Constructing a Mystery

 

After last week’s post about motive, means, and opportunity, here is something about the crafting of your main plot in a mystery story. This one does also apply to other mysteries, not just to the whodunit. Whenever your story revolves around a question, you can use these pointers to craft your main plot.

 

Edgar Allan Poe (whose Auguste Dupin predates Sherlock Holmes quite a bit) once wrote in an essay about mystery stories that the best way to write one was from the end to the beginning, meaning by starting with the big reveal of the answer and going back from there. That is a pretty solid suggestion, since the whole story is centred on that plot and on finding the answer. Without knowing what the answer is, there’s no way to lead the way to it.

The very first thing to figure out when you want to write a mystery is, therefore, the solution to it. The answer to the question you’re posing at the beginning is what you’ll use for the story’s culmination. This is the starting point for your main plot, which is all about finding the answer.

 

Let’s focus on a whodunit again for the moment, although the principle works for every mystery story, no matter what the mystery is. In a whodunit, the answer to the mystery is who did the crime. Minor answers are the motive, means, and opportunity I wrote about in last week’s blog post, but the answer everyone wants is the one to the question ‘who did it?’.

This is the point to start with the plot - the murder. How was it committed? Who is the culprit and who is the victim? What was the reason for it? Once you know all about the murder, can retell it the same way your investigator might if you go for the ‘You may wonder why I have asked you all here’ reveal, this part is done. You now know your answer and you can figure out how to present it best.

Let’s go on from here and line up all possible suspects, because you definitely need more than one for it to be a mystery. Who else has motive, means, and opportunity for the murder? Who else hates the victim or stands to gain from their death in any way? Who else can handle the murder weapon and would have access to it? Who else was in the vicinity when the murder happened? Create two tiers of suspects - some with two of the three boxes ticked and some with only one box ticked. Like this, you have a greater range of suspects and your investigator will have to work harder in the middle of the story. Suspects with only one of the three boxes ticked will be out as soon as it becomes clear that they hardly had a way to do the murder. Those with two boxes ticked are more interesting, because they’re the more likely ones. Your murderer will hide in that tier, do the best they can do to hide that tick in the third box which will make them the prime suspect.

Still, the story will be too simple if there’s only those suspects to tick off as the investigator finds them short of one or two of the three aspects. The next step is to create false leads, to make smaller plots which wrap around the big one. In most investigations, there are other things coming to the surface as well - secrets which have nothing to do with the murder, but are still damaging for the ones holding them. The investigator will encounter lies about the three aspects which have nothing to do with the main case, but merely with other things being hidden out of shame or fear. These complications can only be applied after you’ve figured out the suspects, because they’re related to the suspects.

Finally, the beginning. Figure out how to best present the murder, how to place some initial clues for the investigator to start with. Perhaps you wish to introduce the cast first, give the setting a good look, so the audience can focus more on the murder later. Perhaps you want to go right in with the murder. It’s up to you, up to how you want to write it. The murder or the discovery of the murder make for instant action, which is always a good start for a story because you have an instant hook. On the other hand, many mystery readers, especially when you veer into cosy mystery territory or want to copy classic writers like Agatha Christie, like getting eased into the story, like to get a look at the victim while they’re still alive, so they have a better understanding about why someone would want to kill them.

Once you have decided, your main plot is complete from beginning to end. You may now tag on a little epilogue at the end, perhaps to tie up some additional plots, such as a romantic subplot or a personal development of your investigator. Your main plot is done - you are now ready to write the mystery unless you want to work on the secondary plots a little more.

 

This works for other kinds of mystery stories, too. Figure out the answer to your question first, add problems in finding it, flesh out secondary plots, and figure out how to begin the story by posing the question well. If you do so, you will always know which hints there are to drop, which makes it much easier to see when in the story to drop them. You can take the investigator and the audience to the red herrings on the way without losing sight of the actual path to the answer. Finally, you can give them a satisfying climax of the story where the answer is told and the answer told will fit with the clues they have seen along the way.

Make sure you’re giving all vital clues to the audience because they expect that. They want to guess along with the main character, create their own theories and change them as new information becomes available. You don’t have to give them the main character’s theories to the answer, that can wait until the end, but they must have the means to form their own opinion.

 

Mr. Poe clearly was right and it is much better and easier to plot a mystery from the conclusion to the beginning. Whether you wish to write it backwards as well is your decision, but at any rate you will have a solid main plot and the ability to go through the middle without too much trouble about knowing which clues you need to present throughout it.

Motive, Means, and Opportunity

 

Let’s talk about mystery stories. Any story built around a question is a mystery story, so let’s define it a little more. Let’s talk about a mystery story where the question is ‘who did it?’ - yes, let’s talk about a whodunit.

