(Historical Fiction as a Heist of Its Own.)

Psychologists tell us that cracking codes, solving riddles, resolving conundrums, and uncovering the truth behind history’s most puzzling questions releases dopamine, the “feel good” neurotransmitter. And while we wait for the answers to these real-life enigmas, we indulge our captivation with history’s mysteries by reading historical crime fiction—excellent news for those of us who write it.

The mystery novel was born in the 19th century and grew up during the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, usually described as the period between the two world wars. Conventions of the genre include a puzzle to be solved (usually a murder); a secluded setting, such as a village, a country house, an island; a sleuth (often amateur); a limited cast of suspects; and plenty of clues and red herrings.

Today, hundreds of mysteries are written each year in the tradition and style of the Golden Age. Historical mysteries encompass four related sub-genres:

• Mysteries written in the past
• Mysteries written today but set in the past
• Mysteries set in the present with a historical crime or puzzle to solve
• Mysteries with dual timelines (past and present)

My own series, the Kate Hamilton Mysteries, falls into the third category. Kate is an American antiques dealer and appraiser who lives and plies her trade in the fictional Suffolk village of Long Barston. The antiques and antiquities Kate handles provide me with a natural way to delve into the past since these precious objects are literal time travelers.

What accounts for the enduring popularity of mysteries steeped in the past? Here are four reasons we continue to read them, to write them, and to love them.

Time Travel Without Antibiotics

Carl Sagan once said, “What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years…. Books break the shackles of time.”  

Most of us have considered the possibility of time travel. If it were possible, would you do it? My answer is usually “only if I could pop home periodically for a hot shower and a dose of antibiotics.” Nevertheless, the thought of experiencing the past in real time holds endless fascination for many of us, and until science bridges the seemingly impenetrable time barrier, the next best thing is immersing oneself in a book.

A well-researched and well-written historical mystery immerses readers in the fictional world, and the experience begins with the author. In a recent podcast, Anthony Horowitz advised authors: “Don’t stand on the edge of the book, looking as it were over the edge of the chasm. Live inside the book, looking around you. So what my characters see—what they smell, what they feel, the wind, the sunshine—if I am, as I have said, inside the book, I’m not thinking about these things. Not writing what they’re saying, I’m listening to what they’re saying.”

Authors who deliver a multi-layered sensory and emotional experience of the past allow readers to travel with them in a virtual time machine to worlds populated by characters so incredibly real we mourn their loss on the final page. Through mysteries steeped in history, we can travel to the 12th century with Ellis Peters’ Brother Cadfael or plunge into the swirling pea-soup fog of Victorian London with Sherlock Holmes and still be home in time for supper.

The Lost Art of Deductive (and Inductive) Reasoning

Solving crimes today is primarily a matter of science and technology. The recent theft at The Louvre in Paris is an example. Within eight minutes, start to finish, the thieves entered the museum and escaped with an estimated $102 million in priceless historical jewels. And yet they left their DNA behind on a helmet, a glove, and a stolen truck with a mechanical cherry picker. That DNA was quickly matched to suspects in the police databases and using additional forensic tools such as cell phone records and video surveillance, the police were able to snag the four suspects and three possible accomplices within days.

By itself, the investigation wouldn’t make much of a plot. It was too easy. Readers want conflict, misdirection, false leads, and reversals. We want to figure it out.

Those of us who write crime fiction must take modern methods of policing into account, of course, but what happened to good old-fashioned sleuthing? If everything comes down to science, is there room for the uniquely human art of ratiocination?

One of the appeals of historical crime fiction is the challenge of following clues and exercising our powers of deductive and inductive reasoning along with the sleuth. When the author plays fair with readers, every clue needed to solve the case is laid out for us—cleverly disguised, of course, amongst red herrings designed to point us in the wrong direction. Authors love to keep readers guessing, and we love it most of all when readers say at the end, “I never saw it coming—but I should have.”

Learning History the Painless Way

If I learned anything in my high school or college history classes about the Regency Era in England, I’ve forgotten it; but I’ve never forgotten the experience of being there through the novels of Jane Austen. “The historian will tell you what happened,” said E. L. Doctorow, the American writer of historical fiction. “The novelist will tell you what it felt like.”

