Creating Your Sleuth

Mystery Writers: do you create your sleuth’s personality and characteristics, or does he/she come to you fully-developed like Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, and ready to snoop?  

Just as both nature and nurture have a hand in the makings of a human being, various elements go into your sleuth’s development. One is the trends of the day. In the Thirties and Forties sleuths were tough PIs. These days anything goes. We’ve grumpy investigators, independent female lawyers, science-oriented CSIs. Your sleuth can be a judge, a homicide detective or amateur sleuth. Even a dog, a cat, or a 12-year-old girl. It depends on the type of mystery you’re writing—cozy, police procedural, traditional.

Your sleuth is the most important character in your book. This is especially true for those of us who  write series. He/she is the hero, the character who IDs the murderer and solves the crime. Some sleuths have achieved world-wide renown. Consider Sherlock Holmes, Nero Wolfe, Phillip Marlowe, and Ellery Queen. When Hercules Poirot “died,” his obituary was printed in The New York Times.

Your sleuth sets the tone of your book. Is she intelligent but flaky? Is he somber and beset by demons from his past? Your sleuth views the world from specific perspective. He/she has a particular method of solving problems, both personal and those related to the mystery. He/she has strengths and weaknesses, and people in his/her life who are supportive (best friend, spouse, lover) or a thorn in his/her side (competitor, disagreeable boss.) Always give your sleuth personal issues to deal with, and plenty of room to develop and grow.

A word about quirky characteristics. Like many TV viewers, I fell in love with Monk. I also enjoy watching the new series “Elementary,” which takes great liberties with the characters of Sherlock and Watson. But be careful not to go overboard. Your sleuth’s neuroses and/or disabilities are not simply window dressing, to be discarded in the middle of a novel. If, like Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe, your sleuth almost never leaves home, be prepared to set your books around this situation.

My sleuths are all female, but of various ages and in different stages of their life. Lydia Krause, in my Twin Lakes books A Murderer Among Us and Murder in the Air, is a 58-year-old widow who has sold her company and moved to a retirement community to start a new life. Lydia is feisty and smart, yet sensitive and a bit vulnerable. She solves mysteries as she makes new friends and finds love along the way. 

Gabbie Meyerson, in Giving Up the Ghost, is in her thirties. Newly-divorced, she takes a teaching job in a small Long Island village. She deals with high school bullies as she finds out who murdered Cameron Leeds, the ghost who shares her cottage above Long Island Sound.

Lexie Driscoll is the sleuth in my new series, The Golden Age of Mystery Book Club. The first, Murder a la Christie, makes its debut this year with L&L Dreamspell. Forty-eight-year-old Lexie is a bright college professor with poor judgment when it comes to men. Her first husband left her when she was pregnant with their son. Her second husband burned down her house with himself inside. Low on funds, Lexie agrees to lead a Golden Age of Mystery book club for her best friend’s wealthy neighbors. House-sitting in the upscale community, she feels like she’s inhabiting a Christie novel. When murder rears its ugly head, she employs Hercules Poirot’s and Miss Marple’s methods of deduction to solve the crimes.

Please leave a comment and tell me who your favorite literary sleuth is, or a bit about your sleuth.

EVOLUTION OF DETECTION

trench coats, fedoras
by Earl "Ah, the good old days" Staggs

Back in the day, when Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe and Mike Shayne needed information to catch the bad guys, they wore trench coats, fedoras and used up a lot of shoe leather. They scoured the mean streets for clues, twisted the arms of snitches, romanced willowy blondes, bribed bartenders and hotel desk clerks, all in search of information that would lead them to the solution of a crime.

Not any more. Not if you watch mystery and crime shows on TV.

No longer do our heroes have to plead for warrants to examine phone records, wade through years of newspaper articles, get witnesses to spend hours going through mug books, or sweet-talk an old girlfriend at the Department of Motor Vehicles to trace a license plate number.

All it takes now is a few keystrokes.

Nearly every crime show has a computer wizard/master hacker equipped with a million dollars worth of equipment who can come up with any information on anyone in any corner of the globe in seconds.

Take “Criminal Minds” for instance. Approximately every five minutes, one of the profile team calls Garcia, their mistress of the microchip, and the conversation goes something like this:

“Hey, babycakes, I need a listing of all twenty-five-year-old redheaded women who spilled beer on their yellow dress while on a cruise ship in the Mediterranean in 1983.”

“Sure thing, sweet cheeks. Give me a second. Ah! Here it is. There were three of them and they all live within a mile of where you are right now.”

NCIS has two of them. Both McGee and Abby, with flying fingers, can key up any information from any data base on the planet. Need the criminal record or military history of a suspect? How about high school yearbook pictures, a listing of any call made or received on any cell phone, or every home address the suspect ever had.

You’ll find someone like them on all the popular crime shows these days.

Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating my examples a bit, and I don’t mean there’s anything wrong with any of it. I watch those shows and enjoy them. After all, with the technology available today, there’s no reason not to use it to catch the bad guys.

But somewhere inside me, I miss the trench coats, fedoras and hard-drinking, two-fisted gumshoes whose technology was as simple as a punch in the mouth or a slug from a .45.

Earl Staggs

Make Mine... Mystery Radio

by Anne Carter

I’m not quite old enough to have listened to 1930’s, 40’s or 50’s mystery radio programs. But now, through the miracle of the internet, these fabulous, classic shows are available again to mystery fans for as little as … free! I’ve been listening to RadioLovers.com for several years.

From Beyond Midnight to the Adventures of Philip Marlowe, one can listen in on any number of 30 minute stories from radio’s golden era. My personal favorite is Candy Matson. Some of the recordings are scratchy and difficult to comprehend, but most are reasonably clear. I like that I can play individual programs while I’m working on other things—things that don’t detract from my ability to listen to the story.

Some of these episodes are recorded with their sponsors’ commercials attached. Many have the leading actors reading the advertisement in between acts. Listening to commercials for long-forgotten soap products or snippets about war bonds is almost as interesting as the mystery itself.

Another thing I really like about mystery radio is that it engages the imagination more than its video cousins, TV and movies. Like an audio book, radio theater lets the listener imagine, with the help of a very few sound effects, the visual portion of the story as it unfolds. Sometimes, at the beginning, end or during a commercial, I visualize the actors standing before tall, floor microphones with scripts in their hands. How different from the mechanics of today’s entertainment.

By the way, a disclaimer on RadioLovers.com states that they believe that copyrights on any of the shows they offer are expired. See also Old Time Radio Fans.

Anne Carter is the author of paranormal romantic mystery, POINT SURRENDER, from Echelon Press, Amazon and Fictionwise. Visit Anne at BeaconStreetBooks.com.