Write On: The Untraditional Mystery

      In retrospect, I must have been one helluva macabre kid, because I grew up watching classic horror movies and reading mysteries. 

      While other kids in elementary school were reading whatever it was elementary school kids read in the ‘80s (Garfield?), I was burning through case after case of Encyclopedia Brown. By junior high, I’d graduated to the works of Dame Agatha Christie. To this day, I’m a huge fan of Hercule Poirot, a character who I’ve always found infinitely more interesting than everyone’s favorite Victorian-era Superman, Sherlock Holmes.

In junior high, this was my idea of "bad ass." It was a rough time for me.

      I still enjoy mysteries – the new mysteries rack is the first place I go when I swing by the library – but I’ve had a hard time finding a mystery I can enjoy. It seems like just about every mystery written these days falls into one of two formulas: 

1. He’s a hard-chargin’, hard-drinkin’, starting to get too old for this shit former member of either the law enforcement or intelligence community, but now he’ll take on investigations as a (semi-professional) private investigator operating out of Chicago’s underbelly/Detroit’s underbelly/20^th Century New York City while trying to find time for his semi-estranged daughter.
2. She’s a hard-chargin’, hard-drinkin’, sexy-as-hell-but-doesn’t-know-it private investigator who’s just as rough-and-tumble as the boys, operating out of Las Angeles/Las Vegas/San Francisco who just doesn’t have time to find herself a man.

Ugh.

I knew I wanted to do something different. I didn’t want to do a traditional mystery with a private investigator type protagonist. I wanted my “detective” to be someone unqualified and a bit over their head. It’s one of my favorite aspects of The Big Lebowski, and I think it’s something that will make my protagonist more relatable to the reader.

The other piece of the puzzle fell into place while listing to the Freakanomics podcast of all things.

A couple years back, Freakanomics ran a fantastic episode called “How to Create Suspense.” The big “Ah-ha!” moment came courtesy of author Harlan Coben as he talked about discovering how a missing person is actually better at creating suspense than a dead body:

“If a person’s dead, they’re dead; I’m just trying to solve the crime. But if a person is missing, you have hope. And hope can be the cruelest thing in the world. It can crush your heart like an eggshell, or it can make it soar. And so you raise the stakes by giving people hope and you raise the stakes by just leaving something out that maybe can complete you.”

Now I had someone unqualified to conduct a proper investigation trying to find a missing person. Yeah, I could work with that…