Okay, I was trying to be provocative. There isn’t a perfect anything, not even a perfect mystery. Although Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express comes awfully close. Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca does, too. And there are more modern reads like Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn.  But I digress. Back to me writing a perfect whodunit. It’s a worthy goal.

I am heartened by the fact that writing a good mystery is a practiced art. If I play tennis five hours every day, which I don’t but let’s just say I do, I’m going to get pretty good at it. Same with writing a mystery.  I keep in mind that a mystery is a well-written novel that happens to center around a dead body done in by person or persons unknown.

There are some who believe there is a definite separation between the genres of mystery, suspense, and thriller, although many of us combine the three elements when writing our novels. I certainly do. Regardless, I like to keep the definitions straight in my head in case one of our two cats ask what’s the dif. Daphne and Niles are an inquisitive pair (Niles is the one with his belly hanging out).

Mystery – A puzzle of person, place or thing, a ‘whodunit.’ The reader is given clues but has no idea, along with the protagonist, what the outcome will be. If the protagonist is in danger, it’s only when s/he is getting closer to the truth. Mysteries are more of the mind than anything else. Will the protagonist solve the mystery?

Suspense – A ticking time bomb that must be resolved. It has danger but not necessarily action. The reader is often aware of the clues sooner than the protagonist, who must work against time. Suspense plays more on the readers’ emotions. Will the protagonist stop the culprit in time?

Thriller – From the onset, the protagonist is in jeopardy and knows it. The protagonist and reader share the same information at the same time. The thriller has lots of action and keeps the reader on the edge of the seat. No time for thinking or feeling. Will the protagonist survive?

The Cozy Mystery is usually solved by an amateur, often someone who just ‘happens’ to be around at the moment or ‘happens’ to become involved no matter how many books there are in the series. This person does something else for a living but is always bright and committed. The plus side for this type of mystery is the writer ‘merely’ needs to come up with a good story and run with it. No special knowledge is necessary. The protagonist often doesn’t know much more than the reader from the onset of the story. The protagonist learns as s/he goes along, often helped out by a loved one or friend, who tends to have ‘insider info’ that’s missing from our hero. Well, someone has to help advance the plot!

The Detective Mystery revolves around a professional private investigator or law officer, someone who does this for a living. The plus side of this kind of mystery is the writer can dig deeper, go into more detail, reveal maximum facts to the reader, often getting into scenes and places otherwise not available to the average Joe Schmoe. This protagonist is usually more committed to the cause than anyone else, for whatever reason. When I find that reason I’ve got the heart of my story.

Speaking of protagonists, it is essential to have an interesting protagonist, not necessarily likeable, but one with redeeming characteristics. This protagonist should be intelligent and different, someone who knows the rules, but breaks them. S/he has something personal to overcome such as yearning to be a better person or feeling guilty because s/he can’t be. They should also want something, even if it’s a glass of water. Nothing propels a character forward more than wanting something.

When I read mysteries containing successful protagonists, from Miss Marple to Nero Wolf, Sam Spade to Hamish Macbeth, Sherlock Holmes to V.I. Warshawski, I find they all have one thing in common: they are unique. It is essential the protagonist is someone I would want to spend time with at a dinner party, even if once I get home I say, “Wow! What an oddball. I’m glad I don’t have to live with her/him.” Being normal and ordinary just isn’t part of the package. I tend to save that for my youthful love interests.

After I’ve created my protagonist, I occasionally do an essay or interview with her/him in order to flesh the character out. I ask questions, such as: How do they react under pressure? What do they cherish? What do they abhor? Do they believe in justice above all else? Where is their point of mercy? Would they, themselves, take a life? If so, how do they live with that? Then of course, I have to ask what is their favorite color? Not only does that make them feel more ‘real’ to me, but sometimes the mundane can be very revealing.

Now I’ve got the protagonist who’s going to solve the crime(s). Good for me. But where’s my plot? It’s murderous, of course, but I’ve got 175 plus pages to fill out. When I have no idea what kind of plot to wrap around my victim(s), I pick up a magazine, newspaper, listen to a newscast, or search the internet. Sometimes people in my own life have weird stories they love to talk about. So, I listen, absorb, and delve.

