by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig
Suspect interviews aren’t quite as simple as they may seem. Something that may seem very straightforward for a police officer can be very different for a gifted amateur.
Here are some possible pitfalls and some workarounds for interviewing your cozy mystery suspects:
Why should anyone give an amateur sleuth information at all? Unlike a police interview where a suspect might feel compelled to answer questions, an interview with an amateur sleuth is more like a conversation gone wrong. Suddenly, the person the suspect is talking with becomes very nosy about uncomfortable events or something rather personal.
There are different ways to go about this. You could have your sleuth be someone especially likeable and easy to talk to…someone that people automatically open up to. You could have your sleuth be a professional snoop: maybe a journalist or a private investigator. Or you could go the route where your sleuth is discounted and underestimated by the suspect: Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple is an excellent example of this.
Hunting down suspects. Again, this is harder for an amateur. Police only have to knock on the suspect’s door and they have an interview. The sleuth can’t exactly do that (not without attracting a lot of attention to herself, anyway). It can be easier if the suspect has a known routine (always walks his dog at lunchtime, attends church every Sunday), works in a public place, or is out and about in town a lot (this only works if the sleuth is, too). If your cozy mystery employs a themed hook (cuisine, pets, quilting, etc.), then that can be a fun way to get suspects interviewed, too by centering the interviews around the theme. Maybe the murder happens at a quilt show or at a restaurant the sleuth owns.
Injecting variety. Wherever you interview your suspects, one pitfall is that these conversations can start running together if you’re not careful. They don’t all need to be at the local diner or the quilt show, etc. Think about other settings and other ways to pull the suspects in. One natural spot to have a suspect interview is at the funeral of the victim. After all, these suspects (if it’s a true cozy) should all know the victim.
Too much information is provided. I wrote more about this a few weeks ago in a post about parceling out information. If the suspect gives the sleuth too much information, you may end up with a very short mystery or an obvious murderer.
Too many back-to-back interviews. This is something I have been guilty of in the past and had to have corrected by various editors. Cozy mysteries are about the mystery, but there are so many other important elements to include–especially the sleuth’s friendships and hook-related hobbies that she works on in her spare time. Not only does this help the reader connect to the sleuth, it helps accomplish the variety the story needs.
If you’re a cozy writer, what hazards have I missed with suspect interviews? Do these look familiar to cozy readers? And, if you write other genres, what kinds of pitfalls do you encounter as you write?
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I guess you would have to be creative with placing the sleuth in the suspect’s path. That might be half the fun though.
That’s a good way of looking at it! The challenge does keep things fun for the writer (and after writing nearly 30 of these books, it’s good to find the fun in the process still).
This is really helpful advice, Elizabeth! I especially agree with you about the first point you make. It’s so important to have a credible way for the sleuth to get the suspect to talk. And, as you say, why should a suspect talk to someone who’s not with the police? Answering that question goes a lot way towards making the sleuth more credible.
If it’s not handled correctly, readers can bristle because the sleuth just seems rude, asking a lot of nosy questions.
The sleuth has to be as sneaky as the suspects sometimes.
For sure!
I hadn’t thought about some of those points! you definitely want the interviews to be ‘casual meeting’ types whenever possible. Great tips!
It’s a tough balance, but works really well when it’s an ‘accidental meeting.’ :)
I have a couple of techniques I use once a story or so. One is eavesdropping. Overheard conversations, whether your sleuth is doing it out in the open or has hidden himself/herself, can provide great information in a plausible way. The other is misdirection. Have the sleuth working with or helping an innocent third party in the presence of a suspect and let the conversation be steered toward what the sleuth needs to know from the suspect while having a casual conversation with the other person about it. The suspect is none the wiser about having given up key information.
Those are great ways for a sleuth to legitimately gain information as an amateur! Thanks for sharing these, Anne!
Have you ever had your sleuth interviewing suspects when you, as the writer, realized that who you thought was your killer was not? Or maybe when you were outlining your plot?
Hi Paula! Yes. :) I change my killer pretty frequently and often in the last chapter of the first draft. It’s a pretty easy change to make, though, since the clues leading to the previous killer then become really strong red herrings. Sometimes it means that I need to shore up the clues leading to the new killer, though, but again that’s an easy enough change to make.