Good fiction starts with the following three ingredients: a character, in a setting, with a problem. A detective novel, or a series of them, will start the same way. You will need a detective of some kind. This detective will operate in a certain setting. And he or she will have a problem — namely the mystery they need to solve by the end of the book.
Sometimes, you won’t have all three ingredients right at the beginning. This is nothing to worry about. Just one of them should prove sufficient to germinate the fertile soil of your imagination and produce a wonderful idea for a novel.
Allow me to offer myself as an example. Before I began writing the Adam Lapid mystery series — in which I’ve published six novels so far — all I knew was that I wanted to write a book set in Israel. All I had was the setting, and a partial one at that.
And with that decision made, my mind started working, and it wasn’t long before it furnished me with an idea for a main character.
My character, I decided, would be a private detective in post-World War II Israel. I wanted him to have detecting experience, so I gave him a history as a police detective in Hungary before the war. I felt that he should be a man accustomed to loss and tragedy, so I made him a Holocaust survivor who lost his entire family in Auschwitz. He also needed to be a man of action, so he became a former Nazi hunter and a decorated veteran of Israel’s War of Independence. I named him Adam Lapid.
With my main character firmly in mind, my mind kept working. And soon it gave me the idea that would one day become Ten Years Gone, the first book in the series.
The idea was this: A Jewish German mother hands her baby son to a friend who is leaving Germany for Mandatory Palestine shortly before the outbreak of World War II. The mother plans on following soon, but ends up spending the war in Europe. All contact with her son is lost. The mother finally makes it to Israel in 1949 and she discovers her son has disappeared without a trace. She hires Adam Lapid to find him.
I now had a character in a setting with a problem to resolve: Adam Lapid in 1949 Israel, looking for a boy who’s been missing for ten years.
I now had a character in a setting with a problem to resolve: Adam Lapid in 1949 Israel, looking for a boy who’s been missing for ten years.
As you can see, the setting and initial idea grew out of my character. You might find it fruitful to employ a similar process in writing your own novel.
I knew long before I first put fingers to the keyboard that I wanted to write a series. But this is a decision you don’t have to make in advance. A mystery series is usually not composed of a single story broken up over multiple books, but a collection of complete stories that feature the same character. Your character will likely change with time and experiences, but each should have a definite ending. Mystery readers tend to prefer novels with a clear resolution. Therefore, to begin a detective series, all you need is an idea for one novel.
Once you finish your first novel, all you need to do is come up with ideas for new mysteries. The setting may remain the same or it may not, depending on those ideas. For instance, the first five novels in the Adam Lapid series are set in Israel between 1949 and 1951. But the sixth, The Auschwitz Detective, is a prequel that takes place in Auschwitz in 1944, when Adam Lapid was a prisoner there.
Ideas for new mysteries will often emerge from your setting or character or both. For instance, the idea for the fourth Adam Lapid novel, A Debt of Death, came from the setting as well as the character. In A Debt of Death, Adam Lapid investigates the murder of a man whom he encountered in Auschwitz (a character-derived idea); and the plot involves the thriving black market that existed in Israel in 1951 (a setting-derived idea).
One important tip regarding ideas: You don’t need to have the whole novel in your head on day one. All you need is an idea that excites you, that makes you want to write.
Once you have an idea for a mystery novel, you need to decide how you will write it. You can either outline the book or write it with no prior planning, hoping to find the story as you go along. Outlining has clear advantages. It gives you confidence that you have a great story before you spend months working on it. It allows you to write faster because you know where you’re going. It reduces the need to excise pointless scenes that end up going nowhere, after you’ve expended a great deal of time and effort in writing them. I recommend outlining to all fiction writers.
Unfortunately for me, I have never been able to outline a book. And I’ve tried multiple times with various methods. Therefore, I write without planning, word by word, and flow with the story where it takes me. At some point, I realize who the culprit is and discover the clues I’ve unknowingly embedded in the manuscript that will lead Adam Lapid to discover it too. The unconscious mind is a wonderful tool. It storytelling instinctively. Trust it and it will lead you where you wish to go.
Whether you outline or not, whether you write modern mysteries or historical mysteries like I do, remember to enjoy yourself. Write the stories that will please you, with characters you’ll enjoy spending time with. If you do that, you’ll write better novels. And sooner than you expect, you’ll have a series on your hands.
Jonathan Dunsky is the author of the Adam Lapid historical mysteries series and the standalone thriller The Payback Girl. Before turning to writing, Jonathan served for four years in the Israeli Defense Forces and worked in the high-tech and Internet industries. He resides in Israel with his wife and two sons.