Daniel Sellers guest post: 'Twists, part one: classifying twists'

On the crime writing circuit, one bumps into lots of people, writers and readers, with whom one has the occasional pleasant conversation without necessarily getting the chance to spend a lot of time in their company. A while back I was talking to Daniel Sellers, an interesting writer now based in Scotland whose publishers are the very successful Joffe Books; his series is set in Glasgow and features Lola Harris. A chat with Daniel led to his contributing some thoughts to this blog on the perennially teasing subject of plot twists. Here is the first part; the second will follow in due course:'Mypublisher likes to stress the twistiness of its authors’ crime novels. Straplineson the covers of my first three thrillers declare each to contain a ‘massivetwist’ — so the pressure is on!I love atwist, but have begun to think carefully about how they work — those reveals orinversions that lie in wait for readers.
As astarting point, I think it’s fair to say that twists fall into two classes: thosethat are internal or ‘intrinsic’ to the story; and those that are external, or‘extrinsic’.
Anintrinsic twist surprises or shocks the characters in the story as much as itsurprises the reader. Most traditional (and older) crime stories fall into thiscategory: Christie’s Crooked House (1949) and The Mousetrap (1952)are examples of genuinely astonishing intrinsic twists. The breath-taking twistbecame her speciality. As Robert Barnard pointed out in A Talent to Deceive (1980),‘ . . . she is the despair of later crime writers: because she dared to thinkthe unthinkable there is no trick in the trickster’s book, it seems, that shehasn’t thought of first.’
Anextrinsic twist is a more modern (or should that be post-modern?) development. Thistype of twist isn’t so much a surprise reveal for the characters in the story,as for the reader. Indeed, sometimes the characters in the story already knoweverything, and the reveal is only for readers. An excellent example ofthis is Barbara Vine’s A Fatal Inversion (1987). Another, infilm, is M. Night Shyamalan’s Sixth Sense (1999). Most often thewithholding to achieve this kind of twist is done using the ‘unreliablenarrator’ device (as in Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (2012)) but this can befrustrating for readers and lead to ‘sameness’ or even a perception of cheating.See Marian Keyes’seloquent take down on Twitter/X last summer.
Unlikethe intrinsic twist, the possibilities of the extrinsic twist seem endless. I’msure we’ll see more twists that lie in how stories are told — some of whichwill thrill us, others which might prove irritating.
I’dargue that Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) is a fineexample of a crime novel that features an effective intrinsic twist along withthe most famous extrinsic twist of all. Thanks to excellent alibi-making, thecharacters in the story are as surprised as we are when the killer’s identityis revealed (well, maybe the characters aren’t quite as surprised as us!).
What’syour favourite twist in crime fiction?'