The Elements of Mystery Fiction: Writing the Modern Whodunit (10 page)

It’s not a good idea to postpone the action until you’ve set the stage in every scene. You might want to open with a snatch of dialogue or a glimpse of a character. But you must quickly give the reader a sense of where and when the scene is occurring. You can integrate a fuller description of the setting into the action of the scene later, so that the separate parts of the scene work together unobtrusively.

Here, for example, is the way Eileen Dreyer begins the prologue to her novel
A Man to Die For
:

In this opener, Dreyer uses four short paragraphs to introduce two characters and to create a feeling of urgency before letting readers know where the scene takes place. Delaying significantly longer could risk making readers feel disoriented.

Making settings authentic

You
must
get actual places precisely right. One sour note and you risk losing your reader’s trust.

A friend once recommended that I read a book that was set in Boston. In the first chapter was a reference to Newbury Street—except it was spelled N-e-w-b-e-r-r-y. This writer can’t be trusted even to get place names right, I thought. How can I believe this story?

I closed the book and didn’t pick it up again.

Making settings absolutely authentic requires research. No matter how many times you’ve been there, it’s a good idea to go back to the places you intend to write about. Observe the people, listen to the sounds, sniff the smells, absorb the colors and textures, talk with the people you meet. Note the vivid images that define the place. Look for the striking details that make it unique and distinctive and that will enable you to bring it to life for your readers.

Here’s how Patricia Cornwell leads her readers into a morgue in
Cruel and Unusual
:

Visiting your local morgue may not be your idea of fun. But it’s necessary if you want to describe it with the authority that Cornwell has here. Don’t rely on your imagination or what you’ve seen on television to give you the telling details or the smells and sounds of a place. If it’s worth writing about at all, it’s worth getting absolutely right.

In many cases, researching settings is not unpleasant. For example, you should make it a point to eat in every restaurant you write about, no matter how familiar it already is to you, at least twice—once just before writing the scene to fix it in your mind, and once again afterward to make sure you’ve gotten it right. This is not hard work.

Invented settings

Don’t feel limited to using actual places if doing so will alter the story you want to tell. An invented setting can still ring true for your readers. Ed McBain fabricated the 87th Precinct and the city where it lies. Katherine Hall Page invented the Massachusetts town of Aleford, and Sue Grafton’s Santa Teresa is a fictional place, too. Those who write about actual places commonly invent restaurants, businesses, and residences in them. Readers will readily accept the invented places as real provided they resemble actual places.

If the setting you need exists, use it; if it doesn’t exist, make it up, but make it true.

Milieu

In addition to all of the physical elements of place, setting includes the cultures and professions and other activities of your characters. Horse-racing lore is as much a part of Dick Francis’ novels as the racetracks themselves. Forensic medicine is a vital part of the settings in Patricia Cornwell’s stories. Police procedure is integral to the settings in the works of William Caunitz, Joseph Wambaugh, Ed McBain, and other writers whose main characters are police officers. Sports such as professional baseball and college basketball have served as background for novels by Robert Parker. The traditions and ceremonies of the Navajos are important in the reservation settings in Tony Hillerman’s stories.

A setting can be another historical time. Steven Saylor’s short stories, for example, take place in Caesar’s Rome. Ellis Peters’ Brother Cadfael novels are set in medieval Europe. Carole Nelson Douglas, among others, writes Sherlock Holmes pastiches set in Victorian London. Max Allan Collins’ Nathan Heller series revisits famous American crimes. Robert K. Tanenbaum’s Butch Karp, New York City Assistant District Attorney, works in the 1970s. In all cases, the stories are convincing because the authors exhaustively research the historical period they’ve chosen to write about. A single mistake in the customs, technology, speech patterns, or dress of the times can destroy the willingness of knowledgeable readers to believe your story.

An authentic milieu helps convince readers that your story is real. It can also appeal to readers’ curiosity. Everybody likes to learn something new, and when readers can learn while they’re absorbed by an entertaining mystery story, they like it even better.

Settings that work overtime

Your setting is more than just a backdrop for the action of your story. The conditions under which the action occurs can actually do double or even triple duty for you. Setting creates mood and tone. The places where characters live and work give clues to their personalities and motivations. Place, weather, climate, season of year, and time of day can cause things to happen in a story just as surely as characters can.

Shakespeare and Conan Doyle understood how setting can establish mood and foreshadow events. The “dark and stormy night” had its purpose, as did the spooky mansion on the remote moor or the thick fog of a London evening. Contemporary writers use thunderstorms and abandoned warehouses and barrooms and the back alleys of city slums in the same way.

