Writing a murder mystery is a tricky business. It’s unlike writing most other genres of book in that it generally either requires a lot of careful planning and plotting or one hell of an editing process. I tend to prefer the former.
The rules with regards to writing murder mysteries are well publicised (and I have my own thoughts and views on these, which I’ll come to in a later post) but very few murder mystery novels are ruined through omission. On the contrary, including a real humdinger of an error can throw an entire novel out of kilter (and, more often than not, into the bin). Here are 5 mistakes to avoid when writing your next murder mystery…
1. Ensure your killer isn’t guessable
This might sound blindingly obvious, but you’d be amazed at how many writers forget this. They go in for plot twists and building suspense and believe that the action will save them from the fact that their killer is easy to guess. I know. I’ve been there myself. But if that’s the case, you’ve got to admit that you’re not writing a murder mystery; you’re writing a thriller.
A good rule of thumb is to make sure that everyone could’ve done it. Either that or as many people as possible. Blast open the avenues of suspicion and ensure that every character either has a motive, means or opportunity. Create marks of suspicion, as I like to call them, ensuring that no character is completely innocent. If any character should seem completely innocent, it should probably be your killer.
When you give your book to your alpha/beta readers (which you should always do), omit the section where the killer is unveiled and ask them to guess who the killer is or to order the suspects by their likelihood of having done it. If your killer’s near the top of this list, you’ve got some work to do. Leaving three or four viable killers at the end means you can easily change this if you need to.
2. Don’t crowd us with suspects
There’s a fine line between having enough viable suspects to make it difficult to guess the killer and flooding us with names and characters simply to hide poor mystery plotting.
Some mystery writers introduce so many new characters in the first chapter that readers have trouble keeping up. Make sure your characters are distinct, speak differently and act differently. Also ensure their names are different in order to help readers differentiate between them. Don’t forget: even though you may know your characters inside out, this is the first time we’ve met them. It’s akin to being thrown into a huge party where you know nobody.
A good rule of thumb is to write out the alphabet from A-Z and every time you name a character, write their name next to the letter it begins with. That letter’s now taken, so if you name a character John and later want to introduce a Joanne, you’d better just call her Emma or Brenda.
3. Tie up EVERY loose end. No dead-end red herrings!
The concept of the red herring is grossly misunderstood by many new mystery writers. It’s not simply a dud plot line or device you can chuck in to throw the reader off their scent. If a character regularly visits the grave of a murder victim, disappeared from home in the dead of night at the time of the murder or did a runner and skipped the country shortly after, make sure you can explain why.
Tie up all these loose ends and either ensure that every clue is either directly linked to the murder or has a logical explanation which ties in to the resolution. Keep it plausible and explain everything. Dead-end red herrings can infuriate a reader more than most other things in a murder mystery.
4. Make sure we know the killer
The revelation of the killer will mean absolutely nothing if it’s someone we haven’t been introduced to earlier. We should meet the killer early in the book and at least have a passing familiarity with him or her in order to be surprised when they’re revealed.
Think of the murder stories you read about in the newspaper. If you read that a man you’ve never heard of has been arrested for a murder, would you be at all interested or surprised? Not much, probably. But what if it was your friend Mark or the bloke who runs the local chippy? Or the guy who works in your local pub who you vaguely recognise? Even this sort of passing familiarity with a person can blow the effect of the reveal of the killer into epic proportions.
5. Never underestimate your reader
There will always be readers who guess the killer. Even if you’ve got 20 real suspects (and that’s quite a few), you’d only need 20 people to read the book and by law of averages someone will have guessed who the killer was.
This is why you need to be extra careful to mask your murderer and throw a spanner into the works which means they could not possibly have done it. Of course, this will need to be explained at the end as, naturally, all will not have been as it seems.
Agatha Christie was an absolute master of this type of deception. If you haven’t already done so, read And Then There Were None. This is a masterclass in showing you how the impossible killer can become very, very possible indeed.