How do you open a mystery novel?

This is the first post on Tana French’s The Searcher so, as always, let’s start at the beginning. I took the time to examine covers, front matter, and prologues in our first two books in this series, Ann Patchett’s Dutch House and N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became, so this time I want to get straight to chapter one and dig into the questions we’ve been asking of all openings:

• How does the opening pull us into the world of the novel?

• What do we know? What’s implied? What’s left as a mystery?

• What makes us want to keep reading?

Because this is a Tana French novel, as readers, we are also going to be wondering what is the mystery? She’s slower to answer that question in The Searcher than in her previous novels, which follow the more typical pattern of murder mysteries in providing a body within the first chapter or so of the book. Let’s walk through the first chapter of The Searcher and see what she’s delivering instead.

Here is the first paragraph of the novel:

When Cal comes out of the house, the rooks have got hold of something. Six of them are clustered on the back lawn, amid the long wet grass and the yellow-flowered weeds, jabbing and hopping. Whatever the thing is, it’s on the small side and still moving.

Right away, French establishes that the narrator, at least for this scene (but also, as it turns out, for the whole novel) is Cal, and she immediately puts us very deeply in his point of view. Let’s look more closely at the structure of that first sentence, which, in another context, might read awkwardly. Why, for example, didn’t French choose a more straightforward way to establish these two pieces of information? Compare:

Cal comes out of the house, and the rooks swoop down to cluster around something on the back lawn.

First, by adding “when” to the first clause, French shifts the emphasis of the sentence. “When Cal comes out of the house…” is now a dependent phrase, which could be stripped off the main clause but cannot stand on its own as a sentence. The very structure of the sentence is drawing our attention away from Cal and to the rooks.

Second, notice what French is doing with the tense. Cal’s action (“comes”) is in present tense and is finished as soon as it starts, but the rooks’ action is more complex. The rooks don’t “swoop down” at the same time Cal comes out of the house; rather, they already “have got hold of” whatever it is they are pursuing. The rooks’ action extends backwards into the past and is still ongoing. Note too that French has stripped out all filter words. The sentence doesn’t read: “When Cal comes out of the house, he sees the rooks have got hold of something.”

On the surface, the paragraph seems like just a setting detail, but underneath it is doing quite a lot of work. Intuitively, the reader understands that the story is going to be told through Cal’s point of view and that the action is going to take place in Cal’s immediate present (signaled by the verb tense). On a metaphorical level, French is establishing Cal as an outsider who comes across an ongoing conflict involving creatures who were here before him.

In the next paragraph, we learn that he understands his role as an outsider:

Cal sets down his garbage bag of wallpaper. He considers getting his hunting knife and putting the creature out of its suffering, but the rooks have been here a lot longer than he has. It would be pretty impertinent of him to waltz in and start interfering with their ways. Instead he eases himself down to sit on the mossy step next to the trash bag.

Rather than interfere, he sits down to observe.

As the scene progresses, with Cal continuing to watch the rooks hunt and then kill and eat what turns out to be a young rabbit, French trickles out a few more details: Cal has been in this place for three months; he is doing renovation work on his house, which makes him feel “old and fat”; he used to be married to someone named Donna; he’s applied for a license for a firearm, which he plans to use for hunting, a skill his grandfather taught him.

On the second page we finally understand where he is, in a passage that gets full-dress treatment from French:

Away to the north, a line of low mountains rolls along the horizon. Cal’s eyes are still getting used to looking this far, after all those years of city blocks. Landscape is one of the few things he knows of where the reality doesn’t let you down. The West of Ireland looked beautiful on the internet; from right smack in the middle of it, it looks even better. The air is rich as fruitcake, like you should do more with it than just breathe it; bite off a big mouthful, maybe, or rub handfuls of it over your face.

