  Mystery
This week: Edited by: darkin
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Welcome to the Mystery Newsletter. Why are mysteries so popular? Because mysteries make you think. You follow every clue, examine the crime scenes and remember what each suspect said, until you solve the crime. A good mystery can keep you interested until the end. A great mystery will keep you guessing until the last page...when it makes you slap your forehead in surprise!
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Writing the Serial Mystery
When I was younger I loved reading Agatha Christie's mysteries, especially the Mrs. Marple stories. I fell in love with that woman. The way she went about solving the crime seemed so real.
As I got older, I found myself drawn to writers who wrote mysteries using the same detective. It was interesting for me be able to see the detective growing and changing as time passed. Seeing them find love, lose love, and get older held as much fascination for me as their solving the crime. The characters became almost family to me.
Writing a serial mystery can be a big money maker for an author. I can't speak for others, but when I read a novel with characters I really liked, I want to know more about them. I want to find out what happened after "the end".
Before you try your hand at writing a series of mysteries using the same detective, keep a few things in mind.
1. Start with a strong detective. You want to have a detective who is interesting, realistic, and good at what he/she does. Give him the skills he needs to do his job, but also give him flaws just like everyone else in the world. No one is perfect in real life, so he shouldn't be perfect either.
2. Surround him with the proper supporting cast. Give your detective the people he needs to do his job. Not just police, medical examiners, and support personal. Also give him friends, loved ones, and significant others. Everybody needs somebody, even your detective.
3. Give him people who are against him. No one is liked by everyone. Even the nicest person has an enemy or two. So give your detective people who dislike, and even hate, him.
4. Make his job believable. If he's a homicide detective, then make his cases homicides. Don't have him solving a simple breaking and entering. If he's a private detective, then give him the kind of cases that a real-life PI would have. Not just the glamorous ones, but the boring ones too. Just because a case starts off boring doesn't mean you can't make it more interesting as he starts to investigate.
5. Pick the right town for him to live in. Take your detective's personality into consideration before you drop him into just any old town. Unless you are using it as conflict, his home should reflect his outlook.
6. Do your research. Make sure you understand the lingo, procedures, and behaviors of the police, medical examiners and support people. For your detective to be real to your readers he has to behave like a real-life detective.
7. Be consistent. Keep a record of your characters. Little things like eye and hair color can be essential to keeping a readership alive. Make up character sheets and refer to them often while writing. Also keep track of things that have happened in your character's lives. Make a time line, being sure to fill in important events that happened in each book. If the detective's eyes are green in book one, then they should be green in book three.
We've all read books where we wish there was more story beyond "the end". Taking a little more care when creating your characters will go a long way to making your serial mysteries one of those kinds of books.
Thank you for taking the time to read. Happy Writing!
darkin
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Here are some items I found while traveling the highways and byways of Writing.Com!
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Thank you for allowing me into your e-mail boxes for this week's issue. I had a wonderful time writing this issue and would love to hear what you think about it. Here is some feedback I received from my last newsletter.
darkin
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Submitted By: spidey 
Submitted Comment:
Great newsletter! I'm writing Mystery for the first time with my NaNo novel this year, and I'm definitely embracing the idea of the subplot! Although I haven't written in the Mystery genre before, I have read a lot of it over the last year. I think that really helped me understand how a mystery can be successful. A great Newsletter with lots of helpful advice! Thanks!
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Submitted By: Cyanvia 
Submitted Comment:
Thank you for writing this newsletter. Problems always encountered me when making mystery stories but with your information, I can solve it a little. But I still had problem with the plot...
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Mystery: December 12, 2007 Issue [#2115]
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