How to rite Killer Fiction (8 page)

guests has a stomach attack and the cops suspect poison. Caterer Goldy Bear must delve into the poisoning in order to save her business, but she eventually comes to believe that the "suicide" was murder.

Both Annie Laurence Darling and Goldy Bear make explicit decisions to investigate the crimes early in the story. That decision to "take the case" is the close of the first act, the place at which the detection begins.

It's also known as Plot Point One, or the end of Arc One in the Four-Arc System. The murder itself is
not,
as some might think, the turning point—after all, people are murdered every day and their friends don't step in to solve the crime. Murder itself is not the essence of the detective story. It is the amateur detective's decision to "take the case" and solve the crime that makes the book a classic mystery.

The police officer is different. It is, after all, his job to solve murders, so "taking the case" is assumed. Many police procedurals begin, not with a lineup of suspects, but with the dead body on the floor. This means one of the author's main tasks in the first arc will be to introduce the reader to the victim—a task the cozy writer did while the victim was alive.

When does Arc One reach Plot Point One if the body is already on the floor in the first chapter? One answer: when the case becomes personal, takes on meanings that make it more than just another case. This can involve the cop's personal emotions, or his relationship within his community, or larger political and social implications. Being warned to lay off a major suspect because he's connected makes the case personal for some police officers. The important thing is that something near the end of the introductory material changes the nature of the case or the nature of the cop's relationship to the case, forcing a different attitude and approach in Arc Two.

Private eye novels have their own unique variation on this structure. Usually, the P.I. "takes the case" in chapter one—but the case she takes is seldom a murder. She is asked to find a lost daughter or tail an unfaithful husband or check out a bogus insurance claim. The routine case turns into a murder case at the end of Arc One, thus raising the stakes and changing the detective's focus. Instead of (or in addition to) a murder, the P.I. may find that her client has lied to her, or be warned off the case by cops or people with power in the community. In any case, the routine matter she started with has turned deadly, and that will alter her behavior and focus in Arc Two.

Arc Two: The Big Bad Middle_

Writing the middle of a novel is a lot like driving through Texas. You think it's never going to end, and all the scenery looks the same.

So what breaks the monotony? How can you keep the tension high as your detective essentially plods through the detail-oriented work of criminal investigation?

In a detective story, the detective detects. In case you think that's too obvious to need mentioning, take notes when you read your next mystery and ask yourself whether its amateur sleuth is really detecting or overhearing things, listening to confessions, making wild speculations and wilder connections—in short, is that detective detecting or just getting lucky? The true detective story involves deductive reasoning, the use of logic, and speculation based on concrete evidence.

When the detective detects is in the middle of the book. How the detective detects depends in part on the subgenre we're in. The amateur detective and the private eye are limited by the fact that nobody
has
to talk to him. The cop can compel answers, but she also inspires fear, and fear leads to lawyers, who will definitely call a halt to questioning.

Detecting: The Q&A

Questions and answers are a major source of information for the detective. This is dangerous for the writer because it leads to a lot of talking heads scenes, which can become boring and repetitious. How to spark up those scenes?

• Choose an interesting setting. This might mean tracking the witness down at work—and making that work as fascinating as possible. If you take the Q&A into
the
witness's house, give us a house to remember.

• Don't let all the witnesses roll over. Someone, somewhere, sometime should refuse to talk to the detective. This at least breaks the rhythm of one "confession" after another.

• It wouldn't hurt if someone threw a punch instead of answering questions. The workplace setting can be of great help with this, particularly if it's a place with dangerous objects all around.

• People have been known to lie. Maybe they could lie to your detective. The downside is that he probably won't know it's a lie until later.

• Evasion is good, too. What if our witness is amazingly forthcoming about one aspect of the case and then clams up as soon as a certain name is mentioned? That adds interest to the scene without resorting to violence.

• Even if you have to use the talking-heads-over-coffee setup for your Q&A, there are other ways to put spin on the ball, most notably by making the witnesses very interesting characters with a lot of quirks and zippy dialogue. Humor helps. Always.

Ever watch
Law and Order
? You should; every mystery writer can learn from that first half hour of police work as the detectives track down the perpetrator of the crime we saw in the first two minutes of the show.

What are the lessons of
Law and Order
(which owes a great deal to its predecessor,
Dragnet)
when it comes to presenting zippy Q&A?

First, the cops waste no time getting to where they're going. We start the scene at the witness's home or workplace without wasting time showing the cops making the trip.

Unless
they're doing a quick discussion of exactly what it is they want to learn from this witness, in which case the point of the scene isn't to show them eating a hot dog while strolling down Seventh Avenue, it's to let the viewer know which piece of evidence this witness will or will not deliver into their hands and to remind us where that piece fits into their theory of the case.

Once they're in place, the detectives get right to the point. "Where were you on the night of the twelfth?" The answer given by Witness A takes them directly to Witness B, Witness B puts them on to Witness C—sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly—and quite often Witness D sends them back to A now that they realize A was concealing something.

The show's writers make a point of varying ages, races, genders, and economic backgrounds. The detectives go into the penthouses of the rich and famous and then to the cardboard box that's home to another witness. One witness has a Wall Street office with a view to die for, the next works on the loading dock. The rich threaten the cops with lawyers; the

poor just threaten. The variation, and the deliberate insertion of the cops into alien territory, adds interest to what are essentially talking heads scenes.

