Writing and Selling Your Mystery Novel Revised and Expanded Edition by Hallie Ephron

Author:Hallie Ephron
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: F+W Media
Published: 2017-01-12T16:00:00+00:00

What happens in this brief passage? Not much, right? It’s narrated in the first person with Christopher trying to figure out what happened to his neighbor’s dog. But through what he observes, and how he tells us about it, we learn a great deal about him. He is logical, precise (he tells us it’s 7 minutes after midnight). Even though finding a dead dog might be traumatic to most boys, he is unemotional and observant, noticing the concrete facts of the situation, not its horror. This is amplified by his short, precise, and complete sentences; he never uses contractions. He almost sounds like a robot.

Consider next this excerpt in which Stella Hardesty confronts a friend’s abusive husband in A Bad Day for Sorry:

Stella lowered her gun to her side and let the Raven hang there casually. She could go from full dangle to aimed and ready to shoot in about a tenth of a second. That was a trick she’d worked on most of last winter when business was slow at the shop—sitting on her stool behind the cash register and practicing her draw, tucking the gun into the drawer when the bell at the door signaled a customer’s arrival.

She’s also taught herself to spin the thing on her finger just like Gary Cooper in High Noon, but that trick was strictly for her own enjoyment. She didn’t mind having a little flair, but she wasn’t an idiot: guns, after all, were serious business.

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