How to Write a Mystery Read online

  So. Not a cop. But my neighborhood saw a helluva lot of them. Heard sirens and police helicopters all the time. As a child, I didn’t know that Black cops existed. That women cops existed. The Black women cops… I believed more in crop circles and magic beans than in the possibility that a Black woman cop worked somewhere in Los Angeles. And these unicorns sure as hell weren’t heroines of crime stories.

  I’d loved reading Michael Connelly; though he didn’t write about my part of the city, with its barbecue and fried-fish joints on every corner and brown skin on everybody (not just the pimps and cousins/lovers/aunties of the suspect or victim), he still wrote about this town I loved.

  And I’d loved reading Walter Mosley; though he didn’t write about contemporary L.A., with its crowded freeways and gentrification and women not always being femme fatales but simply… women, he still wrote about this town I loved.

  Where were the L.A. stories of crime-fighting Black women? Women connected to their families, pissed off by the fools in their neighborhood who made it worse for everybody, committed to serving and protecting their beloved community, the same community that taught them how to love their skin, their hair, and the curves of their hips and lips?

  If you can’t see it, you can’t be it—and if you don’t know it, how do you write it?

  Before I started the Elouise Norton series, I had work to do. First, find that character in preexisting work and see how the author pulled off that magic trick. I knew that my request was narrow and that the results would be close to nil. But then…

  Paula L. Woods. Inner City Blues. LAPD detective Charlotte Justice. The riots. Yes! Dear reader, I consumed those books like they were Funyuns. There it was! My Los Angeles. There was Charlotte, a woman I saw walking around Westwood in the eighties. She went to my same hairdresser and stood behind me in the long line at Phillips Bar-B-Que. She knew Albertsons grocery store made the best fried chicken in the city. I knew Charlotte, and her presence encouraged me. Her presence also depressed me—there were only four novels in the Charlotte Justice series, and I had a sinking suspicion why.

  So: I’m not a cop. I don’t look like most cops. I’m an English/American literature major drawn to nonprofit communications. I love a genre that, up until recently, didn’t publish or feature Black women. The few writers who did publish saw their series stuck at three or four books at the most.

  Like a foolish romantic, I still struck out to write my own Black homicide detective story.

  Why did I do that? That’s another essay. How did I do it? That’s the point of this essay.

  Step 1: Read. Consume those stories that you’d want to write. First, for pleasure. Then forensically. What do you like about that story? What don’t you like about that story? Read the reviews—good and bad—so that you can address the points they raise as you write. As for my reading list: of course, Connelly, Mosley, and Woods. But also David Simon, Miles Corwin, and for Los Angeles, Ryan Gattis, Naomi Hirahara, Gary Phillips, and Gar Anthony Harwood. Include screenplays in your reading, but not crappy ones. Again, David Simon.

  Step 2: Attend conferences. This one may be difficult because it requires money. Save up for one conference, then. As my first conference, I chose the California Crime Writers Conference, sponsored by the Southern California chapters of Sisters in Crime and Mystery Writers of America. Dedicated to helping writers, this conference features experts—from cops to FBI agents to forensics specialists, the megillah. Also, it’s small and intimate, so there are your favorite crime and mystery writers standing next to you. This was my first conference and I will love it forever. My second-favorite conference that I attended as I was getting started: Writers’ Police Academy. Some conferences will let you volunteer to receive a discount rate. Others provide scholarships and grants. Check out the websites for Sisters in Crime and Mystery Writers of America.

  Step 3: Ask questions. But mind what you ask. I’m sorry, but yes, there are dumb questions. If you’re blessed to have an audience with an expert, don’t ask stupid questions. Time is precious—ask those questions that you cannot answer with Google. I ask about biology, since my cop and PI is female—from peeing to periods (and if those words squick you out, maybe you shouldn’t write crime), I ask women in law enforcement how they handle those things. Sex, cramps, bras beneath bulletproof vests… can’t find any reliable answers on the interwebs.

