Tying Up the Loose Ends

            I once read a mystery novel by a conventionally published author of multiple titles in which four bodies were discovered in a storage locker early on. By the time the book reached its conclusion, there still had been no explanation of who killed the four people and why.

            Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy. Leaving one murder unaccounted for might charitably be excused as simple carelessness. Leaving the reader in the dark about four corpses borders on gross negligence.

            When something like that happens, the reader is left wondering not only about the lack of editing services at the publishing house, but also dissatisfied in a spiritual and existential way. To put it another way, unexplained puzzles are a violation of the author’s compact with the reader and the reader’s expectations.

Better Than Life

            Life is random, absurd and chaotic, which is why we expect mystery novels not to be. One of the great pleasures of a mystery novel comes from being confronted by a baffling situation (the crime) and seeing smart, competent people (the detectives) work through the confusion and get everything sorted into place. The comfort of seeing chaos turned to order is one of the reasons for reading these books.

            In the classic mysteries of the Golden Age (between the First and Second World Wars), authors took great pains to be sure and dot all the I’s and cross all the T’s at the end of the book. They assumed the reader wanted that, and probably no publisher of the time would have accepted a novel that didn’t explain everything (or almost everything) in the final pages.

            In the hands of masters like Carr, Christie, and Ellery Queen, the explanations made for gripping reading. They were so tight and plausible that, after reading them, you could find yourself wondering why you hadn’t seen what the detective ultimately saw so clearly.

Sometimes Not So Plausible

            Of course, not everyone brought it off as well as the masters. I recall reading one book of that era in which the criminal got into a rowboat during a tide so high it took the water nearly to the top of a 60-foot cliff, enabling the killer to fire a shot from the wave-tossed boat through the windows of the house and plug the unfortunate victim. It was a case of better shooting than plotting.

            As a writer of mystery novels in the classical tradition, I do my best to see that a reader gets a good explanation of the crime or crimes by the end of the book. Loose ends belong in bad hair, not mystery novels. You can no longer call all the suspects into the study, as the detectives of the 1920s and 30s routinely did, but you can show the investigation as it develops and leave the reader in no doubt as to how and by whom the crime was committed.

            Tying the story up neatly by the end is important in a mystery novel, but so are character development, atmosphere and detail. It’s a challenging time to be practicing in the genre, but some of the old ways are still good ways. If nothing else, the reader should finish the book knowing what happened and why.

Can't Tell the Characters Without a Scorecard

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.

The Locked-Room Mystery

            One of the pleasant surprises I’ve experienced since my second mystery novel, Wash Her Guilt Away, went live several weeks ago has been the response to the mystery itself. Several people have commented that they found the puzzle puzzling and the solution and explanation of it interesting and entertaining.

            Seventy five years ago, the puzzle or mystery was why people read mystery novels. Some authors (early Ellery Queen comes to mind) would even issue a challenge to the reader at the point where the detective was about to unmask the killer and explain the crime. The challenge was, essentially, you know everything the detective knows; all the clues have been laid before you fairly and openly; can you deduce who the killer was and how the crime was committed?

            There’s a certain pleasure to be had from this sort of matching wits with the detective/author, but the genre has largely gotten away from that sort of story. Instead, we tend to have police procedurals, where we follow the cops as they collect one piece of information after another until the picture comes into play, or we have books where the killer is known and the suspense is in catching him or her.

Doing It Backwards

            In my book, the puzzle is a locked-room mystery, an old chestnut that goes back nearly a century and a half. For all that, modern practitioners have still tried their hands at it. I’m thinking of Peter Lovesey in The Circle and Sjowall and Wahloo in The Locked Room. And why not? It’s a nifty gimmick.

            I originally conceived my book, years ago, as a social-tension mystery, where a group of people are cooped up in a remote place and things start getting a bit chippy. Somewhere along the way, it occurred to me that having the murder occur in a locked-room setting would be a nice touch, so I worked that into the outline and used it as a selling point in the book description I put up on Amazon.

