Now Write! Mysteries

ELIZABETH ZELVIN is a New York City psychotherapist. Her mystery series featuring recovering alcoholic Bruce Kohler includes Death Will Get You Sober and Death Will Help You Leave Him. Of her four short stories about the same character, two were nominated for the Agatha Award for Best Short Story. Liz’s stories have appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and various anthologies and e-zines.

Voice is the most mysterious element of mystery fiction and one of the essentials for making a writer’s work stand out from the pack. A memorable voice, whether it’s a particular character’s or the author’s, draws the reader back. Because many mysteries are written in series, mystery authors need repeat business. Readers kept buying the late Robert B. Parker’s work not because Spenser always blew away the bad guys, but for Parker’s inimitable and immediately identifiable voice.

Whether painstakingly or intuitively, writers use a variety of techniques to distinguish between one voice and another. One of Parker’s was never to use any attribution except “said.” Another was the wisecracks for which both Spenser and his sidekick Hawk were famous.

Subtle differences in word choice and sentence construction distinguish Ruth Rendell’s Inspector Wexford series from the novels of psychological suspense that she writes as Barbara Vine. One is a police procedural series with an ongoing likable protagonist and the other a succession of creepy stand-alones. But Rendell’s brilliance shows in the utter dissimilarity of voice in the two bodies of work.

One of my series protagonists is Bruce Kohler, a recovering alcoholic with a smart mouth and a good heart. The other is Diego, a young Marrano sailor on Columbus’s first voyage. Suppose each of them is describing an incident in which someone is following him. Bruce might say, “I didn’t want him to know where I was going.” Diego would say, “I did not wish him to know where I went.” Bruce’s voice is colloquial, making use of present-day constructions. To create the historical voice, I avoid a contraction, choose a slightly more formal verb, and use simple past tense instead of the continuous past.

I established Bruce’s voice as gritty and ironic in the first sentence of his first appearance, when he finds himself on skid row: “I woke up in detox with the taste of stale puke in my mouth.” He looks at his surroundings and concludes, “I had an awful feeling it was Christmas Day.” Diego talks very differently about the holidays: “It was the 25th day of Kislev in the year 5253 according to the Hebrew calendar, the second night of the Festival of Lights. It was also December 24th in what the others, including the Admiral, called the Year of Our Lord 1492: Christmas Eve.”

A year later, in Death Will Trim Your Tree, Bruce is having a frustrating time with strings of Christmas lights. Bruce has a New York attitude, so I originally envisioned him using the F-word repeatedly. But the story was for a family-oriented anthology. Could I make Bruce’s voice sound equally authentic without four-letter words? I wrote, “I sat on the floor . . . with a pile of blinking electrical spaghetti in my lap and ground my teeth. For this I’d stayed sober for 357 days and changed my whole life?”

Both of my series protagonists are male. Bruce’s sidekick, Barbara, is a strong female character whose voice appears in dialogue. My authorial voice, too, must be different from Bruce’s first-person voice when I write a scene in close third person from Barbara’s point of view. Here’s Barbara thinking about whether to keep an appointment with a plastic surgeon who’s a murder suspect: “Barbara patted her nose. Why even pretend she wanted to trade it in? Most of the women her age . . . who had had nose jobs in their teens had ended up with identical, unmistakable little pinched-off snouts with too much nostril showing.” Raymond Chandler wouldn’t have written that passage. Neither would Jane Austen. Not only the language but also the content and perspective contribute to the voice in which I write Barbara’s point of view.

One of my female protagonists is Jenny, an eleven-year-old girl whose uncle is molesting her. In the story she appears in, I use both subject matter and vocabulary to establish her voice: “I’ve asked Mom over and over if I can have a lock on my door, but she says I’m not old enough.” And later: “In the Middle Ages, my favorite period in history, the men wore armor and the women wore chastity belts. I bet they didn’t even know how lucky they were.” Jenny doesn’t need teen slang or references to common adolescent issues for her voice to sound, to my ear, at least, neither adult nor male.

A fictional character’s first-person voice does not have to be grammatical. The protagonist can say, “I locked both doors like I always did.” But the third person narrator maintains credibility by saying, “He locked both doors as he always did.” A character’s vocabulary may be limited or specialized in a way that the author’s need not. Voice is about breaking rules and taking risks in order to make the characters—and the writing—come alive.

EXERCISE