For its enduring popularity as a genre, mystery is a surprisingly tough genre to break into for new writers, and in some respects one of the hardest genres to write. This is in part due to the procedural know-how a writer must have to write convincingly about investigating crime. But it’s also because of how inherently predictable the mystery formula ultimately is and the challenge of keeping readers entertained, engaged, and surprised through the grind of case when the one aspect of the outcome--the survival of the protagonist (when the book is in a series or written in the first person)--is almost a guaranteed given and the odds are (usually) pretty good that the bad guy(s) will be caught.

But anyone who loves mysteries knows how absorbing a good mystery can be despite all this. And from a writer’s standpoint, the better you understand the inherent challenges posed by the genre and the mistakes many writers make in connection to them until they know better, the better the odds of writing a book that can complete in the popular but very competitive genre.

So I thought I’d look back over some of the dozen of mysteries I’ve worked on over the years with an eye to the most challenging aspects of mystery writing and some of the standards to keep in mind if you’re going to write a good one. And the most daunting of these may be the vast amount that may need to be learned and distilled for readers on a wide array of topics.

Unless your day job happens to relate to law or some avenue of criminal justice, odds are you  may need to do a good deal of homework on crime scene processing, investigation procedure, surveillance technique, suspect interrogation, the legal ins and outs of admissibility and conduct, and other aspects of day-to-day of getting crimes solved and bringing perpetrators to justice. The extent to how much insiders’ knowledge depends on what kind of mystery you’re writing. But generally the better trained your protagonist is, the more you’ll need to know about his or her work and how things are really  done in that world. Given how knowledgeable hardcore mystery readers tend to be about how investigations really go, you run the risk of losing us if you don’t ace this requirement. 

The same can be said to a certain extent for how crimes are committed and what the perpetrators need to know to pull their crime off and have any kind of shot of getting away with it. It’s vital to be sure that the method of the crime is sufficiently plausible and that whatever clues you choose to seed the story with add up. Fortunately, there are dozens of books out there to help writers get a handle on all this, including: 1. Police Procedure & Investigation: A Guide for Writers (Howdunit) by Lee Lofland

2. Police Procedural: A Writer’s Guide to the Police and How They Work by Russell Bintliff

3. The Crime Writer’s Reference Guide: 1001 Tips for Writing the Perfect Murder by Martin Roth

4. Missing Persons: A Writer’s Guide to Finding the Lost, Abducted and Escaped by Fay Faron

5. Howdunit Forensics by D.P. Lyle

6. Howdunit-The Book of Poisons by Serita Stevens and Anne Bannon

Books like this can be very helpful and make for surprisingly interesting reading in their own right. But writing a convincing mystery takes more than direct experience, research, and crime-solving know-how; it also takes a good bit of finesse in bringing the background facts and information to the page, and in some cases a bit of restraint. 

One issue with we sometimes run into with writers who go deep into research on such matters is the understandable temptation to give readers too much detail on the particulars of what they’ve learned. Most mystery stories are best served by resisting the impulse to lecture readers on how things work or let dialogue ring falsely thanks to your characters explaining things to one another that they should darn well already know.

More on this in a few days.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Null Value