Now Write! Mysteries

JACK FREDRICKSON is the author of three novels in the Dek Elstrom series: A Safe Place for Dying; Honestly Dearest, You’re Dead; and Hunting Sweetie Rose, all from Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s. Some of his short stories appear, as often as the editor can stand it, in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine . Others have been anthologized in The Blue Religion, edited by Michael Connelly; Chicago Blues, edited by Libby Hellmann; and Crimes by Moonlight, edited by Charlaine Harris.

To show I know what I’m writing about, I’ll open with quotes that won’t at first make sense. They come from two works of varied literary regard.

“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.” Holden Caulfield, The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger.

Each has a strong voice that successfully frames how each character sees his world. But now imagine how Salinger and The Simpsons writers might have continued these snippets, say, if they’d been improperly medicated.

For example, Holden Caulfield might go on, “Now I must leave. I have just enough time to stop by Walgreens for Gummi Bears—the pinks are my favorite—before the Miley Cyrus retrospective starts down at the Bijou.”

And for Bart: “Eat my shorts?” Professor Simpson repeated. Fingering his bow tie, he smiled wryly at his seminar of doctoral candidates. “Of course I’m merely being rhetorical. Certainly, no one would look to such square-legged garments, under- or over-wise, for sustenance. They lack nutritive value, and . . .”

Is either of these funny? Nah. But preposterous? You bet. And that’s the objective I’m lounging toward: Humor comes from contrast, from the unexpected.

As do good mysteries and thrillers. Done right, humor can add dimension to characters, primary or minor, as well as provide the means to lull readers into a temporary state of well-being before whacking them upside the head with something truly frightening.

I tumbled onto this while writing my first crime novel. My wife and I were vacationing in California. Always an optimistic adventurer, though for this trip too trusting, she’d booked us into what we discovered was a New Age place, north of San Francisco.

Our door had a sign asking guests to remove their shoes, so as not to disturb the karma in the room. Judging by the filthy carpet, not many guests had complied. No doubt, our karma was disturbed.

Besides the karma, our package included a breakfast of two flattened granola cakes and raspberry. (You read that right: one lone red berry riding atop two depressed cakes. They’d never get away with that where I live, just west of Chicago.)

Because there were no heaping platters to look at while waiting for our own breakfasts, I naturally took to eavesdropping on the foursome at the next table. They wore beads, braids, and flowered print dresses . . . well, not the man. I can’t report on everything he was wearing because my wife absolutely forbade my crawling under their table to confirm my suspicion that he was sporting bell-bottom jeans and Earth shoes, duds kept from the sixties, that decade of love.

All four wore something else: exceptionally ruddy complexions. And they laughed, oh they laughed, even though it was very early in the morning. (They wouldn’t get away with that either, out here, west of Chicago. Routinely, we awake in sour moods, braced for news of our governors being arrested.)

From their boisterousness, I learned the four were New Age therapists—proud practitioners, apparently, of therapies they performed with their hands. (Without leaning over more closely, I couldn’t be sure what they were talking about. Nonetheless, I do allow that things of that sort might go on here, in some sections west of Chicago.)

What really piqued my imagination about them was the frequency at which one, and then another, would get up and cross the room for a refill of cranberry juice. I’d already helped myself to the coffee and orange juice, but from a table much nearer to ours. Being new to the land north of the Bay, I wondered if keeping the cranberry juice separate from the orange juice was a cultural thing particular to that area, like karma and carpets, and raspberries riding solo atop granola cakes.

I questioned our teenaged waitress, who was quite ruddy herself from budding youth and pure thoughts. “Why do you keep the cranberry juice so far from the orange juice?”

She smiled indulgently, as though my Chia head was suffering disabling dryness, and said, “Oh no, sir. That’s not cranberry juice. It’s sherry. We keep it out all day.”

I began writing the whole of it. Observing the karma sign, dirty carpet, and the sherry-sippers would allow my protagonist to crack wise, offering another view of the tilted way he looks at the world. Inserting it as a light chapter into a string of darker ones would change up the pace, and get about that business of lulling the reader.

One thing nagged, though. As I wrote, and rewrote, and rewrote, I began to realize I was facing one of the grand questions of the cosmos: How can a writer tell if his work is funny?

It set me to sputtering like something with too much voltage. What if what I was writing wasn’t funny at all?

As good fortune had it, Richard Russo, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Empire Falls and no mean humorist himself, was speaking to an undergraduate literature class at a nearby university. I slunk in, sat my gray-headed self low in the front, hoping no one would notice I was a few decades too old for the group. When he took questions, I asked, “How does a writer know when his stuff is funny?”

He smiled indulgently, as though my graying Chia head . . . well, you know, and said, “If it makes you laugh.”

There it was. There it all was, the cosmos opened up with five syllables: “If it makes you laugh.”

Fans congratulated me on my creativity when the book came out. In particular, both cited the scene in Northern California.

Did that business with the therapists and the cranberry juice really happen? A lot of it, sure. Did I embellish, and make it preposterous? You bet. But the guts of it I observed, and then polished with my imagination.

And even after I obsessed through several rewrites, it still left me cackling, crazed as a jaybird, down in the dark of the basement where I write.

EXERCISE