The 2^nd novel of the Alvarez Family Murder Mystery Series, A Wedding to Die For, started with an article from National Geographic. It was about an extended family of Egyptian grave robbers, who discovered an ancient royal burial chamber containing precious artifacts. They kept the knowledge to themselves and pilfered from the tomb taking one piece at a time. They did this for generations. They took just enough to feed, clothe, and educate themselves. After decades of careful use of the money, this family came into positions of power within their community and Egypt. Unfortunately, one of them got greedy. Their chicanery was revealed, but it took 60 years to do so. I was entranced. I knew I wanted to take this situation, transfer it to Mexico, and create a powerful family to become the nemesis of the Alvarez clan.

The sub-plot of A Wedding to Die For was a mythical search engine start-up company, Bingo-Bango, and its inhabitants. I felt the sub-plot added a lot of fun and depth to the story, even though it had little to do with the main plot. I did manage, however, to have a situation arise from the sub-plot that gave the protagonist, Lee, an answer to a big problem in the main plot. That was yummy. The finale was the wedding, of course. When I tied everything together, I had the skeleton of my book.

Finally, I go on to the dastardly deed of the murder itself. When my imagination is doing the victim in, the sky’s the limit. What I need to keep in mind, though, is the type of mystery I’m writing. Soft and sweet? Hard-boiled and gritty? Having a disabled little old lady, raped, mutilated and dismembered on page 5 of a story sets up a dark flavor, no matter how many doilies and kittens I throw in.

I have discovered with the cozy it’s best to have the murder victim go in a way that’s more palatable to the reader and off-scene, if possible. But that doesn’t stop me from trying to make it inventive. Drowned in a vat of cabernet sauvignon comes to mind. Someday I may try that. I live in wine country, so forgive me.

If I’m writing a hard-boiled detective story where the protagonist eats rusty nails, drinks rotgut, spits on people’s shoes, and hasn’t talked to his mother since he was eight, dismemberment might not be a bad way to go. Hmmm. Decisions, decisions.

After choosing the protagonist and victim, I try to provide a myriad of suspects with access to the victim(s) at the time of demise. Or just the opposite – no one at all. Right away tension is created. Who, who, who? How, how, how? I ratchet it up whenever I can because I have a pretty fertile imagination. Some say demented. Whatever. You say potato, I say potahto.

Whatever method I choose, I try to do something unusual with it. The method of death, the way the body is discovered, the person discovering it, etc., might have an unusual bend. If I go for the disabled little old lady, for instance, I might have my protagonist find out she was a scam artist on the side, bilking widows and orphans. If I have my victim drown in a vat of 1997 Mouton-Rothschild Bordeaux Blend, maybe I’ll have him be a tea-totaler.

Now that I have some sort of murder going, I start popping in characters that might work with the story. Sometimes I have a chat with these characters as I drive to the supermarket. Maybe when I stop for a light or while standing in the checkout line I’ll go through a scene in my head, acting out certain things. Thank God for cell phones. Nowadays, those nearby assume I’m having an animated conversation on my phone and not demented. Ah! There’s that word again.

When the plot and characters come together, and I’ve eliminated things that don’t work but glom on like crazy to things that do, I sit down and start writing. This is usually the time when the first draft almost writes itself. I just try to keep up.

Hanging over my head all the while is the fervent prayer that this novel will get as near as possible to the proverbial perfect mystery. Wish me luck.

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I’m a setting thief. Lots of writers are, but I always set books where I can see what’s happening which probably isn’t true of all writers. I also steal dialogue, people, and events. What that means right now is book seven in my PIP Inc. Mysteries series isn’t the one I expected to be writing. Originally, I had a great idea about using AI to facilitate a murder, and I will get around to that book, but as number eight, not number seven. What changed the story order was what happened at a two-day Christmas faire last year where I was selling my books when opportunities for theft of setting, dialogue, characters, and of course murder, presented themselves and I decided to steal all of them.

The faire was held at the fire station in spaces normally reserved for huge engines and in the other rooms reserved for meetings, food prep, overnight sleeping, and storage of all sorts of equipment and supplies the firefighters use. The engines were discretely relocated outside for the event and I was lucky enough to be assigned a booth in the part of the fire station where they normally were housed.

Fire engines are incredibly tall vehicles so the garage part of the firehouse had ceilings high enough to accommodate them. Lighting was supplied by banks of lights built into the ceiling. As we vendors began setting up our booths on Saturday morning, one of the lights over where I was started strobing, flashing on and off with bright bursts of light. It was disturbing and likely to cause headaches or worse if we had to try and work under such conditions.

