  Mystery
This week: How NOT to Annoy Whodunit Readers Edited by: Cinn  
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I know that mystery is not a genre frequented by poets, but I love sharing poetry whenever the opportunity arises. The context of this piece is quite different from the topic of this newsletter (how to avoid disappointing whodunit readers). However, I recalled the first line and the last line included here, and I thought they fit quite well in this context. So, here's a little poetry prelude:
It’s the mystery of the hunt that intrigues me,
That drives us like lemmings, but cautiously—
The search for a bright square cloud—the scent of lemon verbena—
Or to learn rules for the game the sea otters
Play in the surf.
It is these small things—and the secret behind them
~Excerpt from "The Mystery of the Hunt" by Michael Mcclure
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I love mystery but never read stories in the mystery genre, especially the whodunit subgenre. In part, that is because I have so little time to read and an abundance of books in genres that I adore. Mostly though, I never read mysteries because I got turned off to the genre in high school. A very lame reason, but sometimes our mental associations with a genre make it less enjoyable somehow. I had a reading experience that annoyed me so much that I just moved on and never looked back. What in the world could have made it so bad? How could I be so irate that I threw the book on a shelf and refused to touch it (or anything like it) again? This is the basis for a perfect what-not-to-do lesson in writing whodunits.
The Story
This was a classic whodunit mystery, a la Sherlock Holmes, Poirot, etc. The entire point of this book was to logically deduce who the killer was, which was what attracted me, an avid logic puzzler. The structure was the standard murder, investigation, and big reveal at the end. All relationships were examined in-depth. The wife who believed her husband was not, shall we say, treating her well. The brother who wanted to inherit the family fortune, etc. The autopsy showed that the man died of mercury poisoning. Other than the poisoning and a cut on his cheek from a dentist visit, he was entirely healthy. The story wound and twisted its way through suspects and offered clue after clue, pointing firmly to the wife (including a mercury thermometer, free of mercury and lying broken in a trash can).
Who is the killer? The dentist! Thus began my fury.  Do you need an explanation? I sure did! The man had a filling at the dentist's office. The dentist filled the tooth with mercury to poison him. What gave this away? They did not test the filling. There was never any mention of the filling beyond the fact that, as part of his itinerary, the victim had been to the dentist. The cut cheek is what the entire case hinged upon: mercury will not deliver a fatal blow unless it has direct entry into the bloodstream. The dentist filled the cavity with mercury and cut the man's cheek "accidentally" to allow the poison to take affect. The motive? The dentist was having an affair with the wife, despite there being no evidence that the two had ever met.
Lessons Learned
I imagine that you now understand why the story annoyed me so much. In a weak attempt at being "clever", the author gave us all of the information needed in the first few paragraphs and added page after page of wild goose chase. That alone is annoying. The real tips to avoid come from the worst of it though: Figuring it out required technical knowledge not supplied by the author, and the criminal was a random person with no realistic motive.
 The key to the mystery should be knowable. In a whodunit mystery, figuring out who did it is half the fun. Making the entire case hinge on technical knowledge robs readers of the satisfaction of figuring it out for themselves and, worse, might make them feel cheated when they learn that they never had any hope of solving the mystery. How does mercury poison a person? I had no idea. To this day, I am not sure that the details are true because I have never heard them anywhere else. It is not common knowledge. If you want the average mystery reader (i.e. your audience) to enjoy the conclusion of your story, the plot should hinge on something they have some hope of knowing.
There must be a motive that is deducible from the story. In the example given, there was no reason to assume that the dentist and wife knew each other, let alone had a close relationship. Saying in the story that he was their "family dentist" would have been an improvement but still insufficient to jump to the conclusion that the dentist would commit a crime because he loved her. The broken thermometer and missing mercury indicated the wife's involvement, but in the end, the jealous boyfriend stole the mercury from her home and used it to commit the crime alone. That is maddeningly weak writing. The final result is that the motive seems convenient but unlikely, a disappointing way to end a story. Providing readers with a motive (or additional motive beyond the one known all along) goes a long way toward a satisfying conclusion but only if the motive makes sense based on the details of the story.
Final Thoughts
It is interesting how much can be learned from reading a bad story. For me, this mystery was one that I never forgot, and it still annoys me every time I think of it for some reason. It was memorable for all the wrong reasons. Aside from the tips on not trying to dupe your readers into wasting their time, using a knowable key to the mystery, and offering a motive that makes sense, I took with me one more basic bit of advice for writing mysteries:
The two most obvious criminals in a story are 1. the one all the evidence points to, and 2. the one with no evidence pointing to them at all. The most expected and least expected tend to be the killer in horror novels more often than not, and the same has been true for the handful of mysteries that I've read. Perhaps, if you want to really surprise your readers, you should choose someone in the middle.  |
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Mystery: September 02, 2015 Issue [#7188]
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