Now Write! Mysteries

JAMES SCOTT BELL is the bestselling author of Deceived, Try Dying, Try Darkness, Try Fear, and several other thrillers. He served as the fiction columnist for Writer’s Digest and has written three bestselling craft books: Plot & Structure, Revision & Self-Editing, and The Art of War for Writers. He lives and writes in Los Angeles.

That’s the question you want in your readers’ minds. That’s what keeps them flipping pages long into the night.

Suspense in fiction is a feeling of pleasurable uncertainty. That feeling must, of course, permeate a thriller or mystery, but it is just as essential for a character-driven or literary novel. Unless readers feel pleasurable uncertainty the story drags. Books get put aside that way.

Death Overhanging. Physical death, of course, is the norm for most suspense fiction. The serial killer on the loose, the villain with a strong motive to kill the protagonist, the malevolent conspiracy out to silence those who know too much—variations on these themes abound.

In The Protector by David Morrell, the threat of death is established from the start. Cavanaugh, the protagonist, is a professional protector who saves a man named Prescott from a hit squad over the course of a fifty-page chase scene. If they’re caught, they’re dead, so we keep reading to see if they make it. Those stakes remain throughout the book.

But there are other kinds of death. One of these is professional death. If the hero does not perform his duties, he’s through in his livelihood. He simply must succeed.

Consider the down-and-out lawyer who gets one last case, a final chance at redeeming his professional life, as in Barry Reed’s The Verdict . The same conflict is present for the shamed cop, or the failed detective, or anyone else whose work is crucial to society.

Then there is psychological death. This sort of overhanging threat can turn literary fiction into a suspenseful read. Unless the character finds a reason to go on living, or solves a dark question from the past, or heals a wound from childhood, she will die inside. Life will become intolerable.

In Janet Fitch’s White Oleander, young Astrid must escape the lethal influence of her strong-willed mother, Ingrid, as well as the emotional challenges in each of her foster homes. The threat of Astrid dying inside infuses every page.

The key to selling any of these forms of death is to create scenes early on that show what the central problem means to the protagonist. If such a scene is not in your book yet, put it there now. Get the readers to feel what’s at stake.

A Sympathetic Protagonist. Death may be overhanging the story, but unless we care about the protagonist we won’t really worry too much about it. For that we need sympathy for the lead character.

Beyond mere empathy—the ability to understand and relate—sympathy places us emotionally alongside the hero.

Sympathy begins, first, with a fully rounded character, one who has flaws as well as strengths. No one can sympathize with perfection.

Second, the character must, at some level, have guts. The number-one rule for lead characters is no wimps. A wimp is someone who sits around and takes it, who reacts more than acts. Get your characters moving against the forces arrayed against him.

In John Lutz’s The Night Caller, ex-cop Ezekiel Cooper is a man who roams his neighborhood, “without employment, social life or purpose.” He’s fighting cancer and his only daughter has been murdered. After the funeral, he is alone in his apartment, with “his grief to keep him company . . . along with his self-pity.”

But Lutz doesn’t let Cooper stay there. By the end of the chapter he’s going to get an old friend to help him find out what the cops are doing. “Not tomorrow. Today. He couldn’t rely on tomorrows.”

The more emotional investment the reader has, the better the reading experience.

EXERCISE