How to rite Killer Fiction (4 page)

When Margaret Maron wrote
The Bootlegger's Daughter
, her first Deborah Knott mystery, she changed her setting from the New York City of her Sigrid Harald police procedurals to the rich soil of North Carolina, sweeping that year's awards in the process. Soon mysteries were set in Alaska (Dana Stabenow, Sue Henry, John Straley), in national parks (Nevada Barr), and in the formerly hidden world of Orthodox Jewry in New York and Los Angeles (Faye Kellerman, Rochelle Krich). More and more writers found Native American connections and set their books among the Cherokee (Jean Hager), the Arapaho (Margaret Coel), the Ute (James Doss), and the Pima (J.A. Jance).

The keys to writing a successful regional mystery are choosing a region interesting enough to engage the reader and making sure the mystery itself isn't swamped by description and portraits of local eccentrics. Those of us unlucky enough not to have grown up in the Alaska bush or the Louisiana bayou have another option: turn back the clock.

The Historical Mystery
"The past is a foreign country," L.P. Hartley wrote in
The Go-Between.
"They do things differently there." Using an exotic setting for your traditional mystery may involve choosing a location you can't get to by train or plane. Through mysteries, you can visit ancient Egypt (Lynda Robinson), ancient Rome (Steven Saylor, Lindsey Davis), Victorian England (Anne Perry), the 1920s (Annette Meyers, Carola Dunn), medieval Europe (Sharan Newman, Ellis Peters). You can meet historic figures such as Houdini (Barbara Michaels, Daniel Stashower, Walter Satterthwaite), the Prince of Wales (not the current one; Queen Victoria's oldest son) (Peter Lovescy), or Jane Austen (Stephanie Barron).

Some authors choose history because they love a certain period and want to share their deep understanding of it with readers. Others frankly admit that one of the charms of history is that it lacks DNA testing. In a world without modern forensics, the amateur, be he monk or prince, has as good a chance of success as the official investigating body. By removing today's scientifically inclined police from the scene, they essentially recreate the conditions under which Dupin and Holmes first flourished.

Comic Relief

Playing it for laughs has been part of the mystery tradition even before
Craig
Rice, the screwball comedy queen of the forties, and humor spans all three of the major subgenres. Joan Hess combines humor and regionalism in her Maggody series, while Parnell Hall injects hearty doses of laughter into his Stanley Hastings P.I. series. For a wonderful sendup of the old country house mystery, James Anderson's
Affair of the Bloodstained Egg Cosy
is a must, while Lawrence Blocks more recent Bernie Rhodenbarr books give us sly variations on some of the oldest tricks in the traditional mystery book.

The only caveat about using humor: to paraphrase the old actor's saying, "Killing people is easy; comedy is hard."

You Gotta Have a Gimmick
Take a stroll through your local bookstore to check out the mystery shelves and you'll see what I mean by a gimmick. If talking cats (Carole Nelson Douglas, Rita Mae Brown) aren't solving crimes, then cooks who provide the reader with recipes do the job (Diane Mott Davidson, Jerri-lyn Farmer). Herbalist-detectives
(Susan
Wittig Albert) give advice on how to dry and use oregano, while crossword puzzle mysteries (Parnell Hall) provide double the pleasure for the word addict. Some of the strictest rules of the old school are broken by authors using ghosts (Nancy Atherton's
Aunt Dimity's Death)
and psychics (Martha Lawrence's Elizabeth Chase series) as detectives.

The trick is not to allow the gimmick to replace a solid mystery core. The culinary detective must not only cook, she must detect. The psychic detective must do more than just wait for inspiration from the beyond.

The "Dark Cozy"

The classic whodunit has been called a comedy of manners, but in

America, broader social commentary has been part of the genre ever since Mark Twain's
Pudd'nhead Wilson,
the first book ever to use fingerprints as a mode of detection (well before their use crept into real-life police work). Today's traditional mysteries go deeper than the Golden Age writers ever thought about going and today's writers use the form to explore social and personal problems.

Nancy Pickard deals with mental illness in
I.0.U.
Margaret Maron examines the bitter heritage of Southern racism in
Home Fires.
Minette Walters (
The Ice House)
delves deeply into the psychological torment beneath placid middle-class facades.

It may even seem that the traditional lines have blurred. There are cozies that bite and private eyes who cry.

The American Hard-Boiled Detective Story

If Agatha Christie's St. Mary Mead is "the great good place," as Auden insists, then the American urban landscape constitutes "the great wrong place." This is the San Francisco of Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade, the Los Angeles of Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald, the Florida of Elmore Leonard, the New York of Lawrence Block's Matt Scudder.

In this world, murder is not an aberration. Order didn't exist before this particular victim was killed, and it's not going to exist after the killer is caught. Justice isn't really possible; the most you can get is "some justice."

"It's Chinatown, Jake," Gittes's cop pal reminds him at the end of
Chinatown,
when it's clear that the villain will get away with his crimes, and the point is that it's
all
Chinatown. In this world, the cops aren't amiable bunglers; they're corrupt and actively hostile to any truth that could upset the rotten apple cart. Even if the killer is hauled away in handcuffs or blown away by a well-aimed .44, the idyllic, peaceful, orderly world represented by the English village is very, very far away.

This world demands a different detective from the cerebral, scientific Great Detective. An investigator going head-to-head with a villain this violent had better be able to use violence himself if necessary. The scientific method isn't much use if the evidence will never see the inside of a courtroom because the cops are corrupt and won't arrest anyone with too much power. Other qualities are called for in this type of mystery, and the hard-boiled detective embodies those traits.

