Writing Mysteries by Sue Grafton

Author:Sue Grafton
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: ebook, epub
ISBN: 9781582971025
Publisher: Writer's Digest Books
Published: 2002-04-22T07:00:00+00:00

twenty-one

CLUES, RED HERRINGS, AND OTHER PLOT DEVICES

P.M. Carlson

“But I want you to be the victim. And the person who kills you can be Deirdre Henderson. The repressed plain girl whom nobody notices.”

“There you are, Ariadne,” said Robin. “The whole plot of your next novel presented to you. All you'll have to do is work in a few false clues, and — of course — do the actual writing.”

— Agatha Christie, Mrs. McGinty's Dead

“All you'll have to do is work in a few false clues....” Yeah, sure. Anyone who's ever tried to plot a mystery knows that Robin's careless words to Ariadne Oliver gloss over one of the most difficult and most important aspects of plotting.

My own books generally start with a complicated cluster of an unusual motive or an unusual murder method with a setting that I find interesting and a character or two whose problems I want to explore. Even at this primitive stage it's almost impossible to answer the cocktail-party question, “Where do you get your ideas?”because a lot of sources have already fed into the cluster. But once this cluster of “ideas” has jelled into the basic triangle of victim, murderer, and detective, the hard work of plotting begins.

A logical story of the murder must be laid out early, of course, even though it will be revealed in a less logical order and won't be seen in full until the end of the book. Signs of this logical story must be thought out carefully for the detective (and reader) to discover as the story progresses. At this early stage I try not to tie things down too much. My notes are full of question marks — maybe this, maybe that — but it's important to me to get a rough sketch of the true direction to be tracked. I'll be subjecting my detective to plenty of distractions and agonies, but this is the trail my hunter must ultimately follow. As Watson writes of Sherlock Holmes in “The Boscombe Valley Mystery,”

Men who had only known the quiet thinker and logician of Baker Street would have failed to recognize him. His face flushed and darkened. His brows were drawn into two hard black lines, while his eyes shone out from beneath them with a steely glitter. His face was bent downward, his shoulders bowed, his lips compressed, and his veins stood out like whipcord in his long, sinewy neck. His nostrils seemed to dilate with a purely animal lust for the chase, and his mind was so absolutely concentrated upon the matter before him that a question or remark fell unheeded upon his ears, or, at the most, only provoked a quick, impatient snarl in reply.

The metaphor of detective as hunting dog hot on the scent has been with us for a long time. And it's useful to remind myself that readers too are hot on the scent, a whole pack of eager hounds chasing after my foxy murderer. Some readers are wily old hunters who know all the

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