner of a mystery bookstore, reminds us of the advice given by Miss Jane Marple: "Nothing is ever quite what it appears to be on the surface."

Diane Mott Davidson's
Catering to Nobody
opens with awake marking the passing bv suicide (or was it?) of a teacher. At the wake one of the

The Four-Arc System for Organizing Your Novel

The beauty of this plan is that you can use it as a blueprint before you've written a single word, or you can plunge ahead at full speed and then reorganize your material accordingly.

Think of your novel as having four parts, roughly 70-80 manuscript pages each in length (based on a total length of 300 pages; longer books have longer arcs). Each of these parts has a distinct purpose in telling your story.

Ten-Minute Hook

An opening scene or chapter that is self-contained and grabs the reader in someway, by either showing a "day in the life" of the character whose life is about to be turned upside down, or giving a mini-preview of things to come.

Arc One

• Set up the conflict or problem, introduce main character and opponent or mystery

• Establish character's inner need, which s/he may or may not be aware of

• Start the subplot rolling—either main character's or a secondary character's or both

• No flashbacks allowed
—tell reader
only
what he must know
now

• Make the contract with the reader through tone and style

• Use a catalyst if appropriate to get story started and keep things moving

End Arc One at a crisis: the first turning point scene changes everything and sends the main character in pursuit of a new goal. A decision leads to a beginning level of commitment.

Arc Two

• Here come the flashbacks—but
only to
illuminate the present

• Main character is tested, trained, given tasks, tries and fails to reach goal

• One step forward, two steps back

• Each gain leads to a (greater) loss in the end

• Subplots deepen, also move toward their crunch points

• Discrepancy between character's wants and needs grows larger

• Establish deadline or ticking bomb, beyond which all will be lost

End Arc Two at a crisis: the Midpoint scene may involve hitting bottom, being convinced there is no hope of success. Or the main character may move from reactive to proactive, from committed to fanatical, from objective to emotionally involved, from wrong goal to right goal. A line may well be crossed. Return to the status quo is now impossible. The character can only go forward, come what may.

Arc Three

• Pace increases considerably; chapters and sentences are shorter

• All threads begin coming together; all subplots will be resolved by end

• Ticking time bomb or other deadline becomes compelling

• Build toward climax with ever-increasing conflicts and consequences

• Character's desire to reach goal increases exponentially

• Disconnect between character's need and want becomes clear even to him

• Character tested and trained for the ultimate confrontation

End with Arc Three crisis, the second turning point, in which the character is forced to make a crucial decision. This can be a low point (if character hasn't already hit bottom), or it can be a recognition that nothing short of a life-or-death confrontation will solve problem.

Arc Four

• The showdown at last—Good faces Evil, and only one will survive

• All the stakes are bet on a single hand; nothing is held back

• Give the ending its full value—give the reader what you promised in Arc One

• Use all the elements you set up in the earlier arcs for maximum payoff now

• Make sure character undergoes both external and internal transformation

• Show an outer manifestation of internal change—character does something in a way he or she couldn't have done at the beginning of the story

• Make sure subplot resolution either supports or contrasts with main plot resolution for maximum thematic impact

• If at all possible, take characters full circle in some way, with a setting or situation that repeats and echoes the beginning