THE MYSTERY HOOK

by James Lincoln Warren

I write several kinds of crime stories.

The first and most characteristic type is the traditional whodunit, so far always featuring independent 18th century insurance investigator Alan Treviscoe. These stories generally feature a lot of physical evidence requiring Treviscoe’s deductive prowess and a puzzle plot. They almost always feature an element of the unusual or the bizarre: a ship denuded of its cargo in an impossibly short time, a gentleman killed by his own hunting dogs, a man who is rumored to be a woman (this one is based on fact), a card player who always wears gloves, and so forth. The Treviscoe series also always hinge on some historical fact unique to the period in which they take place. The Treviscoe stories owe a lot to Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie.

The second type is contemporary hard-boiled/traditional noir. One of them, “When the Wind Blows”, got a cover on AHMM, but the more common type features a tough wise-cracking P.I. named Carmine Ferrari and his partner, Custer Malone, who run a multi-ethnic detective agency called Cal Ops in Beverly Hills. The first of these stories appeared in EQMM last year and the second will shortly show up in AHMM. (The third is in the mail, as they say.) They are traditional P.I. “travelogues” — the reader discovers the unfolding mystery at the same time as the detective, but isn’t always cut in on the detective’s conclusions. The Cal Ops stories owe a lot to Raymond Chandler and his precursors and successors — but also to Rex Stout, with Carmine being more or less Archie Goodwin, doing most of the footwork and narrating the story, with Malone sittiing in for Nero Wolfe, more capable of connecting the dots and arriving at a solution, although a Nero Wolfe packing a .45 automatic. They also owe something to contemporary police procedural/forensics fiction, in that they usually have an amount of tech involved.

A third type is the historical crime story, in which the central character is a direct actor in the events portrayed, but not necessarily as a detective. The only one of these that has been published so far is “Mother Brimstone”, set in the 18th century. A second such story, likewise set in the 18th century, “The Warcoombe Witch”, will be printed in AHMM later this year. (“Warcoombe” is actually meant to be comedic.) Another one, “Shanghaied”, is set in 19th century San Francisco, and I have high hopes of selling it soon, too. These stories, in common with the Treviscoe stories, hinge upon facts that only appertain to the era in which they take place.

The one thing they all have in common, besides my brilliant and witty prose (he said, blushing modestly), is that I try to give them a hook. By this, I mean nothing more or less than some specific element intended to draw the reader into the action. This is not exactly the same thing as Alfred Hitchcock’s famous “MacGuffin” 1, although it serves the same purpose. For me, the hook is usually something organic in the tale itself: there’s actually a reason why Mr. Craven always wears gloves when he plays cards, but the unusual circumstance itself is intended to pique the reader’s interest.

I think most stories — at least, most interesting stories — have such hooks. For me, many stories start with the idea of the hook and the rest of the tale is built around it, like a sculpture in terra cotta over a ligature. At other times, I’ll pick some topic I’m interested in and go looking for a hook to hang it on — in the third Cal Ops story (the one in the mail), the topic I wanted to cover was narcocorrido music, the ballads of Mexican drug smugglers, but the hook is a celebrity murder trial, which, as you all should know, is the second most popular spectator sport in Los Angeles.

One of the things I look for when I read a story is what the author has chosen as his hook. My favorite of all time is the Red-Headed League from Doyle’s eponymous Sherlock Holmes adventure, closely followed by the Santa Ana winds in Chandler’s “Red Wind” (borrowed for the same purpose in my “When the Wind Blows”). After Holmes and Marlowe, my favorite detective in fiction is Miss Marple (although I find few of her anemic literary descendants remotely worthy), and the best hook in the Miss Marple canon is the A Murder Is Announced personal advertisement in a provincial newspaper — that one even hooks the suspects!

I would be very interested to hear about the Gentle Readers’ favorite hooks. If you are a writer, I’d like to hear what your favorite hooks in your own works are. If a reader, I’d like to know what hook grabbed you in your favorite stories.

1. Said term allegedly coined by Hitchcock’s Scottish friend, screenwriter Angus MacPhail, this is a device for setting the action in motion but has no reality or importance in and of itself — a classic example is the “letters of transit” in “Casablanca” (yes, I know it was directed by Michael Curtiz and not Hitch, but the principle applies). Hitchcock himself apparently claimed it was a device for capturing lions in the Scottish Highlands. [↩]