Now Write! Mysteries

MARCIA TALLEY is the Agatha- and Anthony-winning author of ten mystery novels featuring survivor and sleuth, Hannah Ives. Her short stories appear in more than a dozen collections. Like her sleuth, Marcia lives in Annapolis, Maryland, with a husband who loves to sail and a cat who doesn’t.

I’ve read a lot of novels in my time, published and unpublished, and there’s one thing I’m sure of: Perfect characters are perfectly boring. To be interesting, your detective must have strengths, but flaws and vulnerabilities, too. Even Superman can be brought to his knees by kryptonite.

I’m not talking about the gun-toting, hard-drinking, chain-smoking detective who operates on the fringes of the law. Nor the badly behaved heroine in thigh-high boots who drinks, swears, and kicks plenty of ass. To stand out in a field of stereotypes, your characters need to be human, and human beings have faults.

Consider morose, brooding, introspective detectives like Sherlock Holmes, Adam Dalgliesh, Kurt Wallander, and Morse. Holmes is arrogant, self-absorbed, devoted to the science of deduction. So is Morse. “I don’t think, Lewis, I deduce. I only ever deduce,” Morse says in The Wolvercote Tongue. Yet Morse seems more real to me than Holmes. Perhaps it’s because Morse is afraid of heights, cringes at the sight of blood, and, like his author, Colin Dexter, battles diabetes. Kurt Wallander, the modern melancholy Dane created by Henning Man-kell, is dealing with high blood sugar, too. He’s also separated from his wife, has an overbearing daughter, and a father suffering from Alzheimer’s. P. D. James’s detective, Commander Adam Dalgliesh, is a published poet haunted by the death of his wife and infant daughter. In facing life’s challenges, Wallander, Morse, and Dalgliesh are more sympathetic than most to other people’s pain and we, in turn, care more about them.

The challenges facing your detective can be physical. Wheelchair-bound by an assassin’s bullet, San Francisco detective Robert T. Ironside continues to wage war against crime from his specially equipped van. Michael Longstreet, a New Orleans insurance investigator, is blind. In T. C. Boyle’s fast-paced thriller Talk Talk, the main character, Dana Halter, is profoundly deaf.

The physical challenges facing our detectives can be temporary. In Hitchcock’s thriller REAR WINDOW, Jeff Jeffries, a professional photographer, is confined to a wheelchair with a broken leg. Jeffries passes the time by watching his neighbors. When a neighbor’s wife vanishes, Jeffries’s quest to prove that her disappearance is the result of foul play puts his own life in danger.

In Josephine Tey’s classic The Daughter of Time, Scotland Yard Inspector Alan Grant is in the hospital, also laid up with a broken leg. Bored senseless, he becomes intrigued by a portrait of the much-maligned Richard III and proceeds to exonerate him of the murders of his nephews, the princes in the Tower. A similar plot device was used by Colin Dexter in the 1989 Gold Dagger winner, The Wench is Dead. Inspector Morse is recovering from a bleeding ulcer in an Oxford hospital when he reads an account of an 1859 canal boat murder. Morse is convinced that the two men hanged for the crime were innocent and sets out to prove it from the confines of his bed.

Jeffries, Grant, and Morse are immobile, so they depend on acquaintances and friends to assist in their investigations. But nobody needs legs more than the quirky sleuth in Donna Andrews’s series, Turing Hopper, an Artificial Intelligence personality trapped in a corporate computer. Turing has no body! When Turing’s programmer mysteriously disappears in You’ve Got Murder, Turing suspects foul play and explores every avenue available to her microchips and processors to find him—surveillance cameras, credit card records, data files—as well as her human colleagues Tim and Maude.

Other detectives face mental and psychological challenges. Bo Bradley, who first appeared in Abigail Padgett’s 1996 novel Child of Silence, is a San Diego Juvenile Court child abuse investigator. She’s also a closet manic-depressive. Over the course of four novels, Bo’s illness gives her psychological insight and deep empathy with her young clients. Readers empathize with Bo, too, as she struggles to work and live with manic depression.

There is no psychologically challenged character more popular in recent years than Adrian Monk, the obsessive-compulsive detective who suffers from—as he reveals somewhere in season six—312 phobias, requiring him to depend on personal assistants to shop, drive him to crime scenes, and keep a supply of wipes handy. According to his creator, Andy Breckman, Monk’s attention to minute detail cripples him socially and sometimes hampers an investigation—Monk has to resist the urge to straighten overturned furniture at a crime scene—but it makes Monk a gifted detective and profiler. He has a photographic memory and can reconstruct entire crimes based on scraps of detail that seem unimportant to his colleagues.

Steve Hamilton’s Edgar-nominated The Lock Artist is told in the first person by the engaging eighteen-year-old orphan Mike Smith, who is mute. Mike’s a “boxman” who can open any safe, padlock, or locked door. No surprise that every criminal in the world wants to own him. Readers feel Mike’s frustration—“You stupid fucking mutant freak. Say something”—as he struggles to escape a life of crime and unlock his silent world by revisiting the nightmares of his past.

“I am a mathematician with some behavioral difficulties,” states Christopher Boone, the autistic fifteen-year-old narrator of Mark Had-don’s mesmerizing The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Nearly overwhelmed by the vast amount of information and stimuli bombarding him, he nevertheless manages to solve the mystery of a murdered dog, travel to London to find his missing mother, and excel in his A-level math exam.

And continuing a trend for ever younger protagonists, eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce blithely ignores her dysfunctional family; mounts her trusty bicycle, Gladys, and solves the murder of a redheaded stranger in Alan Bradley’s enchanting The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie.

The challenges that face some detectives border on the bizarre. The antihero of R. Scott Bakker’s offbeat Disciple of the Dog, Disciple “Diss” Manning, has hyperthymestic syndrome—total recall: “The one thing you need to remember about me is that I don’t forget. Anything. Ever.” Diss can “freeze-frame and fast-forward, pause and replay things.... It’s a kind of TiVo, only without the monthly fees.” Diss replays investigations over and over, looking for nuances of meaning as he searches for a young woman amid the followers of an apocalyptic cult.

What if a detective had the opposite problem? In Christopher Nolan’s brilliant MEMENTO, Leonard Shelby is so traumatized by a blow to the head after his wife’s rape and murder that he’s suffering from anterograde amnesia, which renders his brain unable to store new memories. In his search for his wife’s killer, Leonard uses a system of notes and annotated Polaroid photos to keep track of everyone he meets, and he tattoos facts he wants to remember—like license plate numbers—all over his body.

Quirky, idiosyncratic, unpredictable, eccentric detective characters like these leap outside the box to break new ground in mystery fiction. Your detective can, too. I’m not suggesting that you make him a quadriplegic like Jeffery Deaver’s Lincoln Rhyme, but whatever his strengths and weaknesses, he (or she) must be able to capture a reader’s attention and hold it for three or four hundred pages. To do this, you—the author—must know your detective inside and out. Try testing your character: he locates a kidnapped child living happily within a loving family, while her real mother is a drug-addicted loser. What would he do? You need to know.

“When I got cancer, I decided I wasn’t going to put up with crap from anybody anymore,” my protagonist Hannah Ives says at the beginning of Sing It to Her Bones. Ten cases later, she’s beaten cancer, but still isn’t taking any crap.

Flaws and imperfections. They give your detective a place to go; they are challenges to overcome, moving the story forward. If skillfully handled by both you and your detective, your detective’s weakness can turn out to be his (or her) greatest strength.

EXERCISE