Repeating Rules for Writing Whodunits

Over the last two years, I’ve posted night on 400 pieces to this blog. It was no surprise to learn that the most popular post is “Home”. The second most popular with is a post entitled “One Small Click of the Mouse” which was a promo post from May last year, covering the early chart progress of The Filey Connection.

I was quite surprised when I discovered that the third most popular, way ahead of the pack, is a piece I put in February 2012, entitled Rules for Writing Whodunits.

I repeat it here in full, with the links updated.

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Exchanging emails with my very good friend Maureen Vincent-Northam the other day, she suggested a plot for the STAC Mysteries. Here’s an outline:

The Sanford gang of middle-aged rockers are on a week’s holiday at a caravan park in Cornwall. A mob of hippie type travellers invade the field next door. Someone is murdered, Joe, Sheila and Brenda investigate and solve it.

Do you like it? Are you frothing at the mouth with anticipation? Hmm. You need to know more before you can make your mind up? Sorry, but you may have quite a wait because it’s all I know right now.

The purpose of that little exercise was to demonstrate just how little I know about my titles when I start work on them. I don’t know who was killed or why or whodunit.

There are rules to producing whodunits. The crime should be carried out very early on. The detective and the killer should both appear no later than chapter two. The text should be sprinkled with red herrings and false trails. The clues should be laid out in the text so the reader has a chance of solving it.

All very laudable, but whoever laid them out should have checked on a few titles from the Queen of Crime. In Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, we’re well into the book before we meet the killer and we meet him/her before the crime is committed. Poirot himself doesn’t show up until page 101 in my copy.

I’m not comparing myself to the genius that was Agatha Christie, but from my point of view, there are no rules.

In my current WIP, another STAC Mystery, the real crime is not committed until the end of Chapter 5 (ish) and in The Filey Connection (published by Crooked Cat on March 2nd, plug, plug) it’s even later. In The Handshaker, there is no clue to the killer’s identity until very late in the novel, and in Voices, we don’t meet the real nemesis until near the end of the book.

So what am I doing while leading up to all this? I’m doing what my reading of Agatha Christie taught me; building up the background, inking in pictures of the location, establishing the various motives and possible suspects… oh and I’m chucking a few clues about, too.

I don’t have anything against rules and using them to plan my work. It’s just that even when I do, the story and characters take over from me, and usually, half way through the book, I learn that the person who I thought dunit, didn’t. It was someone else and for entirely different reasons than I first suspected.

Compare it, if you will, to route planning. I spent years of my working life travelling up and down the UK, so much so that there is nowhere I haven’t been and I know the roads like the back of my hand. As a consequence, I don’t own a satnav, and the result is I get there without running into narrow back lanes where traffic has been banned for the last year.

If I start with the STAC gang at a caravan park and a bunch of hippies moving in next door, it means that anything can happen. And it frequently does.

There are rules. I ignore them without fear. Joe and his pals will sort it out for me.

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The popularity of this post has led me to conclude that there are people out there eager to learn how to write whodunits, and in order to assist, I’m going to tell them.

But I can’t tell anyone how to write a whodunit, because I don’t obey the rules. So instead, I’ll tell them how I write whodunits.

Watch this space.