Winging It

Recently, I had an amiable online discussion with someone over whether or not George Lucas had already planned out how the Force works by the time the first Star Wars movie was released. I’m still pretty sure he was winging it, given he couldn’t be certain whether or not he’d get to make more movies in the universe. That led me to thinking about winging it as a such when you’re a writer.

I tend to do it regularly myself while I’m writing. When I stumble across a one-off object or other detail, I make it up on the spot without really thinking about it. That then sometimes comes back to haunt me when the object, skill, or other detail later needs to be expanded on. Luckily, I’m quite good at winging that, too, and add more detail and depth even if I didn’t do so originally. That might be due to my past as a discovery writer, though.
Even though I do plot by now, my plotting is not set in stone. Therefore, I might suddenly find that I need to introduce something to finish a scene, just a little detail that is important for the moment, but won’t really play a role long-term, since my general plot usually is not affected by changes to a scene as plotted originally. I still know where I’m going, even if I might take a slightly altered route.
In my experience, those ‘spurt of the moment’ additions are fine. They exist simply to enrich a scene, not to make any important changes to the overall story. For that, I can wing it. Sometimes, though, I’m wrong and it turns out that the detail becomes much more important as the story progresses.

In such a situation, there is one big danger, which is to overthink things to make up for under-thinking them before. After just having thrown the thing in the first time, it gets to be developed far further and into something far more complicated than it needs to be and the end result is not working out as it should.
This has happened to me, too. When I first wrote the basic outline for “Stray” (the first novella featuring Gabrielle Munson), I didn’t think much about the necromancy in the story — there was no reason to, as she was mostly on the run and would only use her powers to find out who really had done the murders by asking a victim. When I expanded into other stories, when the first book took shape, I began to realise that I needed to go deeper. I began to overthink.
I tried to write down a whole essay on how necromancy worked, tried to make it all logical and invent rituals which I wasn’t going to need any time soon. Then I took a step back and realised it wasn’t necessary. I needed to write Gabrielle’s skills as a necromancer and an alchemist down to keep them in mind. I needed to make sure I wasn’t writing one thing in one story and the opposite in another. I didn’t need a full magic system for her skills — she uses them little enough. I had overthought and I had to stop doing that.

If you don’t keep notes of the details in your stories, you might also run into a situation where the audience will wonder why your main character doesn’t just use a skill or object shown in a prior story. It’s important to keep track of skills which your recurring characters have shown, in case you need to use them again when they would normally be used again instead of the new solution you want to implement in your plot.
This goes twice for any kind of skill or special object you have given a character in a pinch. As you’ve been winging it, there was no planning this out in advance and you’re probably not expecting to ever use it again. If you’re writing a series, though, you should write it down so you will remember it — parts of the audience definitely will.
Sooner or later, you might put the character into a similar situation and again wing it and write something else in to help that character. Fans of the series will remember that magical object or advanced technology or little-mentioned skill which the character used the last time and they’ll be surprised to see it doesn’t make an appearance. They might even get sarcastic about it, realising you’ve forgotten.

One thing you should never do is wing an important or recurring aspect of the story. When you want to implement something for good, it needs to be thought-out or you will sooner or later be in trouble. Skills and special objects need to be balanced, otherwise they will lower the tension and that is never a good thing. Relationships or backgrounds of recurring characters need to be able to survive the stories or change accordingly. It is always possible to add more details later, but the foundation must be sound.
This should go without saying, but you don’t always know which part of a recurring character is going to become the most important over time. Even if you plan out a full series, while writing it, you might find that there needs to be a certain shift. It has certainly happened to me, see the necromancy in “Theoretical Necromancy”.
Before you give a major character a skill or object, you especially need to think about how it can be used. Even if it’s normally limited, if there’s a way to misuse it, that way has to be eradicated. If one character’s skill or object completely cancels out another character’s skill or object, there might need to be changes. Balance is important for both the stakes and the tension and that means the protagonists must appear under-powered compared to the antagonists.

