Fresh Blood: ELLE COSIMANO

I'm still scratching my head, wondering how I got here.

I've never been a rabid fan of traditional mysteries. Never found myself addicted to Sherlock Holmes or Nancy Drew.

As a matter of fact, I'm pretty sure I set out to write a romance, but when my story landed in my agent's slush pile and I told her I wasn't really sure what kind of story it was, she said, "You are a thriller writer." I suppose she was right.

That's how NEARLY GONE began. As a romantic seed. It burrowed in one afternoon while I watched a woman combing The Missed Connections, a section of the personal classifieds intended to search for a specific person -- a handsome stranger someone was too shy to talk to. A beautiful face across the subway train that disappeared into the crowd. On the surface, the woman was laughing, like the ads amused her. And yet, when she thought no one was watching, she peeked inside the folded pages, looking inconsolably lonely as she read them to herself. I couldn't help but wonder... what -- or who -- was she really searching for?

Curious, I thumbed through them when she set her paper down. The ads were mostly romantic -- some yearning to find, others yearning to be found. They read like a mini-mystery, a story of a missing person masked as casual flirtation in a two-line hook. Just harmless fun.

But what if they weren't?

What might happen if someone posted an ad with malicious intent? What if those two anonymous lines became bait for a lonely girl? What if the ads escalated into a dangerous game of cat and mouse? What if the missing started turning up dead, and what if no one believed her?

From those roots, NEARLY GONE grew into a dark and twisted mystery.

Don't get me wrong. There's still plenty of making out.

But buckle up for the ride.

I'm a thriller writer.

Elle Cosimano is the daughter of a prison warden and an elementary school teacher who rides a Harley. As a teen, she spent summers working on a fishing boat, baiting hooks and lugging buckets of chum. She majored in Psychology at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, and set aside a successful real-estate career to pursue writing. She drinks too much coffee and is a professional puppy and little boy wrangler. She divides her time between her home near Washington, DC and a jungle tree house in the Mayan Riviera. 

Elle's debut YA thriller, NEARLY GONE, releases in early 2014 with Kathy Dawson Books, an imprint of Penguin Books for Young Readers. 

You can find Elle on her website, twitter, facebook, and goodreads.

It's a Mystery

I never set out to write a mystery.  I'm still trying to figure out how I ended up with one.  But one thing I'm sure of, mystery is a component of nearly every book, whether it's a book in the mystery genre or otherwise.  And that's basically how I got here.

In the beginning...

I was a fiction writer, sure, but mysteries require planning, and I was not a planner.  Nope.  I was a firm believer in the let the story grow organically school of writing, and writing a mystery sounded too much like actual work. So I figured mystery writing was probably not for me.

Then, through a series of fortunate events, I realized how wrong I was:

First, I wrote a paranormal romance called SILVER.  Not a mystery book, but when it was done, I realized that mystery played a huge role in the story.  Strange things happen to the protagonist and she's trying to figure out why.  The mystery builds over the first act, culminating in the protagonist's discovery of who and what she really is, and what that might mean for her future. It was fun to play with the tension that came from her not knowing, and then to increase the stakes as she made her discoveries.  Hmmm, maybe this mystery writing thing wasn't so bad.

Second, I tricked myself by calling my second book a thriller.  A thriller implies edge of your seat suspense and lots of action that drives the story forward.  That sounded doable, in a way that mystery writing did not.  I don't know why it sounded easier, but it did.  So okay, I could try a thriller.

Third, I had an idea for a story that lent itself to the mystery format: the story of a teenage girl who works for her father's private investigation firm, who gets in over her head when investigating the cause of her mother's death eight years earlier. The idea sprang from a memory I had of the summer before I started law school, when I worked part time for my own father's private investigation firm.  I recalled trying to look invisible as I crouched in the back seat of my car with a video camera and waited for a client's ex-spouse to emerge from the house with her latest boyfriend. You get some strange looks when skulking around neighborhoods with video cameras. 

