The Elements of Mystery Fiction: Writing the Modern Whodunit (18 page)

These reports and letters suggest to me that by careful, often indirect descriptions of characters, character relationships, and locale, you can write series fiction that is appealing to both new and old readers. The important thing is to provide necessary background information to new readers without boring those familiar with your work.

With this in mind, I try to write each book in my series for a reader who has never read any previous ones. I’ve been told some readers start with the first and read straight through the latest book; some start with the latest book, and read backward to the beginning, and some read the books in no order whatsoever.

So the plan seems to be working.

Oh! Remember that recurring pattern I extracted from studying the four novels I bought in the yard sale? I followed it in
A Beautiful Place to Die
and then never thought about it again. It’s still a good formula, though. You’re welcome to try it.

Chapter 13

Standalone or Series Mystery?

Bill Eidson

Okay, you’ve decided you’re going to write a novel. You’ve locked yourself in your office and you’ve told your loved ones that you’re a busy writer and you’re not to be interrupted unless the house catches fire, and then only if the flames are searing
your
door.

By now you’ve surely thought about the story, the setting and background, you know that conflict is vital, you probably have at least an antagonist and a protagonist in mind.

Question: Is this the first novel in a series? Or are you creating a one-time event in your protagonist’s life?

If you truly haven’t figured that out yet, it’s worth leaving the office and taking a walk around the block, talking to your best friend, or beating yourself about the head with a stick—whatever helps you make a decision. Because choosing between a “standalone” novel or “series” is a decision that will impact every element of your story, including the core idea, characterization, plot, pace, style, and setting. When it comes time to sell the book, it will have a major impact on how the book is purchased and how it will be marketed. It will be one of several ways in which you will be defined as an author, right up there with the sentence-by-sentence quality of your writing.

Now, with that said, did
I
spend much time on that decision?

No.

I didn’t know any better.

I knew I wanted to write one story about a character and story idea that I stumbled across, and I went about writing it. It became
The Little Brother,
my first novel. I’ve written five other standalone books since then, and now I’ve just written my first novel that I intend to be a series,
The Repo
.

In this chapter, I’m going to focus on the standalone.

Mind you, either decision can be the right one. If you know exactly the kind you want to write, then skip ahead and get started. I’m not going to tell you which one to choose. But if you’re still in the consideration stage, I’ve learned some things that might help you. Maybe you’ll make a better-informed choice than I did; maybe you’ll just follow your nose and write whatever you want. In the business of writing books, the creative decisions are truly your own.

What is a standalone novel?

A standalone novel is a one-time story. No sequels. No trilogies. The story is truly finished when the reader puts the book down. The reader may be left with an idea about how the characters will live out their lives, but he or she will never get to meet them in print again. In comparison to a series, the structure of a standalone offers the novelist both freedoms and strictures when it comes to the basic elements of storytelling. Let’s take them one at a time:

The Idea
—I’m going to go out on a limb and state that the core idea of a standalone novel is more vital to its success than it is in a mystery series. Yes, most wonderful mystery novels have great ideas at their center. But the success of a standalone novel is more often dependent upon an idea that makes the reader say, “Oh, it’s about X. I’ve
got
to read that.”

Why? Because readers often look to series mysteries for comfort. There may be heinous acts and a wickedly fast pace in a good mystery, but according what I’ve always read and observed, we go to series mysteries because we like the characters and find them interesting, and we’re comfortable with the world the author has created—enough that we want to revisit that world again and again, book after book.

But with a one-time novel we want a challenge. We want a fast ride. We want to believe we’re in the scene. The idea of the book is compelling enough to pull us in and drive us hard to the end. We want to see what happens next. Unlike a series novel where we
know
the hero will come out safe in the end, in my own books, anyhow, readers have some doubt. I want them to think, “Maybe this guy
will
lose.” Or maybe he’ll win over the bad guy, but it will be a bitter victory, given all that he’s lost.

The stakes must be high—high for the protagonist, and high enough for the reader to care. This does
not
necessarily mean the world will blow up if the hero doesn’t succeed. But whatever is at stake for him must be made real and vitally important to him so that the reader will care.

How do you come up with such an idea? I’ll tell you a bit about how I do it. I keep my eyes open to the world around me. I look for points of conflict in “normal” life. I read, I clip news articles. I develop mental muscles the way a photographer learns to “see” a picture. I learn to see story ideas.

Take my first book,
The Little Brother
. Years before I met my wife, I had a blind date with a woman who told me that her roommate was copying her mannerisms, talking like her, and even wearing her clothes when she was out of the apartment. I put that together with an observation I’d made that it was rather strange how people would invite strangers to live with them by placing small classified ads in the “Roommates Wanted” section of the newspaper. Four years of evenings, weekends, and holidays later,
The Little Brother
came out—the same year as John Lutz’
Single White Female.
My book was unfortunately optioned for a movie
after
Lutz’
was already in production, so there wasn’t much fame and fortune for me.

While you don’t hear the term “high concept” these days as often as you did a few years ago, it remains a useful idea. “High concept” means a story that people can recognize instantly as something they’ll want to read. The little movie blurbs in the newspaper offer a helpful way to see what a good “high concept” sounds like. One that I remember went something like this: “Two men meet on a train and jokingly agree to kill each other’s enemy. Unfortunately, one of them wasn’t joking.”
Strangers on a Train
.