‘Winging it’ is a solution for small details that are not used for long in a story. Sometimes, you just need to make something up on the spot. Yet, if the detail is a skill or object that might return at some point or be useful again, it pays to keep a note on it, especially in a series. You never should try to wing something important for the story, either, because it will always come back to bite you later on. Always…

Sherlock Holmes And Count Dracula Deep Dive

This deep dive follows right on the coattails of a blog post on how not to use supernatural elements in a story (which was also about a Sherlock Holmes novel). In “The Classified Dossier —Sherlock Holmes and Count Dracula” by Christian Klaver, there are a lot of supernatural elements, but they’re well-incorporated in the four stories and they actually work out well.

There will be spoilers, as I want to dive into how the book deals with its ample supernatural content!

This book dives fully into the supernatural from the beginning, as Count Dracula appears in the first chapter of the first story — to seek Sherlock Holmes’ help. In most novels which include Sherlock Holmes and Dracula (and you might be surprised at how many there are), they are set against each other. Not so in this book. In this book, they’re on the same side.
While there have been rare cases where they were not directly on opposite sides of the board (“A Betrayal in Blood”, in which Holmes tries to figure out the whole Dracula affair, springs to mind), they usually are not working together. Dracula is considered a villain (for good reasons) and Holmes is a hero — they’re not supposed to be on the same side of anything. Normally, it is Holmes who comes to the aide of someone threatened by Dracula (often one of the Vampire Hunters around van Helsing) and takes up the fight against the undead count.
This book, on the other hand, does it well by making Dracula a client who wants Holmes to help him find his wife Mina (yes, that Mina). They’re not knocking about together for mutual friendship and Holmes doesn’t always like his clients — he’ll still work for them if the case is interesting or the stakes are high enough. The stakes in this case certainly are high enough.

Vampires are also introduced as people with an infection. They are still alive, but they have a changed body which barely breathes and has a seriously slow heartbeat. The audience hears it from Dracula, but later on also from Watson, who is turned into a vampire, too.
As the story is still told from Watson’s perspective, this also means the audience comes to understand the differences between humans and vampires as Watson does. Watson is a rare vampire who keeps his personality and morals after the change while most vampires who make it through the first ‘animal’ stage of the change become predators with little left of their convictions as humans. They are intelligent, they remember their past, but they don’t care about human morals any longer. Mary Watson (who turns her husband) becomes an example of that.

In the climax, I would have liked for the big bad in the background, the ‘Mariner Priest’ to have been someone else, though. Moriarty is just a villain in the Sherlock Holmes canon, not the only villain. Anyone else would actually have been better — except perhaps for Irene Adler.
It’s not that Moriarty (who had apparently just become a vampire before Reichenbach) doesn’t make for a good villain. Cold-blooded mastermind and vampire is a dangerous combination and he comes up with an interesting solution to the ‘animal’ stage of the vampire transformation. Yet, ‘it was Moriarty all along’ is just too common to still be a proper plot twist by now.

One thing which breaks things up a little is the influence of Lovecraftian horror in the second story (this plot will eventually be taken up again in the sequel), yet this also shows that the oceans — where Moriarty is floating about with his followers — are more dangerous than one might think.
This also means there are more supernatural powers around than just the vampires (the Jekyll-Hyde transformation will follow in the sequel) and gives Holmes and Watson something to do while the main plot is brewing in the back and coming around again eventually.
Personally, I think that introducing the deep ones and Dagon is a nice idea, given the whole ‘vampire ship on the seas’ situation and the title of ‘Mariner Priest,’ which could very well point to a Lovecraftian background and makes for a nice red herring.

