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Informationen zum Autor Larry Beinhart is the Edgar Award-winning author of No One Rides for Free, How to Write a Mystery , You Get What You Pay For , and Foreign Exchange. His book American Hero was adapted into the movie Wag the Dog . Klappentext WHODUNIT? YOUDUNIT! So you want to write a mystery. There's more to it than just a detective, a dead body, and Colonel Mustard in the drawing room with the candlestick. Fortunately, Larry Beinhart--Edgar Award-winning author of You Get What You Pay For, Foreign Exchange, and American Hero--has taken a break from writing smart, suspenseful thrillers to act as your guide through all the twists and turns of creating the twists and turns of a good mystery. Drawing on advice and examples from a host of the best names in mystery writing--from Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane to Scott Turow and Thomas Harris--plus some of his own prime plots, Larry Beinhart introduces you to your most indispensable partners in crime: *Character, plot, and procedure * The secrets to creating heroes, heroines, and villains ("All writers draw upon themselves and their experience. While the whole of yourself might not be capable of being either a serial killer or an FBI agent, there are parts in each of us that are capable of almost anything.") * The fine art of scripting the sex scene *The low-down on violence ("A crime novel without violence is like smoking pot without inhaling, sex without orgasm, or a hug without a squeeze." ) *And much more! From the opening hook to the final denouement, Larry Beinhart takes the mystery out of being a mystery writer.INTRODUCTION The Joy of Genre Genre is a gaudy, tawdry Muse, but the favors she brings the writer are gifts of genuine gold. The first and most important gift is—an Audience. It is from them that all the other gifts flow. Like news, or for that matter, pornography, the audience is insatiable. Who could imagine that there could be more news programming? But there is. Or more skin magazines? But there are. Why are all those books in the mystery section and how come there are new ones every week? There are people who read a mystery a week, a day, or more. Personally, I never get on a plane, a train, a bus, or a subway without one. That means that there is a Market. Publishers need product, and quite a lot of it, to fill that market. If you can produce the material, almost regardless of quality—it does not have to be the great American novel—you can sell it. This is a wonderful thing. HOPE FOR THE WRITER It’s really intimidating to sit down at the keyboard with aspirations of being Hemingway or Shakespeare. When I think about someone doing that, his head full of Literature 101 Dreams of Immortality, I get a cartoon vision of a floor littered with wads of crushed first pages—hundreds and hundreds of them, decades of litter, not one page one good enough to be the first page of a novel by the new James Joyce. The average detective novel is probably no worse than the average novel, but you never see the average novel. It doesn’t get published. The average—or only slightly above average—detective story does. Not only is it published but it is sold … and it is read.… Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder The event that inspired me to become a working writer was reading two truly dreadful mysteries in one day. There and then I was convinced that if I wrote one, no matter how bad it was, I could sell it. It wasn’t that I thought that I could do better. What was exciting, thrilling, illuminating, was that someone had published these meandering, illogical, poorly constructed, cliché-ridden manuscripts and—I presumed—actually paid the writers! This was attainable. When I tell this story I am always asked: Which two books were they? I honestly ...
