I didn’t intend to write a whodunit, it sort of happened by accident. I wrote The Sword in the Stone-Dead in January, February and March of 2015: from first idea to complete 65,000-word draft in a little under twelve weeks. I had never written a novel-length story in such a short space of time, and those twelve weeks had included a couple of substantial rewrites. And it was all done in my spare time, because I had a full-time job at that point. I’m not saying ‘look how wonderful I am,’ I’m saying that sometimes a writer gets lucky, and the muse pays a visit; everything comes together and magical things happen.
Actually, I’m not saying that at all. I don’t believe in the muse, in luck, or in magic. What really happened in those early months of 2015 was that I was prepared to write a novel, I’d figured out how to do it, and I sat down to prove to myself that I really could do it.
Up to that point, I’d written ten novel-length manuscripts and a couple of feature-length screenplays, and they were all rubbish. No matter how many times I rewrote them and polished them, I knew – in my heart of hearts – that they didn’t really work. There was something missing. There were some good ideas in there, some humour, some decent dialogue, but each whole added up to less than the sum of its parts. I sent some of them out to agents and publishers, but none of them really satisfied me, so it was no surprise when they were returned with a ‘thanks, but no thanks.’
For a while I thought that what I was missing was character. Good writing had good characters, so I needed to find out about character. I thought character had to be the problem, because I was pretty sure I had plot nailed. I’d read all the great screenwriting books, I’d attended sessions on how to write for television, I had plot sorted.
You read mystery novels, so you can probably already work out how this is going to end, but stick with me anyway…
I’d learned about three-act structure, and the eight-sequence breakdown used in screenplays: what I needed – or so I thought – was the equivalent of the three-act-eight-sequence model for creating characters. I searched around for a decent model I could use, but couldn’t find one. Everything I read was just too complicated.
I spent three or four years developing my own model for creating characters. Three master archetypes, three hybrids. I wrote myself a manual – because that’s what I do. I worked for over ten years implementing different library acquisitions software systems in a university library, learning how to use the software, and then developing in-house manuals that could be used for training people. Whenever I try and do something new, I write myself a user-guide. Having written ‘the character book,’ I put it to the test and wrote a new novel.
And it pretty much stunk like all the earlier ones. This new ‘curate’s egg’ included characters as one of its relatively good parts, but the whole still didn’t work.
Having worked for book suppliers and in libraries for most of my adult life, I’ve handled a lot of books. At one point I think I’d probably read every ‘how to write’ guide out there, and had even been tracking down out-of-print ones on AbeBooks. I spent more time reading about how-to-write than actually sitting down and writing. It’s how I used to procrastinate before YouTube. These days, with the availability of ebooks and print-on-demand, there are even more books on how-to-write. Occasionally I’ll dip into one, for old times’ sake but, in my heart of hearts, I know I’m unlikely to learn anything new. Flick through a 21st century how-to-write-screenplays book, and you’ll find a lot of the same advice you can find in the how-to-write-photoplays books of the early to mid-1900s.
Where I did learn something new was in academic texts. The joys of working in a university library. I picked up John G. Cawelti’s Adventure, Mystery, and Romance. It has the subtitle Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture. This wasn’t some sniffy professor looking down his nose at genre fiction and saying it wasn’t ‘proper’ literature, this was an examination of how and why genre fiction worked. It wasn’t a how-to book by a genre author, it was an outsider’s view of the mechanics of it all.
Among my unsuccessful early novels was a fantasy trilogy about a thief and an actor. I wrote the middle book first, when I was in college, got hooked by the thief character and went back and wrote a book about him facing off against a dragon (because everyone has to write at least one dragon book), and then the third book was meant to have my actor and thief involved in a plot that was based on the traditional English country house murder mystery. I thought this one was going to be a breeze to write, because those Agatha Christie-type books were all based on a standard ‘formula,’ and all I would have to do was plug in my characters and location, turn the handle, and out would pop a novel.
Again, you can probably figure out how that one ended. Like many of my other would-be novels, I got to about twenty-thousand words or so and the thing shriveled up and died. Same thing with my next project: I tried to write a contemporary crime thriller based on what I understood as the crime-thriller formula. It, too, stunk up the place.
It was at this point that I had one of those epiphany-things:
The problem with formula fiction is that no-one will tell you what the bloody formula is!
I don’t believe in conspiracy theories any more than I believe in magic or muses, but for a while I did wonder if there was actually a secret plot to keep genre plots secret. You won’t get the details from any of those how-to-write books. Of course, it is not a conspiracy, it’s a matter of perspective.
