How to rite Killer Fiction (10 page)

cops and going home for a hot bath; we want her on the scene dodging bullets. When Hercule Poirot confronted twelve killers at once, we had no reason to fear for his safety; that wasn't how the game was played. But put Elvis Cole on the
Orient Express,
and we won't be happy if all he does is talk. In the Second Golden Age, we want our detectives to go
mano-a-mano
with the killer; knowing is no longer enough.

The result is that the scene in which the detective confronts the killer has become as cliched, as predictable, as the old-fashioned drawing-room gathering. We can see it coming a mile away; the amateur detective who grows herbs for a living and who ought to turn the matter over to the police is heading for an abandoned building to meet the man she's sure is the killer. He's armed; she's not—and if you have any doubt about which of them is going to prevail, you haven't done enough reading. She, after all, is on her fourth book of a series.

So one question to ask yourself when you're about to confront your own ending: does the detective absolutely have to go one-on-one with the killer?

The Non-Action Ending_

No. It is still possible to write a satisfying mystery novel without a physical set-to between detective and killer. Take a look at Margaret Maron's
Southern Discomfort
. Instead of confrontation, we have a horrified realization that tragic misunderstandings led to murder. We have a ripple effect that touches everyone connected with the mystery and is more powerful by far than a simpler, more violent, ending could have been. Similarly, Sue Dunlap in
Rogue Wave
gives us emotional resonance and poetic justice without resorting to the traditional wresting-the-gun-from-the-killer's-hand scene.

Sometimes the revelation isn't so much a matter of who the criminal is as why he did what he did. Unusual motives that ring true in terms of character can be found in Robert Barnard's
Fete Fatale
and Reginald Hill's
Ruling Passions.
The story behind the murder is a major reason why Minette Walters, P.D. James, Elizabeth George, and Val McDermid sell
so
many books.

Hill, a grandmaster of the genre, uses other interesting devices to vary the predictability of the whodunit ending: in
Pictures of Perfection,
he opens the book with a gunman shooting at a crowd of people at a garden fete (another fatal fete!). He then backs the story up so that it concludes with the same shooting, and only then do we find out not only what was behind the shooting but also who lives and who dies. In a similar vein, Hill's
Bones and Silence
creates ongoing suspense throughout the mystery by showing letters to a police officer from an unidentified suicidal woman. Only at the end do we find out who this woman is and whether or not she succeeds in her tragic effort to take her own life.

The Two-Layered Ending _

Another traditional twist is the two-layered ending (for example,
The Tragedy ofY
by Ellery Queen). The detective apparently solves the crime, produces evidence of one actor behind the events—only to discover a second layer, a second culprit, another mind behind the murders. This ending is used to great effect in
If Ever I Return, Pretty Peggy-0
by Sharyn McCrumb, and
Time Expired
by Sue Dunlap. It satisfies our mystery-lover's longing for a complex puzzle while deepening emotional resonance through the connections between the two minds.

Two-layered endings don't always mean two murderous minds at work. One of Ellery Queen's hallmarks was the "public consumption" solution, delivered with full flourishes in front of the police, and the "just-between-us" solution given to the victim's family. We readers believed the first one, and then were told we'd had the wool pulled over our eyes and now we'd learn the truly true truth.

On a couple of memorable occasions, Ellery even slipped in a third solution.

Why Endings Fail _

What kinds of mystery endings disappoint readers?

• The "eenie, meenie, miney, moe" ending in which the murderer could have been any one of the suspects and seems to have been chosen at random for the final "honor" of being the truly guilty party. The revelation of the true killer should give the reader a jolt of recognition: yes, this is right, it all becomes clear to me now. The reader wants a sense of inevitability about the killer's identity. It had to be X; it could only have been X.

• The emotionally unsatisfying ending. A killer has been unmasked but true justice hasn't been done. This is okay in a hard-boiled detective tale whose premise is that justice is impossible, but if we're in cozyland where stability and order are supposed to be restored by the detectives solution to the crime, we won't be happy without some justice. By the same token, dry, arid exposition won't do the trick; we need some emotional resonance to our endings to be fully satisfied today.

• Failing to tie up all the loose ends. It is the detective's job not just to solve the murder but to unravel all the threads, explain everything that needs explaining, rip the masks off the phonies, expose all the lies, cut through all the disguises, tell all the secrets. Smart modern writers unravel a few of these lesser knots along the way, saving the big one, the murder, for the end. But all needs to be explained eventually; you don't want the reader wondering who left the upstairs bedroom window open or why the headmaster lied about playing golf.

• Ambiguity. Mystery readers want certainty in an uncertain world. We don't mind existentialist angst and nihilistic dystopias in our hard-boiled reads, but even those have a certain clarity about them. What we hate is not knowing what really happened. Some top-selling psychological mysteries leave us unclear as to the final identity of the killer and suggest a kind of "group guilt" that ultimately turns off hard-core mystery readers.

• The killer just wasn't important enough throughout the story. He's not chosen at random exactly, but he was sufficiently obscure that the reader scratches her head and says, "Him? I can barely remember him" when he's declared the murderer.

• The author gave us a tricky setup with multiple complications throughout the big bad middle and now the solution is as simplistic as a child's drawing. The payoff doesn't pay off.

• "God in the killer's lap" solutions that depend upon the killer having a lot of good luck all along the way. Coincidence piles upon coincidence until any shred of believability is lost.

