"Over a Period of Time I Evolved a Formula for Mystery Short Stories"

PULP FICTION writer Frank Gruber (1904-69; Wikipedia HERE; The Thrilling Detective HERE; the GAD Wiki HERE), like so many authors struggling to make a living writing for a low-paying market, had to come up with something if he wanted to stay in the game—and pay the rent:

  I knew so many writers in those days. I saw them come, I saw them go. I knew the difficulties they had in trying to carve out a spot for themselves, I knew the troubles they had to remain in those niches. I knew the sweat, the toil and the heartache that went into the work of the other writers because I was doing it myself.

  Each of us had his own way of working. I was never one for the regular hours. I couldn’t sit down to a typewriter at eight in the morning and work straight through until one o’clock, or five o’clock, or any specified time. I might work at eight o’clock in the morning but I might just as well break off at nine o’clock and not work again until nine o’clock at night. Or midnight, or even later. I might even go two or three days without working at all. But I still had to work. I still had to turn out my sixty or seventy thousand words each and every month. I still had to work out many complete story ideas in a month. I still had to invent so many different scenes for the stories. I had to come up with “amazing climaxes.” I had to have my hero “snatch victory from apparent defeat.”

  I felt the need of artificial aids to stimulate my thinking in those days. There was a book called Plotto which had been written in old age by a one-time very prolific dime novel writer. It was supposed to suggest thousands of plots to the current writers who used it. I bought one for twenty-five dollars and never got a single plot from it. Someone else had a thing called Plot Genie, which consisted of a pack of cards each with a few ideas on it. The idea was that you were to shuffle the cards and deal yourself a hand, which hand was supposed to be a plot, each unique, each different. For me Plot Genie did not work.

  I used to analyze stories. What elements were required? Over a period of time I evolved a formula for mystery short stories. It consisted of eleven elements. With these eleven elements in a mystery plot I could not miss. I used to work out each element at a time, concentrating on one until I had licked it, then going on to the next. Most writers of mysteries inject the eleven elements into their stories anyway, but by putting them down one at a time I became conscious of them. Once I had worked out these eleven elements, the job of coming up with plots for mystery stories was greatly simplified.

  I did not create this eleven-point mystery plot formula at one time. I evolved it over a period of about two years beginning back in 1934. I had perfected it by about the middle of 1936.

  To this day I claim that this plot formula is foolproof. You can write a perfectly salable mystery story with perhaps only seven or eight of these elements, but get them all into a story and you cannot miss.

  Here are the eleven elements:

 1. Colorful hero

 2. Theme

 3. Villain

 4. Background

 5. Murder method

 6. Motive

 7. Clue

 8. Trick

 9. Action

10. Climax

11. Emotion

  Each of the eleven points needs amplification. In general the line to follow is summed up in the word “unusual.” Every one of the eleven points had to be “unusual.”

  1. THE HERO. A hero must be colorful. He must have an occupation that is colorful or he must be a colorful person. In general, I have followed the theory that a regular policeman or detective is not colorful. Just think a moment about the greatest detective in all detective fiction—Sherlock Holmes—and you will quickly grasp what I mean by colorful.

  2. THEME. This, to me, is the most important element of any mystery story plot. By theme I mean subject matter, what the story is about in addition to, over and above, the ACTUAL MURDER plot. To illustrate:

  Death at the Main is about fighting cocks. I give a reasonably inside account of how gamecocks are raised, how they are fought, etc. This is knowledge not possessed by the average reader and believe me, I did not know it until I read up on the subject for the purpose of this story.

  My book, The Lock and the Key was about locksmiths. A liberal education in making locks and keys was thrown into the murder plot. I knew absolutely nothing about locks and keys until I did research on the subject. I know no more than is in the book.

  If you have ever read Dorothy Sayers’ excellent English mysteries, you will find that theme figures superbly. In The Nine Tailors the reader learns all about church bells, the art of bell-ringing, etc. In Murder Must Advertise, Miss Sayers discusses advertising in all its phases.

  However . . . knowledge of a subject should be used sparingly. The mystery reader may not be as interested in the subject as you are.

  3. VILLAIN. Let’s face it, the hero of detective fiction is a superman. The villain must therefore be a super-superman or have plenty of assistants. The odds must ALWAYS be against the hero.

  4. BACKGROUND. The story must be played against a colorful or unusual background. The streets of a big city are not necessarily colorful. If they’re not, make them so.

  5. MURDER METHOD. Here again the “unusual” should be considered. Shooting, stabbing, etc. are acceptable, but the circumstances surrounding them should be “unusual.”

  6. MOTIVE. Actually, there are only two reasons for murder—hate and greed, but there are many subdivisions of these and the “motive” should be as unusual as possible.

  7. CLUE. Somewhere in the story there must be a clue for the alert reader. Sure, try to fool the reader, but the clue must be there if the reader should want to check back on you after the story is over.

  8. TRICK. In the grand finale, when all seems lost, when the hero cannot possibly win out, he must snatch victory from apparent defeat. By a trick . . . and here again the word “unusual” applies.

  9. ACTION. The story must have pace and movement. It must not consist of talk, talk, talk about the missing button, etc.

  10. CLIMAX. A grand, smashing climax is necessary. Unusual.

  11. EMOTION. The hero should be personally involved in some manner. He should be doing this over and beyond the call of duty. Or beyond the money paid him for doing it.

— Frank Gruber, The Pulp Jungle (1967), Chapter Twenty-four (online HERE).

References:

- Plotto and Plot Genie (Wikipedia HERE):

  "Plot generators were described as early as the late 1920s, with Plotto; a new method of plot suggestion for writers of creative fiction, by William Wallace Cook, appearing in 1928. Plotto is a non-random plot generator; the reader makes all the decisions within the framework set out by the book.

  "In an article originally published in 1935 and reprinted in 2002, Robert J. Hogan described a book-based device called the Plot Genie which consisted of three lists of 180 items each: murder victims in the first list, crime locations in the second list, and important clues in the third list. The item to use from each list was chosen by spinning a dial with 180 numbers on it. Plot Genie (formally Plot Robot) was developed over the course of sixteen years by Wycliffe A. Hill and published around 1931. Hogan also mentions other similar devices such as The 36 Dramatic Situations (described by Polti in 1895, who claims to have improved on the work of Carlo Gozzi, 1720–1806) and Plotto (see above)."

- The Lock and the Key (Goodreads HERE), filmed as Man in the Vault in 1956 (IMDb HERE).

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