Now Write! Mysteries

MICHAELWILEY has written the award-winning Joe Kozmarski mysteries The Last Striptease, The Bad Kitty Lounge, and A Bad Night’s Sleep. He is a member of the Mystery Writers of America, where he serves on the Board of Directors, and the Private Eye Writers of America. He is a professor of English at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville, but sets his books in Chicago, where he grew up.

The best mysteries offer more than suspenseful plots and intriguing characters. They offer well-rendered places: places that we inhabit while reading and that inhabit us when we are done.

Who can forget the Sternwood mansion with the big “stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armor rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn’t have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair” in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep? Who can forget the one gin joint out of “all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world” in CASABLANCA?

Place matters. The opening lines of my mystery The Last Striptease describe the area surrounding Chicago’s North Dearborn Street as “a high-priced neighborhood full of forty-year-old guys fresh out of divorces from suburban wives . . . guys with good money from good jobs or okay money from okay jobs and dreams of an easy life interrupted only by vigorous sex after years of cutting the backyard grass every summer weekend.”

Early in The Bad Kitty Lounge, my detective enters Holy Trinity Church on Chicago’s northwest side:

The chapel was bright and painted as fancy as a twelve-year-old in mascara. A painter had climbed a scaffold and covered the vaulted ceiling with fat, rosy-skinned angels frolicking in heavenly blue skies. A portrait showed Jesus and Mary wearing crowns, Jesus dressed like a little prince, Mary in a red and gold getup that made her look like a model from an old Imperial margarine commercial. Still, the place took your breath away—all the color and light in the middle of the graying neighborhood.

The opening of A Bad Night’s Sleep describes a razed “seven-block chunk on the south side of Chicago.” If developers had “let it sit for twenty years, it would have turned back into the prairie that had stood there a couple of centuries ago. Thirty years and you could’ve put on a coonskin hat and gone deer hunting.”

These descriptions aren’t as memorable as those in The Big Sleep or CASABLANCA. But they establish tone, attitude, and atmosphere, and they reveal character, enabling the plot to play. My detective knows the North Dearborn neighborhood because he hunted for an apartment there himself after his own divorce. As a lapsed Catholic, he has mixed feelings about being in the Holy Trinity Chapel. A lifelong Chicagoan, he knows what the streets and neighborhoods have been and what they could become. The descriptions carry the books in the directions they need to go.

That is as it should be. Setting should offer more than the place where events occur. It should enable events—never overtly (plot-changing lightning strikes and the appearance of deus ex machina went out of style with the ancient Greeks), but by telling readers about the world available to the characters and about the characters’ attitudes in and toward this world.

1. Robert Graves used to advise writers to adopt the perspective of “readers over their own shoulders” when making revisions. In observing a familiar place, you need to defamiliarize yourself; try to watch yourself in the act of looking and notice both what you see and what you miss.

2. Most published novels include disclaimers saying that any resemblance between places in them and actual places is “entirely coincidental.” Don’t take these disclaimers overly seriously. Make your places real.

EXERCISE