Chapter 34: Whispering Loudly
Our last chapter was all about hiding Whispers—clues that are so subtle they don’t make much of an impression on the reader’s conscious mind. But just because we don’t want the reader to consider the clue consciously doesn’t mean we don’t want her to notice it. Ideally, the clue will make enough of an impression that when the Sleuth brings it up in his summation, your reader be able to recall it instantly—and nod along along in dawning understanding as the Sleuth shows her how this puzzle piece fits into the picture of the Villain’s guilt.
This chapter contains several tactics for taking a Whisper and making it just a bit more memorable.
Using a Clue Cluster
A Clue Cluster occurs when you have several Whispers that each point to the same piece of information. Although your reader may breeze over some of them, she’s likely to recall at least one or two.
In the movie Glass Onion, multimillionaire Miles Bron invites his old friends to a house party on his own private island. The party is meant to be a grand event, with a scripted murder mystery at his heart, and intricate puzzle boxes designed to deliver the invitations.
Miles is our Villain, and although he wants everyone to believe he’s a rare technological genius, he actually built his tech empire through murder and fraud. He doesn’t understand much of the elite world he’s brazened his way into—but he can talk a good game.
But, peppered throughout that game are several clues that reveal his actual intellectual paucity. The break in the case comes when our Sleuth puts together a cluster of Whispers that disrupt Miles’s “I’m a genius” narrative. Among other things:
He referred to the Aegean Sea as the Ionian Sea.
He said “infraction point” instead of “inflection point.”
He used the made-up word “inbreathiate.”
The intricate puzzles that make up the backdrop for his weekend party were all designed by others.
This Clue Cluster does two things: first, it bolsters the Sleuth’s conclusion about Miles’s mental capacity. Fact-based narratives, like alibis, can often be destroyed with a single disruption. If a character says he was at the opera from six until nine, all we need is one clearcut clue proving he was somewhere else to blow that narrative out of the water.
But character-based narratives, like “Miles is a genius” sometimes require a few disruptions for us to consider them truly broken. After all, we’re all complex, surprising individuals—and even a tech genius misspeaks on occasion.
Secondly, the Clue Cluester ups the chances of at least one or two of these clues having lodged in the viewer’s brain. We’ve had the opportunity to witness each of the clues drop—but they dropped quickly, and amid a great deal of other information. They were easy to miss.
And that’s what the Clue Cluster guards against. If Miles had made just one or two mistakes that disrupted his genius narrative, the Sleuth could still cite them in his summation—but many viewers wouldn’t be nodding along. The clue would have zipped entirely over their heads. Indeed, some of the clues in this cluster did zip past me, despite the fact that I was watching pretty intently. But I did blink at “infraction” and “inbreathiate—” and so, when the Sleuth disrupted Miles’s narrative, my reaction wasn’t “Wait… what are you talking about?” Rather, I was nodding along: exactly the experience we’re hoping to create.
Our above example uses a Clue Cluster with the hiding tactic of Occlusion—dropping the important details in among a great deal of other info. But it can also work beautifully with the hiding tactic of Allusion, which uses a cultural touchstone to refer to information from outside the story.
Let’s see how, using the novel The Word is Murder by Anthony Horowitz. In this book, a woman named Diana Cowper stops by the local mortuary to arrange her funeral—and is murdered later that day. Diana has given a lot of thought to what she’d like read and played at her service. Some of her choices include Psalm 34, he Beatles’ song Eleanor Rigby, and a poem by Sylvia Plath.
All of these works Allude to Diana’s secret state of mind: she is profoundly depressed, and has arranged this funeral because she plans to commit suicide. Let’s go over her selections, and what they reveal about her.
She chose Psalm 34, which reads, “Many are the afflictions of the righteous: but the Lord delivereth him out of them all.” Evidently, Diana considered herself afflicted, and longed to be delivered.
She was moved by the song Eleanor Rigby, whose mournful chorus asks, “All the lonely people—where do they all belong?”
She identified with the words of the poet Sylvia Plath, who committed suicide.
In order to decipher all of these clues, I’d have to know plenty of information that isn’t included in the story itself: the text of Psalm 34, the lyrics of Eleanor Rigby, and the biography of Sylvia Plath.
But I didn’t actually have to know all of it, because this is another Clue Cluster. While reading this book, I wasn’t able to pick up on all these Allusions—despite my love of the Bible, I don’t have the Psalms on recall, and I don’t know a great deal about Sylvia Plath. But I did note the oddness of Eleanor Rigby’s use in a funeral, and wondered, “What’s all that about?” When our Sleuth told me, I got the Nod-Along Moment—of course there was something off with Diana’s state of mind.
Anchoring it With Emotion
Another way to make a Whisper stick in the reader’s mind is to make sure it comes packaged with a hearty dollop of emotion.
