One of the initial decisions that every author must make is whether to write in the first-person (I) or the third-person (he/she/they). To the reader this may seem like a technical matter with limited effect on the end product, but in the mystery story, the stakes are amplified; there is a crime to be solved, and having—or not having—access to the inner workings of the mind is of paramount importance to how the solution to the mystery is revealed.
The first-person narrator seems less popular in contemporary crime fiction as writers appear to prefer the freedom to move through time and space, from scene to scene, from character to character, and from mind to mind. But it wasn’t always this way: the Sherlock Holmes stories, the early Agatha Christie, and the Nero Wolfe novels all employ a first-person narrator. And in each case, it’s the plodding sidekick—Doctor Watson, Captain Hastings, and Archie Goodwin—who tells the story from the perspective of “I”. There is good reason for this: the reader needs to be kept a distance from the machinations of the mastermind detective’s inner thoughts. Imagine if the reader is permitted to know all that Holmes, Poirot, or Wolfe are thinking. The mystery would be solved quickly; the story would be over almost before it began. Justice would be served, but the reading experience would be short. How often is Watson forced to admit, “I confess that I was filled with curiosity, but I was aware that Holmes liked to make his disclosures at his own time and in his own way”? The good doctor is the filter between the reader and the detective, denying us access to Holmes’ omniscience.
Most of the earliest authors of the hardboiled school, who, in inventing their own style, wrote in reaction to the intellectual puzzles of the earlier mysteries, continued to write in the first-person: Hammett, with his nameless Continental Op, Chandler with Phillip Marlowe, and later, Ross MacDonald with Lew Archer. The new hardboiled detective wasn’t a genius, he was a man of action, tough and immediate. He wasn’t sitting in his armchair, smoking his pipe, thinking about whodunnit; he was knocking down doors not knocking on doors—and getting knocked down himself, if not knocked out. The detective in these early noir novels parallels the reader: the two locked together, united in purpose, chasing down the killer page by page; the detective’s discoveries are simultaneously made by the reader. There is no space between when the detective has a flash of understanding and the reader learns of it.
And it’s not just the immediacy: writing in the first-person is the most realistic of all narrative techniques. It is how we experience our world everyday: locked inside our heads, looking out at the mystery of life around us, unable to see into the black boxes of others’ psyches. In truth, the novel is the one artistic form that fully allows us into the mind of another, to know—if only on a fictional level—the voice, the thoughts and emotions, the dreams and loathings of another. (Film occasionally tries voice-over to get at this intimacy and fails miserably.) James M. Cain took it a step further and had some of his first-person narrators explain the very act of writing their stories. Frank Chambers in The Postman Always Rings Twice: “So I’m in the death house now, writing the last of this so Father McConnell can look it over and show me the places where maybe it out to be fixed up a little, for punctuation and all that.” Even the copy-editing is made transparent!
And so when I write, I’m reaching for that same feeling—to be immediate and realistic, to show the world as we experience it, to propel the reader through the pages alongside the detective, to have them in his head sharing his discoveries, failures, and doubts in real time as if they were their very own.
Alexis Stefanovich-Thomson is a writer living in Toronto. He is a past winner of the Black Orchid Novella Award, the Crime Writers of Canada Best Novella Award and the Toronto Star Short Story Contest. His first novel, The Road to Heaven, was published by Dundurn Press in 2024. Visit his website at https://www.alexisstefanovichthomson.com/
When most readers and writers think of a crime fiction series, they envision following a single protagonist and his or her sidekicks through several stories. Consider, for example, Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op, Robert B. Parker’s Spenser, Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone, and any of hundreds of other amateur and professional sleuths who come immediately to mind.
Not me. I stumbled backward into writing a series in which the setting—a fictional version of West Texas—is the reoccurring element that ties the stories together. This began with “Quarryville, Texas,” a story I wrote for The Private Eye Writers of America Presents: Fifty Shades of Grey Fedora (Riverdale Avenue Books, 2015). In the story, a private eye from Waco travels to Quarryville to solve a decades-old crime.
