Death surrounds us everywhere. Of course, how we react to it differs. Children getting blown up half a world away or elderly coworkers not showing up one day usually provokes no reaction. A rich uncle leaving behind an inheritance might inspire a jubilation that better sense tells us to quell. But let’s say you wake up one morning to find a friendly, healthy, financially comfortable neighbor has drowned in your pool. Now that’s intriguing. And intrigue is at the heart of all mystery. We’ll discuss how to become the next Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler or Dorak Seng on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

Mysteries are some of the most popular books on the market and have been for centuries. But, unlike my high school science teacher, just because they’re popular doesn’t mean they’re easy.

Before we get into the advice, let’s look at some mystery subgenres and their attributes.

First, we have the hardboiled mystery, the province of snoops and private eyes, popularized by writers like Dashiell Hammett and Bill O’Reilly. The protagonists in these stories are famous for cracking wise, having a cynical outlook and having a bad relationship with police. (Which contains some kernel of truth, as it turns out police don’t like snide comments while they fish your dead neighbor out of your pool.)

Cozy mysteries represent the flip side of the coin. These are lighthearted mysteries that take often place in bucolic settings. The Number 1 Ladies Detective Agency and Miss Marple books are some excellent examples. And while these stories often revolve around murder, they usually don’t dwell on gore or scooped out eyeballs or torn scrotums. Like the title suggests, they’re meant to be comfort reading. Murder She Wrote was a famous cozy mystery TV series that was originally meant to have a harder, darker tone, but producers quickly realized test audiences were uncomfortable with the idea of an elderly Angela Lansbury getting sexually assaulted in every episode.

Capers are another popular mystery subgenre. Here we’re often focusing on the other side of the law, and we’re not looking back and asking Whodunit, but looking forward and asking How will they pull it off. Elmore Leonard’s Out of Sight is a highwater mark of the genre, as is my 2016 novella Slight of Hand, about a group of pygmy circus performers who try to steal Stonehenge.

Let’s look at some tips to make our mysteries their most mysterious.

Step One: Develop your sleuth

While the hook of your crime is probably the most important element, your reader won’t stay engaged unless you’ve got an interesting sleuth to follow through the crime-solving process. They don’t have to be all that complicated. Sherlock Holmes, after all, is just a really smart guy who hates Mormons and loves cocaine. But while simple, that also makes him very relatable.

You should also give them a reason for wanting to solve the crime. This could be a personal connection boredom, or it could be political.

Step Two: Plan your crime

Before you start anything though, you need to plan your crime. You need to know who did it, why and what clues they left behind. Don’t worry about it being believable. In the real world people kill because they got cut off in traffic, because God or a dog told them to, or because they didn’t show respect for where the property lines are drawn, so you can give your killer any motive you want.

It’s best to do your research, too. Look up how long it takes a body to decompose. Look up how one might remove traces of DNA from a corpse. Go to your local pharmacy, grab different medications and ask how many will get a 70 kg person to stop breathing. (However, it’s probably not the best idea to do this research if you a suspect under an active police investigation.) But speaking of…

Step Three: Make a list of suspects

Half the fun of a mystery is guessing which from a gallery of vibrant personalities is the real killer. Is it the wife who, though only 90 pounds, easily could’ve brained her husband from behind with a bottle causing him to fall in the pool? Is it the 13-year-old son who purpose fully mislabeled his drug stash in the hope that his dad would take the wrong kind, suffer heart failure and plummet into a neighbor’s pool? Or maybe it’s the person you least suspect, the guy with an airtight alibi, the cocky type who knows he’s smarter than the police and even leaves clues about it on the internet?

Step Four: Choose a unique setting

Post-war urban America and the idyllic British countryside are both fun playgrounds if you want to mess around with the tropes, but I’d go for something less explored. I’ve set mysteries in 30^th century incestual generation ships (It’s All Relative), radical Antifa enclaves in middle America (The They/Them Murders), and I even did an espionage mystery set in caveman times (Ook The Spook).

Step Five: Leave trails of clues

It won’t be fun for the reader if they don’t feel like they can play along. Clues should not only provoke the reader, they should ratchet up the tension in the narrative. New developments can both lead the reader closer to the answer while putting the characters in more danger.

For example, imagine you’re writing about a sleuth who thinks she’s found the murderer because the same pills found in the victim’s stomach were found in the neighbor’s medicine cabinet. But when she goes to ask the pharmacist about the medication, the suspect sees her there asking questions. And she later thinks she can see his car following her home and she regrets living alone in a house with such thick walls but she doesn’t see his car on her street so she goes to bed not realizing he learned how to pick locks at the learning annex last year and with her diabetes it would be easy, oh so easy, to make her death look like an accident.