While each of the four stories which the book is comprised of is self-contained to a degree, all four also form a larger story of a kind. They fit together, boosting Watson’s understanding of his new powers and Holmes’ understanding of the supernatural which in the end make the victory possible. They also introduce the audience to a wider world than just ‘vampires exist.’ There’s deep ones out there. There’s vampires. There’s supposedly other creatures as well.
The world is much larger and stranger than the regular person is aware of — and Watson is now inevitably part of this larger world for good and has drawn his closest friend into it, too (although Holmes is still fully human). Now, Holmes and Watson also have to keep a secret from the world — Watson’s change. He has new needs — and I still don’t know what Holmes has told Mrs. Hudson about that teapot of warm chicken or cow blood which Watson now takes in the evening when he gets up. He has new powers, but also new weaknesses.
Watson works through his new relationship with his wife Mary eventually (it helps that she dies, it doesn’t help that he’s the one who has to kill her to save his friend) and has to face the fact that he will probably spend more time in this world with Kitty Winters (who has also been turned) or the Count and Countess Dracula than with his best friend. Holmes refuses to be turned early on, claiming he’d be a huge danger for mankind as a vampire.

The author is also excellent at dropping hints for what will happen. It’s never too obvious and always close to when it becomes important, which is how I love my foreshadowing.
Especially in the last story when the big confrontation happens, there is a hint dropped which enables the whole twist in the end — the simple mention that Holmes and Dracula are the same height and build and both have a similar facial structure. This is what brings Moriarty down in the end — thinking he’s caught the human Holmes, but really having brought the vampire Dracula too close. A lot of things established before, like a vampire having next to no scent for another while a human has a strong one or vampires having a much stronger sense of smell than sight, play a huge role in that situation.
All of this is mentioned before and enables the audience to see how clever the plan which Holmes and Dracula come up with really is.

Unlike “The Dartmoor Horror”, “Sherlock Holmes and Count Dracula” makes the best of its supernatural aspects. Every aspect is useful. Every aspect plays its role in the story. Even the seeming tangent of the deep ones and the Lovecraftian horror has its use. This is ‘supernatural Sherlock Holmes’ done right.

Doing Nothing With A Plot

“The Dartmoor Horror” by Joe DeSantis is a Sherlock Holmes novel which does include supernatural aspects within the story. It is also an unofficial sequel to “The Hound of the Baskervilles”. This is not about how supernatural elements can’t be introduced into a Sherlock Holmes story. I’ve seen that done very well in other books (look out for a deep dive on one of those soon). It’s about the way in which the supernatural elements are used — a way that makes them surplus to requirements.

There will be spoilers in this post! I can’t discuss the plot threads without talking about what is happening.

The main plot of the story is sound. Jack Stapleton (the lost child of the lost Baskerville brother) has survived the events of “The Hound of the Baskervilles” — which would be possible, as he is lost in the Grimpen Mire, so there’s no body. Stapleton, who knew the mire like the back of his hand, might very well have made it to the tin mine in the middle and hidden from the authorities there. He’s still after the Baskerville fortune, which also makes sense, although I’m not quite sure how he would have claimed it after Sir Henry’s death (Costa Rica was mentioned, though). Stapleton has an assistant in Murphy, a character mentioned as being shady and knowledgeable about the moor in the original book. That, too, pans out.
The romance sub-plot between Sir Henry and Laura Lyons also works out. While it’s not the most natural thing for them to connect, it’s still believable and well-handled. With both of those plot threads working as they should, the whole novel is standing on solid feet. Both of these threads also don’t need any supernatural element to work, as you might already have noticed.

Now for the supernatural elements. Keep in mind that the original novel had a supposedly supernatural element in the hound already, but made it turn out to be something natural instead (a specific dog breed which Stapleton had bought and trained). The basic possibility of using supernatural elements in a sequel is there. After all, the story of Sir Henry and the hound has a scientific background, but there’s still Sir Hugo being killed by a Hellhound centuries earlier.
The Hellhound is back in the sequel, this time as a real, physical creature which, in an interesting twist of fate, becomes a guardian and protector for Sir Henry. Yet, I can see how that would work out if used well.
The second element is an ancient bog witch who is raised by Murphy with his grandmother’s help (Murphy has been exiled from his clan, but is still Romany) and who apparently was alive at the time of Sir Hugo already. She is the more unnecessary of the two elements, as there’s nothing she does which can’t be done without her.

