In Agatha Christie’s 4:50 From Paddington, Elspeth McGillcuddy is taking a train to visit her good friend Miss Marple. She happens to look up as a train passes, going in the opposite direction. That’s when she sees a man strangling a woman. When she gets to St. Mary Meade, she tells Miss Marple what she’s seen. The two women tell the police, but there’s no report of a body on the train, and no-one has reported anyone missing. Still, Miss Marple believes her friend and decides to investigate. Christie begins this novel with the murder; it happens within the first chapter. And that can be an effective way to get the reader’s attention. When a crime novel begins with the crime, the reader is drawn right into the action.
Christie is by no means the only author who’s taken this approach. As Peter Lovesey’s The Last Detective begins, a man who’s been out fishing in Chew Valley Lake discovers the body of a woman floating in the water. The police are alerted, and Superintendent Peter Diamond begins an investigation. The dead woman is soon identified as Geraldine ‘Gerry’ Jackman, a former TV star who’s been out of the limelight for a few years. The evidence shows that she didn’t die by drowning, so this likely wasn’t an accident. This means that Diamond and his second-in-command, John Wigfull, will treat this case as a murder, so they begin a search for anyone who might have had a motive. In this novel, the body is discovered within the first couple of pages, so the reader is invited to engage in the story right away.
That’s also the case with Inger Wolf’s Dark September. That novel begins with the discovery of the body of a young woman in a forest. Aarhus Lieutenant Detective Daniel Trokic and his team are called to the scene and begin an investigation. The woman is soon identified as Anna Kiehl, a single mother and anthropology student. There isn’t much evidence at the scene – just a sprig of hemlock found on the body. So, the team stats to look into the victim’s past and her relationships to find out who had a motive. In this novel, the victim’s body is discovered in the first paragraph. The action begins right away, so the reader can engage quickly. And many readers do prefer stories where the action starts immediately.
Some novels, though, build some tension and develop some of the characters before the crime occurs. That, too, can be satisfying, as it allows the reader to be immersed in the story and get to know the characters. Agatha Christie used this approach (e.g. Death on the Nile), but she’s not the only one.
In Anthony Bidulka’s Tapas on the Ramblas, Saskatoon PI Russell Quant gets a new client. Wealthy heiress Charity Wiser claims that someone is trying to kill her, and she suspects one of her family members. Her plan is to have Quant join a family cruise of the Mediterranean, so he can vet the other passengers and find out who the would-be murderer is. Quant agrees and prepares for the trip. He gets to know the various members of Charity’s family, and the tension builds as readers discover that each one has a very good reason to kill Charity. The suspense continues as the cruise goes on, so the reader is absorbed in what’s happening. Then, a little later in the novel, tragedy strikes. In this case, the suspense comes not from the initial discovery of a body, but from getting to know the different suspects as Quant interacts with them.
Kalpana Swaminathan’s The Page 3 Murders has a similar sort of buildup of tension. Dr. Hilla Driver has inherited a beautiful Mumbai home and has decided to have a big celebration. She invites several well-known celebrities for a weekend at her home, and she plans an emphasis on food. Her chef, Tarok Ghosh, is gifted in the kitchen, and he says he wants to put her home on the culinary map. Everyone arrives as planned, but there’s tension right from the beginning. Some of the guests have a history together; others just don’t get on. So Hilla is hoping that everything will work out. The first part of the story lets the reader get to know the characters and some of their backstories. Then comes the night of the culminating event: a special seven-course meal. To begin, Ghosh prepares an individual appetizer for each guest. Those treats are more than food, though; it turns out that Ghosh knows a secret about each guest and is hinting at tthose secrets. When he is found murdered the next day, Hilla asks her friend, retired police detective Lalli, to find out who the killer is. In this case, the murder doesn’t happen until a little later in the novel, and that allows the reader to get to know the characters and feel the buildup of suspense.
Colin Dexter’s The Jewel That Was Ours begins as a group of American tourists arrive in Oxford. One of them, Laura Stratton, has with her the Wolvercote Tongue, a very valuable part of a Saxon belt buckle. Her plan is to donate the piece to the Ashmolean Museum. The first part of the story lets the reader get to know the tourists, their guides, and Theodore Kemp, curator of the Ashmolean. When Laura suddenly dies of a heart attack, Inspector Morse and Sergeant Lewis investigate. They soon find that her handbag, in which she kept the Wolvercote Tongue, is missing. The heart attack isn’t so suspicious, but the missing bag is, so Morse and Lewis follow that up. Things get even more complicated the next day, when Kemp is found murdered. Now the investigation goes full-on, and Morse and Lewis must untangle a network of history and relationships to get to the truth. Instead of beginning the novel with a murder, Dexter builds the tension as we see the characters interact and learn about them.
Some readers prefer the major crime (often murder) to happen right at the beginning of a story. That’s what gets them invested in the book. Other readers prefer a slower buildup of tension. They want to get to know characters and motivation. Do you have a preference? If you’re a writer, how do you build tension in your work?
*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from Leo Sayer and Barry Mann’s How Much Love.
Crime Writer Margot Kinberg 