Mystery Plot Points - WHO DIES?

Plot Point #2 - Who Dies?
Who dies can be quite different in a written story than at a mystery party. In fiction writing, a writer has the ability to be subtle; in live events, not so much. The dead person in a novel can be good or bad or both. At a party, there is no room for subtly. The dead person is always the deepest, darkest villain who truly deserves to die. Not one tear will be shed as he (or she) drops down in pain, rises up gasping for breath, pulling over chairs and knocking over lamps as he finally stumbles his miserable way out of this world.

Case in point: In Midnight at the Oasis, the Sultan of Haberdashery with his drug sniffing camel Alice, is the villain. Well, the camel gets to live. The Sultan - no. A truly detestable bad guy, he gives everyone he comes in contact with a good reason for wanting him dead. Blackmail, burglary and betrayal are just of few of his horrendous habits. The Sultan has control over something which the killer and other suspects want; their hearts, their freedom, their pocketbooks. Motive is all about being in control at its bottom line.

Time and Timing: Where Did September Go?

The last week of the month, and I'm definitely not ready for October. As a writer,I try to take stock monthly of what has been accomplished so I can assess my success and plan what still needs to be done.
I went to Bouchercon. That was a lot of fun, but a lot of work, too: arranging to be away from home, traveling the distance from Michigan to Missouri, and smiling, smiling, smiling, no matter that my feet hurt or I felt like the smallest fish in the pond at times.
I did a lot of promotion for the upcoming release, POISON, YOUR GRACE, and got some response: great reviews from PUBLISHERS WEEKLY and LIBRARY JOURNAL. I also heard yesterday that THE DEAD DETECTIVE AGENCY is a finalist for best mystery novel in the EPIC (electronically published) judging. All good stuff.
So what didn't I do?
I meant to get the second Dead Detective Mystery off to my publisher on Sept. 1st. It might go out today.
I meant to finish the third Simon & Elizabeth Mystery. It isn't even close.
I wanted to edit a stand-alone I've been working on for a couple of years. I'm maybe a third through that one.
As a writer, I'm often swamped with ideas: so many stories I want to tell. There just isn't enough time for everything I want to do. There's no one standing over me with a club. It's my own desire--maybe need--to write that drives me onward (and maybe a little crazy).
With all that I wanted to accomplish, September has slipped from my (constantly typing) fingers, and I barely noticed.
Oddly enough, for me this is happiness.

Authors Meeting Authors

I'm attending Printers' Row this weekend under the auspices of Mystery Writers of America's Midwest Chapter. Despite ninety-plus degree weather, slow sales, and a nasty thunderstorm to end the day on Saturday, it's been a good experience, and here's why: authors need to talk to other authors.

We often write in a vacuum, alone in our offices, and these days, much of our promotion is on-line as well. Even many of our shoes-wearing public appearances are with booksellers, librarians, and readers. Now, these are all wonderful people, but I'll tell you a secret. I love to talk to others who struggle with plot and protagonist, method and motive. Other writers.

So while thousands of people wandered by yesterday and looked casually at our offerings, we talked. We learned, or more likely relearned, that we are alike, no matter what our subgenre or who our publisher is. We commiserated on the irritations of publishing and exchanged information on tactics that might sell more books.

It could be depressing: the sheer number of people trying to get noticed in this industry, the lack of understanding of the reading public between a book that's been through a process and a book some clueless innocent throws at the Internet without any process at all. But when a group of (dare I say REAL?) writers get together, it's not depressing. It's a celebration of what we do, what we cannot stop doing.

I drove from northern Michigan to Chicago for this, temporarily exchanging my peaceful home life for traffic and crowds to meet with Julie Hyzy, Tony Perona, Barb D'Amato, and a dozen other writers I've seen only on the Net or in passing at conferences. If I don't sell one book, it will be a success for me to know that they all write books one page at a time, just like I do.

Motive

There are many different ways to categorize motives for murder. After ‘Be in Control’ I break the flowchart down to Power, Passion & Revenge. There are many subcategories after that, with the inevitable crossover between the three main one. I’ve produced charts to cover these for a book on mystery cluetrails that I am writing. The main purpose is to give writers some inspiration on what drives a person to kill. Here’s the chart for Power.

Where Do Your Ideas Come From?

