Put simply, the problem your character thinks they're tracking is rarely what the mystery is actually about. But it's only through persevering, as well as beating a confession out of the occasional goon, that your detective will begin putting all the pieces together.
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| They said I'd back off if I knew what was good for me... if I could do that, I wouldn't be here. |
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It's Never What It Seems (At First)
As one of the most widely-recognized examples of the noir detective genre, take The Big Sleep. It starts off simple enough; a private detective is hired to find a rich man's favored son-in-law who has gon missing. As Phil Marlowe follows the clues he manages to uncover an underground pornography operation, he falls afoul of a local mob boss for getting into his business, and he gets mixed up in several murders. In the end, a majority of the leads he follows, and the crooks he ends up busting (or just busting up) have nothing to do with the missing son-in-law.
Spoiler warning for a more than 80-year-old-book... the son-in-law was killed by his own sister-in-law because she tried to seduce him, and he rejected her advances.
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| It really was that dizzy dame all along... |
Now, that's not to say that all of the other stuff Marlowe does in the novel is just fluff and filler. For one, it's exciting watching him have tense stand-offs with gangsters, and get dragged down in all kinds of dark and dangerous doings. For another, though, these incidents show us the different sides of the characters involved, and they let us see the depravity and corruption that runs through both the city, and through the wealthy elite who have turned it into their playground. It circles the issue of the missing young man, until we come all the way back to it, and Marlowe slaps us in the face with the truth like a dead fish, and we see the signs that were there the whole time.
I could list examples of books and films all day that illustrate this point, but then this blog would be colossal, and unreadable. However, as someone who's more than dabbled in the mystery genre, I wanted to suggest a relatively simple method for laying out how to write a mystery like this without confusing yourself.
Step One: What Really Happened?
The first step, and the most important, is for you to lay out what actually happened in your story. This is the "true" plot, if there is such a thing. For example, it might be, "The missing guy is dead, and he was killed by a jilted lover," or, "The young woman the detective saw the target with was his estranged daughter, not a lover," or even, "The wife is, in fact, cheating on her husband."
Step Two: Add Complications
Generally speaking, the actual plot of a mystery tends to be simple and straightforward... the issue is that it's wrapped in layers of complication that all have to be peeled back. In some cases these complications completely subsume the original story in immediacy, until we as the audience remember what set this chain of events in motion in the first place.
For example, in the case of the cheating wife, what happens if she's actually a government agent or acts as a runner for the mob, and most of the rendezvous she has are business related? What if it turns out she's part of a sex cult? In either situation, what is the pushback from the organization against the detective trying to find out the truth?
These complications could be directly connected to the actual plot (yes, the wife is cheating, but the sex cult angle makes it far more than just a marital indiscretion), or they might be a jump off from that plot (the wife might be cheating on her husband, sure, but it's a much bigger deal that she's actually been living a double life as a drug runner, secret agent, etc.).
Step Three: Follow The Violence
This is not universal to all mysteries, but generally speaking the closer your protagonist gets to the truth, the more pushback they're going to receive. If thugs show up at a private detective's office to try to scare them off the case, that's how they know they're going in the right direction. If someone takes a shot at them, or tries to hit them with a car, that's also a good sign they're moving in the right direction. Even cosier mysteries will have people slamming down phones, threatening legal action, or refusing to answer the door, showing they are hoping to stonewall our investigator.
Ideally these things can act as jumpstarts to the case, and bounce your investigator onto the right track. And once they get on that rail, and start pushing back, it's only a matter of time until the case starts coming unraveled, and they manage to find the truth.
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That's all for this week's Craft of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sci-fi dystopian thriller Old Soldiers, the Hardboiled Cat series about a mystery solving Maine Coon in Marked Territory and Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!
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