In Defense of the Leisurely Mystery

Q: Plot, character, setting - how do they fit together in your work? Which do you find the most tricky (if any) and which do you have the most fun with?

-from Susan

 

This question gets to the heart of my books. It also gets to the core of some not-so-great reader reviews. I think in mystery books a lot of readers have the same expectations: dead bodies right away, clever clues, and then, voila, puzzle solved. As a reader, that’s not my favorite form, although I have to admit, I re-read Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe books just for fun, and that was his tried and true formula. 

 

I like to read crime fiction that’s strong on character, that invites me into settings so well-integrated into the story that it’s inevitable that they influence the plot and the characters. Can you imagine Joe Ides’ IQ books with anything less than the richly inhabited character of Isaiah Quintabe making his dangerous but smart moves in a gang-infested city near LA? Or Naomi Hirahara’s brave, quiet Aki Ito negotiating the foreign-to-her city of Chicago after release from a Japanese WWII internment camp, determined to find out what happened to her sister?

 

Sometimes, the setting isn’t a city or bit of Texas scrub land but an institution with its own culture, or a social group that makes and holds to its rules. But, for me, plot, character, and setting are woven together inexorably. I have great fun with the settings, not just rural Burgundy but cosmopolitan San Francisco, art-focused Santa Fe, rancorous college campuses, and so on. 

 

Characters lead. Who is it who said every character is a hero in his or her own mind? I agree. My protagonists, the amateur sleuths I love, are righteous or stumbling, but they all come to believe at some point that they have an essential role to play and some special expertise in solving murder that happens close to them. My secondary characters are similarly confident that whatever is taking place is, of course, their business, and they have no compunction about butting in and offering advice - good or bad. I love writing them, from the playboy ex-husband in the Dani O’Rourke series to Madame Pomfort, the self-appointed village doyenne in the Burgundy mysteries.

 

The villains have no less confidence that whatever they did, it was essential and right, right for their own interests at any rate. Making the characters believable is my job.

 

The trickiest for me? Plot. I start every book knowing who dies and who did it. But there’s an awful lot of ground to cover and plot to build between those two knowns. For me, the “why?” of the crime is so important, and that means diving into the villain’s history, and creating enough interaction with the protagonist that she can see behind the façade and figure out what happened. That can make the race to the end slow for some readers. In some ways, I don’t mind the reader-reviewers who brag that they figured out who did it before the final reveal, because my characters also have suspicions. But I want readers not to figure out why until it’s revealed.