That visual led right into a first chapter.  A teenage girl, Berry Fields, popped right into my head fully formed. She conducts a surveillance of  a cheating husband in a restaurant, but is interrupted by a cute guy who catches her spying...

That initial scene grabbed me and I started to ask a lot of questions.  Who was Berry spying on?  What was she trying to find out?  How did that impact her personally?  What was important to her?  As I searched for the answers to these questions, the story did grow organically, but I also knew I needed a plan.

Fourth, I outlined.  The outline was not terribly detailed, but it provided a road map from the beginning to the ending revelation of what happened to Berry's mom.  I knew the four main scenes leading up to that moment, and I knew I wanted the romance to tie into the Darcy and Elizabeth arc from Pride & Prejudice.  And SPIES & PREJUDICE was born.

In the middle...

Fifth, I wrote. Now that I had the basic plot elements and a story structure in mind, I sat down and wrote the book. The easy part, right?  Berry actually did appear on the page quite easily, complete with bitterness, fear, wit, pride and of course, prejudices.  Her voice poured out of me, and I finished a draft of the novel in a few months.  Good news! Or not.


Sixth, I rewrote. Turns out, I wasn't wrong about mystery writing being hard.  Too many things going on in the plot detracted from the tension.  Were all the elements there for the reader to see how it all fit together?  Was it too confusing? I also needed to decide what the story wanted to be.  A romance with a mystery element?  A mystery with a romance element?  A book about recovering from death or discovering love? Even at this stage, the book itself was a bit of mystery.

Seventh, I simplified.  I streamlined the multiple plot elements, eliminating secondary characters that didn't serve the main thread, and moving up a key revelation from the end to the halfway point in the book.  I was able to keep the main thrust of the mystery moving forward at a brisk pace, and focus more on the romance.

Now, having [almost] finished a mystery, I can pull back the curtain to find that the mystique of mystery writing is a facade.  It's writing.  And like all writing, it's hard.  But it's worth it when the pieces finally come together to form a well crafted story with escalating tension, and yes, even a few thrills.

In the end...
 
I write mystery, because I can't not.

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Talia Vance is the author of the YA paranormal SILVER, coming from Flux in Fall 2012, and YA thriller SPIES & PREJUDICE, coming from Egmont in Spring 2013.

















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We are giving away a copy of COLD CASE autographed by Julia Platt Leonard! (Our Interrogation Room suspect interviewed 10/7/11). To enter the contest, simply comment on any of the Sleuths Spies and Alibis posts between Tuesday October 4 and Friday October 14. Contest closes October 14 at midnight, EST. The winner will be announced on Monday, October 17. One comment = one entry in our drawing; limit one per day. 

What if?: How I Cracked the Code

Photo by Kym McLeod

I solved my first mystery when I was three years old by spying on my older sister. She and my mom would huddle at the kitchen table every day after kindergarten, staring at strange symbols in exotic looking books. The whole operation seemed mighty intriguing, so I'd sneak into the living room and strain my ears to hear what was being said. It took some serious sleuthing, but once I cracked the code, I was hooked. There was no stopping me then. I could open any book and unlock the mysteries inside with my new decoding abilities.

Part of my collection.

And oh my gosh, were there plenty of mysteries to be found! The library was full of them: Nancy Drew, Encyclopedia Brown, Alfred Hitchcock, Hardy Boys . . . I devoured anything and everything that even hinted at intrigue.

But soon, I started to feel a bit, well, cheated.
How come all these kids in all these books always stumbled upon mysteries? Ghosts in the attic, stowaways, jewelry thieves, secret doors in closets, alien ships . . . .Was I stupid? Was I not looking hard enough? Why couldn't I find any mysteries to solve?

