How to rite Killer Fiction (2 page)

At the opposite pole of the popular crime fiction genre is the whodunit. Here the nightmare of sudden, violent death is tamed, put into a neat, logical package of detection and clues, rendered less frightening by the imposition of order. The detective hero, unlike the suspense hero, is the master of the situation, keeping her head when all about her are losing theirs. The detective manages the out-of-control emotions of others and brings logic and insight to bear on the puzzle of unexplained passions. Here the experience is one of taking control while the dream is going on, of telling oneself: I can handle this; it's only a dream.

In essence, then, the reader who buys a whodunit and the reader who plunks down six bucks for a suspense novel are buying two different dreams. One is a power fantasy: the Great Detective is in control, unaffected by the powerful emotions around him. The other is a victim fantasy: the hero is buffeted by the winds of fate—but she will prevail in the end, thanks to skills she hardly knew she possessed.

Reason and Emotion_

Every aspect of the well-written whodunit and the well-crafted suspense novel reflects these distinct dream-experiences. In the whodunit, the reader identifies with someone outside the troubled circle where the crime takes place; whether the sleuth is a cop, a private eye, or an amateur, the classic mystery is a story of other people's troubles. In recent years, detective characters have begun solving their own personal problems in the course of the mystery, but the core of the genre is a situation involving murder that happens to other people.

In a straight suspense novel, the hero is the center of the book. The troubles are his, not someone else's. The reader identifies with the hero and goes through a catharsis by following the hero's journey every step of the way. At the end of the story, the hero, as in a fairy tale, emerges at a different level of maturity.

In suspense, the emotions are up-front and dominant. The big scenes are played out in front of the reader; we see good and evil clash before our eyes. The hero is pursued, captured, tortured in real time, while a time bomb ticks in the background. We expect to see the hero working her way free from the ropes that bind her; we will be extremely disappointed to come on the scene after she's freed herself.

In the mystery, on the other hand, the biggest scene of all, the actual murder, takes place offstage. Most of the emotions, in fact, are buried, hidden beneath facades and lies and secrets; it is the task of the detective to bring them to light. Much is told from the perspective of the present looking back upon the past. A police procedural begins with a dead body, and the living person who once existed is seen only in recollections. The private eye novel contains more violence and conflict in the present, but deep-rooted anguish often lies at the bottom of the problem. The immediacy involves the identity and apprehension of the killer, not the intense emotion that gave rise to the murder in the first place.

Two Steps Ahead, Two Steps Behind_

One key to the distinction between mystery and suspense writing involves the relative positions of hero and reader. In the ideal mystery novel, the reader is two steps behind the detective. We mystery writers want our readers to smack themselves on the forehead when the murderer's identity is revealed, to say: "I should have known! If only I'd remembered that Sally used to be a nurse, I could have figured out that she had access to the digitalis."

What we don't want is a reader who says instead, "I figured that out in chapter four; why did it take this so-called Great Detective so long?" And since the death of the Golden Age, we also no longer want our reader to say, "I couldn't have figured that out in a million years, it was so complicated and far-fetched." We want our readers to stay that ideal two steps behind the detective.

The ideal suspense reader, on the other hand, is two steps ahead of the hero. "Don't go into that old, dark house tonight," the reader begs as Mary Sue puts on her coat to go meet the nice young man she met at the library earlier that day. He's promised to tell her the whole truth about her dead grandfather, but we the readers know he's up to no good. We know something she doesn't (often because the book is written in third person; more on this later), and we writhe in suspense as she steps into danger. We are two steps ahead of her—and that's precisely where the wise suspense writer wants us to be.

Myth vs. Tale_

The classic mystery, whether hard- or soft-boiled, has an aura of myth about it. Sherlock Holmes has much in common with the wizards and magicians of old; Jane Marple is a wise woman—or a witch, depending on your point of view—who sees what others miss. Philip Marlowe and Travis McGee are today's knights-errant, on a quest for honor in an honorless world.

The classic Great Detective is a finished product; we don't expect character development from Nero Wolfe or Hercule Poirot. They don't change or grow because they already embody all the qualities and skills they need to do the job they were sent to earth to do.

Today's detectives may be a trifle more fallible; they may change and grow and go in and out of relationships and question their place in the universe—but when it comes to their ability to see what others miss, to peel away the masks and layers of falsehood, they still retain a mythic aura. The Just-the-facts-ma'am cop who plays no favorites, the Hard-boiled Detective in his trench coat and fedora, and the Perry Mason-like lawyer who always defends the innocent have become archetypes in their own right.

The suspense hero, on the other hand, is not born to succeed. He must learn skills; he is usually presented at the outset as having little ability to cope with the new world into which he's been thrust. The model here is more fairy tale than myth: a king had three sons, the first two of whom were the bravest and handsomest men in the kingdom. But the youngest son was called Simple, and his brothers laughed at him because he was not brave. Guess which brother is the hero. The orphaned female hero will, like Cinderella, emerge from her ordeal a fully mature woman who has earned the love of her prince.

Larger World/Smaller World_

The suspense hero is thrust from a small, safe world into a larger, very dangerous one. Often, the hero spends time and energy trying to return to the safe world she knew before the adventure began. Sometimes the small, safe world of the hero is invaded by vicious messengers from a larger world, forcing the hero to adopt larger-world tactics in order to deal with them.