People often ask where I get my ideas. Some ask with interest; a few ask with a sense of alarm, as if they can't get over the idea of a church-going choir director dreaming up headless corpses and subtle poisons.
Most writers I know could answer with a question of their own: How do I get them to stop? Every day at least one idea floats through my head that might make a decent book. The problem is choosing one that I like well enough to flesh out the details and finish. In other words, the idea is the easy part.
An idea for an Arthur-and-Guinevere sleuthing team struck my fancy a while back, but I couldn't get interested enough to actually write it. I have several other started mysteries that got shoved onto the back burner. An abandoned idea might be due to other demands on my time (like edits), a plot knot that won't dissolve, or simple boredom: I don't like the story enough to finish it. I call these files "somedays", as in some day I might go back to them. (James Michener didn't write IBERIA for years after he took all the notes and outlined it. I'm no Michener, but still.)
If you are a storyteller, stories grow in your head of their own volition. The work part is writing a story down, toiling over it until it is no longer just a good idea, but a story that others can understand and enjoy.
So my answer to "Where do your ideas come from?" is that my brain is like a tree full of story blossoms. I have to pick the ones that seem promising and then work on them until they become fruit.

A Bit of A Problem

But rather a nice problem to have in a way. I am busy trying to finish the second book in my mystery series while doing early promoting on the first one. I feel like a juggler at times, and a poor one at that.

For a little while, I'm a writer, hacking away at the latest scene in Stalking Season. Then I get up, walk around my office chair and become my publicist. I contact places to send the ARCs for review. Work on the promo pieces that go out with ARCs. Write the cover letters that go out with ARCs. Did I mention I have a few ARCs on hand?

The first book, Open Season,  introduces Sarah Kingsly and Angel Johnson, homicide detectives who are unlikely and unwilling partners. When people start dying in area shopping malls, the detectives find themselves up against a killer who has his own race card to play. Some people have described it as "Lethal Weapon" in Dallas with female leads. 

Here is an excerpt from Open Season, which will be released in December from five Star Cengage/Gale. I will post another excerpt in a few weeks.


Sarah took a deep breath and faced Quinlin in the stuffy cubbyhole of an office. The room was hot and musty. Dust motes floated in the slivers of sunshine that had penetrated the haze of accumulated grime on the windows of the old building. The scent of his cologne hung heavily in the still air. Chaps. Rich, masculine, and too easily a distraction.
 
Dressed in a dark, somber suit, Quinlin didn’t speak. He watched her with the careful scrutiny of a snake considering a field mouse. A trickle of perspiration ran down Sarah’s back and dampened her white T-shirt. Shifting in the wooden chair, she contemplated the wisdom of taking off her jacket, then decided against it. He would interpret it as a sign of weakness.
 
She thought she was prepared for this. She’d rehearsed it a million times, remembering the images, nailing down the sequence, readying herself for his opener, “Detective Kingsly, tell me what happened that night.”
She recalled the moon playing tag with a few heavy clouds, casting weird, disorientating shadows on the crumbling buildings. She remembered wishing the clouds would give way to rain, anything to relieve the oppressive heat that had pounded the city relentlessly for weeks. She remembered thinking the heat made people do crazy things.
 
Maybe that’s why it had happened.
 
The rest of it flashed through her mind like a sequence of freeze frames.

Franco and the boy turn.
A glint of metal in the moonlight.
John pushes her away, reaching for the gun tucked in his waistband.
The clasp on her purse sticks.
A flash of gunfire.
The sharp report of return fire.
Struggling to get her gun.
Franco is down.
The kid swings his gun toward John.
She fires the same time the kid does.
The coppery smell of warm blood.
Hers?
No.
Goddam it, John, get up!
Why is everything so quiet?
Where is the kid?
There’s a big gaping hole in the cheap sequined evening bag.

Mystery Writing Tips from a Master

Everything I learned about planting clues for a 'fairplay' murder mystery I learned by studying and dissecting the works of the most brilliant cluemaster of all time, Agatha Christie. 'Fairplay' means that the reader has all the same information as the detective, and could solve the mystery, if they were clever enough. Writing performance corporate mysteries for nearly twenty years, honed my skills in this regard. Here's one priceless gem from Dame Agatha, hidden deep within one of her novels. If memory served me correctly, it was The Mirror Cracked From Side to Side.

"What you have to account for is if one person did see something why didn't that person say so? ... Possibility one - The person who saw it didn't realize what they had seen. That would mean, of course, that it would have to be rather a stupid person. Someone let us say, who can use their eyes but not their brain.

It might have been a person whose action in putting something in a glass was natural. It would be quite possible, audacious but possible, for someone to pick up that glass which as soon as it was in his hand or her hand, of course, would be assumed to be his or her own drink and to add whatever was added quite openly. In that case you see, people wouldn't think twice ... it would be a gamble, a risk, but it could happen.

