Free How to rite Killer Fiction by Carolyn Wheat Page B

reveals her suspicion to the investigating police officer on p. 279. She doesn't share her conclusion or the reasoning supporting it with the reader until p. 284 when she gathers all the suspects together. The Christie Caper follows a similar pattern. Annie reviews her notes on p. 293 and sees a discrepancy. "A false note," she muses. "If that was false, what else might be false?" She has her solution on p. 294, but doesn't reveal it until p. 299, giving the reader a chance to play the game and come up with the false note and its meaning.
    Once you've introduced your Challenge to the Reader, it's your job to lay your solution to the crime before your reader. The ending is so important to the reader's experience that it gets an entire chapter of its own.
    ENDINGS ARE HARD. Once upon a time, in the Golden Age, it was enough for the Great Detective to know. Ellery Queen gathered all the suspects together in the drawing room and proceeded to spend seven or eight closely reasoned pages expounding his theory on who had done what and why, clearing up any loose ends along the way. (I once saw a New Yorker cartoon that parodied this scene by showing the Great Detective as a parrot sitting on a perch with all the suspects in front of him.) Occasionally the disgruntled suspect pulled a gun and made a break for it, only to be subdued by the burly Sergeant Velie, but action wasn't the essence of the scene.
    Across the water, Lord Peter Wimsey conducted his expository scene in a tete-a-tete with the murderer, then quietly withdrew to permit the killer an "honorable way out": pistols for one in the library. Sometimes Dr. Gideon Fell decided the killer was a better man than his victim and played judge and jury, leaving the official solution of the crime to the police he knew were incompetent to solve it.
    Knowing was enough. Justice in terms of courtrooms and jury verdicts was decidedly secondary.
    No one expected the Great Detective to wrestle the killer to the ground and pluck the loaded gun from his hand, or to plug the killer between the eyes.
    But we do tend to expect action endings from Kinsey Millhone and Matt Scudder. We won't be satisfied with V.I. Warshawski calling the
    cops and going home for a hot bath; we want her on the scene dodging bullets. When Hercule Poirot confronted twelve killers at once, we had no reason to fear for his safety; that wasn't how the game was played. But put Elvis Cole on the Orient Express, and we won't be happy if all he does is talk. In the Second Golden Age, we want our detectives to go mano-a-mano with the killer; knowing is no longer enough.
    The result is that the scene in which the detective confronts the killer has become as cliched, as predictable, as the old-fashioned drawing-room gathering. We can see it coming a mile away; the amateur detective who grows herbs for a living and who ought to turn the matter over to the police is heading for an abandoned building to meet the man she's sure is the killer. He's armed; she's not—and if you have any doubt about which of them is going to prevail, you haven't done enough reading. She, after all, is on her fourth book of a series.
    So one question to ask yourself when you're about to confront your own ending: does the detective absolutely have to go one-on-one with the killer?
    The Non-Action Ending_
    No. It is still possible to write a satisfying mystery novel without a physical set-to between detective and killer. Take a look at Margaret Maron's Southern Discomfort . Instead of confrontation, we have a horrified realization that tragic misunderstandings led to murder. We have a ripple effect that touches everyone connected with the mystery and is more powerful by far than a simpler, more violent, ending could have been. Similarly, Sue Dunlap in Rogue Wave gives us emotional resonance and poetic justice without resorting to the traditional wresting-the-gun-from-the-killer's-hand scene.
    Sometimes the revelation isn't so much a matter of who the