Novels steeped in history bridge the gap between documented history and imaginative storytelling. Memorizing dates and facts may get you through your exam, but it won’t give you an understanding of what life was actually like in the past. That’s where the characters in our stories come in—presenting history through the power of personal narrative.

I remember helping my son, John, prepare for a high-school exam covering the history-changing sea battle in 1588 between the English navy and the Spanish Armada. John had zero interest in 16th-century European politics, ship construction, battle strategies, and the superiority of long-range canons and “hell-fire ships” over heavy siege canons and greater numbers. I soon gave up on the textbook and began to dramatize the scene, playing up the “near-miraculous” storm that kicked up in the English Channel, generating strong winds that pushed the heavy Spanish ships toward the North Sea. I knew I’d won when he started asking questions: What would have happened if the Spanish had won?

To be retained, history must fire our imaginations. Nina Wachsman, art expert and fellow writer of historical fiction, said, “The Mona Lisa didn’t become the most famous picture in the world until it was stolen in 1911.” Now we want to know who she was and what was behind that enigmatic smile.

In A Collection of Lies (2024), along with the unfolding plot and through the eyes and mouths of my characters, I layer in the history of the English Romanis, the lives of Victorian lacemakers, mid-19th century fashion, the art of historical textile conservation, the mires and bogs of Devon’s Dartmoor National Park, the Dartmoor ponies, and the vicissitudes of local British politics. Medicine, Mary Poppins reminded us, goes down better with a bit of sugar. History nerds (like me) would never call Hilaire Belloc’s “great panoply of history” medicine, but even we must admit that history goes down better when experienced through the eyes, minds, and hearts of characters we care about.

A Spot of Nostalgia

A final and major reason we love mysteries steeped in history is the human emotion of nostalgia, once described by novelist and screenwriter Michael Chabon as “the ache that arises from the consciousness of lost connection.” But a connection with what? The interesting truth is we often feel nostalgic for a past that never existed. Even our own lived pasts are commonly shaped and polished in our minds over time until they resemble the past we prefer.

Nostalgia is a coping mechanism. The anxiety produced by the uncertainty, complexity, and rapid change of modern life can be soothed by a few hours spent in an idealized historical period that delivers the simplicity, moral clarity, and predictability we crave. And because the human brain has the ability to hold two opposing truths simultaneously, we can enjoy our virtual visit to the past while knowing full well it is pure fiction.

In a talk given in 2016 at the St. Hilda’s Crime and Mystery Weekend, Martin Edwards, British crime novelist and leading authority on the crime fiction genre, said about the Golden Age mysteries: “[These books] take us back to a time that is perceived as gentler and more appealing. The reality of life in the Twenties and Thirties was very different, of course, but the past can often seem appealing. If you’re a commuter suffering on Southern Rail, for instance, it must be very tempting to escape into the world of Freeman Wills Crofts and Miles Burton, where murderers could craft their alibis safe in the knowledge that the trains would always run as per timetable.”

The pace of change today is overwhelming. No wonder we crave the comforting predictability of trains that run on time. The mysteries of the past and those written today in that tradition provide an escape from an increasingly chaotic and polarized world into the calm civility of an imagined past, satisfying our yearning for a world where logic prevails, puzzles are solved, evil is punished, and justice is restored.

Long may they live.

Check out Connie Berry’s A Grave Deception here:

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Reading a sign that says “Stay behind the red line,” some of us will make sure our toes never come close to the forbidden zone. Others will take it as a challenge, purposely standing on the line and even moving an inch or so beyond it. After all, rules are meant to be broken.

(Dark Secrets and Dastardly Lies: Ramping Up a Killer Plot.)

Obviously, that’s not always true. In the thermal areas of Yellowstone National Park, for example, visitors are instructed to “stay on the boardwalks and trails.” Excellent advice, intended not to restrict their freedom but to keep them alive. Death by scalding isn’t a nice way to go.

What about the so-called “rules of writing?” Are they the kind you break at your own peril, or are they simply conventions—good advice, reflecting individual taste and preferences?