The Hellhound could work nicely within the narrative. It has been around to ‘punish’ evil members of the Baskerville family before, from Sir Hugo onwards. This is hinted at in “The Hound of the Baskervilles” already where several strange deaths on the moor are mentioned. Yet, if the hound kills the evil Baskervilles, why should it not also protect a good one?
Within the story, Sir Henry does a lot of good for the nearby towns and villages, taking care of the repairs to the local church and having specialists do repair work on the local roads. For a poor community living in the middle of a large moor, that is certainly a blessing. He also treats the hound well when it comes to him, starving and injured. This is what wins the hound’s loyalty and proves he’s worthy of its protection.
In addition, Stapleton is a Baskerville as well (otherwise the main plot would make no sense) and certainly one on a level with Sir Hugo himself. By protecting his new friend, the hound could very well also return to its job of punishing the evil members of the family.
In a better use of the hound, it would come to Sir Henry’s aide in the big climax and either kill Stapleton like it killed Sir Hugo or at least drag him into a bog in plain view of others, so it is clear this time around that he’s really dead. That is not what happens, though.

Unlike the Hellhound, the bog witch has no practical use within the story. I personally always approve of a little necromancy on the side, but there is no reason to have the witch there. She does nothing which no other established character could be doing instead.
In the story, the witch kills two people, one by luring him into the bog (which is what she enjoyed doing before she died in that bog herself) and one in a more direct way (presumably by strangling or breaking his neck, the audience doesn’t ‘see’ the death). Yet, before she’s raised from the bog, Stapleton has already committed two murders himself. He’s not shy of doing it and he’s certainly capable of it, too. He doesn’t need the witch to do his dirty work, as he’s perfectly capable of doing it himself. In addition, one of the witch’s two victims (two more are suggested, but it’s not clear whether she’s killed them, too) is superfluous and the other one could just as well have been waylaid and killed by Stapleton.
Frankland, Laura Lyons’ estranged father, is lured off the track on his way back home after telling Laura he doesn’t approve of her divorce and new engagement to Sir Henry. He is lured into the bog and sinks slowly while the bog witch watches. Apart from how that is not how swamps and bogs work, there is no reason why Stapleton on his own or with the help of Murphy couldn’t just overpower Frankland and put him in the bog. The end result would be the same.
The second victim, the superfluous one, is an old man who has seen Murphy move about on the moor at night, mostly to bring Stapleton food and water and to get his marching orders from his boss. This character is never mentioned before, he has not caught Sherlock Holmes’ eye already, and his murder is not noted in any way. His death has no influence whatsoever on the outcome of the story. This murder is pointless and unnecessary and should simply have been left out.
With that, the witch has completely lost her use for the story. Her first victim could just as well have been killed by Stapleton (who murdered with his own hands before already) and the second victim could simply have been left out completely.
In the end, the bog witch tries to kill Sir Henry and the Hellhound comes to his aide, grabbing the witch and bearing her into the bog. The hound could just as well have done that with Stapleton. Stapleton is again fleeing into the Grimpen Mire and supposed to have been killed when taking a misstep after Holmes has moved his new markers. To be honest, I would have preferred a confirmed death the second time.

Unfortunately, “The Dartmoor Horror” is a good example of how not to do supernatural elements in a story. The Hellhound and the witch cancel each other out and become pretty superfluous that way. The Hellhound could have been a nice addition to the story, a nod to the legend which is read out to Holmes at the beginning of “The Hound of the Baskervilles”, but it hasn’t been used that way. The witch isn’t needed in a story where the villain has already proven he’s able to kill before she’s even raised. She is neither a tool for the villain nor a mentor or other useful helper.

A Body Isn't Necessary

At the beginning of the year, I wrote a post about how ‘there must be a body.’ I was referring to S.S. van Dine’s “Twenty Rules of the Detective Story” and to my own experience with a cosy mystery without a murder which was horrid as a mystery novel (it was a nice romance novel, though, even if that wasn’t planned, I’m sure). S.S. van Dine claimed that a detective story must have a body ‘the deader, the better.’ After reading the book, I had to agree with him. After reading another two books, I now have to disagree to a degree.

