The Elements of Mystery Fiction: Writing the Modern Whodunit (13 page)

If the arrival of the police or the cavalry or the night watchman or the heroine’s loyal German shepherd has been planned, or if the savior’s appearance makes sense because you’ve prepared your reader for it in advance, then it will not appear to be coincidence. If it flows logically from the story, in other words, it can work.

Here are some other examples of unsatisfactory endings that are tantamount to divine intervention: Your heroine, who has no particular experience with guns, kills the villain with a lucky shot; the villain, normally athletic and sure-footed, trips and falls and cracks his head on the corner of a table; an unexpected thunderstorm knocks out the electricity just as the villain reaches for your heroine’s throat; the villain’s car, in which he’s carrying the bound-and-gagged heroine, runs out of gas in front of a police station.

Endings such as these are easy to write but hard for readers to swallow.

2.
The suddenly invincible hero or heroine
. You have created a desperate and resourceful villain. He has outwitted and overpowered and murdered several strong and capable people already. Now your heroine, using, for example, her skills at computer programming, has identified him. When she tells him what she knows, he says he must kill her to protect his secret. Your heroine then subdues him with karate kicks. Unless her karate expertise has been clearly established earlier in the story, this resolution will seem as contrived as the arrival of the cavalry.

3.
The suddenly fallible villain
. The police and the FBI have failed to bring your villain to justice. Everyone who has confronted him has been killed. Now, at the climactic moment, your heroine faces him—and he does something stupid or clumsy that allows her, unlike all those who have previously tried and failed, to subdue him.

This sort of unmotivated change in the villain is as unconvincing as the sudden invincibility of the heroine.

4.
The conversion of the villain
. Your heroine confronts the man who has murdered several people in cold blood. She condemns his evil ways. He nods and says, “You’re absolutely right. I’m ready to give myself up. Take me in.”

Unless you have portrayed your villain as a morally complex man, perhaps highly religious and tortured by his deeds, his sudden conversion will strike your reader as lucky and coincidental—another variation on the intervention of the gods.

Writing effective and believable climactic scenes requires all of your creativity. There is no formula. Your story’s resolution must follow logically from the strengths and abilities and personalities of the characters and from the events that have come before. And yet it must not seem preordained. The climax must bring all of your story’s tension and conflict to a peak. It’s the moment when the forces of good and evil confront each other. Make it believable, make it logical—and make it a surprise.

Denouement

In the denouement that follows the climactic scene, the mystery’s solution is explained and order is restored. Here the stray puzzle pieces are gathered and sorted and the tangled threads are unraveled. All of the confusing and seemingly random events that have occurred, and all of the characters who have appeared in the story, are rearranged into a logical pattern. Subplots and secondary conflicts such as romantic relationships are resolved. The order destroyed by the murder at the story’s outset is now reestablished.

In some cases the climax can incorporate the story’s denouement. The hero or heroine assembles the clues in a logical way. She tracks down the villain, confronts him, subdues him, and levels her accusation. The villain admits his guilt and confirms the heroine’s suspicions. Remaining questions of motive and means and the roles of other characters are answered in the climactic scene.

When the climax leaves significant questions unanswered, however, an additional scene, the denouement, is necessary. Readers are disappointed if the story ends with plot threads left dangling.

Beware of long rambling confessions. In real life, villains don’t typically bare their souls to the good guys who best them. Fictional villains shouldn’t, either. Avoid denouements in which the point-of-view character—either in question-and-answer dialogue with another character or in narration directed at the reader—explains how he or she figured it all out. The climax should resolve as much of the story as possible, and the denouement should be completed in two or three short scenes.

Remember: The story is the sleuth’s quest of detection. When he or she solves the puzzle, the story is effectively over.

Prologues and epilogues

A prologue is usually a short, focused, single scene showing an event that occurred before the time in which the story itself unfolds. Similarly, an epilogue concerns events that occur after the story’s climax and denouement.

A prologue and an epilogue can give symmetry to a mystery, but they can also make it appear that the writer is striving to be “literary.” If you are tempted to add a prologue and/or an epilogue as an afterthought, scrutinize your reasons. Most well-told stories don’t need either.

A story about an escaped convict who murders the jurors who sent him to prison ten years earlier, for example, might benefit from a prologue in which the convict’s original crime is dramatized. If the storyline involves the murder (or was it suicide?) of a disabled Vietnam veteran, try a prologue that recounts the circumstances under which the vet was wounded.

