Writing popular fiction

dead partner, and himself.
    4.
Is your fictional crime violent enough
? You cannot expect a reader to get terribly excited about a stolen car or a mugging. You should begin with a murder, attempted murder or threatened murder, or missing person. One other possibility is the story in which a woman (usually young and pretty, but not necessarily so), either the accused man's wife, sister, girlfriend, or mother, comes to the private detective and hires him to prove that the accused is innocent despite what the police or the jury has said.
    5.
Is the method of murder or the way the body was found unique and attention-getting
? It should be. Not every mystery must contain a clever murder method, but those that do have another plus. You should be anxious to acquire as many story values as possible, and you should try to think of something unique, something besides a simple stabbing, shooting, or strangling. An axe murder? Hit-and-run in a supermarket parking lot? A forced drowning? A murder made to look like a suicide, but so obviously bungled that the killer intended the police to know it was murder in disguise? A case of deliberate poisoning?
    In the first chapter of Donald E. Westlake's
Don't Lie to Me
, the body is discovered nude, in the middle of a museum, as if it had been dropped out of the sky. Since the victim was strangled, he would have eliminated from bowels and bladder as he died, yet here he is clean as Christmas. Evidently, he was killed, then washed carefully, dried, and brought here in the dead of night, with the guard on duty. Why? How?
And by whom
? The circumstances of the body's discovery are startling enough to carry the reader through the book, wondering about the answer.
    6. Do
you introduce at least one potential suspect by the end of chapter two
? You should, so that both the hero and the reader will have something to mull over. This doesn't necessarily mean that the suspect must be blatantly obvious (though he may be). You need only introduce an associate, friend, relative, or lover of the dead man, someone who might conceivably have a motive for killing him; this person may seem like a very unlikely prospect for the role of the killer, at first, but the important thing is that he remain at least a possibility.
    7.
Do you introduce a second suspect by the end of chapter three
? The sooner you expand the list of possible killers, the more difficult the puzzle becomes—and the more firmly your narrative hook is implanted. For this reason, you should establish murderous motives for at least three characters. Even four or five suspects are easier to work with and better for the creation of a real puzzle.
    For example, if in chapter one the president of a prosperous and busy city bank is found dead in his office immediately after his lunch hour, you might have the following suspects for your detective to question. The president's own Private Secretary, a beautiful young woman who has been angry with the president of late because he's been vacillating about his intentions of marrying her. She was out to lunch, but can't prove where she was when the murder took place. The Vice-President of the bank, who has long coveted the top job and feels the board would put him in if the president retired or left for another position in another bank. The banker's "cousin," who turns out to have been his Mistress. This girl often visited him during his lunch hour, for the purpose of quick sexual relaxation, and might have been there today—and might have been mad at him because he vacillated about rejecting the notion of marrying his secretary. The banker's desk drawer contains a typed note indicating that his ex-brother-in-law had borrowed $20,000 from him a year ago, agreeing to pay it back in twelve months. Perhaps the Brother-in-Law couldn't pay back the money and was there to plead, unsuccessfully, for an extension on the loan. Here you have four characters with murderous motives; in the course of this story, others could easily arise.
    8.
Have you provided legitimate clues to the killer's identity
? You should hide at least three in the course of the story. These may be introduced so quietly that the reader never picks them up. Perhaps, for example, your story opens with a body found in a muddy flowerbed behind a mansion. When the detective covertly steals a glance at the shoes of each member of the household, as he questions them, he may notice that they are wearing scuffed or dusty shoes, that one man's