At first I blamed my surroundings. I lived in the heavily wooded, remote outskirts of Fairbanks, Alaska where exciting events were as sparse as television reception. Of course there were no crimes to solve! I wasn't living in the city like Nancy Drew, visiting old inns or flea markets and meeting new people from foreign countries. I was living in boring Alaska, visiting nothing but boring trees and lakes and meeting no one but the same boring neighbors and the occasional moose or bear or red fox or rabbit . . .

Then I realized that was a cop out. Alaska was exactly the type of place Nancy or Frank or Joe would travel to and discover a mystery.
No. I just wasn't looking hard enough.

So I took a closer look around me . .. . and began asking myself: What if?

 * What if that big orange toadstool is really the main meeting place for a community of gnomes?
 * What if when I pass under the power lines in the woods, I am actually passing through a time warp?
 * What if that stray dog with one blue eye and one brown eye is really a werewolf?
 * What if the old hermit living in the log cabin up the road is really a fugitive?

With every "what if" I asked, I discovered another world, and I liked it. I'd cracked the code once again, and I never looked at anything the same after that.

I discovered it didn't matter where or what or who. There was a secret hiding in everything, and I liked finding it. What's more, I found I liked sharing it. So I started writing my "what ifs" down. Now, everything I write has some element of mystery or intrigue or conspiracy. It's a part of me; it's what I do.

And you can too.

Simply ask yourself:

What if?


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What if a classmate went missing right after you fought with her at a party and she was later found dead? What if you couldn't remember anything after that fight? Not even how you got home? Would you tell the police the truth? Or would you lie about what you remember until you could find out what really happened that night?

16-year-old Roswell Hart finds herself in this very predicament in Laura Ellen's YA thriller, BLIND SPOT (Fall 2012, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)


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We are giving away an autographed book from our next Interrogation Room suspect! To enter the contest, simply comment on any of the Sleuths Spies and Alibis posts between Tuesday October 4 and Friday October 14. Contest closes October 14 at midnight, EST. The winner will be announced on Monday, October 17. One comment = one entry in our drawing; limit one per day. 

Locked Room Mystery

Perhaps I'm the most puzzling of the detectives here, the noir-ish gumshoe with a cheap rented office, a frosted glass door, and prickly disposition. The guy who's maybe on the case because he has to be, not because he wants to be. The enigma. You see, I never set out to write mysteries. Don't really know that much about the rules. I make it a point NOT to know.

That way, when I break 'em, I've got an excuse...

I've written across many genres, everything from romantic comedy, to bone-chilling horror. I like good stories. Period. I hope I've written a few. I start with a scenario first, character second, and let the experts worry about what to call it. So, you can imagine how troubling it was to me when I got the idea for my latest novel, WHISPERTOWN  (HarperCollins, Summer 2013).

I knew I wanted to write about how being part of a WITSEC (that's Witness Protection for those who don't know) family affects a teenage boy. I also knew I wanted him to solve a murder. Right away, that sort of limited my options.

What I knew about the genre pretty much amounted to this: keep 'em guessing. I'd read some Hardy Boys growing up, and watched plenty of Scooby-Doo (okay, it was A Pup Named Scooby-Doo, don't get technical on me), but was far from a scholar on the mysteries. Was a novice, like myself, ALLOWED to write one? Maybe not. I'm sure there are some who'd say DEFINITELY not.

Remember when I said I've got an excuse for breaking the rules? Ignorance is bliss, my friends. I plowed forward.

I didn't exactly FALL into the genre. I'm more like a trespasser. Or a squatter, since I've decided to stay.  I've fallen in love with mysteries. And I plan to write more. WHISPERTOWN is meant to be the first in a series, so maybe I ought to educate myself on the rules and conventions...

Or not. There's a certain appeal to flying by the seat of your pants. I think I'll do it awhile longer.

For the purists out there, you're probably wondering how I did it? How can I possibly get away with such a heinous crime?

Well, I'm sort of like a Locked Room Mystery. The hardest to solve. No easy answers.

I like it that way.