 

A whodunit would be boring if there were only one suspect, so in addition to the victim you also need to present a group of suspects to the reader. During the story, the investigator, no matter whether they’re a professional, semi-professional, or amateur, will then figure out which of the suspects could have done it, narrowing down the list. In order to do that, they will have to see whether the suspect has all three of these: motive, means, and opportunity.

 

The first one on the list, motive, is also the most important one. If the suspect has no reason to want the victim dead, then why would they have done the deed? Even if they have means and opportunity, without a motive they’re not very suspicious. There are three types of motives, to put it down simply.

Money-related motives are the most common. Either the suspect stands to gain something through the victim’s death, such as an inheritance, or they will save money through the victim’s death, such as no longer having to pay support or blackmail money.

Emotion-related motives are quite common in whodunits, too, because it would be boring if it were always about the inheritance. Usually, those motives revolve around hatred and revenge, but there’s also cases where someone kills for a misguided, mutated love of the victim.

Finally, there’s murders committed to keep a secret. Most often, this means committing a murder to hide another crime, such as another murder, a robbery, or a theft. These motives are often connected to the victim being a blackmailer and always to the victim having knowledge of the secret. The secret also can be something like the culprit not really being related to someone, which would get them in trouble if widely known (depending on the era you set the story in).

 

The second one on the list, means, is also the second most important one, because it is a good way to narrow down the list, too. Means usually refer to physical means such as the right tools to commit the murder. If the murder has been committed with a rifle, for instance, only people who have access to a rifle and the ability to use one (skill as well as physical ability) tick off this box and have the means.

Means are a very wide field, of course, given that there’s many ways to kill a person and those ways shift with technical development. In some cases, the means aren’t clear from the beginning or there are not physical means in the way of tools involved. If the victim was strangled, for instance, there’s no tool someone can bring around, but the field is narrowed down to the suspects whose hands are big enough to strangle someone and who do have the necessary strength to do it, too.

In some cases, the means make it unnecessary for someone to be in the vicinity during the actual murder, as with poison put somewhere in advance (“Police at the Funeral” by Margery Allingham does a great job with that, having the murderer kill from ‘beyond the grave’).

 

The last one on the list, opportunity, is also the weakest. There will, most likely, be a lot of people in the vicinity of the victim at the time of the crime. Those who don’t also have the means or the motive are not even real suspects.

Opportunity comes down to alibis and most of us don’t have alibis for the whole day and the whole night. We’re not with other people 27/7 (Siamese Twins excluded), after all, we all need to go to the toilet or take a shower or just have five minutes to ourselves at some point.

Yet, without the opportunity to do the deed, motive and means are meaningless. If the victim’s only heir has the motive (inheritance) and the means (can operate a rifle), but was drinking in a bar two hours away with ten buddies, that heir is no longer really a suspect (unless you wish to give them an accomplice, which complicates matters a lot).

 

Once you’ve figured out these three aspects for every suspect you want to present, you can work the middle of the story very well, because the middle is mostly about the investigator checking the suspects and finding out that they are missing one of the three aspects. They have a motive, but no means. They were in the vicinity, but don’t have a motive. They have means and motive, but were far away at the time of the murder. This is what the middle of a whodunit is about: sieving through the suspects.

The black moment in a whodunit is usually either when the investigator runs out of suspects (someone killed the victim, but who??) or when the investigator finds the culprit, but has no proof to get them arrested.

This is where the twist comes in. Your suspect has motive and means, but no opportunity? Someone at the bar they drank in comes forward and says that they were gone for several hours. Your suspect has motive and opportunity, but no means? You find a device which allows for the frail granny to shoot the rifle successfully. You know that this person did the murder, but you can’t find the weapon they used? You manage to lure them into a trap so they’ll lead you to the hiding place of the weapon (“Columbo” does that a lot and with great success).

 

Motive, means, and opportunity are the three important aspects to figure out for every suspect in your whodunit. Ideally, only one person has all three (unless you want a “Clue” twist where there’s several valid endings), but it will take a long time for the investigator to find that one suspect, because that is what the mystery is about. You want to answer the question at the end, not earlier. You also want to give the audience a chance to guess along, so you need to give them all the information as your investigator gets it - that is very important.

 

Writing a mystery can be fun, but it does need additional plotting to make sure your suspects all have their motive, means, and opportunity down (and are ideally only missing one if they didn’t do it), because the solution usually revolves around those three. Keep that in mind and you can make a great story where the audience can investigate alongside the detective!

