Read The Elements of Mystery Fiction: Writing the Modern Whodunit Online
Authors: William G. Tapply
The Elements of Mystery Fiction: Writing the Modern Whodunit (9 page)
To have him not think these thoughts is cheating your reader. On the other hand, if he does share these thoughts with readers, they will solve the mystery puzzle before your sleuth does.
Writing in the point of view of all significant characters except the villain will also give away the mystery to observant readers. They will notice whose point of view you are avoiding, and they will figure out why.
Omniscient point of view
The omniscient narrator is the author himself, who knows everything and who shares—and withholds—information from the reader as she chooses. This kind of narration, unless handled with great care, feels arbitrary to readers. They tend to feel manipulated by it. They know they are being told only what the writer chooses to tell them. The puzzle feels like a game of hide-and-seek between writer and reader, rather than a problem for the reader to share with a sympathetic sleuth.
Here is a version of our earlier scene between Michael Blake and Sarah Benjamin, this time told from the point of view of an omniscient narrator:
An anxious smile creased Michael Blake’s handsome face. The tall, middle-aged lawyer pushed open the glass door. He was wearing a pin-striped suit. A thin leather briefcase dangled from his hand. He looked at the old woman sitting at the patio table. Her glasses were perched low on her long aristocratic nose. She was reading old letters from her daughter. Sarah Benjamin hadn’t seen Mary Ann since the death of her husband, Mary Ann’s father. All she had left were these faded old letters.
Blake was not only Sarah’s lawyer. He was also her friend and confidant. He wasn’t sure why she had summoned him. He knew she was dying of cancer. Probably she wanted to straighten out her will, settle things while she was still able.
“
Sarah,” he said to her, making his voice as gentle and friendly as he could under the circumstances.
When she heard Michael’s voice, Sarah peered up at him over the tops of her glasses. She shivered. In spite of the bulky sweatshirt—it had once belonged to Mary Ann, a souvenir from their summer trip to Quebec back when Charles was still alive—she was cold. It was the damned chemotherapy.
With this omniscient narration, the reader wanders more or less randomly into and out of the heads of the two characters. Sometimes they are seen from a distance as they are described by the author. At other times the reader is privy to their thoughts. Readers are given no shoes to stand in except those of the all-knowing writer, and they are being asked to identify with two characters simultaneously.
Except in highly skilled hands, omniscient narration feels manipulative and impersonal. Even when it manages to sustain a complex puzzle, it discourages readers from caring about it or trying to solve it.
The neutral or missing point of view
A variation of the omniscient is the point of view that consistently keeps readers at arm’s length from all the story’s characters. The all-seeing narrator reports only what is observable and refrains from entering any character’s mind.
The neutral narrator reports the Michael Blake-Sarah Benjamin scene this way:
Michael Blake pushed open the glass door. Sarah Benjamin was sitting at the patio table. Her glasses were perched low on her long aristocratic nose. She was studying a stack of papers. She wore a bulky sweatshirt and baggy blue jeans. There were deep creases in her craggy face.
“
Sarah,” said Blake gently.
She raised her eyes over her glasses without lifting her head. “Well, hello, Michael,” she said with a soft smile. “Come sit.”
He went over and sat across from her. She held her bony hand to him and he took it.
“
You’ve been avoiding me,” she said.
“
Nonsense,” he replied.
In this example, the creases in Sarah’s face and her bony hand simply describe her. They no longer work to hint at Michael’s fondness for Sarah or his concern about her deteriorating health.
Unlike the omniscient, the neutral point of view is really no point of view at all. Because it forces readers to observe each character through a one-way mirror and prevents them from entering any character’s mind, they are unlikely to care deeply about any of them.
Second person
In the second person, the narrator is someone called “you.” Instead of a character being the story’s protagonist and narrator, “you” are.
For example:
You take a deep breath and push open the door. You see Sarah sitting at the patio table. She’s not looking well, you think.
“
Sarah,” you say.
With this point of view, you hope to convince your reader to become a character in your story. But readers
know
they’re not pushing open doors and speaking to Sarah.
Avoid the second-person point of view, if only because it’s so unusual that it calls attention to itself. It strikes the reader as a facile stylistic trick. To be effective, writing should be invisible. It should allow readers to submerge themselves in the story by identifying with a single sympathetic character. Second-person narration keeps reminding readers that they’re being toyed with by a writer who’s trying awfully hard to be clever. It gives them no character to connect with.
A short story might sustain a second-person narrator. But I know of no mystery novel that’s done it successfully—or of any serious writers who’ll admit that they’ve even tried.
Chapter 6
Setting: The Scene
of the Crime
No matter what your sleuth is doing—driving a car through the night, interviewing a suspect, waiting in an office, getting beaten up, watching television, or lying in bed thinking—she always has to be somewhere.
You can’t have a scene without a setting.
Setting is more than place
Setting is more than geographical place. It comprises all the conditions under which things happen—region, neighborhood, buildings, interiors, climate, weather, topography, flora, fauna, time of day, season of year. It involves not just the scenery, but also the sounds and smells and textures of places.
Successful mysteries have been set in every imaginable city and region in the world. Big cities such as New York, London, Boston, Detroit, and Los Angeles are popular. Sara Paretsky has put Chicago on the mystery map. But increasingly such writers as Tony Hillerman and Jake Page are invoking the richness of the American Southwest. Carl Hiaasen and Edna Buchanan are among the many who set their mysteries in Florida. Dana Sabenow writes about Alaska and Patricia Cornwell about Richmond, Virginia. Philip R. Craig’s novels take place on Martha’s Vineyard; Brendan DuBois writes about New Hampshire’s few miles of seashore. All of these settings work because the authors know them. What’s really important is being so familiar with your settings that you can invoke the defining details that will bring them to life and be useful in your stories.