The quarry at the heart of Quarryville’s economic existence had closed in the early 1950s, leading to the town’s “long, slow slide into oblivion,” and the “dried-out scab of a town” is barely clinging to life at the beginning of that story. I returned to Quarryville for “Smoked,” written for Noir at the Salad Bar (Level Best Books, 2017), a story later included in The Best American Mystery Stories (2018). In “Smoked,” a former biker in the Witness Protection Program opens Quarryville Smokehouse, a barbecue joint that is soon named one of the state’s best. This unexpected publicity leads to all kinds of trouble.
The notoriety of the Quarryville Smokehouse brings visitors to Quarryville, and that sparks a “rebirth on Main Street” in “Mr. Sugarman Visits the Bookmobile,” written for Shhhh…Murder! (Darkhouse Books, 2018). As the story begins, an antiques shop and an art gallery are scheduled to open within the month.
In “Sonny’s Encore” (Black Cat Mystery Magazine #9, 2021), we visit Quarryville’s past when we experience the 1935 robbery of the quarry’s payroll office.
In subsequent stories, the town plays a minor role. Instead of featuring Quarryville, I developed the region, adding towns such as Chicken Junction and Mertz. Even so, characters visit Quarryville, spend the night in the six-room motel, dine at the Quarryville Smokehouse, or travel through on the way to somewhere else. I even set stories outside of West Texas in which characters from Quarryville play prominent or minor roles.
But I didn’t return to modern-day Quarryville as the central setting until “Barbed Wire Bison” (Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, November/December 2024). The smokehouse is still popular, the antiques shop and the art gallery are now open, and the town is no longer a dried-out scab.
In “Barbed Wire Bison,” a woman moving to Quarryville hires two retired barflies to help her unload her rented moving van. There aren’t many secrets in a small town, and before long they wonder what she’s hiding or who she’s hiding from. When violence comes to town, they learn the reason behind her relocation.
This is far from my last West Texas story. There’s one coming up in a future issue of AHMM about a young woman from Quarryville who travels to Hollywood to seek her fame and fortune, and there are others in the pipeline.
While every West Texas story can be read and enjoyed without reading any of the others, seeing how they all tie together provides readers with a richer experience.
And, as I discovered by accident, a series doesn’t need to feature a reoccurring protagonist. Sometimes the right location can tie everything together.
Michael Bracken (www.CrimeFictionWriter.com) is an Edgar Award and Shamus Award nominee whose crime fiction has appeared in The Best American Mystery Stories, The Best Mystery Stories of the Year, and many other publications. Additionally, Bracken is the editor of Black Cat Mystery Magazine and several anthologies, including the Anthony Award-nominated The Eyes of Texas. In 2024, he was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters for his contributions to Texas literature. He lives, writes, and edits in Texas.
If you’re a reader of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, it’s a dead certainty you enjoy reading mysteries. It may reasonably follow that you delight in thrillers and suspense fiction, as well. All three types of stories can present the reader with the kind of scintillating and satisfying experience found in no other genres.
But are there distinctions between the three—mystery, thriller, and suspense? Does it matter if there are?
If, like me, you are fascinated by what captivates us as lovers of the mysterious and suspenseful, please join me for a closer look into what sets these story types apart and what drives us to devour them with such pleasure.
Most merchants of mystery, AHMM included, define a mystery story as one that features a crime or the threat or fear of a crime. So, let us start with the crime as we examine the differences between our three chosen genres.
Naturally, there will be exceptions to the observations I’m making throughout this exploration, but most mysteries open with the crime—the grisly discovery of a corpse or an empty safe, bereft of jewels and bearer bonds. If the crime hasn’t occurred by page one, count on it to happen soon.
That’s because the remainder of the story revolves around discovering whodunit, why they did it, and how it was carried out. The answers to those questions are what keep us turning the pages, piecing the clues together, pitting our own gray matter against the sleuth at the wheel.
We want to solve puzzles and anticipate a resolution at the end, but our expectations go far beyond that. We also want to identify with the hero, experience the thrill of the hunt, and revel in the satisfaction of seeing the perpetrator punished.
Thrillers also involve a crime. Usually, there is the threat of some horrific catastrophe looming ahead and the bulk of the story consists of spine-tingling, nerve-wracking attempts to stop that crime from happening.
