The Elements of Mystery Fiction: Writing the Modern Whodunit Read Online Free Page A

The Elements of Mystery Fiction: Writing the Modern Whodunit
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mainstream variety, can explore the complexity of the human spirit and the irony of the human condition. The best ones do exactly that.
    But mystery fiction offers a bonus. The bonus is the puzzle.
    Here’s how I constructed the two stories that became my eleventh Brady Coyne novel, Tight Lines :
    I decided to explore the difficult and intense relationships that inevitably develop between psychiatrists and their patients in the course of psychoanalysis. Patients, in some cases, fall in love with and may attempt to seduce their analysts, whose professional ethic requires them to resist powerful temptations while continuing to treat their patients. This doctor-patient relationship was the idea for my story.
    Sometimes psychiatrists succumb to temptation. “What if,” I thought, “a psychiatrist had an affair with his beautiful female patient?”
    And, because my story had to be a mystery, I next asked: “What if that patient were murdered?”
    The storyline that resulted went this way: Mary Ellen Ames worshipped her father, who died when she was in college. Mary Ellen cut off ties with her mother and proceeded to engage in a series of love affairs with older men, many of them married. She became involved with drugs and had a homosexual encounter. After several years she decided to seek psychiatric help. She chose Dr. Warren McAllister, a middle-aged psychoanalyst who reminded her of her father, gradually seduced him, and then threatened to expose him to his wife and his professional associates if he didn’t agree to marry her.
    I thought hard and long about Mary Ellen Ames and Warren McAllister and his wife. I created Mary Ellen’s lovers—the married college professor, the bookstore owner who supplied her with drugs, the suspended Boston policeman who lived in a trailer, the troubled young woman who lived in Mary Ellen’s apartment building. I gave Mary Ellen’s mother a story, too. She lived alone in the Ames family mansion. She was suffering from terminal cancer and wanted to reconcile with her estranged daughter before she died.
    From this lineup of characters I selected a murderer.
    Then I was ready to write a detailed narrative summary of this story, complete with all of the characters’ life histories, personalities, and strongly felt needs and desires. The process took me several weeks of difficult and frustrating trial-and-error thinking.
    Only when I felt I knew this story thoroughly did I begin converting it into a mystery novel which, I knew, would be propelled by the puzzle question: Who killed Mary Ellen Ames?
    Because I have a series character, my lawyer Brady Coyne had to serve as the puzzle-solver. So the first question I had to answer was: How would Brady get involved with the case?
    I decided that Susan Ames would ask Brady, her family lawyer, to track down her daughter. The story of detection was underway.
    Then came the puzzle’s development, the unfolding of clues, false trails, and red herrings. Brady tries to track down Mary Ellen. He learns where she lives, but she hasn’t been home in more than a week. He convinces the building’s superintendent to let him into Mary Ellen’s apartment, where he finds a bottle of prescription medicine. This leads him to Dr. McAllister, the psychiatrist, who eventually confides in Brady that he’s been having an affair with Mary Ellen but insists that he doesn’t know where she is.
    Eventually, Mary Ellen’s body is found in a New Hampshire pond. Based on the medical examiner’s report, the police call it an accidental drowning, but Brady has his doubts. By now, he’s encountered some of the people in Mary Ellen’s life, all of whom could have a motive for murdering the young woman.
    As Brady investigates, the stakes grow higher. What began as a search for a missing woman becomes a desperate race against time and a murderer who will kill again. Ultimately, Brady finds himself endangered.
    And so forth, to the ultimate revelation.
    I wrote a narrative
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