I write mysteries and suspense novels. And I’ve spoken on the idea of how to structure them. I thought we might talk about structuring mysteries/suspense novels on this blog over the next few weeks. I did  a little research and found a few things that I thought were helpful. To draft a good story, you must surprise and keep your readership. Mystery/suspense is the perfect place.

Here are some ideas for structuring your story:

Keep your reader guessing:

When you write a mystery, you set up a trail for the detective to follow until they discover the killer. The process is similar no matter what sub-genre you write—traditional mystery, cozy, crime, police procedural, private investigator, etc. That trail leads your readers into the mystery and keeps them turning pages.

Along the trail, your detective protagonist discovers clues that eventually lead him, and the reader, to the perpetrator. As a writer, your job is to plant these clues successfully.

Clues

In order to do so, it’s important to understand the difference between clues, evidence, and red herrings. Today we’ll talk about clues. You’ll be tucking these items in among the scenes in your storyline. Sometimes you want them to be evident to the detective and other times you want to hide them from your protagonist. Understanding what they are and how they work helps you construct a tight story that keeps readers guessing.

In a mystery story, a clue is anything that points the detective to the killer. 

Clue is a variant of the Late Middle English clew, a ball of thread. If you remember your Greek mythology, such things can be very handy when guiding people out of labyrinths – much as a detective unravels a mystery to solve a crime.

As a writer constructing your story, you have endless possibilities to plant and hide clues along your storyline. As you outline your plot, brainstorm ideas for what clues will lead your detective toward solving the puzzle.

Here are some ideas to get you started:

• Physical items the victim left behind – letters, notes, notebooks, a keepsake, tickets, ticket stubs, emails, text messages, etc.
• Dialogue with suspects – voicemail recordings, conversations with the detective, overheard conversations, dialogue with the detective’s opponent or love interest. Even hearsay and gossip can hide grains of truth that are clues.
• Background – cultural paradigms in the victim’s world that make sense within that world. When a victim is part of a specialized world, your detective may need to know about the world in order for pieces to make sense. It could be anything from the gambling underworld to flower shows, or dog breeding, or deep-water diving, or spiritual cults, or… you get the idea.

Clues are anything the detective learns that point him toward resolving the mystery.

In the next few weeks, we’ll talk about evidence and red herrings, how to use them and where to place them in your story to keep your readership turning the page.

Join me next week for evidence. What are you reading/writing this week?