How to rite Killer Fiction by Carolyn Wheat

criminal is as why he did what he did. Unusual motives that ring true in terms of character can be found in Robert Barnard's Fete Fatale and Reginald Hill's Ruling Passions. The story behind the murder is a major reason why Minette Walters, P.D. James, Elizabeth George, and Val McDermid sell so many books.
    Hill, a grandmaster of the genre, uses other interesting devices to vary the predictability of the whodunit ending: in Pictures of Perfection, he opens the book with a gunman shooting at a crowd of people at a garden fete (another fatal fete!). He then backs the story up so that it concludes with the same shooting, and only then do we find out not only what was behind the shooting but also who lives and who dies. In a similar vein, Hill's Bones and Silence creates ongoing suspense throughout the mystery by showing letters to a police officer from an unidentified suicidal woman. Only at the end do we find out who this woman is and whether or not she succeeds in her tragic effort to take her own life.
    The Two-Layered Ending _
    Another traditional twist is the two-layered ending (for example, The Tragedy ofY by Ellery Queen). The detective apparently solves the crime, produces evidence of one actor behind the events—only to discover a second layer, a second culprit, another mind behind the murders. This ending is used to great effect in If Ever I Return, Pretty Peggy-0 by Sharyn McCrumb, and Time Expired by Sue Dunlap. It satisfies our mystery-lover's longing for a complex puzzle while deepening emotional resonance through the connections between the two minds.
    Two-layered endings don't always mean two murderous minds at work. One of Ellery Queen's hallmarks was the "public consumption" solution, delivered with full flourishes in front of the police, and the "just-between-us" solution given to the victim's family. We readers believed the first one, and then were told we'd had the wool pulled over our eyes and now we'd learn the truly true truth.
    On a couple of memorable occasions, Ellery even slipped in a third solution.
    Why Endings Fail _
    What kinds of mystery endings disappoint readers?
    • The "eenie, meenie, miney, moe" ending in which the murderer could have been any one of the suspects and seems to have been chosen at random for the final "honor" of being the truly guilty party. The revelation of the true killer should give the reader a jolt of recognition: yes, this is right, it all becomes clear to me now. The reader wants a sense of inevitability about the killer's identity. It had to be X; it could only have been X.
    • The emotionally unsatisfying ending. A killer has been unmasked but true justice hasn't been done. This is okay in a hard-boiled detective tale whose premise is that justice is impossible, but if we're in cozyland where stability and order are supposed to be restored by the detectives solution to the crime, we won't be happy without some justice. By the same token, dry, arid exposition won't do the trick; we need some emotional resonance to our endings to be fully satisfied today.
    • Failing to tie up all the loose ends. It is the detective's job not just to solve the murder but to unravel all the threads, explain everything that needs explaining, rip the masks off the phonies, expose all the lies, cut through all the disguises, tell all the secrets. Smart modern writers unravel a few of these lesser knots along the way, saving the big one, the murder, for the end. But all needs to be explained eventually; you don't want the reader wondering who left the upstairs bedroom window open or why the headmaster lied about playing golf.
    • Ambiguity. Mystery readers want certainty in an uncertain world. We don't mind existentialist angst and nihilistic dystopias in our hard-boiled reads, but even those have a certain clarity about them. What we hate is not knowing what really happened. Some top-selling psychological mysteries leave us unclear as to the final identity of the killer and suggest