Chapter 36: The Damning Clue

We have now spent one, two… er, twelve chapters discussing clues from every angle. I hope I’ve given you a good understanding of the different types of clues that can exist, how you can come up with them, and how you can hide them in plain sight.

And yet I also suspect that there’s a part of you that’s asking, right about now: Does it always have to be this complicated?

Well, no. In fact, in this chapter, we’re going to be making things simpler by focusing on just one clue: The Damning Clue.

The Damning Clue is the final clue—the one that conclusively proves your Villain’s guilt. Finding this clue is kind of like finding a corner piece when you’re working a jigsaw puzzle. Your Sleuth can use it as a jumping off point to help her assemble the entire picture of what happened, and why. Then she can detail her deductions, point by point, in her final wrap up.

So why does concentrating on the Damning Clue make things simpler for us writers? Because, just like your Sleuth, you’ll find that nailing down this one critical piece makes the rest of the puzzle come together more easily. And also because, while there are lots of types of clues that can contribute to your Sleuth’s understanding of the case, we don’t have to think about all of them when we go hunting for our Damning Clue. There are really only four clue types that work to definitively prove a Villain’s guilt—and in this chapter, we’ll go over each of them.

Tangible Link

The most common kind of Damning Clue you’ll see in mysteries is a tangible clue that directly links the Villain to the crime. Remember that a tangible clue is anything that can be perceived by the senses, and that often, they can be used to link characters to specific encounters—either because the character left behind something distinctive during that encounter, or because they took something distinctive with them.