If the action kicks off with a crime, that early crime is just a sample of what’s to come. If there’s not a crime at the start of the book, there must be the credible threat of a crime waiting in the wings. The story centers on the hero’s efforts to prevent such a calamitous crime from occurring.
Crime lurks beneath the surface of a suspense story, too. Tales of suspense are about danger, or the provocative threat of danger. The peril can be clear and present or a low-level hum but it must persist throughout the story as a pervasive element.
While a crime must take place in a mystery so that there’s something to solve, and the threat of a disastrous crime serves as the driving force of a thriller, it’s possible to have a complete and satisfying suspense story where the crime never occurs. The fear of it, the underlying menace, is enough to produce a full-fledged, emotionally fulfilling reading experience.
In all well-told stories, there must be something at stake. In a mystery, the risk may not rise to the level of life and death, at least not in the physical sense. The stakes may involve the detective’s reputation or relationship with a loved one. But there has to be something the protagonist yearns to gain or fears to lose.
In a thriller, the stakes are large, usually (but not always) expanding well beyond the personal realm. Life, liberty, and justice—these are the values on the chopping block of a thriller. We want to share the hero’s experience of riding the razor edge, nearly losing the desperate gamble, and then pulling back from the gaping jaws just as they snap shut!
We want to free the captives and defeat the enslavers, conquer the villain and see him get what’s coming to him. Give us anything less than life, liberty, and justice at stake in a thriller and we’ll walk away disappointed.
Beyond the intangibles at risk, we thrill over having something concrete in the mix—the formula for a dastardly bioweapon or a time machine programmed to bring Hitler into the twenty-first century. If you’ve ever heard anyone refer to the MacGuffin, this is what they were talking about.
It’s the back and forth of the game that keeps us enthralled and turning pages, keeping score and placing bets as we anticipate what will happen next and how it will all turn out.
While the scope of a suspense story doesn’t usually rival that of a thriller—entailing danger to a single person or small group rather than a widespread population—the measure of risk to the individuals involved should still be life and death, or something comparable.
The focus of the story differs as well across these three genres. In a mystery, the focus is on the crime and follows the protagonist in their pursuit of the perpetrator.
In a suspense story, that focus is flipped. The shadowy black hat is inexplicably in pursuit of the hero, who must peel back the layers to find out who wishes them ill, learn why, and figure out a way to stop it from happening.
In a mystery, the sleuth often labors to find a way into the puzzle. In a suspense, she’s trying to find a way out.
In a mystery, something has happened. In a suspense, something is about to happen and there’s a tantalizing tension as we try to fathom what, why, and who.
In a thriller, we often know what’s going to happen and even who’s responsible for the threat—although the protagonist may still be in the dark. The focus is on the fight, the chase, the race, the frantic battle to prevent the nightmarish disaster from occurring.
One of the most compelling characteristics of a thriller is its almost relentless fast pace, leaving us breathless as we speed through the pages. Suspense stories, on the other hand, can move ahead at just about any pace.
As an example, an all-time favorite of mine, Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca, is fraught with suspense and an underlying sense of peril. Yet it ambles at a leisurely pace through the dark halls of Manderley, taking its time in revealing, piece by piece, the secret that lies at the heart of the story.
Like suspense, the tempo of a mystery story can vary but won’t reach the breakneck level of a thriller and, in fact, usually contains more variation in pacing throughout.
This brings us to the ending of the tale, the finale, the happily ever after. Or not.
The ending of a mystery must provide a resolution. We expect it. Without it, we are not satisfied.
I remember reading Donna Tartt’s The Little Friend and being bitterly disappointed to reach the last page without knowing who committed the crime laid out at the book’s beginning. My fault, I suppose, for mistaking the story as a mystery when perhaps it’s not intended to be so.
There are occasions when the resolution may not exactly include the solution to the puzzle. But the story has to wrap up in a manner that will satisfy us, as readers, and justify the time we invested in reading it.
The ending of a suspense story is sometimes a bit more nebulous, in keeping with the distinctive and moody ambience they often engender. One hallmark of suspense fiction is the setting which tends toward brooding environments with a gothic sensibility—remote, macabre, mysterious.
Such stories may leave us deliberately in the dark at the close of the story. And yet, we might feel there could be no more fitting way to end the tale.
