I’m trying to map out the plot for a murder mystery, but I feel like it’s missing something. Pretty much, there’s an incident in a high school that leads to the death of one of the students. There are four other people in the room at the time that this happens, and the reader is convinced that one of them was responsible for the death. It’ll all be written in first person. The first chapter (the death) will be written from the perspective of the murder victim, and after that it will alternate between the four suspects, depending on what is happening in each of their lives. I want the characters to be complete opposites of each other and show their contrasting reactions to the murder accusations. They all have their motives for disliking the student, but they are not strong enough to warrant murder. It turns out that it was not a murder, and that it was in fact a suicide. The dead student was going to kill himself and took the opportunity to attempt to bring the suspects down with him. There were reasons for disliking them all. I’ve got the beginning and the end, but I’m unsure of what should happen in the middle. Should I gradually reveal their reasons for disliking the dead student? What are some clues that I could sneak into the middle to hint at the reader? Should my characters' worlds be closely related? What could I include to hint that it was a certain suspect that was in fact the murderer? This is my first time trying to write mystery, so any help is really appreciated
How was the case solved? Who found out it was a suicide and how did they do that? Answering those questions is the substance of a murder mystery story. Normally, a murder mystery is written from the point of view of the detective investigating the crime or someone taking on that role. The suspects are interviewed and give accounts of what happened. The reader knows the account given by the guilty party will be false and the question is, which account is false? Having a first-person account from each suspect means all their accounts must be true, and the reader will know this, so no mystery. That will be a problem. In your story, all the suspect's accounts are true but for there to be a mystery, the reader shouldn't know this. I'd be inclined to write the whole thing from the point of view of an additional character who takes it upon him/her self to play detective and find out what happened. This could be a mutual friend of all involved and be able to draw on personal memories.
Regards the first person account from each person, one of them could have some type of condition such as multiple personality disorder where the main personality isn't aware of the actions that the alternate personalities take. Or aliens could take over someone's body and use it to do X or Y.....etc.
The more that I think about it, the more ridiculous the alternating first-person perspectives sounds. I like the idea of having the novel focused around an individual who takes it upon themselves to solve the murder. Do you think that a third person, omniscient narrator would work? That way I could delve into the personal lives of the suspects and be selective in what I reveal about them. The suicide ending is not yet set in stone. I could change it to an unexpected murderer, maybe one of the teachers at the school. The murder victim is a vicious gossip at the school and knows many personal suspects regarding the suspects, so this gives them all a motive. Do you think that it would be more appropriate to have one of the suspects being guilty, or launch something unexpected? Thank you so much for your help.
An unexpected ending would be good. You need the reader to react, 'Of course, why didn't I realize?' rather than, 'Where the hell did that come from?' The trick is to leave sufficient clues so the reader pieces it together after being told, but enough misdirection to ensure they don't work it out before your detective reveals what happened. I don't think third-person omniscient would be the most appropriate as the narrator would, by definition, have accurate knowledge of everything which would be counterproductive since you'll want the reader to consider the possibility of any of the character's testimony's being lies. Third-person limited or first-person would be better. Either of these would rely only on the main character's experience for information and allow that character (and the reader) to be deceived. The main character can speculate about the other characters' thought but he/she (and the reader) shouldn't know. If you want to delve into personal lives; rumors spread like gossip and that information can come from any source. The idea of suicide as the unexpected ending is good but if the dead student wanted a fellow student to take the blame for the murder, they would leave false clues framing a particular person. Broad circumstantial evidence pointing to several people would be insufficient. Imagine you're going to write a story about a student who intends to commit suicide and make it look like murder. Plan the stary, making sure all his motivations, thinking, and actions fit together in a coherent and plausible way. This is not the story you write. This is the story your detective character has to uncover by the details it leaves behind.
I am a huge fan of a good who done it and I would suggest you take a day to just binge watch Agatha Christie. There is nothing wrong with taking a time honored formula and updating it. I LOVE the fact that these are high school kids. Make sure to add their adolescence in as a character flaw in each character. And hopping pov is still valid, but creating your own Poirot style character is a good idea too. Feel free to bounce ideas off me. I love this stuff.
I would agree with @A_Jones about Agatha Christie, but if you are writing a novel form, don't 'watch' filmed versions of Christie's mysteries. Read Agatha's books. That's the only way you'll know how the writer approached the subject. Speaking as somebody who read every single Agatha mystery when I was a youngster (mainly, I have to say, for the local colour of Village England—I didn't really care whodunnit!) I think she often used more than one POV character. In fact, I think she actually used the murderer's point of view as well, at times. So that made it quite hard to figure them out. Pay attention to HOW she pulls these mysteries off. HOW does she misdirect the reader? One of the techniques she uses in nearly every story is to give everybody an opportunity and motive for murder. Sometimes it's actually the person with the weakest 'motive' and least likely appearance at the scene of the crime who ends up being the culprit. Or it's a person we did suspect, but they did it for an entirely different motive than we suspected, or in an entirely different way. Her books were quite formulaic in some ways, but damn. It was certainly hard to guess the outcome of each one! The only people we could automatically discount were the detectives ...Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot, Hastings, Inspector Slack, or a few recurring characters like nieces, nephews, old friends, etc. Anybody else was fair game. Study how Agatha Christie did it. She was a master of the craft. And her stories weren't all that complicated either. Mind you, she didn't have the forensic stuff to work with that modern-day detectives do. No DNA, etc. Only fingerprints. And footprints....
