Hobgoblin of little minds: essential quality for a mystery writer

Back when I last re-read my novel, I said I'd address read-through concerns in future blog entries.

My one-year-old (hi Den Den), Website work and other concerns intervened. But now I'm coming back to this topic, and today I'm going to talk about consistency.

For ages I was extremely complacent and didn't see consistency as an issue. I assumed that all the details of my story were neatly tabulated in my mind. It never occurred to me that they had grown dim behind a mist of frequent edits and plot changes.

Then I wrote a ten-page short story and sent it to my sister for feedback. She's the ideal reviewer; sympathetic, speedy, scrupulous and not afraid to criticise.

She replied with a number of questions, amongst which was: "I thought the mother was dating Mr. Collins. Who's the Mr. Davis on page 9?"

Mr Collins only appears on page 7 of the story. You would think that I could keep his name consistent for four pages. But no; the poor man's name changed half-way through his subplot. This rendered the story unsatisfying verging on incomprehensible.

And I'd thought it was perfect! I was JUST about to send it off to a competition when I ran it past my sister for safety. Thank goodness! (I still don't know if I won anything btw).


I was horribly shaken by this experience. If I couldn't even keep Mr. Collins-Davis on the straight and narrow for four pages, what were the chances for my 300-plus-page novel?

On examination, I discovered that:

- Dashing Harold's mother's name was Julia the first time we met her but Laura thereafter.
- Cynthia's desk at the office, located in the basement in the morning, was magically elevated to the third floor by afternoon.
- The murder weapon was hanging on a wall; 'high up' on page 47 but 'fairly low down' by page 160.
- Cynthia's co-workers thought their boss had died of a heart-attack on Tuesday, but were clued in to all the gory murder details by Wednesday.

(Actually that last is not so unlikely. Most offices are a hotbed of gossip and Airwolfe (my fictional company) is definitely no exception.)

A murder mystery riddled with inconsistent detail is bad news. Mystery readers deduce while reading; for example:

'ok the dagger is high-up, and we heard earlier that Liz is very short so she wouldn't be able to reach it, so she's not the killer'.

Then later on they're told that the dagger was low down. Furthermore Liz appears to have grown by six inches.

Definitely not good.