Because they're cops, they have the option of "squeezing" witnesses who don't want to talk. Sometimes this leads to one witness ratting out another, or it may allow the cops to move up the chain of command in a criminal enterprise.

And it all happens so fast. That's the real magic of that first half-hour. We saw a crime in progress and in twenty-two minutes the detectives have a suspect arrested and ready for trial. They've spun and discarded four or five theories of the case, interrogated eight to ten witnesses, followed three or four distinct lines of inquiry, and they even had time for snappy banter, not to mention that hot dog.

Detecting: Physical Evidence

Questioning suspects and witnesses isn't the only way to get information. In the Golden Age, the Great Detective got down on all fours and checked the carpet for loose threads, mainly because the police didn't understand or respect scientific evidence, but today the police know all there is to know about forensics and they're the ones on their knees. So if your detective is a police officer, you can use all the forensic tricks you want to nail your suspect. Just make sure those details are interesting to the reader.

If your detective is an amateur or a private eye, you have a problem. The crime scene technicians and homicide detectives aren't going to let your sleuth anywhere near the sources of physical evidence. Only if your detective finds the body before the cops are called is there a chance of seeing that evidence firsthand.

Not that seeing it will be enough. The scientific knowledge and technology needed to match hairs and threads, blood and saliva, just don't belong to ordinary people. You need science, and the cops have all the science.

Your detective, however, might borrow a little science by finding out what the cops know. This is one reason why so many female amateur detectives have cop boyfriends—it's one way to be certain that such details
as
time of death are revealed to the detective. Some facts will be reported in the newspapers,
and
the private detective often has sources on the papers who turn over what the newspaper withholds.

Private eyes are expected to have people they can turn to for information outside of official channels. Amateurs, on the other hand, are ordinary people, and the writer who gives them unlimited access to inside information is in danger of losing credibility.

If you can't get your detective to the body, how can your detective make use of physical evidence?

How about the victim's house, car, office, gym locker? Your detective just might have a chance at beating the cops to one of these places, and all of them present interesting opportunities for clue finding. Messages on answering machines, computer disks, letters, diaries, notes, prescription drugs in medicine cabinets, lipstick on the collar, whips in the closet, stacks of money under the floorboards, diamonds in the ice cubes, narcotics in the briefcase, blood on the fender, a dead body in the bathtub— the possibilities are endless.

In
Catering to Nobody,
Goldy Bear has a free hand in her investigation of the supposed suicide because the police discount the idea that it was murder. Through a series of ruses and assertive moves, she gains access to the dead woman's house, her car, her gym locker, and her pharmacy records. She also listens to small-town rumor and finds evidence in her son's desk drawer at school. She collects enough evidence to force the police to consider that the woman was murdered.

To reveal or not to reveal, that is the question. The unofficial detective, whether P.I. or amateur, always confronts the issue of whether, when, and how to let the police in on what he's discovered. Note that I'm not talking about sharing speculations with the cops but behaving like a good citizen and letting the police know that there's vital evidence over here.

P.I.s like to grab that diary and run. They like to make anonymous phone calls about the body in the tub, then hotfoot it to Fresno to talk to a witness before the cops find out that witness even exists. Working outside the law, sometimes deliberately getting in the way of the law, is part of the code.

The amateur is different. We're less likely to go along with flat-out obstruction of justice if the detective is a normal person. We have a bias toward letting the official police do their jobs—so long as those official police are seen as good guys.

So one way to justify withholding evidence is to present the reader with cops who are either on the take or criminally stupid. Perhaps they've arrested The Wrong Man, in which case they not only won't be interested in evidence pointing to someone else, they'll deny that the evidence is evidence at all. If they're on the take, not only will they refuse to believe the evidence; they might even destroy it to preserve their wrongheaded theory. So why bother giving it to them?

Detecting: Reasoning

The detective detects. Part of the detecting is the Q&A, another part is collecting physical evidence, and a third, very important, part is thinking about what she's learned. Thinking is a vital middlebook act in mysteries.

But thinking isn't visual or dramatic or, let's face it, inherently interesting. So how does the mystery writer make it worth reading?

Add a second character, a sidekick, a person with whom the detective can shoot the breeze, air his opinions, bounce ideas back and forth—in short, a Watson.

But won't scenes where the detective and his Watson mull things over become just another talking heads scene? What are some ways to add spice to those inevitable "It could have been George; but what about Martha, she hated him, too" scenes?

• Could the detective and the sidekick argue about who's right? Archie Goodwin often disapproves of Nero Wolfe's suspicions, and we enjoy their byplay more because Archie's not a fawning pushover.

• Some sidekicks do a bit of detecting of their own. When Anne Perry's Inspector Pitt sits down to dinner with his wife, Charlotte, they both have information to share because they've both interrogated different people during the day. (One reason why they investigate in different spheres: the mores of the Victorian Age. Pitt is the official police detective, but the secret, shared world of women is one he cannot penetrate. He needs the information Charlotte can discover by being a woman and a member of the upper class. The key to detective duos is giving each a separate skill or sphere.)