Now Write! Mysteries

WILL LAVENDER is the New York Times–bestselling author of Obedience. His second novel, Dominance, was published by Simon & Schuster in July, 2011. He holds an MFA in creative writing from Bard College. He lives in Louisville, Kentucky, with his wife and children.

Alfred Hitchcock, that master of suspense, refused to film a true mystery, because there was so much emphasis on the end. As writers we can understand Hitchcock’s objection: The endings of mystery novels are, by their nature, so essential that they can threaten other plot elements. How many of us have come to find that our writing has suffered in the middle of a book simply because the pressure of coming up with that final twist looms ahead like a dark cloud?

I was once asked to submit two pages of my first manuscript to an agent. Two! I immediately thought, What can this person possibly learn by reading just two pages? The reality is that this mind-set is how book buying is these days. How many pages is that person who picks up the book in a bookstore, reads the flap, then skims the first chapter of the book actually reading? One or two, at most. Our job as writers is to get that person from the shelf to the cash register. In the age of bookstore café browsing and e-book sample chapters, in the era of tough economic decisions, those first two pages have become crucial.

When I teach at workshops, I lecture on the necessity of the hook: a beginning that grabs readers and relentlessly pulls them into the rabbit hole of the story. After my lecture, my audience will look at me and usually ask two simple questions. The first is: “What’s wrong with the beginning my working manuscript already has?”

To fix a problem, one has to first acknowledge that a problem exists. In my time reading student manuscripts and writing my own fiction, I have come to believe that there are three main problems with most beginnings in mystery manuscripts:

If we assume that the beginning of a story, any story, is to provide the reader with information and dramatic conflict, these three points are key. Addressing the issue of action, as simple as it sounds, will almost invariably make the novel’s hook sharper. Novels are often marred by the writer’s belief that “things get going in the middle” or that their book “isn’t an action novel, it’s a mystery novel.”

These are fallacies; all books need happenings, whether they are external or are in the characters’ minds, to move the book forward in its first pages. Plodding, uneventful openings will almost always have me jumping to the next book in my queue.

The second question I am asked when it comes to beginnings is: “How?” How do you craft a beginning where interesting things happen in just the right order? What are the cardinal traits of good beginnings? How do you get your dream agent to bite and take a chance on your manuscript, and ultimately how do you change that book browser into a book buyer?

This, like all other pieces of writing advice, is multifaceted. There is not simply one trick to writing a better beginning, there are many. The writer’s voice must be strong, the sense of pacing must be established, the main character or an important corollary character must be colorfully and acutely revealed—all of this in just a few hundred words. No one said writing fiction was easy.

There is, however, one easy trick to writing a better beginning: Do not think of the crime; think about what the crime has done. Mystery novels are essentially about crimes and criminals, and the weakness of many manuscripts is that they deal only with the crime and not with its fallout. Who has this crime affected? How have people’s lives been changed? What has happened to people, physically and emotionally, because of this horrible deed?

Here’s an example. In the great Thomas Harris’s Silence of the Lambs, for my money the best genre novel written in the last half of the twentieth century, Harris uses two clever tricks to hook his reader. First, he provides a pleasing amount of action. This action is not explicit to the crime; that is, the main crime spree and the suspect himself are not revealed for another fifty pages or so. The action Harris gives his main character involves a task, and this task has to do only with the performance of a psychological evaluation. In just three pages, we get all this: the task, Clarice agreeing to said task, and her emotional qualms about undertaking it. Just like that: action without velocity. No explosions, no knifings, no blood, no body. Just the puzzle pieces scattered on the floor, and in Harris’s hands that’s enough.

But another interesting thing happens in these first few pages. Once we get inside the prison we learn, again implicitly, of the nature of Hannibal’s crimes. We get who he is by the crimes he committed: what kind of person he is, who he ruined, what he’s capable of. Harris is a brilliant writer, and he pulls all this off seamlessly by telling, inferring, implicitly hinting at these crimes. He shows nothing—not yet. He’s too talented.

Too often writers want to jump into the procedural, into the whodunit itself. They want to show the body, introduce the cops who are to solve the crime, and get the plot moving toward the solution. I think a mystery novel’s opening can be much more subtle, and can in fact be more about what has happened off-page than what happens on.

EXERCISE