Clues vs Cues
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Balancing Intrigue in a Mystery
Maintaining intrigue through a story is a matter of striking a balance between questions and answers. When I’m plotting a mystery novel, I don’t want the solution to the mystery to be too obvious, but I also don’t want it to be so obscure or complicated that no one could possibly guess it. In order to strike this balance effectively, my first and most important rule is to remember that I’m laying out a puzzle in front of two distinct audiences.
The first is the protagonist of my novel. This character may or may not be a detective by profession, but whatever their involvement in the case, they will be invested in trying to figure out what’s going on, so I’ll think of them as my detective for the purposes of the story. Secondly, but no less crucially, I’m creating a puzzle for the reader of the book, who is (hopefully) also invested in solving it. It’s very important to separate these two “detectives” in my mind while I’m writing because they’re going to approach the solving of the mystery in different ways.
Have you ever read a mystery where you guessed the answer very quickly and spent the rest of the book waiting for the main character to catch up? Or where you stumbled in confusion through the chapters only to have the fictional detective reach the solution with apparent ease? It’s annoying, isn’t it? Ideally, we want to have both the reader and the protagonist wrestle with the mystery most of the way to the end, where both reach the answer with a sense of satisfaction. But to keep the intrigue alive for both the reader and the character, I need to keep in mind that at any given point, there will be some disparity between them in terms of what they know and what they don’t.
My general rule of thumb is that characters pick up on clues while readers pick up on cues.
What’s the difference? Clues are physical details present in the storyworld: a fingerprint, for example. They can also be behaviours of other characters or written or verbal communications: a cryptic text message, a throwaway line of dialogue. Our protagonist, being wholly immersed in the world of the story, is in a position to take note of these things. Since clues will often be small, seemingly insignificant details, the reader will only know about them if the character notices them.
Being closer to the story, a character is not only in a position to notice a clue, but also more likely to remember it later. Whereas a reader might put down the book between chapters to go and do something else, the character is living the story continuously and often has a lot at stake in the outcome. The story isn’t entertainment for them; it’s their whole life.
Closeness to the story is not always an advantage, however. Hypothetically, a character will notice everything that’s happening around them, which means that it will be harder for them to sort through that information. They don’t know what’s significant and what isn’t. That’s why when it comes to cues, the reader has the advantage.
A cue is not something that’s tangible. It often comes in the form of a trope (such as the police suspecting the wrong person) or a narrative convention (like the twist at the midpoint of the story). Any reader familiar with the mystery genre will be aware of these cues and expect them. The character, of course, will not see them coming. To put this another way, the reader knows that they’re reading a novel; a character doesn’t know that they’re in one.
This puts the reader a step or two ahead of the protagonist sometimes. As readers, we know that every piece of information on the page has been carefully selected by the author, which allows us to treat them all not only as significant, but also as connected. Characters, by contrast, won’t immediately draw connections between small pieces of information, especially towards the beginning of the story. Coincidences happen all the time in real life and for all the character knows, real life is what they’re living.
So how do you balance the clues with the cues to make sure neither the reader or the protagonist is left too far behind?
Firstly, there are ways to plant a clue that don’t signal to the reader that it’s a clue. You can’t really avoid the fact that the reader will know any information you give them will be relevant, but you can make it seem like it’s relevant in one way when it’s actually relevant in another. For example, if you have a subplot about the character’s personal life, you can make it seem like a particular snippet of information is only important to the character personally. When you later reveal that it’s relevant to the mystery, this can come as a surprise to both the character and the reader.
Red herrings are another good way to make the solution to the mystery less obvious. But again, red herrings work differently for the character and the reader. The character will usually go for the solution you dangle in front of them, because in the real world, that’s how it works: the most obvious solution is usually the correct one. The reader knows about the red herring trick, though, and will probably guess that this is what you’re doing. They will assume that the character is wrong and be looking for clues to an alternative solution. In an effective mystery, the extra breadcrumbs you drop will also lead to a red herring: this one intended to deceive the reader rather than the character. Don’t make them too obvious either; the reader wants to think they’re smart for noticing them and you don’t want the character to seem unobservant for not noticing them. At the end, if all goes well, you reveal that the real solution is a third option that neither the character nor the reader considered.
Having said all this, there are times when you can consciously use the information disparity between reader and character to your advantage. For example, if the reader knows something the character doesn’t, it can create tension — such as if the reader knows that the character is walking into a trap. But you need to know that this is what you’re doing and do it intentionally. Probably you’ll have to find a way to justify the character’s comparative blindness that doesn’t just create frustration in the reader. And remember: there’s a fine line between tension and frustration.
The goal is obviously to maximise the reader’s motivation to turn the pages, but whether you’re doing that using tension or intrigue, the premise is the same: to keep reader and character separate in your mind so that you can make conscious decisions about what information you want to put in front of each of them.