I recently read two mysteries by Shanna Swendson from her ‘Lucky Lexie’ series which didn’t feature a body at all. In one case, there was a suggestion of murder and there not being a body was the point (“Case of the Vanishing Visitor”) whereas the other case didn’t even suggest a murder (“Case of the Curious Crystals”). Yet, none of the stories lacked in tension, stakes, and enjoyment for the reader.
Tension and stakes, of course, are what makes us enjoy a story. We want to read on because there’s something at stake and we enjoy the story more and more as the tension rises and pushes our own engagement with the characters and their possible fates. Now I think that the failure of the book mentioned above wasn’t not to have a murder, it was not to have stakes for the main characters and thus no raising tension. There was no personal involvement and there was nothing horrid to happen if the stolen fireworks weren’t found. The two books mentioned in the last paragraph, though, manage to build up stakes and tension wonderfully.

In “Case of the Vanishing Visitor”, Lexie seems to have met a woman who got herself killed afterwards. Given that Lexie can speak to ghosts and the woman is not to be found, dead or alive, it seems as if, perhaps, Lexie met the woman after she’d been killed already, but in the end, the facts don’t add up and it turns out that the woman isn’t dead and was never in danger of dying, either. Yet, the way the story handles the plot is excellent and you go through the uncertainty and the worry with Lexie as she tries to find the woman, dead or alive. It’s, therefore, not horrid when the woman turns up alive — it’s rather something you’re glad for after going through the story and learning about all the bad things that might have happened to her.
In “Case of the Curious Crystals”, no dead body is even suggested. A wave of strange thefts runs through the town and sows distrust between the regular ‘townies’ and the descendants of the sideshow crew (this is part of the town’s world-building and discussed from the first book of the series onwards — ‘Curious Crystals’ is the second book). Lexie needs to find out who steals cheap 1930s costume jewellery and why and so she stumbles over a try to sway the jury of an upcoming court case. The story has stakes — at least for Lexie and her love interest/local cop Wes, as both don’t condone influencing the court even if it’s not a murderer going free. More importantly, if the case is not solved, the tension between the townies and the sideshow descendants will only rise and one day might end in the severe injury or even death of an innocent person. That can’t be allowed. There’s stakes, there’s tension, there’s a satisfying end, so there’s a good book.
The other three of the five cases in the series (so far — fingers crossed here) do include at least one murder each, so it’s not as if the author has gone for lower stakes in general. The stakes in the two ‘body-less’ cases also don’t feel low at all. Sure, it might be more threatening if you’re caught in a bed-and-breakfast in a storm with a murderer, but watching as people distrust their neighbours simply for their pedigree can also be scary.

Lexie only has a personal involvement with the first case — she has found the victim, she is the person from out of town, and she is standing to gain something from their death (not that she knew and not that she needs them dead as it turns out). In all other cases, her interest in the case as the editor and reporter of the local weekly newspaper get her involved and she strives to solve the crime for the sake of solving it as well as for a more satisfying article in the newspaper. Not to mention that the ghosts of the victims want her to solve it so they can pass on. Then there’s the ghost of the former owner and editor of the newspaper, a delightful 1930s business woman, who will not be satisfied unless the newspaper brings out the news before the gossip mill can.
Nevertheless, all cases are engaging and interesting. They’re being brought to her attention in a suitable way, pulling her out of the regular life in town she has grown used to. They are challenging her by not being simple ‘open and shut’ cases. They involve friends and neighbours and her understanding of justice as well as her wish to make every edition of the newspaper as good as it can be. Not to mention that they bring her into closer contact with the charming and handsome Wes…

It is easier to make high stakes and rising tension when there is a murderer on the run, of course. In a cosy mystery (which is probably not the kind of detective story S.S. van Dine was thinking of in his semi-serious list), the stakes don’t have to be that high and the tension can rise much more slowly. In the end, the stakes must be high enough to engage the audience. The tension must rise fast enough to make them want to read on. If that is happening, you can have a good cosy mystery without a body and people will still enjoy themselves while reading it.