The Hardest Part for an Amateur Sleuth

Donis here, still carrying on, still writing on a mystery and hoping my protagonist is smarter than I am. When I start a mystery novel, I usually know who the murderer is, and I usually know how and why s/he did it. I also have an idea how the killer went about trying to cover up the crime. I’m pretty good about doling out clues at appropriate intervals throughout the story. But here’s the hardest part: Bianca, my protagonist, has to figure out who did the deed.

What’s the problem, you ask? Just have your sleuth sort through the clues, make the right connections, and Bob’s your uncle.

As anyone who has ever written a mystery can attest, it’s not that easy, my friend, because you have to do it in such a way that is realistic and makes sense.

My protagonist,Bianca, is a Jazz age silent movie star, quite unlike my earlier protagonist, Alafair, who is an Oklahoma farm wife with a bunch of children. But like Alafair, Bianca is not a law enforcement professional or a private investigator. She doesn’t solve crimes for a living, nor does she have any official authority to compel people to answer her questions. She also lives in an era when people are constrained by fairly rigid gender roles. So, question number one is: what is she doing trying to solve a murder, anyway? The first thing I have to do is give her a really compelling reason to get involved.

Then I have to give her the means and the opportunities to uncover information and make connections, and I can’t force the action to fit the outcome I want. In other words, I can’t have Bianca doing things that a woman of her time and place - even one with her considerable resources - wouldn’t do. I can’t have her act against her own nature, either, just to advance the plot or create tension in an artificial way.

This is the reason I’ve been known to stare at the screen for an hour when I’m at a critical juncture, thinking, "how can Bianca figure out what a mobster is up to," or “how can I get Alafair off the farm and into that office in town to search for the gun, before sundown, when she has ten kids who want dinner?”

Whatever my heroine does, it must be realistic. Sometimes I just can’t come up with a plausible way to do it, and I have to go at it from a totally different angle or rework the scene altogether.

Forcing the action is a common mistake for a beginning writer. I often see it done in one of two ways. One is the “Idiot College Student Syndrome”. This is when the character has been brilliant throughout the book, but suddenly does something stupid just so you can put her in danger and increase the tension. One by one, five college students went into that dark room alone and were massacred by an ax murderer. In the name of all that’s holy, Number Six, don’t go in there! Call the police, you idiot!

Second is the “Wildly Unbelievable Coincidence”, in which the author hands the sleuth the vital clue in the most implausible fashion. The detective didn’t detect. He just happened to be in the right place. He just happened to stumble across an object. The killer suddenly leaped up out of his chair and confessed. I have to be sure that my sleuth honestly found the answer using the information provided in the story.

This is one of the things I like about an amateur sleuth - she has to be sneaky, persistent, smart, and clever in order to find her answers. In fact, there have been occasions where my protagonist came upon a clue that I was not aware of myself until it appeared on the page. Toward the end of my fourth book, The Sky Took Him, Alafair was sitting in a hospital corridor, having a nice, normal, conversation with the family, when she noticed something at exactly the same time I did, an observation which provided both of us with a vital piece of information. It surprised the heck out of me, but it was plausible, very much in character for Alafair, and worked like a charm. Moments like this are why writing a mystery can be such fun.

I'm working on my twelfth mystery right now, and praying for Bianca to come up with a blinding insight and let me in on it.

The most amazing personal computer of all

Food for thought. I had been wondering what to post on my blog today, when a couple of coincidences fell into my lap. First of all, this week's posts have been about old computers, freezing screens, and corrupted files – all terrifying experiences for a writer. Not being millionaires, most of us try to coax more life out of our moribund computers than they are really capable of.

Secondly, my daughter posted a photo of my wedding day to the family What's App group. It would have been our fiftieth wedding anniversary today, and I realized looking at the photo that everyone in the photo was dead except me. How did that happen? I still feel the same as that young, mini-skirted bride in that photo.

Well, almost.

It got me to thinking about old writers, brain freezes, and information overload. Can an old brain truly keep writing at the same level as its younger self? Philip Roth stopped writing novels in his late seventies because he felt he no longer had the stamina or verbal fluency needed, and he did not want to write a mediocre work. Other writers have kept going but, reading their later work, you can see a decline. A subtle lack of sparkle, creativity, and complexity. That's a scary thought. We all strive to be better with each book. No writer wants people to shake their heads and say, "She should have quit a year or two ago".

And yet other writers carry on well into their eighties, and in the case of PD James, into their nineties. My own mother wrote a book (a non-fiction social history, not a novel) at the age of 86. How will we know when our best work is behind us? Mysteries are among the complex of the genres. We have to keep track of many threads and not only worry about plot, characters, and setting, but also build suspense, create clues and red herrings, and weave it all together into an exciting, coherent whole at the end. It's a lot of balls to keep in the air and a BIG picture to keep track of. No simple slice of life or rambling free association story here!

