Now Write! Mysteries

Crime expert, lecturer, television personality, and investigative journalist M. WILLIAM PHELPS is the nationally bestselling, award-winning author of seventeen nonfiction books with more than one million in print. Phelps has appeared on CBS’s Early Show, ABC’s Good Morning America, Montel Williams, Investigative Discovery, and Geraldo at Large; on Court TV, the Discovery Channel, Fox News Channel, the Learning Channel, Biography, the History Channel; and on USA Radio Network; Catholic Radio; ABC News Radio; and Radio America. He has also consulted on the Showtime series Dexter.

We cannot discuss true crime without mentioning that book (you know the one). So let me address this right now and, hopefully, while doing so, make a point about what makes us all, as readers, turn the page of a good book and continue reading.

First and foremost, engaging, entertaining, and informative nonfiction writing should focus on the one thing great fiction does: storytelling. If you cannot engage your reader on page one, forget it; you have not done your job (and likely have lost that reader forever). This is why, after some years of . . . let’s call it . . . educated reflection, I changed the way I begin my books.

Truman Capote is the one to thank for the nauseating way many contemporary true-crime authors (an early manifestation of myself included), not to mention those brilliant crime journalists—Jerry Bled-soe, Jack Olsen, James B. Stewart, to name a few—throughout the genre’s history, have started their books. I’m referring to the incredibly dry and boring descriptive paragraphs of a city, town, and/or landscape in or around the location where the crime takes place. The idea behind this strategy, I have always assumed, is to drop the reader into this place where evil resides, allowing her to get comfortable in the terrain before the dark and wicked things that are about to happen begin.

Screenwriters use this device. But a camera swooping down on a town is a far different instrument than that of a book author trying to describe the town in a narrative. You lose a bit of suspense when you open your book with highways, byways, bridges, weather, and trees. We get what the writer is trying to do by setting up some sort of idyllic location in quintessential suburbia, where nothing of any importance occurs out of the norm: Here we are, readers, in a slice of American Pie, out on Route 66, where a monster is undoubtedly lurking around every corner—the least possible place in the world where you’d expect murder to come about.

Have a look at the following example: “There are sections of landscape bordering the quaint New England town of Northampton, Massachusetts, as flat as a tabletop—acres of farmland that, from a bird’s-eye view, might make one think this small section of the Northeast is no different from Indiana or Kansas. . . .”

Now, with a smidgen of humility, I should note the above is an exceptionally written literary-quality paragraph (ahem) from my first book. Seriously, though, do the words actually convey anything essential to the story? Do these wonderfully crafted sentences—maybe even magical!—move the story forward or draw the reader into what should be a suspenseful narrative, begging her to turn the page?

Keeping that in mind, here is the opening from that book, In Cold Blood. You know, the one I spoke of earlier (a book I am not entirely convinced Capote wrote himself, by the way, and a book I consider to be nothing more than “faction”—facts on top of fiction): “The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of Western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call ‘out there.’”

Now, can you see where I lifted my early style from? Open several of Ann Rule’s books and you’ll see what I mean: carefully constructed paragraphs (or even a few pages) of the landscape (generally with the identification of the interstate and a few rolling hills tossed in for good measure), designed to place the reader in the middle of suburban bliss.

Throughout the years, as I morphed into what my editor now calls a “real-life thriller” author (exciting, eh?), I realized that by placing this information (the dreary geography lesson nonsense) anywhere else but the beginning of your book, you increase your odds of grabbing the reader by the collar and shaking some excitement into her reading experience. That first page is when you have your reader’s full attention. You want to hook her, not scare her away with the overblown prose of Emerson or Thoreau.

Consider this example: “She was fighting for her life. That was about all patrolman Michael Firestone knew as he sat behind the wheel of his cruiser, flipped on the lights and siren, and sped off.”

A few action-packed, suspense-filled sentences opening your book embed questions in the reader’s mind: Who is fighting for her life? Why? What happened? You can milk this strategy (and all great writing involves milking and strategizing) for some time, as long as you give readers answers, and not lead them down a path that will bear no fruit by the end of the section or chapter. There has to be a payoff. Maybe not a resolution, but something to keep your reader’s curiosity piqued.

One more tip about opening pages (we’ll call this a bonus). At the beginning of any book, you need to set the (narrative) tone of the book’s voice into play immediately. I tend to spend a lot of time (maybe too much) on tempo and rhythm. What I mean by this is syntax: the way your sentences ebb and flow within the structure of the paragraph.

In most instances, I try to maintain a simple rule. If I write a long sentence, I follow it up with a short sentence. Also, I try to pay attention to the number of words in each sentence, compared with those surrounding it. Example: He walked into the room. Looked around. Sat down on the metal chair. Took a breath.

Whether you (or your reader) consciously realize it, you are setting up a rhythmic pulse in your reader’s mind by writing the sentences she reads; you’re telling her mind how to flow: five words / two words / six words / three words . . .

There are so many narrative devices we can choose from when beginning a book or story. If we make the right choices, the reader feels an instant connection. If we don’t, the reader angrily claps the book closed, snapping, “That sucked.” Truly, in most cases, it’s just a matter of realizing the mistakes we’ve made and following that golden rule every writing instructor has pounded into our heads: rewrite, rewrite, rewrite.

For a number of years I taught a “How to Get Published” course I designed for wannabe writers. “The most important part of writing,” I must have told my students three or four times per class, is reading. “As new writers trying to break into the business, we must read more than we write!” I preached.

One has to understand, comprehend, and learn from what published authors have done in order to get their own work into print. We know the tricks. The angles. We’ve made the mistakes—and, most important, learned from them. I mean, if you are going to write true crime, read the genre, study those successful authors within the genre, and get a feel for how a true-crime book is structured. Same goes for romance, mystery, and so on.

As a habit, you should pay close attention to the opening pages of any true-crime book you read. Doing that, you’ll see that most authors—at least the great ones—begin with an action-packed, suspenseful scene. Something significant happens immediately. This is another trick screenwriters like to use: they make something happen within the first forty-five seconds that will have an impact on the plot later in the film.

EXERCISE