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Meanwhile, here is our latest essay, read for free!

Some Thoughts on Beginning a Story

By Leslie Horvitz

A friend recently tried to interest a mid-level literary agent in a mystery novel he'd written - his first. The agent asked him to tell her what his story was about, but no sooner had he begun to describe it than she stopped him. "What?" she said, "You don't have a murder or a body in the first chapter! It will never work." While flipping through the huge stacks of review copies of new books at this magazines offices, I found that many publishers indeed do want this dim clichè.

This got me to thinking about beginning a story (also ending one, also about what comes in between.) No question a writer has to grab a reader's attention right off the bat, or else he's dead in the water - commercially speaking at any rate. But is the writer of mysteries so limited? Are there only two arrows in his quiver? One other question: does a body always have to be a human body?

Stories take all forms. No secret there. And certain types of stories demand certain types of beginnings. That holds true with mysteries as much as any other genre. There is, for instance, the unraveling - the puzzle that must be solved or else. But first we have to set up the situation. Sometimes the best stories (certainly this is true with tales of horror) set the stage carefully, patiently, clueing us in on the terrors to come with a light touch - the chip on the dish, the pale rash on the face, the slip of a razor while shaving. Otherwise everything has to appear normal, routine, impervious to change. Then something happens, or someone appears, to upset the apple cart. You want to depict a scene of deceptive tranquillity, which is impossible to pull off if suddenly a body turns up sprawled on the railroad tracks. Speaking of which, perhaps you'll recall the movie 'Strangers on a Train.' It begins with two men boarding a train and falling into casual conversation which turns ever more sinister so that by the time they get off they have entered into an agreement to kill each other's wives. We do not begin with murder, or a body, but there is murder in the air. And murder in the air is just what the doctor ordered to keep a reader reading.

Where better to begin a puzzle (which is what a mystery is) than with a puzzle? In this case the puzzle comes in the form of a type of ring, found in tourist shops in Turkey. They are rings which are composed of several interlocking rings, as few as four and up to as many as twenty-four. Once unclasped, they come flying apart and can't be put back together unless you know the trick to the puzzle. Puzzle rings were originally meant to serve a prophylactic purpose, or so the legend goes. When one of the sultan's wives had it in mind to enjoy a tryst, free for the day from the watchful eyes of the palace guards, she would be sure to remove the ring because it would identify her as the sultan's property. If she didn't take this precaution, no man would dare go near her, fearing for his own life. But since the harem wives were not let in on the secret they would blithely pull off the ring and then discover with horror that it was so diabolically assembled, that they couldn't put it back together again. The evidence was incontrovertible; the poor girl was as good as dead.

So where to begin this story? First consider that you have not one but two characters in peril - the faithless wife and her lover; the difference is that the former knows she's in trouble while the latter, unaware that the woman belongs to the sultan, is ignorant of the fate that awaits him. Will the woman tell him so he can save his life?. So far, notice, no bodies and no murders. There are some people (you know who you are) who would maintain that this is the paradigm for a thriller, not the scheme for a mystery. I would contend, though, that the story is pregnant with mystery - there's murder in the air. If you insist on a body, or a murder (for one is almost inevitable -we can't even exclude the sultan himself from extinction) we can pluck the beginning from the end - what in movie parlance would be termed a flash forward. But before taking such a radical step you have to ask yourself: Is this a piece of information that we want to give away so early on? Will it increase tension? It can, sometimes. Remember that the protagonist of 'Sunset Boulevard' is introduced to us lying face down in a pool.

Supposing, though, we posit a very clever girl who somehow succeeds in reassembling the ring and returns, breathless and flushed to the palace, relieved at having escaped discovery. But let's throw a spy into the mix. While he works for the sultan he's not such a disinterested actor since he, too, lusts after the girl. Supposing then that he proceeds to let her know that he's on to her. In order to insure his silence he offers her a proposition, one that she will find difficult to accept, but what choice does she have? Well, you get the idea. Still no murder, and no body anywhere in sight, but there's menace - and for both writer and reader many possibilities - everywhere.

You sit down with a friend, someone, say, you've known for many years, or else you find yourself talking to someone you scarcely know at all, and you're making polite conversation, and suddenly, without any warning, wholly unbidden, a confession bursts forth from this person. Sometimes, this is how mysteries are born, too - through the unexpected revelation. Take the example of a young woman I once knew. Let's call her Wendy. Wendy used to work the bar in a neighborhood dive. Think of the scene: a smoky, boisterous bar filled with lowlifes. In this place Wendy is sovereign: attractive, blonde, striking, tall and lithe. She tells you that her sister recently came for a visit - no big deal, you think. You ask her how the visit had gone. Just being polite. Oh, she says, it went very well, and it was especially gratifying because they hadn't seen each other for so many years. Why? (You're still being polite, you really don't care.) Well, she says, they'd been estranged. Now it's getting more interesting. Why the estrangement? At the age of 15, Wendy goes on, she left home because of her father. He was abusing her -- and her sister. Every time she tried to tell her mother about what was going on - and it was going on for years - her mom adamantly refused to believe her. Her mother ought to have listened. Because one day her father ran off to New Zealand, leaving a brief note saying goodbye. They later found out that he'd emptied the joint bank accounts and stolen a hundred thousand dollars from his mother-in-law. Then Wendy's boyfriend left her. Wendy developed such high blood pressure because of stress that doctors feared that she'd die of a heart attack. For a time she was living in her car, she was so broke. Then her car was stolen. She had no where to turn. She called up her mother and said she was desperate. Her mother hung up on her. Then just when she thought things couldn't get any worse someone hurled a brick off the top of a building, striking her in the head. The injury wasn't as bad as the despair she felt, the sense that wherever she figured that bottom was, it was farther down still, and there was no telling how far she had left to fall. "I was sitting in the bath, staring at tufts of bloody blond hair, thinking that I could either give up or try to put my life together."