The curse of being a psychologist is that I know more about the brain than I'd like. Some of its functions, like memory, processing speeds and reaction times, begin their decline in the twenties. Working memory and fluid reasoning – the ability to juggle and recombine elements to create novel solutions – are not far behind. In women particularly, menopause hits verbal memory hard. We all laugh about our trouble remembering names and finding the right word, but the effect is unsettling. Often I stare at the page, trying to capture that elusive word or phrase that I know is lurking somewhere in my brain, out of reach. I use the thesaurus as a memory trigger, or I write a poor alternative in the hope that the perfect one will pop up at some later time (like the middle of the night). And often I find myself asking my children "Have I told you this before?"

Still, there is much to value about older brains. There is greater experience and wisdom. There is an empathy, breadth, and patience that comes across in our stories. I think as long as the latter outweigh the problems in memory and verbal fluency, it is worth carrying on. I hope I know when the scales tip. It doesn't mean a writer has to stop writing. I plan to write short stories when I can no longer keep track of whole novels, and I also hope to do a memoir of my father's life and maybe some journaling of my own. Writing itself helps to keep the brain sharp.

Meanwhile, exercise, diet, stress reduction, new experiences, and other lifestyle activities can all help keep us young at heart. Check out some thoughts on this page about the care and maintenance of the best personal computer of them all.

Here's to continuing the adventure of our lives!

A Gold Mine for Mysteries

Please welcome our weekend guest, Dave Butler, an exciting new writer from British Columbia. Dave is the author of the Jenny Willson mystery series, published by Dundurn Press. Full Curl, the first in the series, won the Arthur Ellis Award for Best First Crime Novel in Canada in 2018, and is also a finalist in the mystery category for the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writers awards. 

Dave is a forester and biologist living in Cranbrook, British Columbia, in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains. His writing and photography have appeared in numerous Canadian publications. He’s a Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal winner, and a Fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. When he’s not writing, Dave is professionally involved in sustainable tourism at local, national and international levels and he travels extensively. He’s a Professional Author Member of the Crime Writers of Canada, and a member of The Writers Union of Canada. Take it away, Dave!

Rick Blechta’s June 5^thpost offered some intriguing thoughts on the creative process. Rick wisely linked writing and music, but he also referenced the Greek goddesses who (may) act as his muse. I can’t help but wonder what Rick’s office is like, what with all those scantily-robed women lying around, sipping wine, tossing grapes into their mouths, strumming harps, offering him plot points.

While I’m not so lucky, and while my office may be much less crowded than is Rick’s, I have discovered that the front pages of major newspapers (or, if you’re so inclined, the home pages of major on-line news outlets) are veritable gold mines of ideas for mysteries.

Aside from the obvious surplus of political intrigue these days, I’ve been using major land use and development issues as a source of inspiration for my Jenny Willson mystery novels. As the Twilight Zone’s Rod Serling used to say, “I offer for your consideration:” a good mystery needs a protagonist, an antagonist or two, lots of human emotion, inciting incidents, obstacles, a climax, and at some point, a denouement.  

Now think about pipelines, mining applications, new hydro dams, nuclear power plants, new ski hills, industrial agriculture proposals, gentrification of historic urban neighborhoods. See any parallels?

In every one of those situations, there’s no shortage of people willing to step up and take a side. And they don’t tend to do it quietly. Some are unstable and unpredictable, some sophisticated and professional. But the main things they have in common are that they care, and they’re willing to express their opinion. Campaigns are then built, clever posters created, noisy demonstrations organized. Emotions build, passions rise, and soon, neighbours turn against neighbours, friends turn against friends, and family dinners become awkward … if not violent. Often, these controversies quickly become good-vs-evil, black-vs-white, win-vs-lose, right-vs-wrong. 

There’s your gold mine, with the (mystery) ore ready for the digging, close to the surface. You can use any excavation tool you’d like, from shovels to backhoes. Even a teaspoon will do. 

Digging up those ideas is relatively easy because there are so many rich sources all around us. But like most mines, it’s the processing that’s the challenging and time-consuming part of the process. Once you’ve got healthy samples of that mystery ore, you need to take it to the next step. That’s when it’s fun to ask the famous ‘what if?’ question that we mystery writers hear so much about. 

What if the opponent of that hydro dam was willing to murder one of its main proponents to stop it from happening? (if Edward Abbey and The Monkey Wrench Gang comes to mind, you’re already on the right track…). What if the main spokesperson for that new downtown condo development disappeared without a trace? What if the proponent of a new power plant decided to murder her opponents, one-by-one, to silence them?

In Full Curl, the first Jenny Willson mystery, I asked the question: what if someone with no morals or ethics decided to use Canada’s national parks as a source of trophy animals? In the second, No Place for Wolverines, the question became: what if someone proposed a new ski area partly inside a national park, but the project wasn’t what it seemed on the surface? I’m working on In Rhino We Trustnow (the third in the series); that involves processing piles of Namibian mystery ore, along with the occasional pile of steaming rhinoceros dung…

If you’re stuck for ideas, or suffering from a short bout of writer’s block, grab a newspaper or your tablet and start asking “what if…?” I’m offer no guarantees that it will work for you. It does for me. But trying this idea just might lead you down a new creative path. Good luck!

You can learn more about Dave, Full Curl, and future projects at www.davebutlerwriting.com.