You won’t die if you use a cliché, ignore story structure, or sprinkle your prose with weasel words. On the other hand, you might not attract an agent or score a publishing contract; and if you self-publish, you probably won’t sell enough books to fund your Starbucks habit.

So what are the rules, or the conventions, of writing?

Most writers are familiar with Chekov’s Gun: To paraphrase, if you mention a gun in an early scene, you better make sure it goes off before the end of the book. In other words, every element introduced in a story should have a purpose in the plot. Chekov’s rule is as relevant today as it was when he first penned it in 1889. This is a rule you break at your own risk.

The most famous modern writing rules may be Elmore Leonard’s Ten Rules for Good Writing:

1. Never open a book with weather.
2. Avoid prologues.
3. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said.”
5. Allow no more than two or three exclamation points per 100,000 words of prose.
6. Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.”
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
9. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

Elmore doubled down on the adverb thing when he said that using an adverb to modify a verb is “a mortal sin.” Heavens! None of us wants to commit a mortal writing sin. But is it true? Can a writer break the rules and get away with it? Here are three well-known writing rules you can break—if you know what you’re doing.

1. Show, Don’t Tell

Show, don’t tell is often the first piece of advice given to new writers. Today’s readers want to experience the story along with the characters, so instead of telling the reader a character is angry, we’re advised to show it dramatically using body language and sometimes interior thought:

How dare he? Ann clenched her fists, wincing as her nails dug into her palms.

It’s good advice. But are there occasions when telling is better than showing? Here are three:

To avoid repeating information the reader already knows

In my books, Kate’s mother acts as a sounding board and counselor. She needs to know what’s going on. So, when Kate relates information the reader already knows, I use a brief narrative summary—like this phone conversation from A Legacy of Murder:

“How are you, Mom?”

“I’m fine. Enjoying myself. Have they found the killer of that young woman?”

“Not yet.” I told her the latest, including the medical examiner’s verdict of murder, the proposed DNA testing, and the rumors about Lucien Finchley-fforde.

To skip over boring and irrelevant to-ing and fro-ing

Your main character is leaving her abusive husband and driving to a cabin in the woods where she will encounter a deranged serial killer. Encountering the serial killer is the important part, right? Instead of showing your character packing her suitcase and then riding along with her on the drive, you say:

The commute was forty-five minutes of hell, but Sarah was relieved to be at the cabin where she’d finally be safe.

Show what’s important; tell what’s not.

To help the reader correctly interpret what you show them

In Beverly Cleary’s Ramona and Her Father, Ramona’s father has lost his job, putting a strain on the family finances. Cleary shows us Ramona’s response and then tells what it means:

“Ye-e-ep!” sang Ramona Quimby one warm September afternoon, as she knelt on a chair at the kitchen table to make out her Christmas list. She had enjoyed a good day in second grade, and she looked forward to working on her list. For Ramona a Christmas list was a list of presents she hoped to receive, not presents she planned to give. “Ye-e-ep!” she sang again.

2. Kill the Adverbs

Stephen King said the road to hell is paved with adverbs. He and Elmore Leonard aren’t the only adverb haters out there. Of all the parts of speech, adverbs are by far the most maligned. There’s a reason. Adverbs are always telling—and overusing them (or using them at all, some say) will weaken your writing and mark you as an amateur. Use stronger verbs, we’re told.

Instead of this: She ran quickly to her next class.

Write this: She sprinted to her next class.

Okay, fine. But are there occasions when a well-chosen adverb is the best word to use? I think there are. Here are three:

When the information conveyed is important and an appropriate stronger verb doesn’t exist

In Jospehine Tey’s Brat Farrar, Brat and Aunt Bee visit the Gates family and are met by two wildly barking dogs:

The clamor brought Mrs. Gates to the door. She was a faded and subdued little woman who once must have been very pretty. “Glen, Joy—be quiet,” she cried ineffectually and came forward to reach them.

Adverbs that repeat the meaning of the verb (she whispered quietly) are superfluous, but can you think of a verb that means “to cry ineffectually?”

I can’t either.

