Tamara Moss on why she loves writing mysteries
Five Voices author Tamara Moss pens a piece for us about her love for writing (and reading) mysteries.
Don’t you love a good mystery? An intriguing setup will always catch my attention.
The body found on the ice rink was covered in honey. The money disappeared while being watched by twelve armed guards. The fingerprints at the murder scene belonged to a person who died in 1944. Seven crimes in seven different countries are connected.
Aren’t you dying to find out how and why?
Mysteries are puzzles, and I adore an interesting puzzle. Piecing together facts, clues and suspects to create an answer to a compelling mystery is incredibly satisfying.
It’s also incredibly hard.
A lot of drafts need to be written. Characters need to be cut, changed or added. Puzzle pieces are moved – this red herring has to go here, this clue can’t come before that clue, this character has to say something that conflicts with what the protagonist knows. It’s a headache wrapped in a migraine a lot of the time. But when it finally starts to come together, it’s like creating magic.
I also like delving deep into character motivations. This is especially true when it comes to writing murder mysteries, because you have to give a believable reason for why someone would be driven to commit the ultimate crime. And when you’ve done that, you need to figure out how can you layer motives and movements for a character that seems to point one way, but when flipped, actually shows something else. The writer is basically doing sleight of hand (more magic!) by placing the killer right in front of the reader without the reader realising.
There’s incredible gratification in crafting a plot twist that has the reader gasping – because when I come up with it, I’m gasping too. It’s so much fun.
Five Voices
by Tamara Moss
Five characters. Four suspects. All of them are hiding secrets. None of them can be trusted. A thrilling and addictive YA murder mystery from a New York Times bestselling Australian author.
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