John G. Cawelti’s book looks at what these formulas contain, and why these things, in this combination and this sequence, appeal to audiences. His chapters on the ‘classical detective story’ gave me more insight into the ‘formula’ than any of the how-to-write books had ever done. At some point during my reading, I figured out that if you wanted to write a contemporary detective novel, you needed to have an understanding of how a ‘classical’ murder mystery worked and how a traditional ‘man-on-the-run’ thriller worked, because the modern detective thriller combines elements of both.
I decided to write myself a manual. Did you see that coming? I read, or reread, a stack of Agatha Christie novels. Why Dame Agatha? Because if you go into a high-street book store today, it will have a section that contains her books: not a few titles on a shelf, but virtually her whole back-catalogue. They’re still popular. Edgar Allan Poe invented the classical detective story with a couple of short stories; Arthur Conan Doyle perfected and popularised the genre with his Sherlock Holmes short stories; but it was Agatha Christie that perfected the detective mystery at novel length.
Reading her novels, and Earl F. Bargainnier’s The Gentle Art of Murder: The Detective Fiction of Agatha Christie, I learned three things. First, some of her novels aren’t ‘classical detective mysteries,’ but are actually modern detective thrillers: she reflected the change in taste of her reading public. Secondly, if you read her novels in sequence, they provide a picture of the way British life changed between the 1930s and the 1950s, as the Empire faded. And thirdly, and most importantly for my purposes, there is a ‘formula’ plot for the whodunit that has, for all intents and purposes, two variations: (i) the body is discovered in Act I, as in Murder at the Vicarage, and (ii) the body is discovered at the midpoint, as in Death on the Nile. In these variations, the constituent parts are pretty much the same, they’re just put together in a different order.
It’s not clear from Agatha Christie’s published notebooks to what extent she considered the structure of the whodunit to be a ‘formula,’ but I think it’s fair to say that she did mess with her readers’ heads by ‘cheating’ with the formula: Murder on the Orient Express and Who Killed Roger Ackroyd being famous examples. Maybe she just did this to stop herself getting bored with this type of story. She does acknowledge that writing a carefully plotted whodunit is harder than writing a thriller-type story.
If you’re suspicious of ‘deconstructionist’ theories, have a look at Umberto Eco’s essay ‘The Narrative Structure in Fleming’ in The Bond Affair (1966): he lists nine situations that occur in the James Bond novels and shows how they are presented in different sequences in different novels. It’s hard to deny that he’s on to something. And you’ll occasionally see interviews with successful authors who admit that they learned how to structure a novel by (sometimes literally) taking apart an earlier author’s work.
As I said, I didn’t actually intend to write a traditional murder mystery novel: my ‘handbook’ was just a tool to clarify my understanding of the genre. I intended to go on and look at the thriller genre, and then put what I had learned together so that I could write my contemporary detective thriller. But having spent a few months in the company of Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, I felt an urge to put what I had learned to the test. I wanted to write one of these things as a sort of ‘proof of concept.’ To prove that I really did know what the formula was. And yes, I’ll admit it: I’d got hooked by the genre all over again.
I effectively set myself an end of semester exam, and the exam question was pretty strict: I had to write a real traditional whodunit. I was allowed to include humour, but I couldn’t write a parody. It had to be set in the 1930s – the ‘golden age’ of the murder mystery – and be as historically accurate as I could reasonably make it. I was allowed to use words that Dame Agatha would never have used, because I felt that real people would use such words, even if publishers in the 1930s couldn’t publish them. And I could be more open about sexual relationships for the same reason.
Historical accuracy wasn’t always easy: Agatha Christie was writing about her own time, so knew what cars and fashions and songs and slang phrases were current; I had to research this stuff. Originally I had decided that my story was set during the May bank holiday weekend in 1935. I did end up being slightly vague about this in the end, not specifying the actual year, because I wanted to include some references to the British film industry that were a little bit later. The cars were an early part of the research, and I fell in love with the hero’s Alvis Speed 20 – that’s the car on the cover of the book. If ever I write a bestseller, I shall buy myself one of those. And a Victorian folly.
‘Murder at Fulbright’s Folly’ wasn’t the first idea I came up with, my first idea was set on an airship, and turned out to be some kind of steampunk thriller hybrid – more of a movie cliffhanger serial than a classic whodunit. I liked the idea, but understanding the ‘formula’ meant I knew it wasn’t right for the genre. My second idea became Who Killed the Lady in the Lake? in its first draft, until I remembered that Raymond Chandler already had dibs on the Lady. Wracking my brains, I came up with The Sword in the Sternum, but a quick Google search showed this to be the name of someone’s blog, so I didn’t want to use that. The Excalibur Murders was also taken, so was Murder at the Round Table. Eventually, I settled on The Sword in the Stone-Dead. Technically, and historically, the title is a cheat: T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone wasn’t published until 1938, three years after my story takes place. Call it poetic licence. Though the less said about the ‘poetry’ in this book the better. (Gluttons for punishment might find the whole of The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Limerick on my website, unless I’ve taken it down in an attempt to deny its existence).