Distant Perspective in Mysteries

 

Recently, I got into reading Margery Allingham’s ‘Albert Campion’ stories and I realized that she and several other mystery authors, like Agatha Christie, often made good use of the distant perspective, which is not quite omnipresent, to tell their stories in an interesting way.

 

Now, you might wonder, how can an outside, distant perspective make it more interesting to tell a mystery story? Wouldn’t the existence of a voice who tells it all from the outside make things less interesting? Wouldn’t that voice be present during the murder and thus tell us who did it early?

Well, the voice could do all that, but it doesn’t, not the way Allingham and others are using it for mystery stories. One way to tell a mystery is from one person’s point of view only. When we read a Sherlock Holmes story, we get to see what Watson sees and hear what he hears. Watson has his own thoughts and his limits - he can’t know what Holmes sees and hears when they’re not together, he can’t even be certain how Holmes would see and hear things.

The distant perspective is more akin to a camera, following characters, sometimes even at shoulder height, almost giving us their point of view, but it isn’t locked on one character. It can move through the house in Cambridge in “Police at the Funeral” and give us a good impression of the people in there, of how they interact with each other, of how they live. Then it can come in closer, give us almost the point of view of one or two of them, only to float away again. It can zoom in on a police inspector who is walking in the rain, only to pan over to the private investigator whom he knows and meets by seeming coincidence. It can follow that PI afterwards when he has spoken to a woman who might or might not become a client and then follows the call of an old friend. It can give us impressions of the emotions all of those people have, yet keep us out of their very thoughts to keep us from knowing too much too early.

 

And that is why the distant perspective is so ideal for a mystery. A big problem with mystery stories is to keep the audience from learning who did it too early (unless you have a crime story where the big question is not ‘who did it?’ but ‘will they get away with it?’). You need eyes close to the investigator, which is why the Watsonian perspective is so popular with these stories - not quite in the mind and the shoes of the investigator who needs to pin it down, but close to them.

It would be very bad writing to be in the shoes of the investigator and then keep certain ideas and certain knowledge from the audience until the time for the big reveal comes, simply because it’s unfair. If we see the world from the investigator’s perspective, we should know all they know. They shouldn’t be keeping secrets from us. If we’re just the Watson, it’s less unfair for the investigator to keep those secrets, admittedly, because we’re not them. What Watson doesn’t see and hear himself is not known to him. Yet, that perspective is not without weaknesses, because it bears the question of why we’re not in the investigator’s mind, why we’re limited to the assistant or chronicler.

These problems don’t exist in the distant perspective.

 

In many ways, the distant perspective also makes it easy to turn a novel into a movie or TV series, because scenes shown in this perspective are very close to scenes in the visual medium already. As I said, it’s very much like a camera following certain characters, but the with ability to show a much wider scope than a third perspective or even first perspective ever could. There may be some lines about what a character thinks or feels, but those are very much tied to the situation and also to what their body language and face might show at that very moment. Like this, the audience can make educated guesses, can work along with the investigator, but they won’t know what’s in the investigator’s mind, they will perceive all clues with their eyes, not with those of, perhaps, a trained criminalist.

 

If novels like “Death on the Nile”, “Murder on the Orient Express”, or “Evil under the Sun” (my personal favourite) were written from third perspective, even if that perspective switched from character to character, it would be hard to keep up the suspense.

Seeing, for instance, the scenes between Linda and her stepmother in “Evil under the Sun” from a distant perspective makes it clear how they see each other and that Linda has more than just a fleeting motive for killing her stepmother, but seeing them through Linda’s eyes would also show she’s not capable of the murder. Just seeing them from the outside, we can’t fully grasp the scope of Linda’s hatred and her capability to follow thought with action.

We only see the outside of the suspects, we only see what the detective does, but not what he thinks. We have all the clues, all the things which are shown or said, but we don’t get the interpretation. That we have to do ourselves and that makes the mystery story much more interesting.

 

I recently finished the third Black Knight Agency story, “Grey Eminence”, and it does feature Jane investigating a murder, which is one of the main plots. She has other things to do in this story, too, but the murder comes up over and over again and its investigation runs through the story as a long, important plotline. That was when I realized how hard it is to keep the detective in the dark and keep the suspense up like this without making them look as if they were simply too stupid to do that job. I had leeway with Jane, as she’s a former criminal and not a criminalist, but it still was something which added to my troubles with finishing the first draft. A distant perspective would have helped immensely. Should I ever write a mystery again, which might very well happen, then I will certainly keep that in mind.

 

The distant perspective can be a curse in stories which need the emotions of the main characters and which need to bring you in close to care about whoever the point-of-view character is. In a mystery, that’s not always necessary, as long as the mystery itself is interesting and can keep the audience invested. In this case, having a distant perspective, which allows for the audience to see and hear everything, but without any interpretation from the detective can help to keep the mystery mysterious.