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Lamar "L. R." Giles writes for adults and teens. Penning everything from epic fantasy to noir thrillers, he's never met a genre he didn't like. His debut YA mystery WHISPERTOWN is about a teen in witness protection who investigates his best friend's murder and stumbles on a dark conspiracy that leads back to his own father. It will be published in Summer, 2013 by HarperCollins. He resides in Virginia with his wife and is represented by Jamie Weiss Chilton of the Andrea Brown Literary Agency.

Clueless in California

I’d make a terrible sleuth. It took me three decades to actually notice how much of a mystery fan I am, despite heaps of early evidence. I missed every clue. The dog-eared pages on The Westing Game and The Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. The bookshelves lined with the trademark yellow spines of Nancy Drew volumes, each one promising to reveal all manner of secrets about clocks, ranches, and bungalows. The unwise seventh-grade choice to study French instead of Spanish, motivated by an urgent need to understand Hercule Poirot’s untranslated asides. And what about the hours spent with the Bobbsey Twins, for goodness’ sake? Anyone who’ll put up with Nan and Bert — let alone Freddie and Flossie — clearly suffers from advanced stage mystery disease.

 Freddie & Flossie:
Symptoms of Stage IV Mystery Disease

I can forgive my bad detective work, though. It isn’t as if I was drawn to mysteries exclusively. Mysteries merely amplify what I already love about stories: the delicious withholding of  information until just the right moment, the transforming of the familiar into the strange, the satisfying way order triumphs over chaos in the end. In his book On Moral Fiction, John Gardner described art as a “game played…against entropy.” It’s an apt description, I think. Stories weave the unruly strands of everyday life into a satisfying whole. And what’s more satisfying than a case solved and a culprit brought to justice?

My younger self would claim that nothing is more satisfying. Which means, too, that nothing could possibly be worse than a book that leaves too many questions unanswered. I am more forgiving now (though I have to admit, the trend of cliffhanger endings in series still rankles me), but back then I loved mysteries because it comforted me to see justice served and order restored. My family was constantly on the move, and by the time I turned 9, I had already been the “new kid” at 5 different schools. I craved neat resolutions to distract me from the abandoned plot-lines in my own life.

Idaville would be in
serious trouble without
Encyclopedia on the case

Besides, I loved reading about kids who had all the answers for a change. That Sheriff Brown couldn’t solve a single Idaville case without Encyclopedia taking charge. And Carson Drew may be good in a courtroom, but let’s face it: the dude would have long been dead if Nancy wasn’t always saving him. In my own life, adults always thought they knew better than I did. That got old fast, especially considering they lacked answers to life’s most basic questions.

As I got older, mysteries compelled me because they wrestled with the same uncertainties I faced as I navigated an ever-changing social landscape. At their simplest level, mysteries deal with a central question: whom can you trust? They remind us of the secrets lurking not far from the surface, the lies people tell, the incongruity between some people’s public faces and their private selves. They dramatize the same questions about loyalty and friendship I was asking myself as a teen. In fact, mysteries delved into an even more troubling question I was wrestling with, whether I recognized it at the time or not: how much could I really trust myself?  Like a mystery reader, I was constantly questioning my own perceptions and revising my assumptions about the cast of characters around me.

I write for the younger unsuspecting mystery fan that I was. The one who didn’t realize she was wrestling with questions of loyalty, assumptions, and self-confidence because she was all wrapped up in madcap hijinks and battles of wits. For me, there’s nothing more rewarding than writing for an age group still working hard to solve the mystery of who they are and where they fit in.

I’ll be sharing more about how I came to write my comic middle grade mystery in more Tuesday “Notes from Our Detectives” ahead. In the meantime, though, I’m curious about you. If you’re clicking through the pages of this brand-new blog, unlike me, you’ve probably long since recognized your passion for mysteries. What draws you to the genre?


