Chalk Scribblers workshop: the mystery plot

We fill page after page with words but how do we make our reader keep turning them? One way to do it is to put a mystery in the middle of the story that’s so all-consuming that the reader can’t stop reading until they know what it is.

The purist practitioners of the art of mystery are the authors of the whodunnit: a story in which the protagonist’s primary goal is to find out who committed a crime. However, a mystery is a plot device that can be applied to any genre. Any protagonist can, after all, be motivated by a need to find out something they don’t know and piquing a protagonist’s curiosity is an easy way to pique a reader’s.

We’ll start by discussing examples of the form from the reading list, and then extend the conversation to talk about how it can be applied in other genres and possibly in our own works in progress.

The reading list is divided into two parts:

The core reading is the two stories that will start the discussion so while it’s not compulsory, you’ll get more out of the workshop if you read them in advance. The stories are:

• Arson Plus by Dashiell Hammett (1923): Hammett is the author who, in the words of his contemporary Raymond Chandler, ‘gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons’. His stories remain formative to the genre and his spare prose makes it easy to see the structure driving a mystery story.
• My Heart Is Either Broken by Megan Abbott (2013): Abbott shows that a mystery story need not be a whodunnit; the protagonist is not trying to investigate the crime that opens the story but is preoccupied by the mystery of his wife’s character.

The extended reading is there to show the evolution of the mystery story for anyone who is interested. The stories are:

• The Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allan Poe (1841): widely credited as being the first mystery story, Poe introduced the detective as protagonist and the logic puzzle as plot.
• The Adventure of Silver Blaze by Arthur Conan Doyle (1892): one of the stories that placed the detective at the centre of Anglophone literature, as well as introducing an idiom that’s still widely used.
• The Abominable History of the Man with the Copper Fingers by Dorothy L Sayers (1928): the sort of story that Chandler credited Hammett with taking murder back from, in which the crime is outlandish and the detective is not hardboiled. It’s also an example of the ‘reverse whodunnit’ structure, in which the reader knows who did what to whom before the detective.
• The Leopold Locked Room by Edward D Hoch (1971): a locked room mystery from late in the pulp era, this story has a plot and structure that remains widely used in TV crime shows, which are where short-form crime fiction has moved to since the demise of most of the short-form crime magazines.

Some of the stories have adult themes that may be explored in the discussion.