How to rite Killer Fiction (9 page)

• The Golden Age detectives act out the crime, reconstructing the walk to the train station in order to determine if the witness lied about how long it took. Adding physicality to a whodunit scene is always a good idea.

• Try not to put all the speculation in one big scene. Let the detective rethink his position every time he learns something new. This is what the
Law and Order
cops do as they race from place to place, and it gives context to the individual interrogations.

• Other Golden Age ideas that shouldn't be abandoned are the written timeline, the hand-drawn map, the diagram of the room showing where everyone was standing at the time of the murder; in short, the raw data that feeds the detective's speculation. Let the reader see these and she will engage more fully in the act of detecting.

Annie and Max, the detective
duo
in
The Christie Caper
, do their thinking the old-fashioned way—and Dame Agatha would surely have approved. They create homemade maps of the attempted murder scenes, lists of suspects and where they were at the relevant times, and have discussions where they compare notes and speculate on the murder.

One important aspect of the Thinking sections of the mystery is that anything the clever reader could come up with by way of explanation must also be considered by the detective if she is to live up to the name.
Catering to Nobody
introduces Goldy Bear and her preteen son, Arch, a troubled boy with a penchant for Dungeons and Dragons. When Goldy learns that her son hated his grandfather, the victim of the attempted poisoning, she allows herself a moment to wonder if her own child could have slipped the poison into the man's coffee. She discards the theory, but at least the reader realizes she's aware of the possibility. Had Davidson ignored Arch as a suspect, the reader would have felt superior to Goldy instead of those two steps behind that the writer wanted'us to be.

Midpoint

Arc Two ends—where? What marks the Midpoint of the book, the beginning of Arc Three?

Something should. The danger is that the middle continues with detection, with Q&A, with speculation, all of the same variety and intensity as in Arc Two. This is what reviewers mean when they say a book sags in the middle.

So what changes?

A second body is always good—
but only if the body is more than a body.

Only if the second body changes everything does it really make a good Midpoint.

How does it change everything? In
The Christie Caper
, the body changes everything because, contrary to the reader's expectation,
it isn't Bledsoe's.
The man we love to hate, the man whose murder we've been expecting since page one is still alive and breathing and someone else, someone we gave no thought to, is lying dead instead.

The second body, or in this case, the first successful murder attempt, changes everything by knocking the detective's theory into a cocked hat. For this to happen, the detective has to
have
a theory in the first place, and he has to be pretty well convinced of it, or knocking it down won't mean much to him. Setting up the impact of the second body, then, requires that our detective have done a fair amount of work in Arc Two, that he's eliminated some suspects and zeroed in on others, and that he's got what he thinks is a clear picture of events. He's narrowed the suspects to one or two, he's proved certain alibis and uncovered certain motives. He's exposed lies and revealed inconsistencies, and he's feeling pretty good about himself.

The impact of Body Two is that the one or two suspects he's focused on
couldn't possibly have committed this crime.
One good reason for being unable to kill Victim Two is that the prime suspect
is
Victim Two. Another good reason is that Victim Two apparently has no connection to Victim One, and yet they were both clearly killed by the same person. Or Victim Two is a person no one has an obvious motive to kill, yet there he is, dead, and his death is a reproach to the detective for not having solved the crime.

Emotional resonance can be added by having the second body be that of a person we actually liked. This gives the detective even more motivation to get to the truth of the matter.

Does the Midpoint event that changes everything have to be a second body?

No, but it helps. The essence of the Midpoint is that shift from one investigational direction to another. Being warned off the case might change everything if the warning comes from someone who shouldn't have a deep interest in the original murder. Violence or danger to the detective in and of itself is
not
really a Midpoint event if all it does is add more pressure without changing the direction of the investigation. The essence of Midpoint—of the shift from Arc Two to Arc Three—is that the detective must double back, must rethink, must re-examine everything he's already done.

And if the writer has done his job, the detective is not only back to square one, but also
worse off
than he was when he began the investigation. For one thing, he probably knows now that at least one of the witnesses he questioned was lying. He may even know which one—the one lying on a slab at the morgue. How will he get the information that witness had now?

Arc Three: Waist-Deep in the Big Muddy_

Law and Order
moves to the lawyers for its Arc Three, and what usually happens is that a case that seemed straightforward suddenly develops more holes than the
Titanic.
A confession is thrown out, physical evidence is suppressed, and the person we thought was guilty turns out to be covering up for the real killer.

Back to Square One—or is it? Isn't it "back a couple of steps
before
Square One"? Because now the cops need evidence independent of that smoking gun the judge suppressed. The best evidence they had is gone; the witnesses they already talked to aren't likely to change their stories without a lot more pressure being put on them. That's the essence of Arc Three in the mystery: to make the solving of this crime seem a complete impossibility thanks to the Midpoint development. In
Law and Order,
because of its unique structure, that development is usually a legal twist. In an ordinary mystery, it has to be something else.