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Kristen Kittscher’s debut middle grade mystery YOUNG & YANG DETECTIVES (Harper Children’s) will be released in early 2013. It follows the comic misadventures of two tween sleuths who suspect their school counselor is a dangerous fugitive — and just might be right! A former middle school English teacher, Kristen lives in Pasadena, California with her husband, Kai. When she’s not writing, you’ll find her running her after-school tutoring business or taking orders from her hopelessly spoiled pets.

Puzzling over Mysteries

Like Diana, my involvement with mystery writing is mysterious in and of itself. I sort of fell into this genre through a series of (very) fortunate events. And now I’m going to leave that statement purposefully vague and intriguing, to keep you reading, just like a good mystery writer should.

So since I’m a newbie to whodunit, I am very much learning as I go, studying every book I read and paying attention to structure, pacing and logic in a way I never did before. Up until now, I’d considered myself strictly a contemporary YA writer, and my concerns were with character, dialogue and emotional arc. Things happened in my writing, but it was often accused of being “too quiet.”

As it turns out, I like the action-driven, big-drama aspects of mystery. I like the process of creating a puzzle and letting my characters unlock it piece by piece. And I like that it demands constant engagement with the reader, as I try to tell the story in a way that is leading without being obvious and withholding without being cryptic. My suspicion is—and I only have one such book plus one first draft of its sequel under my belt—that learning to write mystery is going to make me a better writer, period.

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Elisa Ludwig's debut young adult novel PRETTY CROOKED (Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins), will be released in March 2012. It's the story of Willa Fox, a teen girl who goes Robin Hood on her rich classmates —the first of a three-book series of thriller/mysteries. Even though she had to extensively research pickpocketing techniques to write it, she remains a law-abiding citizen. Elisa lives in Philadelphia with her husband Jesse and cat Beau a.k.a. Bread. When she's not writing for teens, she's cooking and/or writing about food for The Philadelphia Inquirer and other publications. Elisa is a proud member of The Apocalypsies. 

Mysteries On Our Hands

Several years ago, my writing group handed back my 400+ page meandering, unfinished manuscript and leveled with me. “You are writing a mystery," they said.

I protested. I was writing a literary novel. It was about a man with a family secret, who had lost some art, and a teenage girl who was trying to get the bottom of his story. 

“Exactly,” they said. “A mystery. Deal with it.”

I swallowed hard and put it under the magnifying glass. Then under an electron microscope. They were right. I had a mystery on my hands. My worst fear.

Even one of my main characters seemed terrified at the prospect of appearing in a mystery. Every time he showed up with something potentially important to reveal (and a chance to advance my plot), he retreated into shadows, or he dashed off into the night.

"I can't be writing a mystery! O, I can't!"

Why did I fear mystery? I associated it with complicated plots. And plotting was not my strong suit. I was more at home in the territory of characters contemplating life, or grappling with indecision, usually on some form of transportation. I excelled at descriptions of passing scenery. Scenery, yes, that I could do. Mystery writers, I knew, did not need to use trains or buses or cars to move the story forward because they were genius plotters.

I had the impression that mystery writers possessed some secret formula for writing. I felt this despite the fact that I'd read plenty of unformulaic, wildly inventive mysteries. And I feared mystery readers, who would have exacting standards about what a mystery should do, and who would probably speak with British accents and drink a lot of tea.

But once I accepted that I had a mystery on my hands, I began revising my novel aggressively in that direction. Where to start? I knew there were some hallmarks of mysteries that I needed. Suspects. An investigator (or a investigative duo, or team). Red herrings. Reveals. I placed a few calls to Central Casting. Some tired, overworked mystery characters showed up for my book, grumbling about the long hours and low pay. They spent most of their time looking alternately suspicious or puzzled, concealing messages in trench coat pockets, and skulking around corners with weapons.

The Scooby-Doo gang auditioning for my novel.