• The detective fails to detect. The killer reveals herself to the sleuth

instead of the other way around. Sheer dumb luck catapults the so-called detective into a leap of logic that just happens to be true.

• Sudden violence takes the place of logical reasoning and honest investigation. Less jarring in a private eye novel, this can be off-putting if the book has heretofore been a mild cozy and now we're hip-deep in blood.

The Action Ending_

If you choose confrontation, accept the fact that it will come as a surprise only to those readers who are entering the world of mystery for the first time. The confrontation scene is a set piece by now, although it still needs to be set up so that your detective appears brave rather than foolhardy. The truth is, we readers crave the action ending, no matter how many critics carp when V.I. Warshawski heads off to that abandoned factory on Chicago's South Side in the next-to-last chapter, so we're ready to suspend disbelief. We just don't want to suspend our entire grip on reality. We want it to be believable that
this
detective places herself in the position of confronting
this
killer. We even seem willing to swallow yet another killer-tells-all-just-before-plugging-detective-between-the-eyes scene, again flying in the face of critical opinion. Yes, it's ridiculous that the killer sits on the edge of the cliff expounding upon his own guilt instead of plugging the detective squarely between the eyes and heading to Peru, but the fact is, the detective's coming back for the next book in the series and the killer isn't, so we read on, no matter how many times we've read this scene in the past.

How can you set your confrontation scene apart from all the others? Short answer: you can't. But you
can
add to its power by setting it in a very interesting—and, of course, highly dangerous—location. It also helps if your detective goes to the confrontation thinking she's prepared, only to find out otherwise when the time comes. She's armed, but someone takes her gun. She's alerted the police, but they don't respond. She thinks she's confronting a mere witness, but the truth is, he's the killer.

The confrontation section in a modern mystery is a mini-suspense novel. You need to switch gears from the puzzle to the roller-coaster ride, to shelve logic and reason and go straight to visceral emotion. You will want to swing the pendulum between safety and danger, between trust and distrust, in exactly the same way the suspense novelist does. The only difference is that she does it for an entire book; you will do it for two or three chapters.

One of the hallmarks of suspense writing is the slowing down of time to an agonizing pace that emphasizes every minute. If you have a ticking time bomb in the background, now is the time to let it tick as loudly as possible, reminding the reader of exactly how many seconds the detective has left before the worst will happen. Read Mary Higgins Clark's
A Stranger Is Watching
—which involves a real time bomb ticking in the basement of Grand Central Station; a time bomb which will kill not only our heroine but a child—and watch how she shows every one of those seconds ticking away as our heroine extricates herself from her bonds. We feel every tug of the rope that ties her, we see the blood trickling down her arms, we experience her agony of despair as she tries and fails to loosen her bonds.

That's what you want in your confrontation scene. The rest of the book may involve the highest levels of ratiocination since the late, great Ellery, but for the confrontation chapters, go for pure adrenaline. Slow down the filmstrip and milk the situation for every ounce of terror. Let the detective feel every possible emotion from deepest despair to exhilarating hope as she struggles with a killer bent on eliminating her.

What, then, is the difference between a suspense ending and a mystery ending with suspense overtones? Suspense is its own reward; we don't care in a suspense novel if we know from page one who the villain is. In a mystery, we can keep the puzzle going even through the confrontation; it's no less satisfying if the detective is shoved
into the
autoclave by an unknown killer than if he's already identified the villain as Evil Doctor X. The suspense is just an extra on the menu; the main dish is the whodunit.

The Coda_

Linda Barnes closes
Snapshot
with a seder. To this traditional Jewish ceremonial dinner her detective Carlotta Carlyle invites a decidedly untra-ditional family. Carlotta's friends Gloria and Roz (who wears a pink T-shirt that says "Will work for sex"); Roz's new boyfriend, a mobster named Sam Gianelli, Carlotta's Little Sister Paolina and her Colombian family all sit around the table. Now that the crime has been solved, the unorthodox group that surrounds Carlotta has become even closer and they celebrate that closeness with a ceremonial dinner.

The cozy coda shows that the fabric of society has been rewoven after it was torn by the victim and his killer (according to W.H. Auden, the victim was as much a disrupter as the murderer). We see order restored, peace preserved, sheep safely grazing, ordinary life moving along in its ordinary way without the threat of violent death.

Since mysteries now choose to explore aspects of the detective's personal life, the intensely personal coda has become important. Not only has Jenny Cain solved a murder in
I.O.U.,
she has reconciled in some way with her mentally ill mother. Not only did Matt Scudder face down ruthless killers in
Eight Million Ways to Die,
he also faced his own alcoholism. Some detectives find a meaningful relationship; others end one.

The Meta-Novel _

I first heard the term "meta-novel" at a writer's conference in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The idea is that even though each book in a series stands alone, when read collectively they form one big ongoing novel about the main character. Each book represents its own arc: in book one of the series we meet the character and establish a meta-goal that will carry him through further books, in book two that meta-goal is tested, in book three—you get the picture.

It's All One Big Book

Looked at this way, every book about Kinsey Millhone,
from A Is for Alibi
to the latest letter of the alphabet, constitutes one big novel with a lot of different episodes, kind of like a television series. As we read through the series, we learn more about Kinsey and we deepen our connection to her so that even minor conflicts in later books mean something to us because we know her so well and we're aware of exactly what pushes her buttons. When something big happens, such as finding lost family members in
J Is
for
Judgment,
it resonates because we're fully aware of her orphaned childhood.