De has been posting some nice material on writing in general, and writing mysteries specifically:
There’s a bare minimum of what a story needs to accomplish: it has to allow the audience to suspend disbelief. A story doesn’t even have to be entertaining to accomplish this. Entertaining is good, thought-provoking is good, original is good…but first, the story has to let you believe in it before it can do anything else. How you do you make a story believeable?
[…] There are two ways to screw up the meaning of a story. One, don’t have one. Two, include stuff and meanings of stuff that have nothing to do with the meaning of the story. Oh, you can vary it: show what happens when people try to act against that meaning or when they do it only half-assed. But the meaning of your story is your story. If your meaning is “love conquers all” then don’ t make the ending depend on robots (unless the robots mean love).
Note: The person telling the story goes with this, too. If the voice of that person doesn’t fit in with the story, that’s bad. Don’t have Kafka tell a love story unless you want a Kafkaesque love story.
Plot Twists and Transformations:
In a mystery, there are two plots. The first plot is the one the reader sees. The detective hunts the murderer among a number of suspects, eventually discovering the criminal and ensuring he or she comes to justice. The second plot is the one the reader doesn’t see, but guesses at — why did the murderer do it? What does the murderer do to cover up the act — more murders, concealing or destroying clues, etc. The second plot pokes up from time to time in the form of clues, but it isn’t fully revealeduntil the end of the story
… at which point both the plots tie together, and the reason for there being two plots becomes clear.
Interesting, ponderable reads.