Finding places to include elements of mystery did help me push an early draft forward to an end point. But these features alone did not make the book a compelling mystery. I still had a lot to learn, both about the art of mystery writing and about my own story. I wanted to keep the emotional core of my original story, and the narrator's voice. I also wanted to unfold the complexities of the mystery in way that would keep readers turning  pages. I did not want to end up with Scooby-Doo. (Although, for the record, I like Scooby-Doo). Genre cliches and stock characters would not save my story. I started the novel over, from scratch. Again.

As I revised, I began reading more mysteries. Lots of them, for adults and for young readers. I noted what worked and what didn't. I added more tools to my toolbox. I learned how varied the mystery genre is, and how it's entirely possible to write a mystery with characters who are complex and real. I also rediscovered a stash of childhood and young adult books in my mother's attic and realized that I'd cut my teeth on mysteries. I had boxes and boxes of them up there -- Nancy Drews and more. I knew more about mysteries than I thought I did. And my story, it was now clear, demanded to be a mystery.

I became less intimidated by mysteries when I read interviews with authors and learned they didn't possess a magic formula. They too struggled with tangled plot lines, timeline problems, character motivations, pacing, suspense, and raising the stakes.They too wrestled with when to reveal vs. when to conceal.

Finally, I dove deeper into my characters and my story. Because all the mystery tools in the world couldn't help me if my own story mystified me. As a writer of a draft, you can frolic in the shadows of the great unknown. But at some point in the revising process, you have to know what's going on.

Later in the revising process, I received expert editorial advice. I continued refining both the emotional core of my story and the mystery plot. Mystery writing, like all writing, involves a lot of revising.

It took many, many, many revisions for my book, Tokyo Heist, to evolve into the mystery it is today. And in the process, I've learned a few things about mystery writing (and writing in general) which I'm excited to share on this blog. But I haven't figured it all out -- that would be boring -- and so I look forward to learning from my six fellow sleuths here: Elisa Ludwig, Kristen Kittscher, Lamar "L.R." Giles, Laura Ellen, Talia Vance, and W.H. Beck. I'm also excited to learn from other readers and writers (hey, that's you!) whom I hope will comment liberally on our blog.

Who are we? The seven of us write mysteries for young people: middle grade readers and young adults. Our debut novels come out in 2012 and 2013. Our investigative team aims to demystify the writing and publishing process. We're also exploring the question of what makes a good mystery. If you snoop around our site, you can read more about all of us and our books. You'll also find links to mystery writers' websites (we're always adding!), teaching resources, mystery writing resources, and lists of Edgar and Agatha award winners.

We blog in rotation every Tuesday, on a monthly topic. This month we'll be introducing ourselves and blogging about how we came to write mysteries. We also have special features on the blog every week. On "Mystery Mondays" we provide writing exercises and prompts. On Thursdays we rotate special features: "Under Cover" (books we're reading), "Writing DNA" (what inspires our writing), and "Mysteries Among Us" (how we find mysteries in everyday life or in the news, and what we mystery writers might learn from them).

Interrogation Room Suspect #1

Finally, you'll get the inside story behind some mysteries in our "Interrogation Room." Once or twice a month, we'll be hauling a published mystery writer in for questioning. You 'll be able to read transcripts of our interrogations here. We have an award-winning middle grade mystery writer on deck for later this month, and will be dropping some clues about who he/she is, so please follow us on Twitter (@kidlitmysteries) and see if you can guess before September 21!

Whether you're a mystery writer or reader, a teacher or student, a sleuth or a spy or a partner in crime -- and whatever your motives may be -- we hope you'll follow our footprints and join us here!
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Diana was born in Seattle and now lives outside of Boston with her husband and son. She also works as a freelance writer and editor in educational publishing, and has authored several ESL textbooks (which is way more exciting than it sounds). TOKYO HEIST (Viking/Penguin, coming June 2012) is her first novel.

IMAGE CREDITS IN THIS POST: Sobbing woman, courtesy of Florida Center for Instructional Technology: http://etc.usf.edu/clipart; Scooby-Doo gang copyright Hanna Barbera/Warner Brothers; http://clipart.toonarific.com