  Step 4: Watch TV. I watched a lot of The First 48. Not for the cases, mind you, but to look at the world being filmed. From the station with its coat rack filled with different neckties to the family picture stuck in the visor of the detective’s car. Hearing the cadence of people being questioned, the clothes they wear, the tattoo on the detective’s wrist. I rolled down the streets in these episodes—from New Orleans to Tulsa to Detroit. I saw the different types of uniforms worn by cops in the same department—the blue wool but also the khakis and polo shirts. I wrote down things that struck me, atmosphere and details I wouldn’t otherwise have access to.

  Step 5: Subscribe. Get thee into the Metro section of the newspaper. Los Angeles Times has always had a great Metro/California section. Growing up, my first section of the paper was Metro and then Comics. Death and crime lurk in these pages. On the web, reporters have incredible series, following a case from first victim to needle in the arm. My hometown paper also lists homicides that occur each day. It’s macabre, but then you didn’t choose to write romance, correct? Follow the paper on Twitter. Follow those reporters on Twitter. Get to know the underbelly of the city you’re in.

  Step 6. Shoot past the stereotypes. Not all cops drink whiskey and play jazz. Not all cops yearn to pull out their gun and fire. Not all cops have broken marriages and kids who resent them. Not all cops are good. Not all criminals are flat-out evil. Not all criminals are poor. Not all criminals live south of the 10. Not all criminals are violent. Not all victims are noble. Not all victims are women. Not all victims had a secret. Not all victims are easy to love. Not all victims were at the wrong place at the wrong time.

  Step 7. Don’t give up. When I was submitting to houses for the first Detective Lou Norton novel, Land of Shadows, some editors told my agent that Lou wasn’t special. This was 2012, and oh sure, there were thousands of novels starring Black women homicide cops [insert eye roll]. You will hear that: This is nothing special. You will ignore it. You will ignore it because the story that you’re writing comes from the community that’s being overpoliced, because your cop was told girls can’t play, because your cop actually listens to the community. You will ignore it because you’ve actually listened to how people speak, what scares them, and you will write it without being a bigot and a racist. You dig?

  Step 8. Hold on to that day job. First, I’m editing this as the world is in quarantine. My day job is paying for the electricity that keeps this laptop charged—and if I get sick with coronavirus, my health insurance covers my treatment. So there’s that. Also, jobs are a great resource. Your coworkers? They’re nuts. And they’re related to other strange people. You may experience that wackiness firsthand or hear a story that may just make one of your scenes more interesting. Collect these stories and use them, maybe not now, but someday. My brother once told me about this hooker who put Visine into a john’s drink and took money out of his wallet while he was on the toilet with diarrhea. See, Visine is a laxative and this is the real way she came into money. Great stuff.

  Does any of this help?

  I certainly hope so.

  You’re starting off in a better place than I did—with this book and collection of essays, you have gold in your hands, my friend.

  LINWOOD BARCLAY

  When I write a book, I feel as though I am building a house. I’m the carpenter. I am banging this thing together, one stud at a time. If literary writers are the gardeners, crime writers are the contractors. A genre in which a well-constructed plot is critical demands practitioners who know enough to measure twice, cut once.

  The second draft—and, as is often the case,
several drafts beyond that—is when the finishing touches go in. Trim, wallpaper, paint. I hang a few pictures on the walls. Family pictures are stuck to the fridge with magnets. It’s those subsequent drafts where I add in all the details I failed to include as I got the story down.

  I’m not a big believer in “writer’s block.” I think it’s adorable that of all professions, we have an actual condition to justify not getting our work done. But in any line of work, there can be times when we need to take a break, to clear our heads. Go for a walk. Cut the grass. Build a Lego kit. That’s often when the solution to our problem will come to us.

  The Mindset of Darkness: Writing Noir

  It’s about character: the flawed protagonist and letting your characters fail.

