Writing A Murder
Mystery - Part 1 - Characters
By Bryan Hallett
Crime fiction in general and murder
mystery in particular is a popular staple of bookshops, theatre and
television drama, and is a genre often tackled by new writers. This
article is written from the standpoint of someone who writes mysteries for
theatre performance, but the lessons and techniques can be applied to any
media.
However you wish to present your mystery,
there are at least three vital elements to a ripping mystery: characters
and plot. So often the budding writer gets so bogged down in developing a
complex web of intrigue that the all important element of character
development is missed entirely and consequently we hardly care what
happens to them.
I strongly advise that a murder mystery,
in what ever form, should start with the development of characters who fit
closely into the environment you have chosen for your story. Plot will
come later, and actually flow from the characters you have created.
So, let's begin with the environment.
Murder mysteries set in a 1930s English mansion have been done, pardon the
pun, to death, but there are reasons for their popularity. For starters,
this setting instantly gives the writer a set of stock characters with
whom the reader/watcher will already be partly familiar. Secondly the
confined setting often means that the list of suspects is immediately
obvious. I'm certainly not advocating that you avoid such a setting, but
there are hundreds of other situations which can give rise to a similar
set of conditions. Consider, for example, a submarine, an office party, a
medieval banquet, an Antarctic expedition, a spaceship, a cruise ship, a
town council meeting - the list can go on and on.
How to Write a Mystery
Once you've picked your place you can easily begin to think
of a series of characters. Let's concentrate on the submarine for now to
get an idea of how this might work. We obviously need a captain, and let's
add a couple of officers and ratings for good measure. We shall want to
make the trip a little interesting along the way, so let's throw in a
mysterious passenger and his beautiful wife. We don't even need to name
our gallant crew at the moment - but we can begin to sketch in the
characteristics that can point the way to an interesting plot.
So then, our captain. He needs a bit of
backstroke. Let's make him a gruff old sea-dog who demands high standards
and is nearing retirement. He has a fear of water developed after his wife
drowned in a pleasure boat accident. We can go on this way with all of our
major players, and then the interesting part starts - working out their
relationship with other characters.
I usually do this by drawing a bubble
diagram and connecting each character to each of the others with an arrow
describing their relationship. For example: Captain -----------> blames
for death of his wife ----------> Officer 1
Captain -----------> was once engaged to -------------------> Beautiful
wife
Eventually we have a web of interconnections that begin to suggest a
framework for a story.
Some of these interconnections may fall by the wayside or be changed as we
progress, but it's a good start.
Now go back to your characters and assign
them names. If you are planning a comical story these names could suggest
their characteristics (eg Captain Stable), or you may want something more
sombre. Add a few more notes on their character then you are ready to
begin on part 2 - the plot...
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