            That sort of device is fun, but there are two things that have to be understood. The first is that there is no mystery involved for the author. He essentially does the story backwards, figuring out how to create the locked-room situation, then writing it in such a way as to misdirect the reader and sow confusion. The second is that the solution is always a bit disappointing, since it has to be more prosaic than the situation as presented.

Underestimating the Mystery

            Perhaps because I approached the locked-room mystery in the way described, I wasn’t all that impressed by my own creation. In fact, I went through moments of angst in which I was telling myself the solution was so obvious as to be cringe-worthy and subject to ridicule by readers.

            I was emboldened, however, by the fact that neither my wife nor my editor figured it out, which was an indication that I had pulled off the literary shell game with at least some degree of competence. And, after all, it was a good tease for the book, so I went ahead with it, and that’s looking as if it was the right decision.

            In the handful of reviews now up on Kindle, most comment on the quality of the puzzle as being something the reader liked in the book, and I’ve received several comments from people who said they were baffled until the mystery was explained by the detective at the end. I suppose it goes to show that the old pleasures never die; they’re simply reinvented over and over.

Can't Tell the Players Without a Scorecard

            I am nearly done writing the first chapter of the second Quill Gordon mystery, tentatively titled Wash Her Guilt Away, and have 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 without the benefit of the seven or eight corpses that usually appear in the first three pages of a modern mystery.

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 20 to 30 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 solely 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, which I pulled down at random 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? We’ll see.

           

                                               

The Odyssey of a Book

            This past weekend I read Ellery Queen’s The Player on the Other Side. Published in 1963 it was one of the last works of Manfred B. Lee and Frederic Dannay, who wrote under the Queen nom de plume, and while interesting, is probably not as good as the earlier works that made their name. But it’s not the written book I want to discuss today.

            What I found myself thinking about after I finished it was the physical book itself — the copy in my hands. I had bought it at Logos used bookstore in Santa Cruz probably a year ago, brought it home and put it on the shelf for later reading. It was a hardcover book-club edition of the original Random House printing, which sold used for $3 — probably about what it cost new nearly a half-century ago.

            It still had the original dust jacket, only slightly frayed, and when I removed the dust jacket to read the book (as I always do with a hardcover copy), I saw the thing that got my imagination going.

From Indiana to California

            On the inside front cover of the book, hidden by the dust-jacket flap when I looked at it in the bookstore, was one of those return address labels that used to be commonplace back when people actually used the mail. It said:

            M Francis

            7934 Delmar

            Hammond IND

            For some reason the first thing I noticed was the absence of a ZIP code on the address label. That’s not surprising, given that ZIP codes were introduced in the year the book was published and quite a few people had a lot of those return address labels to use up. Still, it dated the book as having come from a simpler, more innocent time.

            On the heels of that observation, there was the obvious question of what the M in the owner’s name stood for. Michael or Mark? Mary or Myrtle? No clue whatsoever as to even the gender of the owner.

            Hitting the computer, I Googled the address and found that 7934 Delmar Avenue is a three-bedroom one-bath home in the Chicago suburb of Hammond and is currently valued at $80,000. No owner’s name was shown, but odds are no Francises have lived there in a long time.

The Really Intriguing Question

            Finally, the really big question: How did the book get, in nearly pristine condition, from there to here? I’d like to think that it first was taken aboard the Orient Express, with a secret code slipped in between pages 136 and 137, and that some spy risked his or her life to get it back to America. The more likely and prosaic explanation is that It was passed down a couple of generations and that some latter-day Francis, who wound up in California, finally sold it to the used bookstore.

            The book was in such good condition that it’s possible I may have been the first person to read it since it was mailed to Indiana. Which raises another point. One of the reasons for writing a book is that it conveys a form of immortality. Long after an author dies, even a forgotten book can, through yard sales and used bookstores, find its way into the hands of someone who reads it, as I did, and in so doing, brings the author alive again for a few hours.

            I can only hope that 48 years hence, someone comes across a copy of my mystery, The McHenry Inheritance, at a yard sale or on a family bookshelf, opens it, and starts reading. Wherever I may be at that moment, I’ll smile if I can.