How to Write an Intelligent Murder Mystery (ePub)

How to Write an Intelligent Murder Mystery is a book that explores the difficult environment for the modern writer of murder mysteries. With thousands of murder mysteries being published nowadays, how is it possible to write an original and compelling murder mystery?

To do this, you will certainly have to come up with an excellent plot, as well as some deeper issues, such as moral dilemmas, that will engage the reader's mind and cause them to consider and reflect upon the events portrayed in your novel. Was the police officer justified when she shot the unarmed man? Was the mother justified when she murdered, in cold blood, the man who raped and tortured her daughter?

However, more than any other type of novel, the murder mystery relies on plot, and because of that, I am going to be examining, sometimes quite critically, the various plot ideas I have used in my thirteen murder-mystery novels. Some of these ideas are unusual: A fake murder where the crime scene was staged; an unreliable narrator who cloaks himself, by means of various lies, in a veneer of innocence; a murder mystery where the plot motif is not who murdered the victim but who was the one murdered; a locked-room mystery—here, the murderer is somehow able to exit a room where the door and windows are all bolted and locked from inside.

I know that there are probably going to be some people who will be upset that I sometimes use parts of my own novels as examples to consider. This is an important issue that needs to be discussed because if you don't have faith that I'm trying to help you and am only trying to promote myself, then this book won't be of any use to you.

The basic problem is that there are more than a few people who are immediately suspicious of authors who have no brand name. To those people I would say that if a well-known author, such as Stephen King, was the author of this book, you would accept the sample passages in the spirit in which they are given. There's an old saying that a picture is worth a thousand words, and so that's why I am going to include, for instance, parts of the closing arguments in a trial that occurs in one of my novels. I could have just said, "If you want to find out how lawyers talk, you can locate some sample closing arguments on the internet." But I thought it might be more helpful to you if I showed you a few practical examples of what I have done when it comes to certain things that I am trying to emphasize in this book. Because, after all, it doesn't make much sense to follow the advice of a person who is incompetent, and I think it's helpful for you to be able to make a judgment about whether I am competent. But above all, I am trying to give you the benefit of my experience, and I think, because of my experience, that examples can be helpful. It's true that some, or all, of the examples (which account for about a third of the word count of this book) may not help you, but they may help others. It really isn't likely that everything contained in this book is going to help everyone who reads it, but if you are able to pick up one good, usable idea from this book, then that is well worth the purchase price, and I think there are many people who will pick up quite a few good ideas from this book.