HOW TO WRITE A MURDER MYSTERY
Almost Everything I Know About Writing Murder Mysteries I Learned from Reading Nancy Drew…

For as long as I can remember, I've wanted to write murder mysteries, and when I set out eight years ago to finally do it, I was convinced that my sheer desire for success would make the whole process relatively easy. Boy was I wrong. As I reviewed the first seven chapters I'd completed, I realized that, ironically enough, I was pretty damn clueless when it came to the job. I had a decent enough concept (a beautiful young nanny gets murdered, poisoned by a chocolate truffle) and what I thought was a winning protagonist (an irreverent, gutsy true crime writer named Bailey Weggins), and yet even I could tell that my early chapters lacked excitement and suspense. You know what my mystery reminded me of? A frittata, that quiche-like brunch dish that always sounds appealing on the menu but when you take your first bite you discover that it's this bland, eggy thing-and what's worse it almost always arrives at the table lukewarm.

I had to fight off a swell of panic the night I reread my early efforts. Since my dream for years had been to write mysteries, I couldn't bare the idea of bombing at it. I decided that I would rework the chapters but first give myself a crash course in the craft. I dashed out from work one day at lunchtime and bought a dozen books on the art of novel and mystery writing. There was so much information-some of it contradictory-I didn't know what to do with it.

In a moment of desperation that week, I pulled down one of my old Nancy Drew books from a shelf-The Secret of Red Gate Farm. As a girl I'd adored reading each and every one of the series. Not only did the books inspire in me a passion for the genre, but Nancy was also my first role model-a sassy, fearless detective who wouldn't let anything scare her away from accomplishing what she wanted to. (In fact, I might not be editor of Cosmopolitan magazine today if it weren't for her!). Though I'd long since lost my original books, I'd discovered a few years ago that a publisher had re-released the early volumes with their original covers, and for nostalgia's sake I'd bought a few.

I hardly expected to learn any writing tips from paging through the book that day. What I hoped was that just hanging with Nancy for a bit might jumpstart my creative process. But something fascinating happened. I kept reading and reading. The Secret of Redgate Farm wasn't exactly on a par with The Big Sleep or The Maltese Falcon, but it was a real page-turner. When I reached the end of each chapter, I couldn't resist going on to the next one.

And when I was finished, having highlighted a ton of passages, I realized that I had a much better sense of how to create a mystery. I went back to my chapters, killed off some sections, beefed up others, and what I ended up with was far stronger. A Body to Die For was picked as Kelly Rippa's first book club, made it to Number One on Amazon and spent ten weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

Here's what I learned from Nancy Drew that day about writing a successful mystery.
  1. Start with a Killer Title

    The reason that The Secret of Red Gate Farm beckoned me from the bookshelf in my grandmother's parlor years ago was pure and simple: the cover. There was a gripping colored illustration of the young titian-haired detective with a worried look on her face, spying on people who were dancing in hooded white costumes under a full moon. But it wasn't just the drawing that captured my attention--it was the title too. What was the secret of Red Gate farm? I just had to know.

    The Nancy Drew books have tantalizing titles: The Bungalow Mystery, The Ghost of Blackwood Hall, The Hidden Staircase, The Clue in the Diary, The Password to Larkspur Lane. They're not especially creative, but you feel compelled to read them. If you don't, you will never know for sure what the clue, the password, the secret or the mystery is.

    A great title will entice people to read your book. Case in point: When I was on tour in Atlanta for my first book, I had a few minutes to spare and called a bookstore to see if I could come by and sign copies. They only had five copies but said they were happy for me to drop by. The manager would leave the copies on the front counter.

    But when I arrived there were only two copies on the counter, not five. It turned out that in the twenty minutes it took me to arrive, customers had seen the books--with the title If Looks Could Kill-- on the counter and bought three of them. Those customers didn't even know what it was about-but the cover and title compelled them to buy it.

    I recently had the chance to chat with the very talented and amazingly successful author Harlan Cobin. His Myron Bolitar mystery series-with titles like Drop Shot and Fade Away--won many awards but his career didn't take off until his first stand-alone thriller was published. You know what the name is? Tell No One. Utterly tantalizing.

    But I'm not advocating that you come up with your title early simply to help jack up sales. I think a great title helps give you direction when you're writing. It will crystallize your concept and challenge you to live up to it. When I decided on Over Her Dead Body as the title for my fourth book in the Bailey Weggins series, it helped me develop a sense of just how angry the editor Mona Hodges could make someone-in fact, angry enough to kill her.