In the Remington Steele episode “Hearts of Steele,” Steele and Laura are approached by first-rate divorce attorney Malcolm Marcall, who is convinced someone is trying to kill him. They take the case, and focus their efforts on the most obvious group of suspects—the four women whose husbands are currently being represented by Malcolm. Each of these women will profit mightily if their husband's case can be sabotaged—perhaps by taking out his ace lawyer.
But while Steele and Laura investigate, the attempts on Malcolm’s life continue. Someone rewires his car. A bottle of poisoned wine is delivered to his office. And his home is nearly burned down—with Malcolm’s wife, Loretta, inside.
The twist ending comes when we realize that only Loretta was capable of carrying out all of the attacks. The whodunit of the case is now clear—but we still need a clue to explain whydunit, so Loretta’s guilt doesn’t feel like it comes out of nowhere.
And we have it—in an earlier scene that didn’t mean much to us at the time, but now comes back to us with clarity. After Loretta was trapped inside the burning house, Laura visited her in the hospital to take her statement about the fire, and found her tremulous and emotional. Loretta has a lot to say in this scene, and packed in among her statements is the suggestion that she feels betrayed by her husband’s recent decision to give up law—and with it, their easy, glamorous life. With that scene in mind, it’s easy to understand Loretta’s confession. She wad done with the marriage and wanted to split—but she knew she’d never get a good settlement from a killer attorney like Malcolm.
You may be familiar with this Maya Angelou quotation: “I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” That’s true of characters as well. Your reader may not remember every word they say or action they take—but she’ll never forget the characters’ raw emotion.
Pointing the Reader Right At It
Sometimes, I like to use a tactic I call Guided Occlusion. Guided Occlusion occurs when you serve your reader up a large haystack of information that includes, buried somewhere within it, an Occluded clue. The clue may be quite subtly placed—however, you draw her attention very deliberately to the haystack itself.
Let’s say that at the outset of your novel, your Sleuth, down on her luck, moves into a creepy, old mansion that’s been willed to her by her recently deceased aunt. When handing over the keys, the lawyer also gives your Sleuth a long letter from the aunt, talking about the history of the house and how it came into the family. That letter is going to be packed with details, many of which are irrelevant and serve as packing peanuts for your clue. After reading it (and showing us the text), your Sleuth might close the chapter with a remark like, “Looking back, I wish I’d paid more attention to Aunt Millie’s letter. It would have saved me a lot of trouble.”
Now your reader knows that something in that letter is a clue—a major one. She may find herself ruminating over the letter’s contents, and she can even re-read it if she desires.
Guided Occlusion doesn’t exactly make a clue more memorable to the reader—but it does give her a heightened chance to spot it. And that makes the reader feel that she’s been dealt with fairly, that you’ve given her a legitimate chance at solving the case.
Guided Occlusion can be quite subtle. To see this, let’s look at an example from Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile, which we last discussed in Chapter 20. In this book, the final clue comes when our Sleuth, Hercule Poirot, is investigating the Victim’s cabin aboard a steamer vessel.
Quietly, deftly, Poirot went about his search. He went down on his knees and scrutinized the floor inch by inch. He examined the bed. He went rapidly through the wardrobe and chest of drawers. He went through the wardrobe trunk and the two costly suitcases. He looked through the expensive gold-fitted dressing-case. Finally he turned his attention to the washstand. There were various creams, powders, face lotions. But the only thing that seemed to interest Poirot were two little bottles labelled Nailex. He picked them up at last and brought them to the dressing table. One, which bore the inscription Nailex Rose, was empty but for a drop or two of dark red fluid at the bottom. The other, the same size, but labelled Nailex Cardinal, was nearly full. Poirot uncorked first the empty, then the full one, and sniffed them both delicately.
And odor of peardrops billowed into the room. With a slight grimace he recorked them.
We’ve been told where the significant detail is: it’s something to do with the nail polish, “the only thing that interested Poirot.” But we’ve been given a lot of details, so—what is it? The brand name? The colors? The odor of peardrops? Is the clue the almost empty bottle—or is it the full one? Where, in this tiny haystack of info, will we find our clue?
It’s in a mismatch between color and name. “Rose” would usually refer to a light pink color, but the fluid inside this bottle is dark red. This is an indication that the bottle has been refilled. In fact, it’s been filled with red ink, which our Villain used to create the appearance of a gunshot wound—and give himself a Time-Shifted Incompetence Alibi (see Chapter 20 for details).
It can be challenging to figure out exactly how much attention you want to draw to your Whispers—enough that they register in your reader’s mind, but not so much that you tip your hand. Fortunately, not all clues have to be quite this subtle. In our next chapter, we’ll deal with Lockboxes—clues that don’t play hard-to-get in the slightest. Lockboxes walk right up and announce themselves to the reader, then challenge her to figure out the information they contain.
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Kitty Callahan gets more than she bargained for when she takes her cousin, Koko, for a day at the airshow. The Death Angels may be the world's greatest flying aces, but when it comes to their teamwork... something's off balance.