I taught myself early on to see if my stories could be encapsulated so easily. For instance, my concept statement for
The Little Brother
: “A man adopts the personalities of his roommates and kills them when he feels he can live their lives better than they can. He gets away with it until he moves to Boston and his new roommate and his girlfriend catch on just in time.”

Mine was a whole sentence longer than
Strangers on a Train
. Maybe that’s why I’m not rich and famous.

The Protagonist
—If you look closely, you’ll find subtle but important differences in the heroes of series versus standalone novels. For your own story, ask yourself: Whose problem is it anyhow? With the standalone, more often than not the answer should be: “the protagonist’s.”

Think of it this way. If you’re writing a series novel, Mr. X or (Ms. X) walks into the doorway of your detective’s office (or caterer’s tent, or horse stable, or wherever your protagonist calls home) and lays out his problem. As some sort of expert, your protagonist is supposed to help him out. Yes, she’ll make mistakes. Yes, she’ll get personally involved. And yes, there may be substantial risk to those close to her as she goes about solving the problem. But initially, the problem isn’t hers. She’s the expert, she’s fully expected to survive and live to deal with other people’s problems in the future books.

In the standalone novel, the protagonist more often than not
is
Mr. X. If he walks into a detective’s office, either the detective can’t help him, or she tries to and fails, leaving the protagonist in an even worse spot. (The movie
Cape Fear
is an excellent example of this.) Often, the protagonist isn’t an expert in whatever it is that’s threatening him, but he must find the inner resources and expertise along the way to extricate himself and those he loves from the spot he’s in.

In many stories, the protagonist is not blameless. He has done something to put himself in a terrible spot and must grow personally during the story to win. In my second book,
Dangerous Waters
, the character finds himself in trouble seemingly from the outside. But decisions he made beginning in his early teens are at the root of what is now happening to him in his thirties.

When I look back at what I’ve written here so far, I see the words, “Often,” and “supposed to,” and “maybe” a lot. That’s because everything in a good novel is up for grabs. But more often than not, I’m right. The key problem is
supposed to
land squarely on the shoulders of your hero.

The Antagonist
—A friend of mine, Frank Robinson, the author of
The Glass Inferno
, which later became the movie
The Towering Inferno
, told me this about thrillers:
Readers measure the good guys by the bad guys
. This means your protagonist can strike all the right poses, say all the right things, and fight with amazing skill, but he’s ultimately meaningless if your bad guy is a wimp.

Not to suggest your antagonist must kill everyone he sees, or only wear black leather, or kick puppies for fun. But he must have a certain weight and presence in your story. The reader should feel that his threat is real and that truly bad things might happen to your characters. The reader should understand something about why the bad guy acts like he does. That means you’ll have to evoke your readers’ empathy (not necessarily their sympathy) so they’ll believe that this person might do the thing he does. We’ve all been assailed by countless snarling bad guys in novels, television shows, and movies. The only way to make yours come to life is to work on the details that make them real.

Usually it’s the antagonist’s motivation that first drives the story. He wants something desperately enough that he is willing to do terrible things to get it. The protagonist in some way becomes entangled with the antagonist’s goals…and that’s your story’s conflict. So at the heart of your big idea, your high concept, are the characters—the protagonist versus antagonist wanting opposing things.

Viewpoint
—I refer to movies as often as books. That’s not only because I love movies, but also because I feel that a cinematic viewpoint is helpful for standalone novels. Actually, I feel the same about series novels, which is why
The Repo
, my first in the Jack Merchant/Sarah Ballard series, is written in the third person. I allow readers a limited amount of viewpoint in Jack and Sarah’s heads, as well as that of the primary antagonist, Thomas.

Quite often, series novels are told from the first-person POV. I like reading first-person novels (assuming I like the character), but the only book I ever wrote in first person was
Dangerous Waters
. The book turned out well, but I found the first-person point of view constraining. I knew there was a lot of interesting stuff going on with other characters, but I could only relay it through dialogue and other secondhand sources. It drove me crazy. First person offers all sorts of benefits in keeping a mystery a mystery. And it is easier to give the reader an in-depth view of the protagonist’s inner thoughts. But I find it more difficult to reveal my antagonist’s views in first person. And in most standalones the antagonist is the one driving the story, at least initially.

Think hard about viewpoint. I usually limit the viewpoints to only two to three characters, and I never switch viewpoints within a chapter. One of the benefits of working in third person is that you can choose chapter by chapter which character has the most dramatic or interesting view of the story.

Plot and Pace
—With standalone novels, think about a ticking clock.

Is a definite time limit (racing to stop the bomb from exploding, finding the child before she’s lost forever) a tried and true device that borders on the cliché? Yes. But it also works. The ticking clock works because it’s in the very nature of a thriller. At the most simplistic level, the difference between a mystery and suspense novels is: In a mystery, you want to know who did it. In a suspense novel, you might know whodunit from the first page, but you want to know what happens next.

For the reader to care about what happens next, speed and hard-driving momentum are vital elements of the story. With a good mystery, if your protagonist is engaging, the pace can be more leisurely. But with a suspense novel, if you’re not reluctant to put the book down, if you aren’t burning to see what happens next, something isn’t working.

Think about what’s at stake. Think about a short deadline. Think what would happen if even with all the best efforts of the protagonist, that deadline kept growing shorter. Think about making your reader feel anxious. Think about making him give up a night’s sleep to finish your book. That’s your job.