Photo by Anders Jildén.
Mystery is by far the genre I edit most and the one I consumed most growing up. Even now, I regularly rewatch episodes of Poirot and Miss Marple with the enthusiasm of visiting dear and much-missed friends. Mystery is also, I firmly believe, one of the most difficult genres to write well. I am perpetually impressed by the authors who attempt to take it on, and awed by those who do so with aplomb.
The Twin Pillars of Plot and Character
While literary fiction often concerns itself primarily with theme and character, and science fiction hooks with its concept and plot, mystery truly is about plot and character. The plot, after all, is quite literally what makes a story a mystery, but consistent, believable characters are what make a mystery work. In the best cases, compelling characters can even draw readers in over and over, long after they understand the plot’s puzzle.
With that in mind, here are my top tips for those intrepid writers endeavoring to take on this daunting genre.
Check your timeline
I mentioned this one back in my “Beyond Typos” post, but a clean, logical timeline is crucial for mystery writers. Because mysteries are about understanding past events, usually by untangling multiple character threads, chronologies can become very complicated very quickly. If everything doesn’t line up logically, your story will fall apart.
Especially if you’re a pantser (i.e., someone who writes without an outline or other form of plan), perfecting your timeline will mean going back over your finished draft with a fine-tooth comb and finding an editor able and willing to catch the stuff you may have missed. Plotters (those who create a clear plan and preparatory materials before drafting) will have an easier time with this, as they can build and double check their timelines in the outline stage. However, even plotters alter their stories as they go, and thus are not immune to plot discrepancies. The main difference between plotters and pantsers in the self-editing stage, then, is that plotters should have a pre-made timeline to check their manuscript against, while pantsers will create their timelines as they edit.
Bonus tip: Don’t depend on your beta readers to fix your timeline. Although you may have particularly thorough and sharp-eyed friends able to catch plot inconsistencies as they read, straightening out timelines typically requires multiple passes and an extremely organized, detail-oriented approach, both of which are outside the scope of traditional beta-reading.
Keep your characters distinct and (mostly) consistent
You can have a perfectly logical and clever plot, but if readers don’t find your characters believable, they won’t have confidence in your book. And if they can’t distinguish your characters in a way that allows them to remember who’s who, they won’t be able to follow your plot. Establishing characters with easily distinguishable traits and making their actions consistent with those traits is therefore imperative.
In part, this means giving your characters clearly distinct names (think Raj, Karen, and Emery, NOT Katie, Karen, and Kai), as well as varied ages, physical features, personalities, social roles, personal philosophies, and histories.
Naturally, you will have some logical overlap between characters—members of the same family will have physical similarities, for instance, just as people from the same graduating class will be around the same age. In these cases, you have two general choices.
The first is to lean more heavily on other types of differences to distinguish members of that group. For instance, to individuate two gray-haired widows who now share a house, you might want to make one of them tall, stern, and quiet and the other petite, friendly, and chatty. To make it easy for the reader to remember who is who, you could also give them names that reflect their personalities. In this case, the tougher character might have a consonant-heavy, harder sounding name like Gertrude, while the more approachable character might have a softer or more diminutive name like Aggie or Dot.
The second choice is to treat the group as a single character, meaning that the group’s members share the same major characteristics and we only (or mostly) see them while together. If you choose this path, you will want to use a single group name or combined name for every mention of the group and the people in it. For our widows, this might mean always describing them as “The Watching Widows” or always referring to them together so that their combined names eventually read as a single moniker. In other words, they aren’t “Gertrude” and “Dot,” but rather “Gertrude and Dot.” This is also a rare case in which you might want to give members of that particular group similar names, because the shared identity of that group’s members matters more than the individuals themselves. The widows might then become “Betty and Letty” or “Aggie and Annie.”
Of course, people are messy and prone to change over time. Including those discrepancies can make your characters more believable, but only if the reasons for these character inconsistencies are well-grounded. For instance, let’s say you have a suspect who has dedicated her life to non-violent causes. If that’s all your readers know about her, they will not find it plausible if she turns out to be a crazed murderer. On the other hand, if sticking to non-violent means leads to the death of someone close to her, readers might understand if she ultimately loses faith in her once-held beliefs and seeks revenge against her friend’s killer. Or, we might find out that she killed someone many years ago, and has clung to action-through-non-violence as a kind of penance ever since. In either scenario, the murder and the murderer’s primary characteristics are revealed to be intimately linked. Even better, by showing logical growth in response to major life events, the character becomes more textured, deeper, and, thus, more believable.
Balance number of suspects with story length
On a related note, the number of suspects in your story can also have a serious impact on reader enjoyment. Too few and the mystery may become too easy or boring. Too many and you risk bogging down the story’s pace, leaving characters underdeveloped, and overwhelming readers. For short stories, a good rule of thumb is to include three to four suspects, while novels should have at least four, and probably closer to between five and eight.
Can there be exceptions to this rule? Depending on your approach and goal, sure. If, say, your book is really meant to be an in-depth psychological or philosophical study of two contrasting characters, then you might only have two real suspects. But straying too far from the 3–4/5–8 guideline can make it more difficult to maintain tension and/or coherence throughout your story, and should only be done for carefully considered reasons.
Balance clues with red herrings throughout your manuscript
For mysteries, reader satisfaction comes from endings that are so logical they seem obvious once the story is complete, but only once the story is complete.
Too often, writers confuse surprise with satisfaction. When this happens, they might hide crucial information until the final reveal. This tactic will increase the likelihood of surprising readers, but at the cost of leaving them feeling cheated.
Never forget: most mystery readers love a puzzle and expect a fair shot at figuring out that puzzle on their own. No one likes to play a rigged game.
Mystery writers, therefore, must include clues throughout their stories, but will need to balance these clues with red herrings and/or hide them in plain sight by inserting them into places where the reader’s focus will be elsewhere. The YouTube channel Just Write has a great video on how J.K. Rowling both presents and hides clues in the Harry Potter series by using selective descriptive vagueness, placing the culprit in the background of the story, burying clues in other information, or dropping clues and then immediately redirecting the reader’s attention to something that feels more important. All of these techniques are effective because, when implemented well, they should leave readers feeling satisfied that the game was challenging but, ultimately, fair.
Again, plotters are at an advantage here. Because they know where their stories are headed, they can add both clues and red herrings as they go. Pantsers will probably need to weave clues and anti-clues into second and third drafts.
The above tips are mainly for those writing traditional mysteries, but are worth keeping in mind for related genres like suspense or thriller. And, as usual, they are meant as (hopefully) helpful guideposts rather than hard and fast rules.