Now Write! Mysteries

STEVE LISKOW’s Who Wrote the Book of Death? came out in 2010, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine published The Stranglehold, his 2009 Black Orchid Novella Award winner. He also writes short stories, and his current projects include mysteries about rock’n’ roll and roller derby. A member of Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime, he lives in Connecticut with his wife, Barbara, and two rescued cats.

The problem,” the agent told me, “is that publishers can count how many private eye stories they have. They can’t do that with other books.”

An amateur sleuth can be a nurse, teacher, salesman, reporter, beautician, or dog trainer, and those different worlds offer variety for your stories. Private investigators, on the other hand—male or female—have a fairly constant pathology and get involved in certain situations over and over. That means certain plots appear over and over, too.

Style refers to all the technical choices the writer makes to tell his story effectively. Those choices include setting, flashbacks, irony, dialogue, description, and everything else you studied in high school. Voice relies on three interrelated aspects of the story: character, point of view, and attitude, what English teachers usually call tone.

Your story and characters need an attitude, especially the point-of-view characters. If they have no attitude, there’s no emotional stake, so your reader won’t care enough to keep reading.

Many people claim that first-person POV is the most natural way to write. What they don’t mention is how easy it is to do it badly. Repeating “I . . .” can bore your reader until she puts the book down. How do you fix that?

Years ago, George Garrett pointed out that the essential action of a first-person story is always the telling. Your character needs to tell his story. That means he has something at stake, and it creates an attitude that generates a distinctive voice. Think of Patrick Kenzie, who narrates Dennis Lehane’s P.I. novels, Linda Barnes’s Carlotta Carlyle, or Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum.

Omniscient POV allows the narrator to know everyone’s thoughts and see all the story’s events from the same distance. That’s good if you have a complex story with several subplots, but it runs the risk of flattening the different characters’ viewpoints into a homogenized sameness that muffles personality.

Multiple close third-person POV helps you pace scenes and create tension. It also helps create voice because the details and perceptions get filtered through different characters, who have distinct personalities and attitudes.

You convey your character’s attitude—how he deals with the world around him—through imagery and rhythm. Imagery helps you capture the character’s unique worldview and interests. A teacher, athlete, musician, or mechanic sees the world in terms of how he or she copes with it, and the imagery will show that. Children rely on senses other than vision more than most adults, and that can give them a distinctive voice, too. A small child may lack technical vocabulary, but he compares things with what he already knows: candy, animals, textures.

Rhythm is a product of vocabulary and punctuation. Short, choppy sentences (what my teacher used to call Hemingway style) with strong consonant sounds and sparse punctuation feel different from long lyrical sentences with commas, softer closing consonants, and parallel phrases and clauses. Modern open punctuation style favored by many publishers uses fewer commas between independent clauses, so sentences go more quickly, too.

Rita Mae Brown points out the differences between Latin-based vocabulary and Anglo-Saxon vocabulary. We think of the former as gentler and more cultured, maybe because the words often end in vowels or softer consonants. It’s a polite, erudite language. Anglo-Saxon, with its strong consonants, has most of the words we use to curse. It has more harsh monosyllables that interrupt the flow, too. These differences will help you imbue your character and writing with more attitude.

So will verb tenses. Present tense gives your prose more immediacy than past tense, and many contemporary editors discourage the use of past perfect, favoring the simple past because it creates less distance.

Subtext makes a difference, too. Don Winslow’s present tense bristles with energy, and he uses urban settings and characters. As a result, his prose has a subtext that sounds like “Can you effing believe this crap?”

Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum is a big-haired Jersey Girl to the marrow, and her speech patterns betray her OMG vision of life so you can almost hear a question mark at the end of every sentence. Lisa Scottoline often tells her legal thrillers through Mary DiNunzio, a Nice Catholic Girl turned lawyer (speaking of paradox), and her take on the action adds more flavor than her mother’s cooking.

Pat Conroy unspools sentences long enough to use for bungee jumping, full of exquisite description and parallel clauses. His majestic rhythms create a higher vision of the world, even if his characters have demons doing a kick line through their nightmares. Scottish author Kate Atkinson uses allusive puns and irony, referring to film, literature, and rock songs to give her characters a trenchant view of life, sort of Macbeth meets the Delta blues. Now look at Robert Crais, James Crumley, S. J. Rozan, or Laurence Block.

EXERCISE