Planting the Body in a Cozy Mystery

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

If you’re writing a cozy mystery, there are little things that come up sometimes.  Writing is a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure process. You have so many different choices that can take the plot in different directions that it can seem overwhelming.

It doesn’t have to be that overwhelming, though. There are choices, but you can address them as they come along. Here are a few things to consider when planning the discovery of your victim: 

The timing: You have a couple of different choices in timing the body’s discovery.  You could start out with the discovery of the victim, which can be a fun way to shake things up a little bit.  The only problem with that, I’ve found, is that you will need to deal with backstory more than you might otherwise have done.  One way of getting around that is to include backstory about the victim and his or her relationships with others in suspect interviews.

My editors at Penguin preferred the victim to be discovered in the first 30-50 pages of the book, for pacing reasons.  So if you don’t start off with the body, you might consider having a couple of scenes with the future victim interacting with one or two future suspects to make things easier to write later in the story.  The suspects will be easier for the sleuth, who is merely a gifted amateur, to figure out.

The place:  The location of the body needs to be somewhere accessible. It should be a place that all of the suspects have access to. It could be the victim’s own house (victim either didn’t lock up well or knew her attacker) or it could be a public place…but not too public because we don’t need the body discovered until the killer gets safely away (for now, anyway).

Who discovers the body?   An easy way to get your sleuth involved is for him or her to discover the body and feel a sense of ownership.  Of course, if your sleuth is finding all the bodies in your entire series, you might be stuck in the “Murder, She Wrote” Cabot Cove syndrome (Jessica Fletcher found a heck of a lot of bodies in a very small town. Statistically, she should probably have been considered as a possible serial killer. :) )

Alternatively, it could be good for someone close to your sleuth to discover the victim.  That way the sleuth still feels looped in (maybe she’s even called before the police are called) but isn’t always falling over bodies.

Other considerations:  Your sleuth, if he discovered the body, clearly needs to call the police. But depending on how close his relationship is with the police department, the sleuth may feel the need to find information on his own.  Maybe he carefully assesses the scene before the officials arrive.

Another note: the condition of the body doesn’t require much description.  The more description you include, the less-cozy the discovery scene.  The readers can fill in the details by simply knowing that the victim was strangled, shot in the head, or pushed out a third-story window. Cozies are all about escape and not forensics, so you can go light on detail with these books.

Are you a mystery reader or writer? What else have you observed about victim discovery scenes?

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