Fresh Blood: Sarah Skilton Discusses Why Mystery Elements are Vital in Non-Mystery Books

Okay, you twisted my arm. Confession: my upcoming debut novel, BRUISED (Abrams/Amulet Books) is not a mystery.*

However, it does contain mystery elements. I've come to believe every kind of book, no matter the style or genre, can benefit from the use of mystery techniques. That's because writing a page turner requires posing questions readers must want to get answers to.

Carrie Arcos' extraordinary Young Adult novel, OUT OF REACH (Simon Pulse, 2012), is about a teenage girl, Rachel, searching for her missing brother, a meth addict who has disappeared. The story isn't labeled a mystery, but readers are immediately wondering three things: Why did the brother run away? Where did he go? And most importantly, Will Rachel find him?

With only one clue to go on -- an anonymous email -- Rachel and her brother's friend, Tyler, set off on their search. The book is considered contemporary YA, and it contains excellent characters and backstory, but the mystery elements are what drive the plot.

Likewise, in Sarvenaz Tash's terrific middle grade adventure book THE MAPMAKER AND THE GHOST (Bloomsbury, 2012; out in paperback March 26), 11-year-old Goldenrod Moram has decided to draw a map of her town. While in the woods, she overhears a group of kids who are up to no good, and she needs to figure out what they're scheming or her younger brother could pay the price. Readers, too, will be curious about the gang (whose entertaining nicknames include Brains, Snot Shot, and Lint).

In my own BRUISED, a 16-year-old girl skilled in martial arts freezes up at an armed robbery and blames herself for not preventing a shooting. The incident is so upsetting that she buries part of it away so it can't hurt her. The main focus of the novel is her relationships -- with her parents, friends, martial arts instructor, and the boy who also witnessed the crime -- but readers will hopefully be compelled to discover what Imogen's missing memories are.

Using mystery elements in non-mystery books provides a feeling of suspense as well as a reason for a reader to commit to the story.

*How did my riff-raff self get invited to join Sleuths, Spies, and Alibis? The easy answer is that my second book, HIGH AND DRY, is an actual mystery.

Sarah Skilton lives in California with her magician husband and their young son. BRUISED received a starred review from Publishers Weekly and comes out March 5th, 2013, but you can enter to win Sarah's very last ARC (advance readers copy) at GoodReads right now!

If you live in L.A., consider attending Teen Author Night at LAPL.

Fresh Blood: Mary McCoy

There are a few things about the me who writes and finishes books that are different from the me who didn’t.

Like most people who make the leap from “I’d like to write a book” to “I wrote a book,” I’m more self-disciplined about writing than I used to be. I have confidence I can finish the manuscripts I start, and I’ve become shockingly unsentimental about making revisions.

But there’s another difference I wanted to write about for my first Sleuths, Spies, & Alibis post, and it’s this:

I ask better questions now.

Since my debut novel, Dead To Me, is a 1940s YA crime noir set in Hollywood, it probably comes as no surprise that I’m a sucker for a true crime story. If it happened at least fifty years ago in Los Angeles and involved a celebrity, BONUS.

At the height of my true crime jones, I wanted to track down the craziest, most notorious, most shocking crimes, and Los Angeles history is full of them - just open up any newspaper. We’ve got vengeful teen lovers, creepy secret attic boyfriends, mysteriously missing starlets, and a rash of celebrity misdeeds.

I ate all of it up, but the more I read, the less interested I was in who did what to whom - or even why they did it. Increasingly, I wanted answers to the kinds of questions that weren’t going to be answered by old newspaper articles or Hollywood Babylon.

I wanted to know what it was like for Lila Leeds to be famous not for her considerable talent, but for a stupid thing that happened in 1948, and why Los Angeles’s most famous murder victim, Elizabeth Short, was so alone during her lifetime. I wanted to know about the people who lingered at the edges of the stories: the kid sisters, mothers, best friends, and favorite uncles. I wanted to see these people as more than the sum of their most notorious parts.

Realizing I felt this way about true stories did wonders for my fiction. When I started asking deeper questions about the characters in my stories - questions that had nothing to do with them being a criminal or a victim - that’s when they turned into the kind of people I wanted to spend an entire book with. That’s when the stories that I wrote began to have something like a heart.

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Mary McCoy
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Mary is a librarian at the Los Angeles Public Library, and has been a contributor to On Bunker Hill (http://www.onbunkerhill.org/) and the 1947project (http://1947project.com/), where she wrote stories about Los Angeles's notorious past. Mary grew up in western Pennsylvania and holds degrees from Rhodes College and the University of Wisconsin; she currently lives in Los Angeles with her husband. Her debut novel is called DEAD TO ME, and will be published by Disney-Hyperion in 2014. It's a YA mystery set in Golden Age Hollywood about a teenage girl who uncovers some sinister business while trying to get to the bottom of her aspiring film star sister's disappearance.