When adverbs add intentional humor or irony

Neil Gaiman is the master of this technique. Here’s an excerpt from Neverwhere:

“It’s a rat,” said Richard.

“Yes, it is. Are you going to apologize?”

“What?”

“Apologize.”

Maybe he hadn’t heard her properly. Maybe he was the one who was going mad. “To a rat?”

Door said nothing, fairly meaningfully.

“I’m sorry,” said Richard, to the rat, with dignity, “if I startled you.”

To paint a more vivid picture

“The view from the mountaintop was gorgeous” is a perfectly fine sentence, but “The view from the mountaintop was breathtakingly beautiful” adds emphasis and emotion.

3. Drop That Body ASAP

This applies to crime novels, specifically murder mysteries. Hooking the reader from page one is great advice. Writers are told, and rightly so, to grab their readers’ interest with the first sentence by dropping them in the middle of the action and sparking their curiosity with something puzzling, intriguing, or unusual—the inciting incident. 

Something must happen or the tension will be lost. Conflict and tension are what keep your readers turning pages. In murder mysteries, the inciting incident (the murder) belongs—depending upon who you listen to—on the first page or by the end of the first chapter or before page 30, but certainly by the end of the third chapter.

But does the body drop always have to occur right away? Here are three good reasons to break the rule:

When delaying the body drop actually ramps up the tension

The Guest List, by Lucy Foley, a captivating thriller murder mystery set during a wedding celebration on a remote Scottish island, is a great example because the murder doesn’t take place until close to the end of the book. But there’s plenty of misdirection and foreshadowing along the way. Here’s an example:

The Irish band begins to play again…. Many of the guests hurry in that direction, eager for some light relief. If you were to look closely at where they step, you might see the marks where one barefoot guest has trodden in broken glass and left bloody footprints across the linoleum, drying to a rusty stain. No one notices.

The reader knows someone is going to die. The question is who, and as we move toward the shocking conclusion, the tension becomes almost unbearable.

When a murder overturns readers’ expectations, acting as a plot twist

In The Kind Worth Killing, by Peter Swanson, two strangers who meet on an airplane form a deadly pact to take revenge on those who have wronged them. The reader “knows” who the perpetrators will be. The question is how will they do it and will they be caught? But all is not as it seems, and when the first body drops about a third of the way into the story (“This Changes Everything”), one shocking twist after another upends every expectation.

When the murder isn’t the inciting incident or even the most important plot point

Miss Pym Disposes, by Josephine Tey, is an older example but a good one because the crime itself doesn’t happen until page 180—and the book is only 235 pages long. Miss Lucy Pym, a popular English psychologist, is a guest lecturer at a ladies’ physical training college. When she catches one of students cheating on a final exam, she decides, for what she considers to be good reasons, to cover up the evidence. That act and another close on its heels are the actual crimes that precipitate the death. Again, plenty of subtle foreshadowing creates tension, keeping readers turning the pages. Here’s an early example:

They stood there on the gravel, looking up at her, smiling. That was how she always remembered them afterwards, standing there in the sunlight, easy and graceful, secure in their belief in the world’s rightness and in their trust in each other, untouched by doubt or blemish, taking it for granted that the warm gravel under their feet was lasting earth and not the precipice edge of disaster.

Yes, the story includes a murder, but the real conflict is generated by questions of human psychology, personal preferences, and justice. Tey shapes the readers’ preferences and prejudices and then asks us, along with Miss Pym, to form conclusions with incomplete data—leading to tragic and unforeseen consequences. The death in this case isn’t the precipitating event; it’s the end result.

Check out Connie Berry’s A Collection of Lies here:

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Have I convinced you? I might have cited other writing rules such as No Prologues and No Head-Hopping, but I hope the three I’ve included make my point. Breaking the rules comes with risk, but it also provides opportunities for innovation and creativity. If you know what you’re doing.

I’ll end with some personal advice.

• Know and master the rules of writing before you break them. Understand them and see their value before you toss them out as constrictive. Even Neil Gaiman, whose generous use of adverbs is part of his wit and unique narrative voice, understands their pitfalls:

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with adverbs (he asseverated, gnomishly) but I do tend to do a final read-through of anything I’ve written, deciding whether each adverb lives or dies, based really on whether it adds anything. If it’s implicit in what I’ve already said in the book I chuck it out bravely.