Your settings must strike your readers as realistic. A true-to-life setting persuades readers to suspend their disbelief and accept the premise that your story really happened. The easiest way to do this is to write knowledgeably and confidently about real places.
Mood, theme, and character
Mystery writers appeal to all of their readers’ senses to establish their story’s setting and mood. James Lee Burke, in
Black Cherry Blues
, evokes a section of Baton Rouge this way:
The rain clattered on my truck cab, and the wind was blowing strong out of the southwest, across the Atchafalaya swamp, whipping the palm and oak trees by the highway. West Baton Rouge, which begins at the Mississippi River, has always been a seedy area of truck stops, marginal gambling joints, Negro and blue-collar bars. To the east you can see the lighted girders of the Earl K. Long Bridge, plumes of smoke rising from the oil refineries, the state capitol building silhouetted in the rain. Baton Rouge is a green town full of oak trees, parks, and lakes, and the thousands of lights on the refineries and chemical plants are
regarded as a testimony to financial security rather than a sign of industrial blight. But once you drive west across the metal grid of the bridge and thump down on the old cracked four-lane, you’re in a world that caters to the people of the Atchafalaya basin—Cajuns, redbones, roustabouts, pipeliners, rednecks whose shrinking piece of American geography is identified only by a battered pickup, a tape deck playing Waylon, and a twelve-pack of Jax.
In this passage, Burke’s narrator focuses on his physical surroundings—the colors and sounds and the people who are part of the place. Although Burke does not directly describe any sense impressions other than “clattered” and “thump,” it’s easy to smell the refineries and chemical plants and to feel the dampness of the southwest wind that blows in from the swamp.
In a film or a stage play, the setting is always visible to the viewer, and conversations, actions and setting are available simultaneously. Complex settings do not distract from other components of the scene. In a book or short story, however, all that’s visible is what the writer presents in words. A powerful paragraph of description such as Burke’s does not interrupt the story’s flow. Longer—or less adept—descriptive passages, on the other hand, can cause readers to lose touch with the story’s characters and action.
The writer’s challenge is to integrate setting into a scene’s other components, such as dialogue and action, so that it is vivid without interrupting or intruding on the events. Here is how Sue Grafton’s narrator, Kinsey Millhone, describes the motel she has just entered, in
F Is for Fugitive
:
I moved to the counter and peered to my right. Through an open door, I caught a glimpse of a hospital bed. There was the murmur of voices, but I couldn’t see a soul. I heard the muffled flushing of a toilet, pipes clanking noisily. The air was soon scented with the artificial bouquet of room spray, impossibly sweet. Nothing in nature has ever smelled like that.
Several minutes passed. There was no seating available, so I stood where I was, turning to survey the narrow room. …
Here the descriptions are short, so that the reader’s attention remains on Kinsey. The smells and sounds of the motel are carefully woven into the scene without distracting readers from their focus on Kinsey and her reason for being there.
Opening scenes with setting
Films typically begin with an “establishing shot.” The camera pans across a crowded restaurant or a mountain range or a city street to fix the viewer in a place
before the action begins
. Coming at the beginning, establishing shots do not interrupt ongoing action or distract the viewer.
Mystery writers can use the establishing shot to equally good effect. The following passage, for example, begins Chapter One in Peter Hoeg’s
Smilla’s Sense of Snow
:
It’s freezing—an extraordinary 0-degree Fahrenheit—and it’s snowing, and in the language that is no longer mine, the snow is
ganik
—big, almost weightless crystals falling in clumps and covering the ground with a layer of pulverized white frost.
December, darkness rises up from the grave, seeming as limitless as the sky above us. In this darkness our faces are merely pale, shining orbs.…
Here Hoeg uses an establishing shot of the dominant element in the setting, the snow. Then he pans quickly to the cemetery (“the grave”) before establishing that other people (“our faces”) are present in the scene.
Lawrence Sanders begins
The First Deadly Sin
this way:
There was quiet. He lay on his back atop a shaft of stone called Devil’s Needle, and felt he was lost, floating in air. Above him, all about him stretched a thin blue sac. Through it he could see scribbles of clouds, a lemon sun.
He heard nothing but his own strong heart, the slowly quieting of his breath as he recovered from his climb. He could believe he was alone in the universe.
Finally, he stood and looked around him. Waves of foliage lapped at the base of his stone; it was a dark green ocean with a froth of autumn’s russet. He could see the highway, the tarred roofs of Chilton, a steel ribbon of river uncoiling southward to the sea.
Sanders’ opening scene, like Hoeg’s, depends largely on description. But neither of the scenes is static. Something is happening. In Hoeg’s beginning, the narrator’s distinctive observations, plus her use of an unusual foreign word, draws readers into the story that will unfold. In the scene by Sanders, readers are acutely aware that the scenery is being presented through the eyes of the point-of-view character, who has just climbed to the top of this rock. Besides establishing specific seasons and locations, both scenes introduce readers to the characters’ narrative voices and, by their observations, give hints about their personalities and interests. The two scenes also establish certain expectations in the reader and set the tone for what follows. In this way, even relatively straightforward narrative descriptions, when presented through the point of view of the protagonist, can serve many purposes.