In Rick Boyer’s
Pirate Trade
, his narrator, Doc Adams, explains in a prologue called “Lightship Purse” the origin of the baskets crafted by Nantucket natives and the significance of the ivory medallions on their lids. The reader needs this information to understand the story that follows.

James Lee Burke opens
Black Cherry Blues
with a dream sequence that establishes the foreboding mood of the novel and introduces the reader to the tortured mind of Dave Robicheaux, the first-person narrator.

If your prologue sets a mood, reveals a character trait, gives important information, or introduces a theme echoed in the story itself, it is likely to work for you. If it does none of these things, delete it.

Epilogues typically explain what happens to characters after the story has ended. Minette Walters ends
The Sculptress
with this epilogue:

This epilogue, which takes place a significant time after the story itself has ended, is necessary to give the reader a sense of completion. In this case, what happens to Olive Martin after the story itself ends contains a hint of irony and foreboding. The epilogue in
The Sculptress
is dramatically satisfying. It leaves something for the reader to speculate about: Is Olive Martin
really
innocent?

Chapter 9

Building Conflict to
Make Scenes Work

All forms of fiction—films, stage plays, novels, short stories—unfold in an ordered sequence of events or scenes, the purpose of which is to move the story forward. In mystery fiction, each scene is a turn along the maze of the sleuth’s journey of detection. If you neglect to account for even one of those turns, your reader will become immediately—and hopelessly—lost.

Every scene should have a function. Test its validity by asking yourself: “If I omitted this scene completely, would the story still make sense to my readers? Would my hero still get to the same place at the end?”

If your answer is yes, you should omit the scene.

While moving the story forward through time and space, scenes perform other functions as well. They introduce new characters. They expand and complicate the personalities and motivations of old characters. They establish setting and mood. They develop subplots, clues, red herrings, and false trails. They amuse, sadden, excite, confuse, clarify, educate.

Scenes dramatize events that are
motivated
. Accident, coincidence, and luck, while common enough in real life, do not move invented stories believably. Readers want to know why events occur. They demand cause-and-effect logic. The law of stimulus-response operates in well-motivated novels and short stories. For everything that happens there must be a reason. Readers may not immediately know what that reason is; in fact, not knowing impels them to continue reading. They trust that explanations will eventually emerge, and they read on, seeking clues that will help them understand the stimuli that produced the responses they witnessed. If those explanations never appear, or if the only explanation is luck or coincidence, readers feel cheated.

Scenes should create the illusion of taking place in
real time
. Action is played out step by step. Dialogue scenes unfold word by word, fight scenes blow by blow, love scenes caress by caress. No significant piece of action is omitted in a scene. As readers witness these events, the illusion becomes their reality. They are there.

You can, and sometimes should, summarize actions: “O’Donnell, the bad cop, questioned the woman for an hour. Then Napoli took over. He played the good cop. He got nothing out of her, either.” Or, “They scratched and punched and pulled each other’s hair, and then the two women fell to the floor exhausted.” Or, “We kissed and stroked each other long into the night.”

But while summaries do important storytelling work, they do not create the illusion of observed events for readers. Summaries are not scenes.

Every character in mystery fiction, as we have seen, wants something important that he doesn’t have, cannot get without struggle, and is willing to take risks to gain. The sleuth, the truth-seeker, struggles to solve the mystery, while the villain does everything he can to escape detection. Every other character has a direct or indirect stake in the story’s outcome. Tension and suspense come from characters whose goals conflict with each other.

A scene can be defined as a closely connected sequence of actions in which one or more characters working toward an important goal encounter obstacles, struggle against those obstacles, achieve some kind of resolution, and end up with new problems. The new problems lead to new efforts to achieve their goals, which are dramatized in subsequent scenes, and so on to the climax.

Every scene, therefore, contains goal, obstacle, conflict, resolution, and new obstacle. Eliminate any one of these elements and your scene falls flat.

Let’s analyze a typical scene in mystery fiction, this one from
The Sculptress
by Minette Walters. Roz, a writer and the story’s protagonist, has agreed to write a book about Olive Martin, a convicted murderess. Roz visits Olive in prison and then does some background research on the unspeakably violent murder of the woman’s mother and her sister. Roz is repelled. She cannot bear the thought of spending more time with Olive and writing about it. She decides to tell Iris, her agent, that the deal is off: