Four Slick Ways to Hide Mystery Clues in Plain Sight

Hello, friends! I’m on sabbatical for the rest of this week, working on some editing and publication tasks. New posts resume on August 25th, with the first chapters of my latest mystery writing resource: The Tangled Web: Thread-Spinning. In the meantime, please enjoy this classic post on how to hide Whispers—those clues that are meant to fly completely under the reader’s radar!

Whispers are those clues that are meant to fly under the reader’s radar, entering her brain without ever really receiving her conscious attention. In this post, we’ll talk about four ways to hide Whispers in your novel.

Let’s say that your Sleuth examines the contents of a suspect’s purse, and finds the following items: a notebook and pencil, lip gloss, a flashlight, a phone, a bottle of nail polish, and six old receipts. Later, a murder occurs, and your Sleuth finds a broken fingernail at the crime scene. In the final scene, she’ll point out the clue that allowed her to connect the suspect with the crime: the nail polish in the bag was she same color as the broken nail.

There’s a good chance your reader won’t have noticed the connection—because in the midst of all the stuff in your Villain’s bag, the nail polish has gone undetected. The entire rest of the purse contents can be thought of as packing peanuts for one crucial item: the nail polish. This is Occlusion: packing one piece of pertinent information in with a whole bunch of fluff.

Let’s talk about some of the ways you might use Occlusion in your novel:

• You can detail the contents of a suspect’s desk, slipping a receipt from her dry cleaner in among the other papers and bills. Later, when we learn that the Villain left clothes at the very same dry cleaner, we can connect this suspect to that location.

• You can give us several facts about the Villain’s background, including the very relevant detail of her college alma mater. When we learn that the crime was carried out to cover up a crime that occurred at that college years ago, the Villain’s status as an alumnus will suddenly become relevant.

• You can let your Villain chat with your Sleuth, detailing all the fun events she’s attended since coming to the small Greek island where they’re both vacationing. Somewhere during this conversation, she’ll mention the signature dish of a tiny little restaurant—a restaurant that will later be the scene of a murder.

Occlusion is easier to use in books than in shows or movies, because of the sheer amount of text the typical book includes. If you write an 80,000-word novel, with rich characters and compelling scenes, it’s sure to include plenty of little details—and some of those details may provide important clues.

For this reason, though, Occlusion isn’t my favorite method of hiding Whispers. Remember, our goal isn’t just to hide clues in your book—it’s to hide clues in your reader’s brain, so that when your Sleuth cites them in his final summation, your reader can nod along in dawning understanding. And since your reader simply won’t remember every last detail of your book, slipping in a single germane fact here and there risks the possibility of it floating right out of her mind.

Fortunately, there are several to make an Occluded clue a little easier for your reader to spot and recall. We’ll detail all of these in the next chapter, but first let’s talk about a few more hiding techniques.

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Our second major tactic for hiding Whispers is Distraction, which works on the same principle as Occlusion: packaging the clue along with something else that prevents your reader from focusing on it too sharply. But instead of packaging your important clue with a great deal of irrelevant information, you’ll be packaging it with just one other thing—and that other thing will pull a lot of the reader’s focus.

Let’s say I’m writing a scene in which my Villain is going to let slip a little revealing knowledge: he knows how to fix cars. This will be important, because it will indicate that he had the ability to hotwire the car that was used in a murder attempt halfway through my plot. I want you to remember he has this ability—but I don’t want you to spend too much time mulling it, so what do I do?

I distract you. Maybe I :

• Have him rescue the Sleuth, whose car has broken down on the side of the road, resulting in an intensely flirty interaction.

• Let him disarm a car bomb that was wired into a car’s ignition.

• Have him tell the Sleuth all about his dad, who died of cancer, but who loved to tinker with old cars. In the final months of his life, when he was confined to a wheelchair, my Villain had to do the tinkering for him.

• Write a scene in which a young teenager is bullied by some older kids who disable his car. My Villain assists him in fixing it.