  ALEX SEGURA

  “Noir,” as it’s used to describe prose, can be interpreted in many ways—almost to its own detriment. Some see it as a genre, others as a style. Some drill down to classify it even more precisely. For my money, noir is a mindset—but before we can get into that, we have to discuss what we know noir to be.

  The term “noir,” of course, comes from film noir, which literally means “black film” in French, and refers to an era of Hollywood cinema that boasted a number of stylish crime dramas, predominantly in the 1940s and ’50s. But parallel to its cinematic counterpart, noir grew to prominence as a subgenre of crime fiction during the ’40s, often confused with its sibling, hard-boiled crime fiction. So what sets noir apart? Well, it depends on who you ask.

  Some will say noir stories have to feature a sense of looming failure or darkness, or excessive sex and/or violence. Many will point to some of the cinematic tropes, like the femme fatale or the bleak, dour ending. Many works of modern noir define themselves based on a nihilistic point of view. Though hard-boiled private eye novels—like those of Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, and Mickey Spillane—and noir works are often confused or thought interchangeable, one could easily argue that the best, most lasting stories in the hard-boiled genre are heroic in nature, with a tainted-knight-style hero circumventing the law and defying “the system” to reestablish a greater sense of equity, allowing for the scales of justice to return to balance by story’s end. Noir films and novels, on the other hand, are about moral ambiguity and base emotions, with characters driven by lust, greed, fear, and often hate. These are pessimistic works about messed-up people who’ve made dodgy choices in life.

  Megan Abbott, one of my favorite modern crime writers and a shrewd student of noir in particular, had this to say about the two subgenres and what sets them apart:

  The common argument is that hardboiled novels are an extension of the wild west and pioneer narratives of the 19th century. The wilderness becomes the city, and the hero is usually a somewhat fallen character, a detective or a cop. At the end, everything is a mess, people have died, but the hero has done the right thing or close to it, and order has, to a certain extent, been restored.…

  Noir is different. In noir, everyone is fallen, and right and wrong are not clearly defined and maybe not even attainable.

  I tend to use Megan’s description as my own internal definition of noir—and it influences how I approach the genre. For my money, noir stories involve people painted into corners, forced into desperate, often illogical actions to try to bring balance to an imbalanced and unfair world. More often than not, that imbalance is their own fault, and their panicked actions are a by-product of their own selfish, lustful mistakes—whether it’s a lurid affair, a money scam gone wrong, or murder.

  It’s through that filter that I can get to the heart of this piece—which is “writing noir,” which raises the question: How do you write noir? My own novels are first and foremost private eye stories, starring a down-on-his-luck ex-journalist, Pete Fernandez. So they can’t be noir, right? Wrong. As noted above, PI stories are about a heroic figure, even if flawed, who pushes back on the establishment to do the right thing. But that doesn’t mean PI novels can’t be noir—quite the opposite.

  The key to writing noir can be learned from any Jim Thompson novel, if you want a shortcut. The one most critics would rightfully point to is Thompson’s seminal The Killer Inside Me, about a small-town sheriff who finds his life quickly unraveling as the reader discovers the true monster hiding beneath the police uniform. It’s a jarring tale propelled by Thompson’s terrifying and unreliable narrator, and leaves the reader shaking in disbelief and surprise. Dorothy B. Hughes’s In a Lonely Place features a similar twist, if executed differently—both novels evoke the same “not everything is as it seems” tone, and that makes for immediately unsettling reading, a tenet of great noirs. Generally, Thompson’s noir novels are stories about bad people doing bad things who are forced to do worse by circumstances they can’t control. You can inject these same kinds of characters into any type of story, which is the secret flexibility of the term. Noir isn’t only noir when it’s all-consuming. You can inject noir elements into any kind of story, as long as you’re clear on what noir is—to you and to the reader.