Possibility three ... Somebody saw what happened and held their tongue deliberately ... if so, it's a very dangerous thing to do. - Agatha Christie.

I'm So Excited

The first book in my mystery series will be released this coming December and I have just received the coverart from my publisher. I really like what the artist did. The skyline is Dallas, where the story is set, and the badge is an official Dallas PD badge. I have had a number of people tell me that the cover is great and would make them pick up the book.

What do you think?

Also, I have just received blurbs from two authors whom I have the greatest respect for.

"Open Season is a solid police procedural with fully developed characters and provocative social issues." --- L.J. Sellers, author of the Detective Jackson mysteries

“Detectives Sarah Kingsly and Angel Johnson are crisply drawn characters. The hard-edged story of racial tension in Dallas could be drawn from today’s headlines. Open Season is a smart, spirited page-turner.” —Bruce Cook – Tommy Gun Tango

In his e-mail Bruce also thanked me for letting him read the book in advance and wrote, "It was great fun, with likeable characters and a strong plot."

Wow, what a terrific week this has been. It is the kind that gives a writer a real boost, and I'm sure all the writers reading this are nodding heads in agreement. The business of writing is so intense and challenging at times that we may wonder why we keep doing it.

This is why....

Open Season will be coming out in hardback in December from Five Star Cengage/Gale.

Introduction

Since I'm listed on the masthead for this blog, I thought I should introduce myself. Can you tell I have a lot of experience with newspaper and magazine work? If you are a good detective you would note my use of a word not often used in the blogging world.

My writing career started when I wrote a humorous column for a suburban Dallas newspaper many moons ago. From there I went on to do a lot of journalism for regional and national publications - columns, feature stories, reviews, and news stories - but my heart was always in fiction. I've written short stories, novels, screenplays and stageplays - not all of them published or produced, but I keep on trying.

I love mysteries, especially police procedurals and some of my favorite books were the 87th Precinct series by Ed McBain - alter ego of the amazing Evan Hunter. Reading his work taught me a lot about how to handle an ensemble cast in a series, and I hope I have mastered even a smidgen of his ability in my series that will debut this December.

Open Season introduces two women homicide detectives in Dallas, one white and one black, who deal with racial issues that are impacting the department and the city. They both see the pairing as better PR than policy, but they can't let that hamper their efforts to find the killer who is murdering people at area shopping malls.

My earlier books are One Small Victory, a romantic suspense first out in hardback, and now an e-book through Smashwords. Play it Again, Sam, is a woman's novel in e-book format from Uncial Press. I have self-published a young adult novel, Friends Forever, for Kindle, and put a short story up there, too, The One O'clock Nap.

I am honored to be a part of this blogging group and hope that readers find my prattling worth the read.

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Maryann's Web site

Cluetrails

Wanting to please everyone, has long been a trait of mine; some would call it a failing, yet I’m
still sure it can be done, at least with mysteries. I want to have as many mystery party themes as possible available at MysteryFactory.com - something for everyone - with as little work as possible. Laziness is another trait of mine. Luckily there is a way it can be done.

I am going to write six different cluetrails and plug them into eighteen different mysteries; three mysteries per cluetrail.

A cluetrail is different from a mystery. The cluetrail is the path of clues that a sleuth follows to solve the mystery, and the mystery is the forest the path runs through ... or the desert, town, castle, or anywhere ‘evil lurks in the heart of men’. A path can run anywhere. A cluetrail can be made to fit any theme.

It’s quite exciting to come up with scenario that works just as well in the late 1800s of Paris and in contemporary Hollywood. Poison can go anywhere though, just like a cluetrail.

Bones

Research is a passion for me. When I began writing murder mystery scripts I was determined to have a performance that was entertaining AND 'fair play'; meaning that all the clues needed to solve the mystery were presented to the audience so that the mystery could be solved if they were clever enough to follow the cluetrail.

Glorious years were spent reading and analyzing mysteries by the masters of the craft; Agatha Christie, Rex Stout and many, many others. Plots and perpetrators were reduced to their bare bones and plunked into a spreadsheet in an attempt to find a cluetrail formula. Patterns began to emerge. Library stacks were searched looking for one book that would detail the tangled web. It hasn’t been written yet. Ok – I’ll write it then.

The manuscript has been gathering dust for five years. Now as the website for Mystery Factory is taking shape I am starting to write instructions for mystery house parties. That dusty manuscript is going to be getting a workout. Over the next however long it takes, I will be sharing the process of what is involved in creating the bones of a cluetrail and fleshing it out into a mystery. Any feedback and questions will be welcome.