The Opening Mystery

Creating Curiosity before the Inciting Incident

In Just Another Missing Person by Gillian McAllister, we need to skip the prologue for this class, because it feels like one of those cutouts from later in the book that the author wants you to feel unnerved by and feel something different once you return to it with more context. Prologues are a lesson for another day!

Sometimes, mysteries start with different mysteries for their openings, allowing us to get to know the main character and their current life before the bigger disruption of the inciting incident. But we still need, as agent CeeCee Lyra calls them, “Curiosity Seeds” to get us interested in the story.

Julia is trying to work out if the man at the table next but one is somebody she has arrested before. He’s ordering a caramel cheesecake, out with a wife and two children, and she’s pretty sure she once charged him with murder. The lighting is low; she just can’t tell.

I love how much this reveals about Julia’s job, the place she lives, and her character in three sentences. It shows that Julia likely lives in a small enough area that she can encounter the people she has arrested, and that those she has arrested before can’t hide from her. This denotes small-town living, one I can relate to as I avoid former classmates, former students, and people from a church I used to frequent. I’m immediately sucked into finding out if Julia is right, and how awkward it will be if she is right, and what will happen next!

She is trying not to let her husband and daughter know what she’s seen, eyes down on the menu.

This opening does a great job of giving us some bits of action and exposition, so we are getting small jabs of context along the way, like getting a piece of the puzzle with each paragraph. It primes the reader to expect to get the information they need in a slow drip, one that could increase the tension for the right reader. Here’s a main character who wants to keep a secret, or at least keep her family from her job. Characters that keep secrets have a way of getting themselves into trouble! Charles Baxter says, “But stories begin when things start to go wrong. Stories begin when trouble is visited upon the characters.”

The cheesecake arrives at the maybe-murderer’s table. Julia watches him as he looks up. He has two phones, both face down on the table in front of him. A dead giveaway of a criminal. She’s pretty sure it’s him. Something about the brow . . .

It’s hard to make a dining scene work since we’ve seen so many of them, but McAllister makes this work by having the main character’s thoughts flip between her family and the man she thinks she arrested for murder at the next table. This juxtaposes regular family stuff with murder, violence, and criminals. The subtext wafts toward us. We could all be eating next to criminals. A frightening thought that primes us for wanting to know more! Notice, too, how McAllister adds just enough interiority for us to know our protagonist’s thoughts, immersing us in her character, while also keeping the scene moving.

As Julia leaves, a call about another crime, we’re left wondering how this man will figure into the larger mystery, because as writers we want to make every character have meaning, to foreshadow future trouble, to plant small mysteries, to hook our readers with curiosity.

In these two and a quarter pages we get a lot of information about Julia, facts about her family, her place in their lives, but we also get to see a bit of how she thinks, how she is suspicious oin nature, that even while being at dinner, she is actively a monitoring for crimes or criminals, that her job is often a disruption to her normal life. The question is just how much this particular case will wreck her life. Planting important characters or situations in the opening of your story can add tension. It can give you something to play toward or against as you move toward the book’s inciting incident. Immerse the reader in a mystery, no matter how small, as soon as possible, and they will continue reading!

Prompt: Consider how you can unnerve your main character as they interact with their family or a friend, and show us how another character in this setting’s behavior makes our main character concerned for their own secrets or the safety of the people they are with. Use a familiar setting like a diner, church, school, or community gathering. Allow the antagonistic character to approach the main character, even as she wants the antagonist to stay away from the people she cares about. Introduce tension by providing context as the protagonist recalls or notices something unsettling about the antagonist. Consider having your protagonist be interrupted, forcing them to leave the scene or setting, thereby allowing the mystery to fester or move toward the inciting incident later in the story.

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