Yes, I'm going to quote Chandler. Here it comes: "Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid." That phrase lies at the heart of the American hard-boiled tradition, and it's as alive in Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone and Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins as it ever was in the old
Black Mask
days.

Tough private eyes started out as white American males. Women were faithful, warmhearted secretaries, long-suffering girlfriends, and red-lipsticked
femmes fatales.
Nonwhite males and females appeared as walk-on characters at best. Today's shamuses come in both genders and all races. The great wrong place is no longer just the American city; a sense that
officialdom can be bought
pervades the world. Justice is hard to come by, as some sensational jury verdicts have shown, and the sensibility of the private eye reflects that cynical approach to reality.

With the widening of the circle, new perspectives entered the field. It's all but impossible to read books set in Los Angeles during the forties and fifties without filtering them through Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins series, which illuminates the dark heart of racism that permeated the LAPD. V.I. Warshawski and Kinsey Millhone walk those mean streets with the same incorruptible courage shown by Philip Marlowe, yet because they're female they bring a different sensibility
to the art
of private investigation. Marcus Didius Falco wears a toga instead of a trench coat, but his anachronistic presence in ancient Rome allows us to see that long-dead world through very modern eyes.

Non-P.I. detectives who act like private eyes even though they wear a badge (Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch, Ian Rankin's John Rebus) or have a law degree (John Lescroart's Dismas Hardy) or do social work (Abigail Padgett's Bo Bradley) provide another twist on the hard-boiled genre. It's the worldview that makes a hard-boiled story, not the fedora. It's the attitude that Harlan Cobens Myron Bolitar, sports agent, brings to his cases that makes him an integral part of this subgenre.

The essential whodunit bones are still there, but with a twist. The hard-boiled story provides us with bodies, not just a single body. Instead of the small circle of suspects being confined to a small community, there are subterranean connections between the victim and perpetrator that the detective must uncover. The villains make active attempts to silence the detective by force rather than throw him off the scent with false clues. A world of random violence instead of stability leads to the impossibility of restoring order to a place that never had order to begin with.

The Procedural

Somewhere along the line, mystery writers realized that murders weren't actually being solved by gifted amateurs with independent incomes or by seedy private eyes with bottles of rye whiskey in their desk drawers. Real cops did real work and, at least occasionally, came up with the killer. Like Sherlock Holmes, these detectives used science, like the Hard-boiled Dicks, they used violence when necessary. Unlike the cops in St. Mary Mead, they weren't bunglers; unlike the cops in Bay City, California, they weren't corrupt.

The antecedents of the classic whodunit and the hard-boiled detective story are both fairly clear, but who invented the police procedural is shrouded in mystery. Was Sergeant Cuff of Wilkie Collins's
The Moonstone
(1868) the first fictional cop we readers were meant to identify with and view as a real detective? Or was it Sergeant Friday of the LAPD who galvanized mystery buffs into finally giving official police their due?

One major difference between the traditional police procedural and the other two strains of detective story is that the police are not loners. One individual does not solve the crime in a vacuum; it takes a squad, working together and sharing information, to do the job. Ed McBain's wildly successful 87th Precinct books are the perfect example; the precinct is the star, not a single detective. Reginald Hill's British procedural center on Superintendent Andy Dalziel and his subordinates Chief Inspector Peter Pascoe and Sergeant Wield. They each interrogate different witnesses and provide pieces of the final solution to the crime, as well as bringing very different sensibilities to bear on the event.

The police solve crimes the old-fashioned way: by wearing out shoe leather canvassing witnesses and comparing their stories, by using science to connect fragments of evidence to a particular suspect, and by exploiting the power to arrest. The reader goes along for the ride because he is fascinated by the actual details of crime solving, not just the intellectual pyrotechnics of the Great Detective or the tough-guy tricks of the Hard-boiled Dick.

The procedural celebrated the police, but it also whitewashed them (pun intended). They were cast in the mold of Sgt. Joe Friday, speaking in terse syllables and devoted to justice for all. Surely there were no racists in Friday's police department, surely no one working with him ever abused a suspect or coerced a confession or planted evidence or hushed up a crime because a perpetrator was politically connected. Friday and his partners didn't even use bad language, and not only because they were television cops and had to pass the censors. They were straight-arrow stand-up guys with all the emotional depth of wood.

Joseph Wambaugh, though not a mystery writer in his early years, broke down the blue wall and let the reader see a more realistic police force. His cops weren't super-detectives, they were a mixture of profane, scared, macho, racist, compassionate, alcoholic, ambitious, burned out, loyal, and human. Above all, they were human.

James Ellroy went farther than Wambaugh in portraying the LAPD of the fifties as corrupt, violent, racist, and cunning—from top to bottom. Walter Mosley, writing a private eye series, nevertheless shone a harsh spotlight on institutional racism.

Today's police mysteries are not all procedurals. Some who detect under the auspices of police departments are actually loner private-eye characters with a badge; others are traditional detectives using traditional methods of detecting. But all bear some mark of Wambaugh's influence, because all now acknowledge that police forces and the men and women who work in them are far from perfect.

The biggest news in the world of procedurals is that they aren't confined to police anymore. Patricia Cornwell and Kathy Reichs hit the best-seller's list with medical examiner procedurals, which track the day-to-day efforts of today's forensic scientists to solve complex murder cases. Television's
CSI
takes us behind the scenes of a big-city crime scene unit and makes the most minute, painstaking matching of hairs and fibers seem like an adventure.

Other People's Troubles _

Perhaps the major alteration in the world of the mystery novel was the gradual shift from the detective's concentration on other people's troubles to the present-day expectation readers have that the detective, whether amateur, private eye, or police officer, will grow and develop in the course of solving the crime.