The Elements of Mystery Fiction: Writing the Modern Whodunit (7 page)

Grotesquely obese (or emaciated) waitresses, seven-foot (or five-foot) lawyers, and purple-haired (or skull-shaven) teenagers, or characters who are incredibly beautiful (or ugly), smart (or stupid), graceful (or awkward), do not strike the reader as true-to-life. At best, they’re utterly boring; at worst, they make the narrator or point-of-view character (and, by extension, the author) seem superficial and mean-spirited, and they will alienate rather than attract the reader.

Complicated and interesting characters can be created with quick and simple strokes by giving readers something they don’t expect. For example:

Major characters can—and should—be developed gradually. But writers need “tags”—quick, deft, unexpected strokes—to bring minor characters to life. A janitor who whistles classical tunes while he sweeps the floor, a beautiful actress who bites her fingernails, or a professor of Renaissance literature who carries a confession magazine under his arm will etch themselves indelibly in your readers’ memories.

These characters are established and ready to be more fully exploited if and when you choose.

Remember: In real life, we learn more about people through how they behave and talk than by how they look. How people appear, in fact, is often deceiving; the same is true of fictional characters. If you focus on your characters’ speech, mannerisms, actions, and responses to situations in the story, you won’t need to paint detailed physical descriptions of them or make them look strange for them to be memorable.

Avoid the trap of telling readers what to think about a character. Instead of calling a cab driver “grouchy,” show him acting grouchy through what he says and how he behaves. Don’t call a woman “flirtatious”; instead, show her flirting with a man.

Mystery readers want to figure it out for themselves, and they resent a writer’s depriving them of the opportunity to draw their own conclusions about characters. The writer’s golden rule—“Show, don’t tell”—is never more important than in creating interesting minor characters.

Secondary characters play a limited but crucial role in your story’s development. You needed that whistling janitor to give your hero vital information, or to tell him the location of a businessman’s office, or to direct him to the fire escape. He’s a player. He might have a bit part, but without him the story will not work. He deserves your attention.

Some minor characters, of course, are simply walk-ons. They are the bus drivers, ushers, clerks, waitresses, and others who anonymously populate your story. They serve a function, and should be thought of as objects rather than characters. If a bartender’s only function in your story is to deliver a drink, don’t describe him or give him dialogue. Just call him “the bartender,” as you’d call a passing vehicle “an automobile.” Characterizing him further is not playing fair. It intrudes on your narrative and distorts it by suggesting that the bartender might be more significant than he really is.

Playing Mr. Potato Head

When my children were little, they had a toy called Mr. Potato Head. It came with plastic noses, ears, mouths, hats, moustaches, hairpieces, and glasses that they’d mix and match, sticking them onto a potato to create a face.

To create memorable minor characters, try playing Mr. Potato Head. Draw your characters from your experience. Mix and match the mannerisms, life experiences, and appearances of your friends and the people you encounter. Take note of how people around you act and react, speak and behave. Observe their table manners, reading habits, gestures, expressions. What do they watch on television? How do they spend their free time? What do they read, sing, and drink? How do they dress and wear their hair?

Don’t seek bizarre combinations or you will create cartoons rather than believable characters. Encourage your reader to wonder about them and care about them. Don’t present too much information; choose a few details, then allow your readers to use their imagination to create their own interpretations.

Why, for example, does that actress bite her nails? Did her parents mistreat her? Does her husband abuse her? Is she afraid or insecure or guilt-ridden?

Does the English professor with the confession magazine actually read it? Does he write confessions under a pen name? Is vital information coded into one of the magazine’s stories?

And the janitor who whistles Pachelbel—were his parents classical music lovers? Was he—or is he—a serious musician? Did an accident, or an enemy, or a cruel trick of fate deprive him of a career as a concert violinist?

When a quick sketch prompts your readers to ask questions such as these, you’ve done your job.

Chapter 5

Point of View: Giving Your Reader a Place to Stand

The next time you find yourself in a crowded restaurant, take note of which sense impressions have registered on your consciousness. Perhaps you’ve tuned into the restrained argument between the young couple at the next table. Your waitress has a bawdy laugh and an engagement ring on her left hand. From the direction of the kitchen comes the aroma of sautéed garlic, which conjures up ancient memories of your grandmother’s kitchen and reminds you that you skipped lunch.

Now ask your dinner companion what she notices. The Vivaldi they’re piping in through the speakers is nice, she says, but the clank and clatter of silverware and crockery are terribly annoying. What about the waitress? Oh, she wears too much makeup and her roots are showing. The smell of garlic? Now that you mention it, it is a little unpleasant, isn’t it?