Arc Three often involves revisiting the witnesses already questioned in Arc Two. But we question them now with a greater sense of intensity and we know things we didn't know in Arc Two. We perhaps apply more pressure to get the answers we want—if there's a danger of the detective crossing the line to force people to talk, now is when he will cross that line. The straight-arrow cop becomes Dirty Harry and the Dirty Harry cop goes ballistic.

Violence escalates. The murderer uses violence to silence witnesses and to intimidate the detective. Our police detective goes too far in his interrogation of someone with connections and is taken off the case. The private eye gets fired by his own client, who now seems eager to forget the whole thing.

Subplot s coalesce with the main plot. Arc Three is where the detective figures out what astute readers have suspected all along: those two seemingly unrelated cases he's been working on are connected in some subtle, subterranean way. This happens in
Catering to Nobody,
and the realization of that connection changes everything, and forces Goldy to re-examine all she's learned and deduced from the beginning.

That's part of the funhouse effect. What looked "normal" in the mirror is really a distorted picture of reality. What seemed authentic was bogus; what seemed a lie was only the truth in a thin disguise. Now that we know the entire truth, everything that went before becomes suddenly clear. When Jake Gittes finally understands Evelyn Cross Mulwray's anguished cry, "She's my sister
and
my daughter!" it all falls into place. What seemed murky is now both clear and terrible, worse than anything Gittes imagined, and yet completely believable in terms of what we know about Noah Cross.

Challenge to the Reader

Ellery Queen, one of the great detective writers of the Golden Age, introduced a device called Challenge to the Reader. When Ellery the detective character finally figured out who did it, he'd shout, "Eureka!" and jump out of his chair, ready to confront the criminal. End of chapter, and, by the way, Plot Point Two.

Queen didn't start the next chapter on the next page. Instead, he inserted a one-page Challenge to the Reader, which said that the reader was privy to all the clues Ellery had unearthed, and invited the reader to put the book down, rethink everything he'd read, and match wits with the Great Detective.

In other words, the Challenge gave readers a chance to pause and think before turning the page and finding out the solution.

Did it work? Did millions of readers—and Queen was a best-seller in his day—actually put down their books and stare at the ceiling, hoping for enlightenment? Did they jot down clues, make little maps of the crime scene, flip the pages back to reread certain sections of the book before arriving at their well-reasoned conclusions?

I have no idea.

What I do know is that if you catch an episode of
Murder; She Wrote,
there will be a scene in which Jessica Fletcher jumps from her chair, eyes wide, says, "I know who killed him!" and races off to confront the killer.

Cut to commercial.

That's the Challenge to the Reader. Not only are you supposed to run to the refrigerator or the bathroom, you're supposed to think for a minute about whom you suspect and whom you think Jessica suspects and why. It's the writer's way of playing fair with the reader, of saying, "You have the clues; now solve the crime."

Both Carolyn G. Hart and Diane Mott Davidson, whose books are firmly in the classic whodunit tradition, use Challenge to the Reader. In
Catering,
Goldy realizes who the killer is and reveals her suspicion to the investigating police officer on p. 279. She doesn't share her conclusion or the reasoning supporting it with the reader until p. 284 when she gathers all the suspects together.
The Christie Caper
follows a similar pattern. Annie reviews her notes on p. 293 and sees a discrepancy. "A false note," she muses. "If that was false, what else might be false?" She has her solution on p. 294, but doesn't reveal it until p. 299, giving the reader a chance to play the game and come up with the false note and its meaning.

Once you've introduced your Challenge to the Reader, it's your job to lay your solution to the crime before your reader. The ending is so important to the reader's experience that it gets an entire chapter of its own.

ENDINGS ARE HARD. Once upon a time, in the Golden Age, it was enough for the Great Detective to
know.
Ellery Queen gathered all the suspects together in the drawing room and proceeded to spend seven or eight closely reasoned pages expounding his theory on who had done what and why, clearing up any loose ends along the way. (I once saw a
New Yorker
cartoon that parodied this scene by showing the Great Detective as a parrot sitting on a perch with all the suspects in front of him.) Occasionally the disgruntled suspect pulled a gun and made a break for it, only to be subdued by the burly Sergeant Velie, but action wasn't the essence of the scene.

Across the water, Lord Peter Wimsey conducted his expository scene in a tete-a-tete with the murderer, then quietly withdrew to permit the killer an "honorable way out": pistols for one in the library. Sometimes Dr. Gideon Fell decided the killer was a better man than his victim and played judge and jury, leaving the official solution of the crime to the police he knew were incompetent to solve it.

Knowing was enough. Justice in terms of courtrooms and jury verdicts was decidedly secondary.

No one expected the Great Detective to wrestle the killer to the ground and pluck the loaded gun from his hand, or to plug the killer between the eyes.

But we
do
tend to expect action endings from Kinsey Millhone and Matt Scudder. We won't be satisfied with V.I. Warshawski calling the