• Write a contentious scene in which the Villain, and another man who is a rival for the Sleuth’s affections, try to one-up one another at trivia night. Finally, my Villain wins the day with a difficult question about car engines.

• Place my Sleuth in a humiliating situation, in which she’s claimed to some automotive knowledge she lacks. This is a scene fraught with hilarity, and by the time my Villain saves her bacon, I’ve got you laughing your head off.

You can certainly think of other big events or emotions that can pull focus, but these six—romance, suspense, sorrow, injustice, conflict, and humor—will get the job done. They also tend to make for rather good scenes, which, as luck would have it, is one of your jobs.

But there’s one more tactic I want to share with you that can make a great Distraction—package the clue with another, more obvious clue. Let’s take that scene where our Villain disarmed a car bomb. If the Sleuth finds a critical piece of information on it—say, a distinctive bit of wiring, or a partial fingerprint—that, dear Reader, is where your focus will go.

Allusion is when you make a reference to information from outside the story that must be known in order to understand the clue. Let’s see how this works by looking at the novel Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn.

In the first pages of this novel, Nick notices that his wife, Amy, is humming the theme song from M*A*S*H while preparing a special breakfast for their fifth anniversary. The book doesn’t tell us that song’s title, but I happen to know it, and my spidey sense tingled ever so slightly. Suicide is Painless? An odd song to hum while preparing a celebration.

But what if we knew that Amy was looking forward to faking her own death, and framing Nick for the murder? Suddenly, the fact that this song is uppermost in her mind makes perfect sense. She’s about to end her life—at least, in public perception. And since she won’t actually die, it’s gonna be painless.

This is what Allusion is particularly good for: conveying what’s going on inside a character’s head—either right at this moment, or as part of her overall beliefs and attitudes. That’s because the Allusion is generally chosen by a character—chosen because it’s significant to her in some way. For example, a character might:

• Attend a costume party dressed as Alice in Wonderland, because she identifies with the character

• Keep a bust of Plato in her office because she admires his philosophies

• Wear a claddagh ring because it’s connected to her heritage or beliefs

• Quote a fairy tale because she believes in the lesson it teaches

In Gone Girl, Amy’s choice of Suicide is Painless is definitely a Whisper, meant to fly under the reader’s radar. But this tactic can also be used as a Lockbox—a clue that is clearly seen by the reader, but whose meaning must be puzzled out. It’s really just a matter of how much attention you draw to the Allusion you’re making. Let’s say, for example, that your Victim scrawled a line from the song in blood before expiring. Your reader would fully understand she’d been handed a clue which needed to be deciphered.

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My last technique for hiding Whispers doesn’t have a slick little one-word name like Occlusion, Distraction, or Allusion. I call it simply, “Stick it in a Subplot—” and you can probably guess how it works.

In an episode of Remington Steele called “Steele Belted,” Laura and Steele try to clear the name of a man who’s been framed for fraud. The episode involves a substantial romantic subplot in which Laura dates the client’s lawyer, Creighton Phillips. During this subplot, we learn plenty about Creighton, such as the fact that he quit his job at a fancy law firm so he can serve the underprivileged.

We learn about Creighton without connecting his biography to the case—until Mr. Steele gets jealous, and goes digging. That’s when we learn that he didn’t quit the law firm willingly—he was turned down for a partnership. The information we picked up during this romantic subplot was the beginning of establishing Creighton’s motive—he’s down on his luck, and desperate to get his client thrown in jail so he can embezzle from him without getting caught.

Sticking a clue in a subplot is a way of being very up-front with your info—while preventing your reader from paying it much attention. Your clue could slip into:

• a romantic subplot

• a coming-of-age story

• a conflict between your Sleuth and one of her allies

• a secondary case that the Sleuth takes on

And there are lots of other options. Frequently, if the subplot is going to be giving us information about the Villain, that Villain will need to feature in the subplot, as the Villain of “Steele Belted” featured in Laura’s subplot. But there’s one other kind of information subplots are particularly good at conveying to the reader. I’m talking about…

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