It’s a wonderful coincidence that “who” and “how” are anagrams of each other because I have just come to appreciate their competition as the crucial elements of mystery and suspense. When I first started writing murder mysteries, I was convinced that the whodunit was the apex of the genre; that is, I thought that a writer who kept us guessing as to the identity of a killer was providing the most satisfying experience for a reader. After a lifetime of reading and writing such mysteries, I remain a fan of the whodunit, but my admiration is now more nuanced. I recently enjoyed reading THE ENDING WRITES ITSELF, a novel which, like the Knives Out movie series, both winks at and celebrates the whodunit tradition. The author, Evelyn Clarke, is the pen name of V.E. Schwab and Cat Clarke, two experienced pros who decided to collaborate for the first time in their careers. I’m guessing that they started by brainstorming the standard tropes of the golden age mystery and then tossed in as many as possible: a group of strangers in a large and isolated house on a remote island; each of the characters dying, one by one, mostly by the hand of an unidentified killer; at least one murder occurring in a locked room; homage to Anton Chekhov’s principle that if a gun appears onstage in Act 1, it must be fired by Act 3; lots of red herrings; hidden doors and secret passages; a mysterious stranger lurking around the scene of the crimes; you get the idea.
What makes this novel better than the ordinary is that it’s not only a murder mystery, but also a sendup of the publishing industry. We have an imperious literary agent, a shrewd editor, a dolt of an editorial assistant who stays employed via nepotism, and a collection of mid-list writers in different genres—mystery, thriller, sci-fi, horror, young adult, romance—competing for a high-stakes prize that could propel them to the bestseller list. There’s a lot of inside baseball for writers, but the material is not so arcane that readers would miss the jokes. I really enjoyed the book, with two caveats.
First, it has lots of one-sentence paragraphs.
I mean a lot of them.
Often fragmentary.
I had to wonder about this stylistic choice until I realized that it would be happening from beginning to end and that I should read the novel as if it were a long work of free verse. Aside from her distracting paragraphing, “Evelyn Clarke” is a good writer who manages to stay ahead of the reader with her surprises and can be forgiven for Caveat #2:
Like most whodunits, the journey, as opposed to the final reveal, provides most of the fun. This book is clever and twisty enough to avoid a crash landing, but still, as one character puts it, the killer turns out to be the most obvious one of the batch. Kudos to “Clarke” for saying so just as we readers are likely to be thinking the same thing. So this entertaining book had the side effect of getting me to consider the inherent weakness of having everything in the payoff depend upon the “who” in the whodunit.
Bear with me now as I wrench the conversation to professional basketball. I promise that what I’m about to say will apply to the topic of writing eventually. I was a huge New York Knicks fan in 1973, when they won the NBA championship. How could anybody not be a fan of a team that included Willis Reed, Earl Monroe, Bill Bradley, Dave DeBusschere, and (my favorite, the coolest of the cool) Walt “Clyde the Glide” Frazier? Like the mystery genre, the Knicks also enjoyed a golden age, and it peaked in 1973. I stopped paying attention to the team until this year, when the whole city united in cheering for their Knickerbockers, and after the team took a 2-0 lead in the best-of-seven series, I was among the hordes hoping that they would sweep their way to the championship. But when their opponents, the estimable San Antonio Spurs, won the third game decisively at Madison Square Garden, I felt the ill wind of a momentum shift. So when I sat down to watch Game 4 and saw the Knicks fall behind by 27 in the first half, I turned off the television. However, having seen enough miraculous comebacks in the NBA finals, I pushed the Record button before I retired for the night, and so I was quite pleased to hear in the morning that the Knicks had somehow won the game and that therefore I would be able to watch their second half comeback.
And that’s exactly what I did. But as I watched, I was mystified. The Knicks were down by 29 at one point in the third quarter, and after New York cut the San Antonio lead to 15 at the beginning of the fourth quarter, the Spurs surged back to go ahead by 20 points with less than ten minutes remaining in the game. By this point, knowing that the Knicks were destined to win by one point, I found myself in great suspense. The question of their victory was ordained, but the even greater question was “How?” How could they have possibly won this game? And that’s when I realized that how could be even more effective as a driver of suspense than who.
Consider The Silence of the Lambs. There we know who the bad guy is well before the tense conclusion, but the question is how will Clarice Starling possibly prevail over such a formidable foe, especially when he has the home-court advantage? Likewise, in the Harry Potter books and movies, we know that Voldemort is out to destroy Harry, and we wonder how J.K. Rowling will come up with a plausible way for her young hero to emerge victorious. For that matter, how is the crucial question in much great literature. How could Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy possibly get married after they have created so many obstacles for themselves? How could Raskolnikov, who has literally gotten away with murder, come to turn himself in for his crimes? How is Yossarian going to escape the Hobson’s choice between actual death and the dehumanizing system known as Catch-22? In most great literature we know who the villain is; I’m looking at you, Claudius, Iago, Roger Chillingworth, Regina Giddens, Miss Havisham. But we don’t know whether or how they will get their comeuppance. For my next project, I’d like to try my hand at a mystery novel that’s very much a mystery but is not a whodunit, a book that generates suspense using how over who.
As Evelyn Clarke might put it, I’m still figuring out how.