I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,
Straining upon the start. The game’s afoot:
Follow your spirit; and upon this charge,
Cry ‘God for Harry! England! and Saint George!
In Shakespeare’s Henry V, “The game’s afoot” means the battle is about to begin. But nah, we’re going with the later version. At the beginning of “The Adventure of the Abbey Grange,” Sherlock Homes awakens Watson by saying, “Come, Watson, come. The game is afoot. Not a word! Into your clothes and come!” And we’re off!
I knew I was going to write something about mysteries. Where to start? So I looked up a list of Sherlock Holmes stories (not Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote other stories, too). I found a list of 62 works, 4 novels and 58 short stories. I looked up a list of Agatha Christie books (this time by author). There are lists, and then there are lists. They don’t seem to be in actual chronological order, but rather ordered by the ‘detective’ (Miss Marple; or Hercule Poirot; or Tommy and Tuppence), and they aren’t numbered, so it’s hard to tell how many Christie actually wrote.
And then there’s Nancy Drew. Darn it! I found numbers, all right. Too many numbers. The first source quoted an unbelievable 620 stories. Huh? The next said 175. Oh? And the third says there are only 64 “original” books (whatever “original” means). Well, there are a lot of them, for sure.
I, personally, don’t write mysteries. I’m not likely to bury little mysteries inside my stories, either, although maybe I should. Would it make the stories more interesting? Dunno. I’m either not good at dropping clues like little bread crumbs for the pigeons, or I don’t care enough. Or both. I also feel it would be a show-stopper, and not in a good way. I don’t want to wake the readers up from my story and send their brains off in a whole different direction. For my kind of writing, at least, it would be breaking the contract I made with the readers at the beginning. “You’re going to read some historical, more or less realistic, fiction”. I can imagine them shouting, “Hey, no fair!” if I suddenly change genres. Even as a subplot, either I don’t have the skill to make it work in my particular stories, or it just can’t be done.
Of course there are questions that are raised in our stories. If the readers know the answers ahead of time, they might not find much purpose in reading. Will Dorothy find her way home? Will Frodo survive the trip to Mordor? Will Lassie make it back home? (And how come Chewbaca didn’t get a medal?) There’s suspense, all right. But those still don’t fit the Mystery genre.
I’ve found lists (and more lists) of the elements of a mystery story/book. Some have only 5 elements. One has ten. So, putting them together and then distilling, lets see how many we come up with, which ones are true of all stories, and which ones are specific to the Mystery genre.
1. A strong hook. Well, duh! We do need to get the reader engaged in every book. In a mystery, they need to care about both the crime and the victim. A sense of violating social norms is probably essential; outrage is a bonus.
2. An atmospheric setting. While many stories have, or should have, a compelling sense of time and place, a good mystery usually has a sense of tension or unease from the beginning of the mysterious part. (Allowing for some leisurely introductions, a la Miss Marple, but then the readers already trust that she’ll deliver, so the start can be a bit later—not a lot later, but not Paragraph 1.)
3. A crime. When I think of mysteries, I think of “Who dunnit”, whether it’s the rhyme for toddlers, “Who stole the cookies from the cookie jar” or Blue's Clues, to the adult Murder on the Orient Express or the very adult Driftnet. Are there other kinds?
4. A detective. Columbo shows up, and the villain might as well give up. Nancy Drew may not strike such fear in the hard heart of the bad guy, but the reader knows she’s on the right trail.
5. Villain(s). Crimes don’t happen in the passive voice.
6. Narrative momentum. Rising action brought to its limit. It should get faster and more tense the closer we get to the conclusion.
7. Clues. Let the reader play along. This goes along with the next point:
8. Red herrings.* A toddler might not want to do more than follow the trail of crumbs to Cookie Monster’s trash bin, but adults have more reasoning capacity and attention span, so let’s engage that.
9. Foreshadowing. Sometimes those are an incentive to re-read the story. “How did I miss that?”
10. Justice is served. Or not. The ending should be satisfying to the reader and a natural conclusion of the story. Yea! The bad guy got caught! (Scooby-Doo for the win!) Or Wow! The culprit literally got away with it. (Maxim de Winter murdered Rebecca.)
*Re: Red herrings. A few years ago, a friend recommended I watch Shetland. The first season was entertaining enough. Each episode was a self-contained mystery in itself. And I’m familiar with several Scottish actors, so it was a nice side-line to pick those out in the story. Season 2 was a disappointment. It was a single crime, stretched out over the entire season. They started out with a whole list of suspects, and each episode was the process of investigating, then eliminating, them one by one. In the middle of the second episode I lost interest. Why? Because of all the people in the story who Jimmy Perez put up on the cork board to investigate, two of the characters weren’t there, both women. So I knew it had to be one of them. Figuring out which one wasn’t enough of an enticement to watch through several hours of chasing after people who weren’t going to be the culprit at the end. Yes, I was right. It was one of those two women. Hey, writers, don’t make the red herring so obvious, huh?
So what about you? Have you ever written a mystery? Wanted to write a mystery? Enjoy reading mysteries but don’t want to write one yourself?
I’d almost say it’s too much to do a mystery in the space/time we have here, but then there are the Oh My Tales for kids.
Challenge:
Would you be interested in writing a mystery? Explore one (or more) of the elements of a mystery. How would you develop it?
OR
Write the opening paragraph or two of a potential mystery. What do we need in the opening? Setting; detective; crime; victim.
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A request here. If you want to do more than a paragraph or two, can you do it in the other diary, the Works in Progress? It’s great if you want to give us your entire version of “The Speckled Band” but that’s a bit much for a practice exercise. We’ll be delighted to read it, and there’s a place for longer works. And it will help give that thread more traction.
Click WriteOn Fiction WIP for tonight’s and earlier diaries of chapters and excerpts by DK storytellers.
Write On! will be a regular Thursday night diary (8 pm Eastern, 5 pm Pacific) until it isn’t.
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