mystery

“Meet me in Wuhan.”
Those were the words that lifted me out of my slumber that early Friday morning. I didn’t need to ask – those dulcet tones could only have come from the mouth of a certain European seductress:
the petite, ever sprightly Fran Blauchamp. I pressed the phone to myear and tried my best to respond to her primordial mating call.
“How you doin’?”
“Come to me.”
“I looked for you. For years. I thought you’d run away to Paris.”
“Oh no, I found a place much more romantic. For starters, it doesn’t smell like the piss of Japanese tourists here.”
Her rapier wit had not diminished with age.
“China,” I said. “Just like we always talked about. Where are you, exactly?”
“I’ll text you the address of my hotel. You’d love it here. It’s hot. The food’s great. Plus, you can do your banking on a Sunday! There’s a flight leaving tonight at seven. There’re two layovers, through Dallas and Pyongyang. Tickets start at $3500.”
Dallas? No, thank you, I thought to myself.
I sat up in bed and closed my eyes. Fran Blauchamp. I felt the imagery pulsing through my temples – the smooth, olive skin, that tropical, private island – the one visible from our Holiday Inn SuperSavers suite – that vagina, white sand beaches, shade from palm trees, two bell boys knife fighting along the docks, the ruffled bedsheets, a three-legged dog, Diet Sprite, more vagina, a bottle of
lube leaking onto a copy of Gideon’s Bible.
“You know I’d love to, Fran. But… it’s complicated.”
“Wuhan – do I really need to say any more to convince you?”
She was right. Memories started pouring in. Thirteen years ago we spent four unforgettable days together in Aruba. Two lonely stars crossing paths in the cosmos. I still thought of her fondly every time I stayed at, walked past, or saw commercials for, hotels.
“Just imagine,” she continued. “You and me. Wuhan, China. The Hong Kong of the East. The Pearl of the Clam. Sin City. The Big Hot and Steamy. Fuck Town. Gateway to the Ass.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah.”
“Sounds like one hell of a tourism board.”
I took a sip of water to calm my nerves. “That covers the nights. But that still leaves our days free, though.”
“Well, we can do what everyone else here does.”
“What’s that?”
“Oh, mostly wander around watching people fight with traffic cops.”
“That does sound tempting. But…”
I hesitated. I looked over at the picture on my nightstand. Guilt began to creep up my spine. Then I turned over the pamphlet to feed starving children I knew I was going to ignore. But the guilt
remained as my eyes reached back to the photo of my current girlfriend propped farther along the nightstand.
“But I just can’t. I’m seeing someone now.”
“You mean the 9/11 widow?”
I wasn’t sure how she could’ve known. The guilty tingling worsened. I drank some more water.
“She doesn’t have to know. Make something up. People come to Wuhan on business all the time.”
She was really reaching with that one – I could sense the desperation in her voice. Nobody would ever buy that. I tried to think of excuses. To buy time, I started hacking up phlegm into the
small trash can near my bed. I then decided to go on the offensive. “Is there something wrong, Fran?”
“Of course not. It’s just that, me staying in a hotel and all, I naturally thought of you.”
The tension throughout my body worsened. I started chugging any water I could find to calm myself down. “It’s just… I haven’t seen you in thirteen years, right?”
“Almost fourteen.”
“A lot can happen in fourteen years. People might switch jobs or move to a different house, crazy as that sounds.”
“I know.”
“I looked for you for a long time.”
“I know,” she repeated.
A great silence bore down upon us. I thought I’d hack up some more phlegm to break the icy chill, but my throat was all cleared out. Instead of just tiptoeing around it, I decided to take the ball straight
down the lane, see if I could draw a charge.
“Did I mention I’m dating a 9/11 widow?”
“I actually mentioned that.”
“Well, you know, it’s not like I can just…”
“Of course you can.”
The silence returned. I thought I’d let her bring the ball up the court this time. We played this game of cat-and-mouse for five minutes. She finally relented.
“Do you remember when we met?”
I did. We had met coming off some of the biggest disasters of our lives. Her parents had recently passed in a climbing accident in the Apennines; I had just missed two free throws that cost our team an eighth seed. I suppose when our eyes met across the room of that party we could sense it. Through the lines of tears streaming down her face, I could sense a great sadness.
Of course, I never put much credence in the idea that eyes are the window to the soul. For starters, most scientists will tell you souls can’t even be measured.
(Plus, all the time I’ve spent with hardened criminals, I’ve learned the eyes can be used just as easily to deceive. Like when you got a gun on a guy, and then he looks at something behind you and
yells, but when you turn around, there’s nothing really there and he was just pretending, and now he’s running away.)
Fran had a friend at Holiday Inn corporate who had gotten us a great package deal in Aruba. I ran off with her for four days. We made love. We talked. We shared long walks along the seaside. We got first aid certifications. We became proficient in Mandarin. We finished a game of Risk.
“Duh,” I said finally.
She laughed. A lot. But then her tone changed.
“The pain we shared, that will always be a part of us. The anguish that brought us to embrace, it will never leave us. The despair that you shot inside me, and sometimes in and around my mouth, will forever remain.”
“But we can move on. We can rebuild. It’s what makes us human.”
She paused, and then continued.
“For you, maybe. But I’ve been running a long time. I thought the pieces would be there for me to pick up, once I found the right place. But I don’t think I ever will.”
For some reason, it didn’t seem like she was flirting anymore.
“Forget I called.”
“I want to help you.”
“Don’t worry. This didn’t turn into that kind of call. I guess I just wanted to hear your voice.”
She hung up. It was now approaching midday. I put on my clothes and headed for work.

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.