Twelve weeks after setting myself the task, I had created the book you hold in your hands. I have no idea if it is a good novel, or a good example of the genre, but having finished it, I – as a writer – felt a sense of satisfaction that I hadn’t felt with any of my earlier novel-length stories. I felt that this met my expectations. Not an A+ but almost certainly a ‘pass.’
Strictly speaking, the ‘formula’ isn’t really a formula, it’s more of a structure. It helps you figure out what should happen where for maximum effect. All stories are based on a simple structure – set-up, rising tension (or suspense), payoff (or release). A joke is structured this way, and so is a novel. It’s often referred to as the ‘three-act structure’. In a novel you just have to spin it out for sixty- to a hundred-thousand words or more. You can use an eight-sequence approach to help you map those three acts. And you can use a genre ‘formula’ to help you figure out what goes where in the eight sequences. What I learned about my own writing was that I was trying to pile too much into the first third of my novels – by the time I got to twenty- or thirty-thousand words, I’d run out of stuff. I didn’t understand the importance of pacing, of the steady release of information to the reader, of the importance of strategically placing particular turning points in order to achieve maximum dramatic effect. I’d just keep trying to make up new stuff to get to the required word-count, and as a result my novels were the wrong shape and didn’t look or feel right. Like a body-builder in a mankini. Not that I’ve ever felt a body-builder in a mankini. Honest.
For most genre authors, this understanding of structure comes to them by a process of osmosis, from the novels they have read throughout their lives. They absorb it without really knowing it, which is why they don’t lay it out in their how-to-write books. To them it is probably too obvious. Also there’s the fact that they’re probably uncomfortable about acknowledging that there could be a ‘formula.’ I had to learn it the hard way, and feel no shame in admitting that I used it.
The other great thing about a structure or formula is that it allows you to compare what you’ve got – your initial idea – against what you need to have, so that you can develop the idea into a novel. Formulas help you assemble and evaluate the raw materials – and having all of those to hand makes the writing process much smoother. The formula is also a map of where you are going, and where you need to get to on each stage of the journey, and if you have that, you’re less likely to end up in the dead-end that is writer’s block.
I’ve already revealed myself to be a heretic, so I’ll tell you one last thing I like about formulas: they’re a real boon when you write stuff out of sequence like I do. If I’m stuck with a particular scene, or unhappy with what I’ve just written, I skip over to another part of the story and write something I feel more confident about. That way I can still use my writing time while my subconscious is noodling away on the bit I’m stuck on. It’s the finished item that matters: it doesn’t matter how you write, nobody’s ever going to know. Unless you’re stupid enough to mention it in an afterword.
I’m not going to write any more about how this book was written, or how I came to publish it: on the website I have a more detailed analysis of how I plotted and wrote this book – it is full of spoilers of the worst kind, so please read the novel first! I will also make available a free ebook that gives an introduction to the basics of the three-act, eight-sequence structure that I’m using as the basis for my own learning about genre plots. As I learn new things, I will put more articles, blog posts and mini-manuals up on the site.
You can get in touch with me via the contact page on the website, or let me know what you think about The Sword in the Stone-Dead by posting a review on Amazon: I will read them all – how could I not? – and I look forward to your feedback.
Thank you for reading.
Acknowledgments
Dame Agatha Christie provided the ‘secret formula’ – her Death on the Nile is a near-perfect example of the genre.
John G. Cawelti’s Adventure, Mystery and Romance and Earl F. Bargainnier’s The Gentle Art of Murder helped me uncover the secret.
Susan Zappala acted as first reader and typo-spotter, and tried to keep me sane during the crazier months of my ‘proper’ job. Thanks for taking on a hopeless cause, Doctor Zee, and for organizing the best leaving do (and gifts) I ever had.
Ange Hart, my sister, gave advice on cover design and how to make InDesign do what I wanted it to do, while Isobel and Edward made a noise in the background, and Mike didn’t.
My brother Mark and his family – Keri, Jake, and Alex – who should all have their names in this book in case I never do another one!
Stanley Tomlinson, who is ‘Bill’ to most people but ‘Grandad’ to me, and in memory of Doris Tomlinson, Reggie Goodman and Lou Goodman – because our grandparents contribute a huge amount to the people we become.
And finally Dot and Bill – ‘Mum and Dad’ to me and ‘that couple with the weird son’ to everyone else – thank you for putting up with the weirdness. And for extra typo-spotting.
PAUL TOMLINSON 