Beyond the wonderful fruitcake metaphor, French is continuing to give us clues in this passage: Cal is from a city (Chicago, we learn on the next page) and he decided to move to this place without ever having set foot in it first. Note, too, how French weaves in Cal’s voice, especially his pragmatic informality—the “right smack in the middle,” the “bite off a big mouthful, maybe.”

After this passage, Cal stands up to take his garbage bag down to the trash pile at the edge of the yard, stopping to inspect the remains of the rabbit (which tells us he’s not the squeamish type), and here’s where the chapter pivots: Someone has been watching Cal, and that someone is in the yard again, their presence signaled by the rooks kicking up a fuss. Immediately after this pivot, we get another key piece of information: Cal is a retired cop, having spent twenty-five years in the Chicago PD, and he moved to this out-of-the-way place in part to switch off “his mental alarm systems.”

Now we’ve got a few story questions pulling us forward:

• What happened to Cal’s marriage?

• What happened in his career as a cop that made him want to turn off that mental alarm system?

• Who is watching Cal and why?

Note that the first two are backstory questions: Cal already knows the answers to them, and presumably we readers will find out in due time. But the last question is the one that really stokes the suspense because neither the readers nor Cal know the answers yet. A character can’t transmit a sense of suspense about a question he already knows the answer to, and suspense is what, more than anything else, pulls a reader into a story. What will happen next?

What happens next in this chapter is that Cal walks back into the house and begins making dinner. French keeps us lightly tethered to the present action, showing Cal turning on a burner under a frying pan in one paragraph and putting bacon in the pan a page later. But the real purpose here is summary: Cal is sifting through the incidents before this one, the other times he felt he was being watched. And he’s also considering other details that have triggered his “cop sense”:

Engines revving, three a.m. down faraway back roads, deep-chested bubbling snarls. A huddle of guys in the back corner of the pub some nights, too young and dressed wrong, talking too loud and too fast in accents that don’t fit in; the snap of their heads towards the door when Cal walks in, the stares that last a second too long. He’s been careful not to tell anyone what he used to do, but just being a stranger could be plenty, depending.

He recalls the long-simmering, intergenerational feuds he’s heard about from his next-door neighbor, Mart, which has given him “an inkling of how tangled up things get around here, and how carefully you have to watch where you put your feet.”

Now he’s worried that he’s already made a wrong step and that he doesn’t know enough about the community to understand what he might set in motion if he deals aggressively with whomever is watching him.

He ponders a theory that it has something to do with the house, which had stood vacant for many years before he bought it. This allows French to catch us up on the state of the house when he found it and the work he’s been doing to slowly restore it, building in more details about Cal’s past along the way.

Then, as Cal is eating the dinner we’ve seen him make, we get another punch of action in the present tense of the scene: Cal hears a noise outside, sneaks out his own bathroom window, circles the house, and grabs the lurker. This turns out to be an adolescent boy, who bites Cal’s hand and gets away.

So we (Cal and the reader) know the answer to who, but still not the answer to why. Cal attempts to dismiss his mental alarm system, telling himself it’s just a bored kid, but his deeper sense tells him that the kid wasn’t there for kicks. “He was here for a purpose. He’ll be back.” The chapter ends on the same ominous note with which it began, Cal “listening to foxes fighting somewhere out across the fields,” under a sky full of “cloud-patched stars.” This piece of West Ireland where Cal is attempting to make a home for himself is wild, untamed, and he is, at least at the moment, unable to see it clearly.

Takeaways

What can we distill from this analysis that you can apply to your own writing?

• Use grammar and syntax to direct your readers’ attention where you want it. Use metaphor and setting to suggest the theme and mood of the story.

• Make sure that your first chapter launches ‘live’ story questions in addition to backstory questions.

• Anchor summaries or extended internal reflections to the present moment by occasional references to an easy-to-understand action, like making a meal.

• Build momentum and suspense by answering one part of a story question but leaving another part open. If you answer a who question, leave open a how or why question to pull readers forward.