Having Your Crime and Solving it Too: Writing a Thriller and a Mystery in One.

 

People tend to use the labels “mystery” and “thriller” interchangeably, but they’re actually mirror images of each other. A mystery starts with violence, and the story is about figuring out who committed it. A thriller is the story that leads to that violence, building slowly to a bloody climax. In fact, many books that get lumped into the mystery/thriller genre are really just one or the other. Karin Slaughter’s The Good Daughter is billed as a thriller, but in its bones it’s a mystery. Lou Berney’s November Road won the Anthony Award, but it’s not a mystery. It’s a thriller.

There is a way to combine the genres, though, and books that are truly both mystery and thriller – like Tana French’s The Secret Place and Kate Morton’s The Lake House – are among my favorites. These authors use a dual narrative structure, with alternating chapters set before the murder (the thriller part) and after (the mystery part). I used this in my latest book, The Distant Dead, and while I’m not about to compare myself to either of those literary giants, I found it very rewarding. Here are some of my favorite things about it:

(1) I can show the murder on the page, like a thriller does. In a mystery, the sleuth finds out who killed the victim and why, but the very nature of a mystery requires the murder itself to happen off the page. Killer and motive are revealed through characters’ recollections and the parsing of clues. But in a dual narrative, I can interrupt the sleuthing with chapters set in the past, which let me show the slowly building events and complicated relationships that will make a seemingly ordinary person commit murder. I can also show the crime itself, in all its gory glory, something traditional mysteries typically don’t do.

(2) I can show the aftermath of the murder, like a mystery does. A thriller often leaves its surviving characters reeling from the climactic violence, without saying much about how they’re going to pick up the pieces. But to me, one of the most satisfying elements of a mystery is seeing how a crime sends shock waves through the community of people connected to the victim. The dual narrative structure lets me delve deeply into that in the crime-solving chapters.

(3) I can double down on my themes. In The Distant Dead I played with themes of guilt and atonement, so I had one character in each of my interwoven stories commit a similar sin, but choose dramatically different (and in one case fatal) ways to make amends. This made my theme stronger because I could show that atonement is deeply personal, and isn’t always a right-versus-wrong proposition.

(4) I have more options for planting clues and red herrings. There’s a terrific tension in a dual narrative: the purpose of the “thriller” chapters is to gradually reveal what happened, while the “mystery” chapters try to hide the solution for as long as possible. I can play with this by having a chapter set in the past, then follow it with one where a witness lies about it, so the reader knows something the sleuth does not. Or I can drop a red herring in the sleuthing story and then, when I’m ready to show my hand, reveal the truth in a scene from before the crime. The whole thing becomes a delightful jigsaw puzzle for me and, hopefully, the reader.

(5) I have twice as many opportunities to build suspense. There are two kinds of suspense: the kind where you don’t know what’s going to happen, and another kind, rooted in dread, where you know exactly what’s going to happen. Writing a story where I reveal who the victim is right away, then show the events leading up to the murder while also putting potential future victims at risk in the aftermath, lets me lean heavily on both kinds of suspense.

Dual narratives are challenging to write, I have to admit. There were lots of index cards and late-night angst involved in crafting mine, and many times when I thought I should just toss the whole thing and write a traditional mystery or thriller. But in the end I found it a creatively stimulating way to write, one that gives me a chance to lean into different aspects of storytelling than if I were writing a classic mystery or thriller alone.

The Distant Dead by Heather Young (Oldcastle Books) Out Now

A body burns in the high desert hills. A boy walks into a fire station, pale with the shock of a grisly discovery. A middle school teacher worries when her colleague is late for work. When the body is identified as local math teacher Adam Merkel, a small Nevada town is rocked to its core by a brutal and calculated murder.  In the seven months he worked at Lovelock’s middle school, the quiet and seemingly unremarkable Adam Merkel had formed a bond with just one of his students: Sal Prentiss, a lonely sixth grader who lives with his uncles on a desolate ranch in the hills. It is Sal who finds Adam’s body, charred almost beyond recognition, half a mile from his uncles’ compound.  Nora Wheaton, the school’s social studies teacher, sensed a kindred spirit in Adam – another soul bound to Lovelock by guilt and duty. After his death, she delves into his past for clues to who killed him. Yet, the truth about Adam’s murder may lie closer to home. For Sal’s grief seems shaded with fear, and Nora suspects he knows more than he’s telling about his favourite teacher’s death.