Now Write! Mysteries

JOHN LUTZ is the author of more than forty novels and 250 articles and short stories, including virtually every mystery subgenre. His awards include the Edgar,the Shamus, the Trophee 813, and the Golden Derringer. He is a past president of both Mystery Writers of America and Private Eye Writers of America. His latest book is the suspense novel Serial. His novel SWF Seeks Same was made into the hit movie SINGLE WHITE FEMALE, and his novel The Ex was made into an HBO movie, for which he coauthored the screenplay.

What sinks so many thrillers is that the action scenes are too obviously planted in an attempt to set a frenetic pace. Which makes the book . . . a book, and not an exercise in the combined active imaginations of writer and reader. The puppeteer’s hand shows. The compact is broken. The reader no longer trusts the writer; the real world, lurking just beyond the pages, intrudes. If one element of the novel is unconvincing, so is the rest of it.

So how do we make the action more an integral part of the story, a plus instead of a minus? There are some obvious methods, such as minimizing adjectives and adverbs to quicken the pace. Or using sentence fragments (as in the opening paragraphs above). Or introducing the ticking clock, so the character is fighting time as well as whoever or whatever else constitutes the main problem.

An effective technique, too often ignored or not used to full effect, is to involve most or all of the senses. Weapons glint in the sun or look dangerous in the shadows; blood has an unpleasant taste; the flesh of the combatants is sweaty and slippery; perspiration has an odor; bone makes a distinctive sound when broken; there might be ragged breathing, cries and moans of pain, soles scuffling on grass or dirt or gravel. So there we have sight, taste, feel, smell, and sound, all easy enough to use in even a brief action scene. All five senses. Makes my pulse quicken just reading about them.

However, when it comes to violence in fiction, there can be too much of a bad thing. It strains credulity if every dozen or so pages your main character enters a room and he or she gets involved in a slugfest or a shootout. The trick here is to alternate various types of action. A knife fight on page 100 is less convincing if there has already been a dandy such scene on page 90.

One thing you can do to make it easier to alternate (and therefore make more plausible) action scenes is to categorize them. There are fistfights, knife fights, gunfights, poisonings, strangulations; not to mention miscellaneous methods of introducing violence, such as drowning, falls from high places, being run over by vehicles, devoured by animals, crushed by falling objects, to name just a few.

On to chase scenes. There are footraces, vehicle chases, chases in interesting places such as subways or construction sites, injured characters dragging themselves to reach lifesaving weapons before their opponents do, water pursuits in boats or swimming . . . And we’ve touched only on types of races against time itself. Getting far enough away or finding shelter while the timers on explosives tick relentlessly on, obtaining the antidotes of poisons before doses become fatal, getting balky cars started, or coaxing other mechanical or technological devices to work, before it’s too late.

Also effective is the aftermath of violence. Descriptions of broken furniture and shattered bones, of bruises and fatal stab wounds, of mayhem created by bullets or shotgun pellets. The book’s violent episodes can be relived in the characters’ (and readers’) minds, and are also disturbing. And a disturbed reader is an involved reader.

A good, safe scare is what the thriller writer strives to create. And what the thriller reader is looking for. Remember when you were a kid and the roller coaster scared you silly and then finally leveled out and rolled to a gentle stop? What a relief! And the first thing you wanted to do was buy another ticket so you could go around again. The danger that wasn’t real danger was intoxicating.

Same way with a good thriller. The reader wants to go around again. Wants to read the author’s next novel, or catch up with a back-list, if one exists.

So if you are writing a thriller—a novel containing action and velocity as well as suspense—there are plenty of techniques calculated to keep the reader squeezing the pages. Among the most effective are to vary your types of action scenes, and when writing them to make good use of all or most of the senses.

Diversification works, and not only in the stock market. When you read what you’ve written, make sure you’ve applied these techniques and included different types of action. They help make it possible for the reader to believe, which is why the reader opened the book in the first place. Readers really do want to suspend disbelief. Avoid writing two or three gunfights or knife fights or car chases or dark-room bonks on the head in a row.

EXERCISE