The firefighters, as firefighters do, rushed to help. They took a tall ladder off one of the engines and placed it under the offending light. A brave young firefighter climbed it and decided which florescent lightbulb was the trouble maker. He shouted down to us that he thought it would be an easy fix, but when he removed the bulb, the whole bank went dark. A search for a replacement bulb was started, but it seemed the fire station with its vast stores of equipment was out of lights of that length. He replaced the bulb, towels were collected, and an attempt was made to wrap them around the offending bulb. It didn’t work. The only way to stop the light from causing us all to lose our sanity was to cover the entire bank of lights.

The strobing stopped, but some of us were plunged into late-afternoon-post-time-change darkness. We needed light to show off our wares. Many vendors were distraught. We tried to help one another with some booth occupiers switching places, but there were still problems. Lamps, hurriedly gathered from other rooms in the fire station satisfied some of our needs, but there were many unhappy people and one vendor remained outraged at how dark his space was and caused a scene. At that moment, I decided to kill him.

The light situation presented a great opportunity to do so. No stabbings or poisonings for him. No gunshots. He was going to die by electrocution. My creative, or should I say warped, mind immediately came up with some ideas for how his murder would take place and a clever twist about who his killer was. All I was missing was a motive for his murder since it didn’t seem reasonable to kill him for being annoying. By the time the faire was over on Sunday afternoon, I had watched how other vendors moved around the faire, who covered for whom for food runs and bathroom visits, and where firefighters slipped off to for breaks. I had many red herring suspects with opportunity…but still no motive.

Writers know that sometimes you just have to stop pondering and sleep on it; which was exactly what I did. The motive came to me in the middle of the night, not exactly in a dream, but in a moment of sleepless restlessness.

 “A Faire to Remember” will be out later this year. A cover reveal and more about the book in next month’s post.

It can be done but straighten your lederhosen, it will be tough. When I started my latest book of the Alvarez Family Murder Mysteries, Cleopatra Almost Slept Here (set to debut mid-August), I thought it would be an easy write. Here was my reasoning: A – it would be my 19^th novel, the 11^th of the Alvarez series. By now I should know what I’m doing. Pardon my naivete. B – It takes place in Egypt. I love Egypt. It is a country chockful of history, hope, and filled with wonderful people. I even met a sweetheart of a camel named KFC who so captivated me, he became a central part of the novel. So, wouldn’t you think this would be an easy book to write? Pardon my belly-laugh.

Here was my problem: Book 9 of the series is called The Drop-Dead Temple of Doom. It takes place in the jungles of Guatemala and is about, among other things, ancient Mayans, their temples, and their pyramids. Book 11, Cleopatra almost Slept Here, takes place in the deserts of Egypt and is about, among other things, ancient Egyptians, their temples, and their pyramids. These minor similarities got by me until I finished writing the first chapter of Cleo blah-blah. Then something seemed eerily familiar. Sure enough, it was almost word for word as chapter one of Drop-Dead.

After realization clobbered me over the head, I buried my face in the warm, furry belly of one of our two cats, Niles, sleeping on his back next to the monitor with all four paws in the air. Niles has gained a few pounds as of late and his belly was soooo comforting and soft. But his ‘tude was not.

Said feline is on a diet, as is his twin sister, Daphne, who has to lose a pound or two herself. Like any hungry being whose food supply has been rationed, he was not in a good mood. Instead of lying there purring and patting my head with a paw in a ‘there, there’ fashion, he got up, jumped off my desk, and ran to his cereal bowl. A bowl, which as far as he was concerned, was seeing too much light of day and not enough action. He began caterwauling. I’m sure if he could have gotten to any pots and pans, he would have started banging on them with a spoon.  He was joined at the cereal bowls by Daphne who is never one to let a good time go on without her. She began yowling in harmony. My not-so-little love buckets.

After giving them a limited amount of treats, for which there was no thanks, I went back to my problem: how to keep Cleo from bearing any resemblance to Drop-Dead, especially with me being my own worst enemy. That meant I had to throw away any preconceived notions of the novel.  How can I make a story different when it takes place in a foreign country as exotic and magical as Egypt? Then I had it. While in Egypt, my protagonist, Lee Alvarez, was not going to see one single sight. She would be too busy solving ‘the mystery.’ Imagine the frustration? While the family visits such places as the Valley of the Kings, she tackles thieves, hides in closets, and files reports at Egyptian police stations, which are, as she says, surprisingly similar to American ones.

That meant there wouldn’t be a lot of travelogue. But still there would be KFC who likes to bury his face in Lee’s neck while making a sound somewhere between a hum and a purr. To the left is KFC and me in Giza. When I met him, he did that to me. Of course, I initiated it by wrapping my arms around his neck and hugging him. When he began to hum/purr, I knew I had to have him in my story. My great big love-bucket.

