The Perfect Puzzle: 7 Tips for Creating Fiendish Mystery Plots
Author Tom Mead pieces together seven tips for creating fiendish mystery plots that will keep readers turning pages late into the night.
I grew up loving the mystery genre and fascinated by what makes a good whodunit “work.” Now that I write them for a living (my latest, The House at Devil’s Neck, is published this summer), I’ve had the opportunity to give this a lot of thought. And while there’s no precise methodology or scientific formula for the creation of a satisfying mystery, there are certain techniques which make the process a little easier.
Establish your “closed circle.”
The best mysteries tend to be “closed circle” mysteries—meaning they involve a small number of suspects within a single unit. How you define your closed circle is up to you: It could be family members at a country house or passengers on a Nile cruise … use your imagination! But if you’re planning to write a puzzle mystery, it’s a good idea to focus on a handful of main characters, with the killer lurking somewhere among them. That way, your reader won’t feel short-changed by a villain appearing from nowhere in the final chapter.
Establish your “rules.”
It might seem counterintuitive to talk about rules for a genre where all the most satisfying examples break the rules in some way. But you need a logical framework of some kind in which your plot will unfold. A good rule of thumb is to make sure your detective is never more than one step ahead of the reader, and that your Watson character is never more than one step behind.
Keep it simple.
The best mysteries are the ones which hide a deceptively simple trick in plain sight. Now, that’s not to say that your plot shouldn’t be devilishly complex. But most of those ornate convolutions will be in service to a single, overarching trick. A favorite analogy of mine is the “Orange Tree Illusion” of the great magician Jean-Eugene Robert Houdin. This is a stunningly elaborate trick which relied on an ingenious mechanical construction, pyrotechnics, and various stagehands lurking behind the scenes. But it was all in pursuit of one of the simplest and most ancient illusions imaginable: the disappearance and reappearance of a handkerchief.
The timeline is your friend.
In any fiction where the plot is at the forefront, it’s vital to have a clear understanding of your chronology. You need to know who was where, and at what time. Even if the characters lie to each other, and to your detective, you need to have a clear visual of where they were and what they were up to. Think of it like pieces on a chessboard—everything is relative; one move has various ramifications for every other piece on the board. You need to plan your sequence of moves accordingly.
Treat your suspects equally.
Of course you know whodunit, but it’s important to remember your reader doesn’t—or rather, they shouldn’t. To keep them guessing, it’s a good idea to devote equal space to each of your suspects, so there isn’t one particularly obvious front-runner. Also, make sure you don’t go too far in the opposite direction—your murderer should be someone who’s been present in the narrative from the beginning. It can be a difficult balance, but it’s worth getting right.
Motive, motive, motive.
When writing mysteries, you are essentially attempting to deceive several different types of readers. Some will be highly attuned to the physical clues, the erroneous alibis—in other words, the material details. But others will be more directly focused on character and motivation—the immaterial, psychological clues. That’s why it’s important to ensure that your victim was either universally loved or universally loathed. Either everyone has a motive, or nobody does—at least on the surface.
Surprise yourself.
In many ways, you are your own “Ideal Reader.” Presumably you want to write a mystery because you enjoy reading mysteries, so it’s a good idea to think about the types of plot twists and “reveals” that truly startled you. How can you set about replicating that effect? Often the best method is to think of the most obvious solution to your puzzle, and then invert it.
Let’s say that the hated patriarch of a large family has just written his unruly youngest son out of his will. The kid gets nothing. When the old man dies, surely the first suspect to be ruled out is the unruly son? After all, what did he have to gain? This is the “obvious” path for our detective—it’s a logical deduction, after all. But what if the youngest son did have a motive that none of his siblings knew about—something that ran deeper than money? That’s the first inversion.
But it’s not really enough: The best mystery writers tend to orchestrate a double-bluff, only to transform it into a double-double-bluff. What if the youngest son was plotting to murder his father, only for a second, unidentified murderer to beat him to the punch? This is the kind of approach I usually take, with one complication feeding neatly into the next. As long as you don’t tie yourself up in knots, you can leapfrog your way from one revelation to another en route to that all-important satisfying denouement, in which the whole tapestry is unravelled.
Check out Tom Mead's The House at Devil's Neck here:
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