The Importance of the First Draft

 

The first draft of a story, long or short, is always horrid. It’s something most writers will never show anyone else, will only keep so they can revise it and make something better out of it. Yet, without the first draft, there is no story, and that is what makes it important to get it all out, to get this first draft on paper (or into a file).

 

“You have a lot of bad writing in you and you need to get it all out” is a motto I have read somewhere once, a long time back - and one I now use to remind myself why the first draft is so necessary. The first draft is all that bad writing which I need to get out first. I write down a basic timeline by now, have for a couple of books, but that is only giving me the direction in which I’m steering the characters. This is to know what is going to happen when (and there can still be surprises while I write).

The first draft, love it or hate it or both, is a way of getting that idea from the concept in your mind (or a file) into the right shape - into a story. The first draft is where you put your ideas to paper, pin them down, and make sure they stay where they’re supposed to. That doesn’t have to be beautiful, just as the first, rough sketch doesn’t have to be beautiful, as long as it gives you the basic measures, shapes, and proportions. The finished product, be it a story or a painting, can read or look very differently, but it won’t exist without that first sketch - because that is what a first draft is, too: a sketch of what you want to create.

 

Especially when you just start your writing, when you haven’t seen a couple of first drafts and then compared them in your mind to your finished stories, the first draft can make you feel like a failure. Your only comparison usually is the polished and finished work of your favourite authors - books which have been through a tight and often long editing and revising process which turned that horrid first draft into something infinitely better.

The first draft is never what is published, no matter how good the author is. There’s always a long process which follows that first draft, but it needs the first draft to work. Once you have realized that, you will be much more relaxed when it comes to judging your own first drafts and that is a good thing. You need to learn to go into your first draft with less pressure.

 

That doesn’t mean, of course, that you shouldn’t try to make your first draft work - the fewer mistakes there are in it, the fewer of the content you need to change later. Yet, there’s no need to do it all perfectly. This sentence looks a bit odd? Ignore it, that’s a case for revision and editing. You’re not sure about that line of dialogue? Leave it in, you can work on it later. You’re not completely happy with this character’s name? Keep it for now, the ‘search and replace’ function can take care of it later. Try to keep the story working, try to keep the plots in line. This first draft mostly is there to make the story work, the details can be fleshed out in latter revisions. The first draft is there to get your idea on paper (well, into a file these days). The second, third, fourth, and fifth draft are for all those details, for the grammar, the spelling, the wording. That’s not what you should worry about in the beginning.

 

Writing is a long process with a lot of different steps, from the first ideas and the research to the finished book you can publish - for free or for money. Writing the story down is only one step on the way, usually neither the first nor the last one. It’s an important step, the moment you pin your ideas down and see how all those plots you’ve worked out, all those characters you’ve created, all those things you’ve researched or invented for the story play together. The first draft is the moment you see it all together, the starting point from which you can extrapolate, add and subtract things, make the plots run more smoothly.

You will change things afterwards, tighten scenes or expand them, add sub-plots or take out parts that are just slowing the story down. You may want to give one character more space to shine or combine two smaller characters into one to make things less complicated for the audience. You will also hunt down grammar and spelling errors, of course, but that is for much later revisions and edits, for the time when you’re happy with the plots and the story. That doesn’t mean you should ignore such an error when you see it, but you shouldn’t focus too much on that level, that can come later.

 

Do not worry yourself too much about that first draft. It will be rough, it will be unpolished, it will be weak in some areas and strong in others. There will be mistakes in the story logic. There will be passages which need serious rewriting. There will be characters who will change severely until they’re ready for publication.

Remember that quote about bad writing above. Where, if not in the first draft which will be severely edited and revised later, should you let all of that out so you can get to the good and the great writing? Nowhere. Let yourself run wild with the first draft, pin the story down as it is in your head, in your notes. Don’t censor yourself - you can tone down violent or erotic content later if it seems unfitting with the general tone. Write down what you have in your mind, don’t hold back. Experiment with the tone and with the point of view, try to find out what will work best for the story you have in mind. Don’t worry too much about inconsistencies, those are something to take care of later. You will polish the story in every aspect, from content over grammar and spelling to wording and beyond - eventually.

 

Your first draft is horrible, but you should still love it. It’s an important step into the right direction, an important step towards the finished story you want to see. It will need a lot of tender care, though. You should embrace it and love it and give it the care which will turn this ugly duckling into a swan eventually. I’m not saying that will be an easy or quick thing, but it will happen, trust me.