There are also no heavy-duty descriptions of well-known tourist destinations, either. Well, I did throw in the pyramids. One has to. When seen in person, the pyramids are astonishing. And then there’s the Nile River. But Lee gets to know the Nile a little better than she wants. She has to jump in to save … hmmm. Too much info?

Cleopatra almost Slept Here is a mystery about a family on the vacation of a lifetime that seems to be out to kill them. Menacing notes, car chases, Egyptian cobras, crumbling temples, passenger ships that go nowhere, and a drug lord with an appetite for murder are only part of the daily routine. The final draft came back from the editors and the beta readers seem to like this story. They are calling it another winner. Yay! And it’s nothing like Drop-Dead.

On to Daphne and Niles’ success rate. Or, rather, lack of it. After a weigh in, neither of them lost or gained an ounce! As that didn’t seem possible, I reflected. The vet told me to give them ¼ cup of food each, but I was thinking about Cleo blah-blah at the time and neglected to ask how many times a day I should do this. Was it three? Six? Hmmm. I may have another ‘realization’ moment ahead of me. Where’s that warm, fat, furry belly?

Below is what I hope is the final version of the cover. I just love it, but the CA may still have a tweak or two.

Back in the Dark Ages, probably only in the 1980s though it feels like it was that long ago, I was hired to edit the manuscript of a visiting scholar at MIT who was considered “very important.” As a result, another academic had already taken a pass over his ms before it was sent to the press and then to me. I don’t know why they did this, but they did. It was probably a warning, akin to carrots are good for you, and so is liver.

The ms was pretty clean, as we say, and I settled down for what I considered an easy job. My biggest decision was how to style certain topic titles that he used throughout the book. I scanned the pages, saw no consistent choice had been made, and picked a format that wouldn’t clutter up the page visually and yet be clear for the reader. I chugged along happily, with few other editorial issues to slow me down, and turned in the ms on time. Piece of cake.

About a week later I heard from the helpful academic who had read the ms first and, unknown to me (and not evident to me or anyone else), had made some stylistic choices that, in my drive for consistency, I had reversed, and instead imposed another stylistic choice, mine. To this day I still wonder that he thought he had sent over a completely edited ms.

I rarely edited fiction, but when we first set up the Larcom Review, in 1998, that changed, and I learned that writers of fiction have a different attitude to editing compared to writers of nonfiction, and I don’t argue with it most of the time. In one short story, the only change I made was to remove a single comma. The author restored it. The story was not, I hasten to explain, a mystery but a literary story, so perhaps that explains it.

Editing is always on my mind, but especially now because the editors at Crime Spell Books are editing the sixth anthology this summer. Death Camas will be out in the fall, in October, but the work is done in the summer. The other editors have turned in their changes, and I’m adding mine. So far the editors fall into two camps, those who take out commas, and those who put them in. My job is to integrate my edits and approve the ms changes overall.

At this point in a discussion about editing someone always pops up with the infamous quote: “Consistency—the hobgoblin of small minds.” At which point I used to send them to some poorly edited books so they could enjoy a text free of consistency and even coherence sometimes.

The trouble with editing is we all need it, no one wants to admit they need it, and amateurs aren’t really clear on what it is or entails. But it’s good for all of us, like veggies. One or two of my Beta readers have also been editors and I always looked forward to what I could learn from their reports and responses. Good editing is like a healthy dessert, an oatmeal cookie instead of a chocolate torte, after a healthy main course of composing the ms.

I’ve stretched the food metaphor till it’s ready to snap, if I can mix metaphors here (and I can because I’m the author), but we all come up against editing. How we feel about it is key to how much we’ll benefit from it. I try to tell other writers that it doesn’t mean they have to take every suggestion (and each editorial change should be considered a suggestion), but they should care enough about their work to think about why the editor made the change. Is the editor following a strict grammatical rule that offers no flexibility? Does the change take a light-hearted verbal twist and reduce it to a pedestrian phrase? Does the editorial change erase an allusion to another story or author, something to entertain the well-read mystery fan? Is the editor’s change clarifying an idea the author struggled with but couldn’t quite express satisfactorily?

Editing is work. If you love working with words, as I do, it can also be fun. Done with respect for the work and the author, editing can steady a ms, an overarching idea, strengthen the work’s best qualities. Editor and author always have the same goal: to take a good book and make it better.