One of the chief pleasures of the spy/techno-thriller subgenre is that it gives the reader a passport to other countries—and the reader goes visiting, not as a tourist, but as a privileged member of the elite. We travel not just to Moscow, but to the heart of the Kremlin; we see not the usual tourist London, but the inner workings of MI5. We eavesdrop on Hitler and Roosevelt and Stalin as they discuss their forthcoming meeting at Yalta. The hero of this kind of suspense novel is a modern Cassandra; he knows and speaks truth, but he is not listened to.

The detective's world, in contrast, narrows instead of expanding. There is a small circle of suspects to be questioned; clues are often found in the tiniest of objects: a thread, a bent blade of grass, a minuscule discrepancy between one witness's story and another's. Even in the hardest of the hard-boiled mysteries, there are subterranean connections between suspects; the murder will turn out to be committed by someone we have reason to suspect, even if all the suspects aren't gathered around a drawing room for the final twenty pages.

Information Concealed or Revealed _

The tension in the mystery depends on information withheld from the reader. A clue is interesting because it must be interpreted; it is not clear on its face what the red thread at the scene of the crime means. It will take the detective's brain to make the connection between the thread and the bellman's uniform worn by the clever killer, and then to put that bit of information together with some other seemingly random fact to form a chain of evidence that will convict someone of the crime.

The suspense novel relies on information given to the reader; we know that when our hero's back is turned, the old friend she's asked for help will telephone the Nazis and give away her location. She sleeps in ignorance in the best bedroom, believing herself safe at last, while the SS is on its way. We shudder with anticipation; will she wake in time to escape? How will she get out of the house? Where will she go? We are worried about her because we have been given information she doesn't have.

Central Questions_

The central question of the mystery is: Who did it? Can our detective unravel the puzzle and bring the killer to justice?

The ending of the mystery is intellectually satisfying. We understand the truth of what happened, and we believe that this truth explains all that confused us in the course of the story.

Emotional satisfaction comes, first and foremost, from the fact that we accept the solution to the mystery on an intellectual level.

The central question of the suspense novel is: Will our hero survive? Will she prevail?

The ending of the suspense novel is emotionally satisfying: our hero is not only alive, she has successfully undergone an ordeal and has become a stronger person on another plane of existence. A man has become a mensch; a girl has become a woman.

A mystery novel is at its most satisfying when it is part of a series. The best way for a mystery writer to create growth in a detective character is to do it over a series of books; the focus of each separate story is still the solution of an individual crime. The detective hero ends or begins a relationship, comes to terms with her past, or faces a tough professional choice—but her personal dilemma is a subplot, subordinated to the central issue of who killed the victim.

The suspense novel can be a stand-alone book; the writer has taken the hero through a life-transforming ordeal—and this can only happen once in a lifetime. Since this hero will be seen between the covers of a book only once, the writer pulls out all the stops and tells all aspects of his story. This is especially true of the suspense novel that ends with the hero becoming a
mensch; suspense stories
that revolve around a hero who is already a mensch give a different kind of pleasure, a pleasure which may be repeated more than once.

Crossovers_

Are there books that succeed as both a mystery and a suspense novel at the same time?
Presumed Innocent,
by Scott Turow, comes as close as any book I've ever read to doing just that.

How?

First: the mystery was solid. It was complex enough to satisfy a mystery fan; it had clues and suspects and red herrings—all the things a whodunit aficionado is looking for in a good read. Turow took the reader into the funhouse of mystery, showing us distorted images and confusing pictures of what might have been until we were just as befuddled as he wanted us to be.

Second: the hero was in personal danger, not from a villain out to kill him, but from the legal system that put him on trial for killing his lover. Turow took us on the roller-coaster ride that is the hallmark of suspense; one chapter we were up, we felt Rusty was innocent and was going to win his case; the next chapter we were convinced he was on his way to the chair—and what was more, we believed he deserved to be.

Both the mystery and suspense aspects of the book were given equal weight in the writing—and that's not something most writers in the genre can pull off. One thing that helped Turow is the intellectual nature of criminal trials. He wasn't trying to balance the essentially cerebral function of detection with physical derring-do; instead, the detective/ suspense hero's skills as a lawyer were tested to the full by the courtroom battle.

Another road to crossover success is the one paved by Elizabeth George, whose
A Traitor to Memory
weighs in at a hefty 710 pages. This length comes about because George is literally writing two books in one: a straightforward police procedural mystery about a death in the present day, and a psychological suspense novel centering on events from the distant as well as the recent past. The result is a kaleidoscope of plot, subplot, sub-sub-plot, character arcs, turns and twists, emotional resonance—it's a book you fall into and emerge from a week later, blinking at the light as if you'd been in a cave. Its 710 pages are the result of an intensely disciplined writing mind, and Ms. George wrote at this length only after publishing shorter books.

My advice to beginning writers who want to write the next best-selling crossover book: Don't. My advice is to stick to one side or the other of the equation, to go into the funhouse or to step on the roller coaster and not try for both in the same book. It can be done, but it's difficult. And the reason it's difficult is that you are combining two different dreams.

There are suspense elements in many mysteries, and some top-notch suspense writers add mystery elements to their plotlines, but this is not the same as attempting a true crossover. Writing two books in one is a very difficult proposition, and one that demands an almost obsessive attention to structure.

Different Dreams, Different Choices_

So enter the funhouse of mystery and see how the twists and turns of the mazelike passageways disorient you. Move on to the roller coaster and take the plunge into terror. Then decide which you enjoyed more, and choose that experience as the main focus of your book.