The Concept Album and other adventures, by Catriona

Q:  Crime fiction has tried and true conventions, such as a murder/crime in the first chapter (or soon thereafter), an investigation, believable motive, hidden clues etc. Add to this, the conventions for each subgenre, such as cozy or police procedural. Have you ever ignored or deviated from these established conventions? Do you find them restrictive or do you like working within them?

I love them! The rules of crime fiction are like a corset: yes, okay, they hold you in a bit but they also hold you up. 

Which is not say that I haven't broken them, both deliberately and out of ignorance. Here's a partial list of the rules I've broken, to the best of my recollection, and an honest account of why it happened.

Rule 1: You find out who dunnit.

After the Armistice Ball was my first attempt to write a detective story. Still today, when I sign copes I add the plea "Read this gently; I was learning". What worried me was that everyone would know the solution and, in trying to look clever, I'd look stupid. So I went the other way. Three out of four early readers didn't know who dunnit after they'd finshed the whole book. Also, I added a little kicker of a bonus mystery right at the end and made an oblique reference to its solution that still - 19 years later! - has people emailing to ask if they've missed something.

 

Rule 2: you find out who dunnit at the end.

Next, I wrote The Burry Man's Day and I was determined not to trip over my own insecurities this time, so I made the murderer more obvious. So obvious, in fact, that everyone who reads the book knows who dunnit about halfway through. But seasoned readers know that that can't be, so they read on waiting for the twist. I imagine people turning the last page and going "Huh". Maybe some of them think I was "problematising the genre" in that insufferable way. Nope, just getting it wrong. Again.

Rule 3: in a murder mystery, there is a murder.

Bury Her Deep came next. It's the one my husband calls the concept album and other people people call "the one where nothing happens". Listen, I still like it. Dorothy L Sayers wrote Gaudy Night and I wrote this. Also, it led to one of the most hilarious bits of feedback ever. David Headley of Goldsboro books in London said - in all seriousness, "Around about p.160, I realised nothing was going to happen and I have to say, Catriona, if nothing's going to happen, your reader should know quicker than that."

Rule 4: in a murder mystery, there are suspects, clues and red herrings.

Book four was The Winter Ground. Loads happened! It was set in a circus with many, many, many characters. And it was packed with incident. But none of the circus folk are possible culprits and none of the incidents are clues to the murder. Oops. Again, though, I still like this book. Did I say it was set in a circus? Come on!

Book five was when I really hit my stride. Dandy Gilver and the Proper Treatment of Bloodstains has a plot, suspects, clues, red herrings, an investigation, a solution and has never sparked a single email asking follow-up questions. I'm very fond of it for all those reasons and also because I happened to set a story below-stairs in a grand house just as the world caught Downton Abbey fever, and my career moved from hardly-deserving-of-the-name to ill-advised-and-precarious. Yippee!

I've broken lots of sub-genre rules. Once, during a panel, I was musing about whether the Dandy Gilver series was cozy and someone shouted from the audience, "It's not a cozy if you nail a kitten to the road". Hard to argue. I've also, in a contemporary supsense novel, killed an old lady, a kid and the dog. And I still think it's a happy ending. 

I'm not putting up a picture revealing which book that is (spoilers) so here instead is Dandy Gilver No. 16, The Witching Hour. Isn't it pretty? It's out in the UK in May, and coming to the US in September.

Cx