Do we need a body to get this story going? Why would you need a body? You've got that bloody tuft of blonde hair, and a sobbing naked woman on the verge of making the decision that will change her life. And that's better than a body if you ask me.

Or consider the type of story which begins "After that night nothing was ever the same." For most of us, a day will come (or has already) when the world we knew, or thought we did, is turned upside down. All bets are off, the rules you abided by turn out to be crooked, that wonderful person you were gong to love forever is gone, or else has betrayed you by loving another or by dying and leaving you alone. Or by becoming someone - something - unexpected, mysterious and fearful to you. "When I was growing up things were so bizarre I thought they were normal." I'm quoting Wendy again. This is part of her story, too. She was in her teens when this story takes place and staying over at her friend Jennifer's house. Wendy and Jennifer were in the bathroom, putting on make-up, getting ready to go out when the local evening news came on. All of a sudden Wendy noticed a change come over her friend's face. The blood drained from her face. Her eyes had a strange look in them. "What's wrong, Jennifer?" Wendy asked. For several moments Jennifer didn't say a word. What was wrong was that she'd just heard the news that her father had been arrested in connection with the murder of her stepmother whose head had been found in the oven. "After that I didn't go over to Jennifer's much anymore," Wendy said. One can see why.

In this case we have a beginning of a story that offers both a body (and a head) and a murder, but there's no mystery about the identity of the murderer. The real mystery, though, is what will happen to Jennifer.

Let us now consider the story that rises out of ignorance, out of an inscrutable void, a black hole. This story is about a family living in Montclair, New Jersey. One day, when the wife and kids came home, they found a note from the husband saying that he had to go away on business and would soon be back. Six years passed without a word from him. His wife went so far as to initiate court proceedings to have him declared dead. Then one day, while she was with a friend the key turned in the door. In walked the husband. "Is anybody home?" he called out cheerfully. As if he were just coming home from work. Where does this story begin? Not when the husband walks out - that's too banal. It begins when he walks back in. Is there a body? Any murder? Well, maybe. Maybe not. We don't know. We have to start excavating, we have to dig into that black hole - the missing six years -- and see what we can dredge up. Do we have a mystery? You bet we do.

Sometimes stories begin so elliptically or so elusively that they have the enigmatic quality of a Zen koan. Take this story, which is told about the famous Brazilian musician, Joao Gilberto, who wrote The Girl from Ipanema. This story was told by a percussionist who played with him. One day, the story goes, Gilberto found himself in a room with a cat. He began playing his guitar and went on playing for twelve hours straight. Then he began to talk to -- or at -- the cat for another twelve hours after which the cat leapt out the window and plunged to its death. What can we make of this? It has an ominous, but also darkly humorous quality to it. But what happens if, shortly after the cat plunges to its death, the door opens and in walks the guitarist's girlfriend? (It doesn't have to be Gilberto, it could be any musician who either has plenty of stamina or plenty of drugs to stay awake.) Say he had the key to her place and hoping to surprise her, let himself in the day before. But as the hours wear on he grows angrier, suspecting that she must be with another man. Seen in that light, his torment of the cat takes on another meaning and carries with it a rather sinister message for the oblivious girlfriend. So in the first chapter we have a body and a killing, if not necessarily a murder (can one murder a cat?) Yet I would argue that the death of a cat, under the right circumstances, makes for a far more chilling beginning to a mystery than any number of human corpses. Ask any animal lover.

Or what about this story? It also has a body and even a murder, but not necessarily in the usual order. Some years ago several people, seeking relief from headaches, ended up dead from tainted Tylenol. Somehow the killer was opening bottles of the drug once they'd gone to market and putting poison in them. What made the case even odder was that the murderer had no way of knowing his victims in advance; it was just the luck -- or bad luck - of the draw. Perhaps, the FBI reasoned, if the horror of his action was brought home to him he might be filled with remorse and reveal himself.

So they contacted Bob Greene, syndicated columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, and asked him to write a story about the poisonings. Greene used the first anniversary of the death of a 12-year-old girl named Kimberly as the springboard for his column. Local cops were assigned to stake out the graveyard where Kimbery was buried in the event that the killer showed up. It was a bitterly cold night and the cops were miserable; they couldn't imagine that any good would come from what must have seemed to them nothing more than a PR stunt. Suddenly a man materialized, tracing his path among the headstones with a penlight. Approaching a grave, he dropped to his knees and cried out, "Sophia, oh, Sophia, forgive me!" Who the hell was Sophia? The cops were confounded. The Tylenol girl's name was Kimberly. They went to talk to him. It turned out that the man was a hit-and-run driver who'd killed a girl named Sophia years before. So the stakeout was a success, just not in the way the cops had expected. The Tylenol killer meanwhile remained at large. So here we have not just one but two bodies. But their appearance in the story doesn't abide by formula, after all, it isn't as if people didn't know that the bodies were there. So the point here isn't the body (or bodies). The point is the story. There are, as Joao Gilberto might say, many ways to skin a cat.

By Leslie Horvitz

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