• If you’re a new writer trying to attract an agent or a publisher, I’d stick with the rules for now. Publishing professionals receive so many submissions per week that a single adverb or a prologue might tempt them to hit the delete button. Once you’ve learned your craft and established yourself as a writer, you can experiment. Even then, you might experience some blow-back. If you break the rules, be prepared to justify your choices.

Whatever you do, make sure it’s a choice, not a mistake.

The post Breaking the Writing Rules (And Getting Away With It) appeared first on Writer's Digest.

The challenge for readers is to sort through the evidence—the clues and the red herrings, the secrets and the lies—to discover the truth. The challenge for authors is to keep the reader guessing until the final reveal.

How do we do that? How do authors handle the tension between the perpetrator, who needs to keep his deep, dark secrets, and the sleuth, who is determined to unmask them? The answer will vary from author to author and from book to book but remembering five simple principles will help you elevate a killer plot.

(Blending Mystery and Romance in Fiction)

The Victim Was Killed For A (Secret) Reason

Unless your victim is murdered randomly or accidentally (and that would hardly make for a compelling story), he or she was killed for a reason—not necessarily a good reason or even a sane reason, but a reason. This means your killer is hiding not only the fact that he or she committed the crime but also the motivation behind it. Knowing the why of a murder goes a long way toward revealing the who.

Psychologists tell us murders are committed for lots of reasons—greed, shame, fear, self-defense, the desire to escape, a loss of control, sexual jealousy, loyalty, personal satisfaction, and insanity. That list and its many permutations provide the mystery writer with a nearly infinite number of possibilities. Why take the easy route? A psychopath who kills for the sake of it may be terrifying in real life, but in fiction, it’s pretty boring. Presenting the victim as a horrible person who makes tons of enemies, all of whom would cheerfully stab him in the heart, is common—too common. Why not dig deeper? Why not create a secret, hidden motive that overturns readers’ expectations? Maybe your victim was a ruthless real estate developer, forcing small businesses into bankruptcy in order to snap up the property at bargain prices. But what if that dodgy real estate developer was killed for an entirely different reason altogether—one that is integral to the plot and which you carefully seeded in from the beginning, but which emerges only in the final act?

In Agatha Christie’s Peril At End House, for example, a young woman survives a series of near-fatal attacks staged to look like accidents. Poirot tries to protect her—until he realizes the victim herself staged the accidents to cover a murder of her own. I won’t give away her secret motive, but even the little Belgian detective is fooled at first. Which brings us to the second principle.

Not Every Secret Is Relevant

Uncovering the hidden motive behind murder inevitably requires more than one suspect, and that means uncovering secrets and lies that, in the end, prove to be red herrings—false clues that send the reader off in the wrong direction. The purpose of a red herring in crime fiction is to deflect the reader’s attention for the purpose of disguise.

In Christopher Huang’s debut mystery, A Gentleman’s Murder, a member of Eric Peterkin’s London club is found stabbed to death in the club’s inner recesses. Only one of the club members is guilty, but just about everyone has a deep, dark secret of their own, one they are determined to conceal but which did not lead them to commit murder. As Peterkin uncovers those secrets, guilt falls temporarily on one suspect after another. Instead of plotting the sleuth’s investigation like a circular labyrinth with a one-way path toward the center (clue leading to clue), Huang constructs it instead like a hedge maze with lots of dead ends along the way.

Even dead ends are enlightening. As Sherlock Holmes famously said, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbably, must be the truth.” As dead ends are met and discarded, the list of still-viable suspects is narrowed until there is only one left—the real culprit. The mystery is solved. The innocent are cleared, and their secrets shown to be irrelevant. For one character, however—the killer—the slow unraveling of his dark secret has inevitably taken a toll.

Keeping Secrets Is Costly

Sigmund Freud wrote, “No mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.” Freud wasn’t talking about murder, but he might have been, because unless your killer is a sociopath who can do anything and feel no shame, the secrets he keeps and the lies he tells will eventually take a toll on him.