You and your dining companion bring different memories, interests, sensitivities, moods, and expectations to the simple experience of sitting in a restaurant. Each of you notices different things. Your reconstruction of the evening is therefore radically different from that of your friend.

You can report it only as you experienced it—from your own point of view. That’s why eyewitness accounts of events often conflict wildly with one another. For a great many reasons, all of us perceive and interpret things differently.

Of course, in reconstructing your evening at the restaurant you could also recount your dinner companion’s impressions—but only as she chose to share them with you. You probably wouldn’t know why she chose to be critical of the waitress’ grooming or why she failed to notice the argument at the next table, although her facial expressions, gestures, tone of voice, and body language might give you clues. Perhaps she was jealous of the attentions the waitress received from her male customers. For all you know, your friend was eavesdropping but didn’t want to admit it to you.

You experience your life only through your own point of view. Part of that experience, of course, comes through your interactions with others. But you can never crawl into other people’s heads and experience what they experience, nor can you trust their reports to be entirely accurate or complete. People lie, distort, omit, and otherwise fail to say exactly what they really think. You must impose your interpretations on what others tell you, basing your conclusions both on what you know or infer about them and on your own preconceptions about human nature. In your interactions with others, you must rely on your own point of view.

In fiction, events are filtered through the five senses of the point-of-view characters and then reported to the reader. Establish your story’s point of view immediately—preferably in the first sentence. Let your readers—the participants in your story’s puzzle-solving quest—know whose shoes they will be walking in as they move through your story, whose eyes and ears and nose they’ll be using to witness your story’s events. Choosing your story’s point of view is one of your most crucial storytelling decisions.

First person

The first-person narrator is the character who experiences the events of the story and who interprets and explains them to the reader in his or her own words.

Kinsey Millhone, for example, is the “I” in Sue Grafton’s popular mystery series. Readers walk—and sometimes run—through the stories in Kinsey’s shoes. They go only where she goes, know only what she knows, see and smell and hear only what she experiences and is aware of and believes is important. Readers don’t know what any of the other characters is thinking or feeling or experiencing. They can only speculate based on what the characters say and how they act in Kinsey’s presence.

Grafton begins
A Is for Alibi
by immediately establishing Kinsey’s first-person narrative voice:

The very first word in Grafton’s book is that first-person possessive pronoun “my,” clearly establishing the first-person point of view. Kinsey is straightforward and candid from the beginning. Readers trust she will tell them the truth, and they have faith that she will share important information with them.

Through the eyewitness reports of the first-person narrator, readers accumulate information. They test it, interpret it, link it with other bits of information, and formulate theories. Readers understand that things are happening offstage that Kinsey cannot tell us, and they assume that the story’s other characters do not share all of their thoughts with her. Some characters, in fact, may mislead Kinsey. Others could be lying.

First-person narrators are not omniscient. As a young female California private investigator, Kinsey Millhone has her own ways of perceiving the world. She notices and understands things differently from the way John D. MacDonald’s first-person narrator Travis McGee and Sara Paretsky’s V. I. Warshawski do.

Readers who want to solve the case must take into account Kinsey’s personality and limitations as well as the facts as she recounts them in her narrative.

It’s no coincidence that so many successful mystery stories are told by first-person narrators. Readers readily identify with the “I” of these tales; it’s a powerful alliance. If readers like and trust the first-person narrator, they feel that they have a friend. It makes for strong reader loyalty.

Readers meet and learn about other characters directly through the experiences and perceptions of the first-person narrator. For example, early in Linda Barnes’s
A Trouble of Fools
, Carlotta Carlyle’s doorbell rings:

In this passage, readers meet Margaret Devens through Carlotta’s eyes, just as they might meet any person in real life. They form impressions based on what Carlotta observes and what Miss Devens chooses to say. Readers know only what Carlotta is thinking and feeling. They cannot enter Miss Devens’ mind. The self-proclaimed spinster may subsequently prove to be a terrorist, or a kidnapper—or an antivivisectionist. But readers won’t know that until Carlotta does.

Readers must respect the first-person narrator. She must be at least as intelligent and observant as they are if the puzzle-solving quest is to challenge both reader and narrator equally. Mystery readers do not want to solve the problem while the hero or heroine is still muddling around gathering clues and acting confused. First-person narration works best when the narrator is actively engaged in the story’s quest. Give your sleuth reasons to go places, to witness events, and to have a variety of experiences. Her narration, as much as possible, should be firsthand and immediate. A passive sleuth such as Nero Wolfe (who rarely leaves his Manhattan apartment) would make a poor first-person narrator, as author Rex Stout realized. That’s why Stout gave the narrating job to Archie Goodwin, Wolfe’s gofer.