Resources on plotting mystery stories

You should dig into the Detection Club, which had Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers, Chesterton, etc as its founding members. It's entry oath was:

Do you promise that your detectives shall well and truly detect the crimes presented to them using those wits which it may please you to bestow upon them and not placing reliance on nor making use of Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence, or Act of God?

The full ceremony is here and offers quite a few nice rules for you to summarise and to print out for your wall.

posted over 6 years ago

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Brereton‭

55 reputation 8 2 7 0

EDIT: In reconsidering this question and a conversation I had with a colleague the other day I believe I have something to add on this. He mentioned reading about the way Agatha Christie used to construct her stories. He made the assertion that she used to write the whole thing without actually knowing who the murderer was, then analyse what she had written to find a suitable murderer as she approached the end and then quickly "plant" the clues along the way.

Whether this hearsay is true or not I cannot say but it did make me wonder if there was anything about Christie's methods on line I found:

http://www.christiemystery.co.uk/method.html

And from the same site:

http://www.christiemystery.co.uk/plot.html

Hope those help!

-END EDIT-
FINAL EDIT

Just to put the lid on this and make it complete, following the Christie search I just did a generic one for whodunnit plot methods and the best link, despite feeling a little spammy, was:

http://www.squidoo.com/writing_whodunit_mystery

-END EDIT-

When I wanted to write a crime novel I didn't worry overmuch about the "whodunnit" aspect of the novel as the crime I was describing was so bizarre it was more of a "whatexactlyarewedealingwithhere". However I did want the rather surreal situation I was describing to have some sort of psychological veracity and for the police procedural details to be accurate. Perhaps these desires were born of the bizarreness of the actual incident I was describing. (It's that odd that I'm not even going to attempt to describe it here.)

In preparation for that I consulted the Writer's Digest volumes Scene of the Crime and Armed and Dangerous. The former was considerably more helpful than the latter and my actual weapons reference for firearms is a rather scary volume called the D20 Modern Weapons Locker which is for a role playing game but contains a great and accurate write up of almost every firearm in the known world (I told you it was scary). The Weapons Locker also points out matters for simulating the realism of weapons in games and deals in points of fact like there being no way to silence a revolver.

Finally for a psychological aspect I read many of the behavioural profiling memoirs of FBI Behavioural Profiler John Douglas. His books with Mark Olshaker give Douglas a chance to discuss the psychology of the criminal in depth that is more than sufficient for an author to know their criminal. He mostly talks about serial killers obviously but also about particular single murders and even a few "nuisances" like the profile of the kind of guy who would add a urine kicker to the office coffee pot (similar psychological make up to the unabomber for the record).

What all this taught me was that if your crime is compelling the "mystery" aspect kind of takes care of itself. A story in which you just ask "who" dunnit is not as exciting as one that asks "why" they dunnit and "what" they tried to do to cover it up.

From that time whenever I design a crime story I always walk through the crime from the perspective of the criminal and allow the detectives to work back to the crime from the evidence.

posted over 13 years ago

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One Monkey‭

210 reputation 4 17 41 0

Maybe you can look into how Memento was written and use that as a framework?

Stefano Ghislotti wrote an article in Film Anthology which discusses how Nolan provides the viewer with the clues necessary to decode sujet/plotline as we watch and help us understand the fabula/story from it. The color sequences include a brief overlap to help clue the audience in to the fact that they are being presented in reverse order. The purpose of the fragmented reverse sequencing is to force the audience into a sympathetic experience of Leonard's defective short-term memory, where prior events are not recalled.

posted over 13 years ago

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pageman‭

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A) There is no resource in the world that will make you a writer like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, or Isaac Asimov. You are going to be the writer that YOU are going to be. Being inspired by the greats is fine and a good thing.

B) The best resource anywhere for tropes is tvtropes.org, and specific mystery tropes may be found at http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MysteryTropes

C) Now considering that you already knew the term "trope", you likely already knew B.

D) The butler did it. Elementary.

posted over 13 years ago

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Ernest Pazera‭

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I highly recommend reading related articles / forums in one of the many Role-Playing Games Communities.

Since writing adventures for a group of gamers often include mystery elements, lots of good advice on design and writing can be found there.

While using a lot of Gaming Language, these resources are highly readable even to someone not familiar with Role-playing games.

A quick search on Google yielded:

How do you write mystery adventures from http://www.enworld.org forum, and Mystery plots from one of the designers of the d20 Modern Roleplaying Game.

posted over 13 years ago

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Ido Tamir‭

30 reputation 2 2 5 0

Specifically on Tapply's Elements of Mystery Fiction, I bought the book, and was disappointed to find almost nothing concerning the plotting issues I raised in the question. Alas.

posted over 13 years ago

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Standback‭

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