Dana Isaacson on CareerAuthors.com discussed Agatha Christie’s plotting techniques in an article entitled ‘Christie Tricks’ as part of a review of Lucy Worsley’s best-selling biography of Agatha Christie: An Elusive Woman. Worsley, a popular British historian and bestselling author, covered Mrs. Christie’s life as she evolved from a young debutante, wife, and eventually brilliant mystery writer, including her infamous eleven-day disappearance before her divorce and second marriage. Worsley’s book (Pegusus Books) is now high on my pile of to be reads.
Christie’s Tricks:
#1 Hide an object in plain sight: In my Killer in the Kitchen, the murder of a celebrity chef takes place during a television cooking show. I loved working on a plot that divulged how the chef was killed yet those in the viewing audience, and including my readers, miss the how-done-it. I lost a lot of sleep while deciding how to pull this off.
#2 The Hidden Couple: In Peril in the Pool House, I created a relationship that was kept under wraps until my protagonist started to unravel truths.
#3 Authors Should Play Fair with Their Readers: When a villain is eventually revealed as a minor store clerk at the local checkout counter mentioned in chapter three paragraph six of a story, my blood boils. As I’m editing, I keep an eye on how the breadcrumbs are dropped. Sometimes it means I need to reweave those details to be sure my readers have a fair shot at discovering the villain. In all my books I try to give readers opportunity to smell a rat. Am I revealing too little or too much along the way? Occasionally, readers get it right. Often, they get it wrong. But they always know the clues are in between the pages.
#4 The omission of tiny but key facts by someone we trust: Christie definitely walked a fine line by maintaining the information given was not false just omitted. In other words, everyone is a suspect. I find it hard to make everyone a suspect, especially if I like them. Do you?
#5 Clothes Do Not Make the Man: No one does a better job at hiding wisdom and intuition better than Christie with her Jane Marple.
#7 Steal from the News: Christie’s stories picked up on crimes of her century. True crime is also my favorite inspiration for all my stories. A real-life fraud case involving a builder during my real estate management days was the basis of Murder in the Master. I tucked it into the back of my brain to use twenty years later. Villain in the Vineyard, my fourth, was a perfect example of a past crime coming back to haunt someone. My plots, characters, and settings are different from the true crime. But true crime got my imagination whirling in the direction of ‘what if’. What real news have you used to enhance your mysteries?
#8 Set the Crime in a Place Familiar to You: Whether it is at the top of a lighthouse on the Chesapeake Bay, an Adirondack cabin, or a dusty horse stable, incorporating a setting we know well is definitely an advantage as we pull in our readers. The first time I walked out to a lighthouse just a mile from my house, I knew there was a story I had to tell.
When you look at these Christie Tricks, which ones do you think have helped you build your mysteries? I want to hear about them.
