Slightly edited version of a post from spring 2013
A couple of
years ago, in the early stages of writing the second Quill Gordon mystery, Wash Her Guilt Away, I found myself
thinking about Ellery Queen. Early Ellery Queen, to be precise.
What drove
my mind there was the experience of trying to write a book that is a
contemporary American take on the classic English country-house mystery. If
you’ve read Agatha Christie, Georgette Heyer, or any of the other
practitioners, you’ll know that’s a story where a diverse group of characters
are invited to a country estate for the weekend and a murder ensues, with all
the guests being suspects.
Americans
in the present day don’t do that sort of thing (I mean the country-house
weekend; we certainly do murders) so in my book the characters assemble at a
remote fishing lodge that has a bit of a history. The challenge facing the
writer is bringing in all the characters, establishing their characters, and
getting the reader interested in those characters before the first corpse makes
its appearance.
The Nephew or the Secretary?
A caring
and considerate author also wants readers to keep the characters mentally
sorted without too much effort as the book progresses. When Jones reappears
after an absence of 30 to 40 pages, you don’t want the reader scratching her
head and saying, “Let’s see — was Jones the rich uncle’s nephew or was it his
secretary?”
Based on my
own reading experience, this can be a serious problem. Quite a few mysteries
(and serious novels, as well) have left me dizzy trying to remember what the
relationship between the characters was. That’s what sent me to the bookshelf
for a look at Queen’s The Greek Coffin
Mystery to see if my memory was
correct.
The Greek Coffin Mystery was published in
1932, which definitely makes it early Queen, and sure enough, right at the
front, I found what I was looking for: A list of characters. Each was described
in only a few words, but those few words established the relationships between
the characters and generally what they did.
At any point in the book, a reader could flip back to that
page to double-check on who someone was.
So Old School It’s Not Even Retro
Looking through
the character list of this particular book, the reader can quickly be reminded
that George Khalkis is an eminent art dealer (and the victim); and that Alan
Cheney is the son of Delphina Sloane, who is Khalkis’ sister, and who is
married to Gilbert Sloane, the manager of the Khalkis galleries. Got that?
That sort
of scorecard to help the reader keep the players straight can be most helpful,
but it went out of style in the 1940s. A writer who tried to use the technique
today would probably be laughed off Amazon for being so out of date he wasn’t
even retro. The contemporary author has to write his way through that problem
without the help of a cheat sheet.
My approach
to separating the sheep from the goats, so to speak, is threefold. First, I’m
keeping the character list short; Wash
Her Guilt Away has 15 characters compared to 39 in The Greek Coffin Mystery. Second, they aren’t related, except for
the married couples. Third, I try to introduce them one or two at a time so the
reader can get to know them before moving on. Will that help the reader avoid
confusion? I don’t know, but the more critical question is, will the reader
care about them? Several reviews commented favorably on the book’s character
development, so I guess so.
