Three Things I Wish I’d Known When I Started Writing a Murder Mystery

When I started my debut novel, I didn’t know anything about writing fiction. I’d always been a voracious reader, and I loved to write. But constructing a novel—a traditional murder mystery—involved skills that were all new to me. So I gave myself a crash course in crime fiction. I read craft books. Listened to podcasts. Sought feedback. Read a ton.

After six months, I finished a first draft. It was good enough to interest an agent, but not nearly good enough to publish. It was only in revisions, first with my agent, and later, with my editor at William Morrow, that I filled some huge holes I’d missed in my first draft. 

Here are three lessons from these industry professionals that helped take my murder mystery to the next level.

1. Put your suspects on rotation.

I thought I’d set up my murder mystery properly. I introduced four clear suspects in the first hundred pages. But then, I let them drift. I spent long scenes with some suspects and left others out in the cold. I brought the suspects in when it suited the story, not considering how much pagetime each of them received or how often they popped up. 

The result? Some suspects were very suspicious. Others, not so much. My agent suggested that I take a more intentional approach. She encouraged me to deliberately cycle from one suspect to another. I revised the story so that each clue that invalidated one person casts fresh suspicion on another. My agent called this the “lazy susan” approach to suspects. It turned a choppy story into a propulsive one. And it made all the suspects worth attending to. 

2. Mystery readers are suspicious of everything. 

Every genre has its conventions. If two single people meet at the beginning of a rom-com, they’re probably going to fall in love. In a mystery, everyone a detective meets—even an amateur detective—is suspicious. Readers are on a race against the author to try to solve the puzzle before the last page. This means readers are on high alert for clues. They will pay extra attention to a shadowy object, a squinting acquaintance, even a sinister adjective. 

You can use this to your advantage, picking words deliberately to obscure and confuse armchair sleuths. But you also need to be aware when you might be doing it unconsciously. My editor pointed out that some dialogue tags I was using—small gestures characters were making—made one character seem overly suspicious from their first showing on the page. I got much more attentive to my word choice and use of symbols in the next revision.

3. Readers need checkpoints to play along.

I wanted to write a “fair play” mystery, where every clue the detective finds is also revealed to the reader. I thought I’d done this in the first draft. But there was something crucial I left out: the detective deliberating on what it all meant. The result was a short, fast-moving mystery that left more than one beta reader lost or frustrated. 

My editor encouraged me to add more of the amateur detectives’ thought process on the page. At first, this advice confused me. I wanted to respect my readers’ intelligence. I didn’t want to bore them with scenes with the detectives rehashing the meaning of the clues on the page. But then I reread a few of my favorite traditional mysteries. I looked at scenes where detectives processed the information they uncovered, and I highlighted each sentence that explained what the detective thought. I was shocked by the frequent, extensive interior thoughts on the page. I highlighted many lines like: “This new information changed everything,” or “he remembered what the girl had said about the smell in the garage.”

This simple exercise helped me understand my editor’s advice. Writing these deliberations felt awkward to me. But reading them felt completely natural. So I trained myself to do it. The result was a more satisfying read that allowed readers to check their own assumptions and stay apace as the mystery progressed.

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