  In many of my novels, there’s a key character who serves as the noir protagonist—but it isn’t necessarily the story’s main protagonist, Pete the (sometimes amateur) private eye. In my third novel, Dangerous Ends, the twist reveals that someone the reader (hopefully) considered an ally was, in fact, spending years trying to hide a deadly mistake—one that cost them the life of their own mother. The twist—which I’ll do my best not to spoil—does what all good twists should, which is that it makes you reconsider everything you’ve read that’s come before, and while damning the character, it also creates sympathy for an admittedly “evil” person. That’s noir—when we can have some feelings of remorse for a character’s terrible, murderous actions, because deep down, we fear that in the same situation, we’d probably make similar choices. Noir is an emotional tone—it comes from a primal state of being. The best noir characters may be calculating and cunning, but they’re also propelled by basic emotions, and end up paying the price for their instinctive reactions.

  Many crime fiction series, especially procedurals and PI novels, are what I like to call “evergreen.” That means that while you may see some incremental changes from book to book, for the most part, the character you meet in the first novel remains consistent until the end. Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer is a good example. In the first Archer novel, The Drowning Pool, Archer makes reference to a past career as a cop. It’s a carbon copy of Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, and Archer remains a Marlowe clone for the first batch of novels. But the point is, we don’t learn about Archer’s (or Marlowe’s, for that matter) past, nor do we see either character change much from book to book. Whatever development happens is in service to the plot, whether it’s Macdonald’s deep dive into the meaning of villainy or Chandler’s twisty, often meandering but beautifully written character puzzles. While these kinds of novels are superb, and prime examples of how to do serialized stories that are more plot-driven and procedural in nature, they’re not conducive to being works of noir.

  The root of noir is in character—and to fully experience a noir story, you have to see the character go from their norm, whether buttoned-up businessman unhappy with his job or bored housewife, to their rock bottom: the businessman completely penniless and wanted for murder; the former housewife on the run with the gardener who killed her husband. See what I mean? And while these kinds of characters can exist in a PI novel or procedural, as I noted above, if the series is more evergreen than “evolving,” it’s harder to label the work as noir. (Though there is some precedent for an evergreen PI, in this case the film version of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, existing in a noir tale—check out 1955’s Kiss Me Deadly, directed by Robert Aldrich, a powerhouse noir that, in many ways, destroys the idea of the battered, heroic private eye.)

  Exceptions aside, noir hinges on change—actualizing change and showing change—and that is the core of what I like to call the “evolving” PI novel or crime series. Some examples are George Pelecanos’s Ni
ck Stefanos novels, or Dennis Lehane’s masterful Pat and Angie series. While each book spotlights a specific case our heroes must solve, we’re also in the trenches with them—and seeing them change from book to book, often for the worse by the end of it, adds a jolt of noir that many evergreen series lack. You’ll notice, too, that most evergreen series can run indefinitely. For example, while Michael Connelly’s Bosch character does change from time to time over twenty-plus novels—partners die; he’s shunted to different departments—his basic elements remain, making for a Bosch who is almost Holmesian in his consistency, yet giving the reader the impression of change on the protagonist’s journey toward solving the crime. On the flip side, with characters like Stefanos or Pat and Angie, by the end of their respective—and relatively brief—series, most readers could not imagine them going on any further. Their stories are over, and the characters are spent. That’s an element of noir, believe it or not.

  This is a long-winded way of saying noir can be many things, and there are many ways to write it—but at its core, noir is about character, whether it’s your protagonist, your supporting cast, or your villain. It’s about the evolution of character, more precisely—and the fallout of the decisions characters make under duress and how they react when things start to go south. Take, for example, the 1944 Otto Preminger film noir masterpiece, Laura, an elegant and unforgettable work that feels miles away from the grimy and bloodstained streets one would expect to find in the pages of a crime novel or in a mystery film. Yet it is noir, as we discover the truth behind Gene Tierney’s mysterious Laura and just what happened to her.