  2. Create a character with damn good demons. You've probably read enough mysteries to know that the best sleuths have demons-stuff (sometimes weird) haunts them and on occasion trips them up. Nancy has one hell of a demon. Her mother died when she was three (the cause is never disclosed but it's pretty clear it wasn't a forest fire). Though she never seems tortured in any way, that experience makes her character all the more intriguing. It also explains why she tries to be the perfect girl and sometimes gets all goody two shoes.

    Think of some of the contemporary protagonists you love and consider how delectable their demons are. Kinsey Millhone, Sue Grafton's detective, lost her parents early in a car crash and was raised by an aunt. Michael Connelly's character, Harry Bosch, had a mother who was a prostitute and later murdered. (Do we detect a dead- parent pattern here?) Inspector Thomas Lynley, in Elizabeth George's series, is a lord, from a dysfunctional aristocratic family. And hey, Sherlock Holmes had a coke habit.

    A good demon makes your character captivating, someone the reader can't resist spending time with. We want to know how that demon could undo him or her, how it impacts behavior and choices. Since many of the really great demons have been used, you're going to have to be creative. One of the most outrageous and winning examples recently is the TV private eye Monk. He's got a wicked case of OCD---now that's fresh.

    When I was developing my character Bailey, I decided I wanted to make her a young divorcée. I had been divorced myself at an early age and I thought it would be the kind of angst I could make work. But I felt if I made the reason for her divorce something very typical--like a philandering husband--it would be too trite. While I was working on the book, I attended a management conference where Laura Day, the author of Practical Intuition, and I mentioned to her that I learned something about creativity from her book. We rode to a dinner together one night and since she was reportedly known for her intuition, I asked her to intuit something for my book. She said she saw a lottery ticket. At the time I didn't have any idea what that could mean but the next day an idea occurred to me: I made Bailey's ex husband a compulsive gambler. He pawned her jewelry and eventually fled town, just ahead of guys with tire irons. I thought readers would be intrigued.

  3. Start like a bat out of hell and keep going. I once read a guide to writing fiction that said that reading a novel should leave you with a sense that you're on a train and it never stops moving. The Nancy Drew books make you feel like you're on a bullet train. Sorry to mix metaphors this way (bat and a train), but what I'm really talking about is just speed and momentum.

    One way to guarantee momentum is to start with plenty of action rather than try to build to it.

    Consider the very first sentences of several of the Nancy Drew books:

    "Oh Nancy, this is like a hurricane. We'll be blown off the road," cried Beth.

    From The Sign of the Twisted Candles.

    "I wouldn't go in that spooky old house alone for anything," declared the plump nervous woman who sat beside Nancy Drew in her convertible.

    From The Witch Tree Symbol.

    "Nancy, you're kidding. No statue can whisper."

    From The Whispering Statue.

    You're not only hooked from the get go but it establishes a pace for the book immediately. Look at your first chapter, your first sentence. If your action takes too long to get off the ground, try an experiment. Cut out half the build up and start there.

    I love the first sentence of Moment of Truth by Lisa Scottoline: "Jack Newlin had no choice but to frame himself for murder." What a perfect example of starting in the thick of the action.

  4. Make the end of every chapter a seduction-so that the reader has no choice but to go onto the next one. Nancy Drew books mastered the idea of the cliffhanger chapter endings. Consider these delicious examples:

    "At that moment a frightful howl echoed through the old inn. Then came a reverberating crash. "

    From The Sign of the Twisted Candles.

    "Screaming she began to roll down the hill toward the drop-off and the leaping flames."

    From The Password of Larkspur lane.

    "With a fierce snarl the dog leaped on Nancy, knocking her flat."

    From The Secret of the Old Clock

    In every case the action is unfinished--and you don't know the outcome unless you turn the page-despite how much past midnight it is.

    Two good examples:

    Chapter 20 of A Certain Justice by P.D. James. "Or had he seen something-or worse still, done something-so terrible that his mind refused to accept its reality?"

    Chapter 21 of In the Presence of the The Enemy by Elizabeth George. "He's been taken," he said. "Someone's kidnapped my son."

    Even totally out of context they are completely intriguing.


Okay, these tips are hardly a soup to nuts (or corpse to cased closed) guide. It's not everything you need to know to write a mystery. But maybe one or two of them will prove as useful to you as they did for me when I felt so hopelessly stuck seven years ago.