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Ingredients every mystery should have
'My name is Kinsey Milhone. I'm a private investigator, licensed in the state of California. I'm 32 years old, twice divorced, no kids. The day before yesterday I killed someone and the fact weighs heavily on my mind.'
A Is for Alibi
by Sue Grafton
So now you're writing a mystery. Your detective is a whizz, yet believable, and your criminal dastardly and inventive. You know who was killed and why. If you do say so yourself, your mode of murder is ingenious, in fact, it's the stuff nightmares are made of, and you even have a few red herrings up your sleeve.
Plotting and pacing
Now comes the tricky business of plotting a story so that the clues are laid, the suspects interrogated and the criminal revealed at a pace that keeps the readers involved. You don't want to write based on a formula, but at the same time you want to use the storytelling devices inherent in the genre. Mysteries require organisation and reason. The writer metes out clues bit by bit, shaping a pattern like building blocks.
Early in the story you must introduce the criminal, the victim and any other main characters. While some writers prefer to introduce the setting and characters, and get their stories off to a leisurely start, the sooner a corpse is discovered, the sooner the reader is wracked with questions and forced to keep reading to discover answers. Some authors insist that the criminal need not lurk about in the early stages of the book, but these authors would do well to read the classic and best mysteries. A true mystery novel is based on fair play, a kind of cat-and-mouse game between author and reader where the writer conceals and the reader guesses. Fair play requires that the writer reveals the same clues to the detective and the reader until eventually she tells all. As the puzzle pieces fall into place over the course of the story, if the criminal is kept in full view, it is deeply satisfying to slowly expose her, replete with gruesome motive.
Your victim and suspects
In the early chapters of the book, the victim, the murder scene and the person who finds the body are introduced. This scene usually includes several clues and should be sufficiently horrific to linger in the mind of the reader. Once the main plot is firmly in place, a sub-plot, such as a love interest, can be introduced.
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