“It is completely unimportant. That is why it is so interesting.”
- Hercules Poirot, in Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926)
Clues, clues, clues. Creating devilish ones, planting them unobtrusively, distracting the reader with showy ones that turn out to be not at all what they seem. It’s so much fun to read them in stories by masters of crime fiction, and so hard to do oneself. After all, if you created it, it screams out to you. How could anyone else fail to pick it up immediately?
That’s why it’s a high-five moment when a reader emails me to say she had no idea who the villain was in MURDER IN THE ABSTRACT until I revealed it. And that’s why I’m squirming in my chair this week as I work through a particularly tricky moment in my new mystery in which I have to lay a false trail at the same time I sneak in a couple of genuine tips that must seem unimportant, as the little Belgian detective says, his moustache twitching, for another ten chapters.
A lot of crime fiction doesn’t rely on mystery. In thrillers, you frequently know who the bad guy is on page one. The tension comes from not knowing if he’ll be caught before he kills again. In police procedurals, the cops may not know who the murderer is, but they assemble their clues in front of you, for the most part. The challenge often is for you to put the puzzle pieces together as well as the professionals do, or to fret that they’re not seeing the picture correctly, and that the killer will strike again before the analyses – or the cop’s hunches – pay off.
I lost interest in Nancy Drew early on (too goody-goody), but gobbled Agatha Christie’s devilishly clever mysteries when I was a young teenager, and still own and reread many of them just to marvel at her powers of distraction. As a young mother with time on her hands and an unhealthy threshold for boredom, I dove into Nero Wolfe’s world, as created by Rex Stout and narrated by Archie Goodwin. I think my taste for clue-driven crime fiction took hold in those days and is probably why I have chosen to write in that vein now. I love and admire the work of authors who write other forms of crime fiction, but the planting of clues deliberately designed to lead the reader astray is my first love.