A thriller concludes after the final electrifying confrontation, the climactic scene pitting the rivaling forces against each other in a duel to the death—literally, in most cases. But there’s an important convention in a thriller that gives it that extra twist, the bite we crave in this particular type of story.
The false ending.
You know, when we think everything has been neatly wrapped up and we let our guard down. And then—wham!—out of nowhere, the unexpected happens, squeezing yet more suspense out of the story.
Think Casino Royale, Alien, or The Silence of the Lambs. These movies feature such a double ending. I’ll bet you can think of several more and they’re probably among your favorites.
When I was writing my first thriller novel, Nocturne in Ashes, it wasn’t until I reached the end of the book that I realized it was missing something—that false ending that leads to the final surprise twist. As I pondered how I might fix this deficiency, the solution jumped out at me with such force that I literally stopped in my tracks, stunned.
I, who had written the book, hadn’t seen it coming. And I knew readers wouldn’t see it either. When I hear from fans who’ve read the book, that twist is what they talk about most. It satisfied the convention, leading to satisfied readers.
So, I’ve made the argument that there are distinctions between mystery, thriller, and suspense and I’ve laid out my reasons. But how much does that matter?
To some, it matters a lot. To others, not so much. As for me—I love them all. Each one brings its own delicious flavor to the table. I hope our exploration has whetted your appetite and inspired you to dig into your next mystery, thriller, or suspense story with gusto!
I write short stories and novels and a novella here and there. I believe most authors write short stories as a way to “cleanse the palate” during the long haul of writing a novel, although some prefer to concentrate only on this most tortuous art form. I say tortuous because writing short is famously more difficult than writing long.
My shorts are stories that don’t fit with any of my three series, or story ideas that can’t be stretched to novel form, or tryouts for a new character or setting I’m experimenting with. But it’s always something that won’t let me go until I at least get it sketched out, then come back later to devote the better part of a month to tinkering with it. Sometimes the story won’t gel, and I have to put it away for a while.
In the case of “Cold Cases,” my story published in the January/February issue of Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, the sketching and tinkering stretched into years. I would have to leave the story but I always came back to it; I changed the title several times before finally hitting upon one that exactly described what the story was about. After that, the writing pretty much took care of itself.
That I couldn’t decide on the title was unusual, but I couldn’t let the idea and the main character go. It was too much fun and too different from anything I’d done before.
You see, “Cold Cases”bends the mystery genre into a ghost story, one in which the ghosts, all murder victims haunting a rustic Overlook-like resort hotel, are trying to earn a “get out of purgatory free” card. They are saddled with each other, possibly for eternity, as they try to bring their plight to the attention of the authorities.
Two of the ghosts were rivals in life, but their time in eternity is teaching them something like tolerance.
It should be a dark story, and it is. But it’s also filled with moments of irony and even humor, as the ghosts fumble through the afterlife, still clinging to old grudges and quirks from their time among the living. There’s something almost absurd about watching them, eternally bound to the scene of their demise, bickering over the past while trying to cooperate on solving their murders. It’s a story that highlights the complexities of human nature—how even in death, we’re shaped by the lives we lived, the choices we made, and the unfinished business we leave behind.
The challenge with “Cold Cases” was balancing that fine line between the macabre and the humorous, between the tragedy of these lost souls and the absurdity of their circumstances. It’s what kept me coming back to the story again and again. The characters, dead as they are, were very much alive to me, and I think that’s what every writer hopes for—that the characters take on a life of their own, refusing to let go until their story is told.
In the end, it’s not just about solving the mystery of their murders. It’s about redemption, even when redemption seems out of reach. It’s about finding closure in the most unlikely of places and circumstances. And maybe that’s why I kept at it for so long—because sometimes, like the ghosts in “Cold Cases”, we’re all just trying to find our way out of purgatory, one unfinished story at a time.
G.M. Malliet <gmmalliet.com> is the author of three mystery series; a dozen or more short stories published in The Strand, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine; and a standalone suspense novel. She wrote the Agatha Award-winning Death of a Cozy Writer (2008), the first installment of the DCI St. Just mysteries, which was named one of the ten best novels of the year by Kirkus Reviews.
Trace Evidence 