Modern readers are sophisticated, however, and writers have to keep up with them. Obvious settings can too easily become literary clichés. If you misuse or overuse them, they lose their punch.

Never underestimate the power of going against stereotypes. Seek subtlety and irony. Murder can be committed anywhere, anytime. When it happens on a sunny May morning in a suburban backyard, for example, or in a church or school or hospital, the horror of it is intensified.

Carefully selected details of setting delineate the characters who populate it. The pictures or calendars that hang on the office wall suggest the interests and personality of the person who works there. Look for the small details that tell readers about a character before they even see him or her: a policeman’s desk littered with half-empty styrofoam coffee cups or cigar butts or used tea bags or chewing gum wrappers; the absence of a family portrait on the desk of a corporate CEO; the music that’s played on a lawyer’s phone line while your protagonist is on hold; a week’s worth of newspapers piled on an elderly widow’s front porch; a specimen jar containing a smoker’s lung sitting on the desk of a forensic pathologist; a bag of golf clubs in the corner of a politician’s office; or a stack of old
Field & Stream
magazines on the table in a dentist’s waiting room.

In
Billingsgate Shoal
Rick Boyer’s oral surgeon protagonist, Doc Adams, visits his friend Moe Abramson:

An office featuring a big aquarium and Mozart’s music can reveal as much about a character—even before you meet him—as his dress, manner of speech, or physical appearance.

Compare what Moe Abramson’s office reveals about him with what you might deduce about the man whose apartment Carlotta Carlyle enters in Linda Barnes’
A Trouble of Fools
:

The secret of a successfully rendered setting lies
not
in piling detail upon detail. Boyer highlights just three details of Moe Abramson’s office—the Eames chair, the aquarium, and the Mozart concerto. Barnes focuses on the furnishings in Pat’s apartment. And yet in both cases a few carefully chosen details enable readers to color in these settings from their own imaginations.

Think of your settings as characters in your stories. Settings need not be passive; they can act and interact with your characters. Rainstorms cause automobile accidents. Snowstorms cover footprints and stall traffic. The bitter cold of winter kills homeless people in a city park. Water released from a dam raises the level in a river and drowns a trout fisherman.

As you plan your stories, your setting may, at first, be vague and arbitrary. The storyline usually comes first, since it involves character, conflict, motive, detection, and resolution. But as the story begins to grow in your imagination, you’ll discover that you need to place it somewhere specific, and as that happens, you’ll think of ways that the various elements of setting—place, weather, time of year, and so forth—can give your plot its distinctiveness.

For the general storyline, it may be enough to know that a dead body must be found in Chapter One. Once you decide where your tale will take place, however, you should spend time there. Search out particular places where the events in your story can occur. Visit them often enough to absorb their sounds and smells, their colors, their details. Hang around. Talk to the local people. Walk up the alleys.

Learning the skills of observation will make you a better writer. Look at the places you visit through the lens of a camera. Photographs will help jar your imagination when you’re at your typewriter or word processor. If you have an artistic bent, make sketches. Carry a tape recorder and record your observations.

As many details as you gather for your setting, however, avoid extended descriptive passages, because no matter how poetic and original you make them, and no matter how much you might admire the elegance of your own prose, these kinds of passages risk becoming self-indulgent. If they’re too long, they will stall the momentum of the action and threaten to bore your reader, who is eager for the story to continue.

The key to creating effective settings in mystery fiction lies in finding the few
telling
details that will hint at all of the others. Be spare and suggestive. Look for a water stain on the ceiling or a cigarette burn on the sofa. Note the odor of mildew or the rattle of a loose windowpane. If you find the right details, your readers will draw the conclusions you want them to without losing track of the story itself.

Chapter 7

Getting It Started: Setting
the Narrative Hook

The next time you visit a bookstore, do what most fiction writers do in public settings: Watch the people. Find a browser and study the way she selects a book to purchase.

Something compels her to pull a book from the shelf. Perhaps it’s the color of the jacket, or a familiar author’s name on the spine. Maybe it’s an intriguing title. Whatever her reasons, she now holds a book in her hands. She examines the front cover. That may be enough to cause her to replace the book and choose another.

But if she continues to hold onto that book, she probably flips it over and looks at the back of the jacket. If the author’s picture or the blurbs that scream “Amazing!” “Irresistible!” “A real page-turner!” don’t put her off, she opens the book and reads the “flap copy,” which is generally a plot summary designed as a come-on.