As Michael Kurland points out, few people believe they are villains. They tell themselves they have good reasons for what they do. Life is unfair. They got a raw deal. They deserve more. And yet, psychologists tell us guilt is the natural emotional response to causing harm. This guilt may be suppressed, sublimated, or outwardly denied, but keeping that guilty secret will require constant effort. As you plot out the slow reveal, consider the short- and long-term effects of guilt—and the toll that self-deception will take on your villain. Take this opportunity to create a more complex and interesting bad guy.

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Your killer is human, after all. How does he respond internally to the weight of his secrets? How can you show his growing guilt without giving the game away? Maybe the killer makes mistakes because she really wants to be stopped. Maybe he piles lies upon lies, one of which eventually leads to his downfall. Maybe guilt takes a physical toll—lack of sleep, stomach problems, headaches. Keeping that deep, dark secret becomes increasingly more difficult and costly. When confronted, will your killer blurt out a confession, attempt suicide, try to escape, or summon his remaining strength for one final evil act? Remember the psychology of guilt. And remember something else as well.

The Author Has Secrets, Too

In mystery fiction, the author must play fair with the reader. We can’t withhold vital clues for the purpose of deception, and we can’t tell outright lies (although our characters can). What we can do is disguise or camouflage the real clues, directing the reader’s attention toward details that appear relevant but aren’t.

Like magicians and conjurors, our stock-in-trade is the art of misdirection. According to Michael Kurland, the goals of misdirection are “to slide information past the reader without waving it in her face, to change the direction of a story in mid-page, and to plant clues that will lie dormant until they’re ready to sprout.” The trick is to embed the fictional sleights-of-hand naturally within the plot or subplot so they don’t raise the reader’s suspicions—or if they do, to direct those suspicions toward the wrong suspect.

Agatha Christie was a master of the Art of Misdirection. She constructed her scenes, said Elizabeth George in Write Away, “so that the clue was present but so was the red herring. And the scene pivoted around the red herring, not around the clue. Brilliant.”

Fortunately, there are many ways to misdirect the reader. Here are four:

1. Creating a false clue. A stabbing victim is found clutching a piece of paper on which is written the partial word MIL. The police suspect he was fingering his friend Will Millman for the crime. Turns out he was reminding himself to buy a gallon of milk.
2. Confusing the time frame. The victim died between 7 and 9 p.m., exactly when the killer was playing the violin on stage before an audience of hundreds. But did the victim really die then?
3. Creating a Distraction. Six people dine together at a pricey restaurant. One of them is the killer; another is the victim. Just as the killer reaches into her purse for her lipstick (a vial of poison disguised as a lipstick), another diner stands up, throws a drink in the victim’s face, and stalks angrily off.
4. Burying the real clue in a list. Readers tend to remember the first two or three items in a list—and the last one. They also remember more intriguing or colorful items over the seemingly mundane. Who remembers a half-filled glass of water when there’s a bottle of sleeping pills on the nightstand, a smashed window with bloody fingerprints on the frame, a gold button with a distinctive crest on the carpet, and a book on black magic on the bed, open to a chapter on necromancy? Later, the red herrings will be explained away, but the half-filled glass of water will be the seemingly insignificant fact that cracks the case.

Like the audience in a magic show, readers love to be fooled. But unlike that audience, mystery readers want to know exactly how the author did it.

All Secrets Are Revealed in the End

With notable exceptions—Tana French’s In The Woods, for example, where the author never reveals what happened to two children who disappeared in the woods 20 years earlier; or Barbara Vine’s A Dark-Adapted Eye, where the reader knows the identity of the killer from the get-go but is never told the motive or even the identity of the victim—the unwritten contract between mystery author and reader dictates that, in the end, all clues are accounted for and all questions answered. At least the ones bearing upon the central plot.

Unless questions are purposely left hanging for a subsequent book, the author ties up the loose ends, providing a satisfactory ending. Secrets are revealed, order is restored, and justice is served. Unlike real life.

Maybe that’s the appeal of mystery fiction.

Click to continue.

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