The scarcity of Why-dunnits in the slushpile

Our slushpile suggests that Why-dunnit is not as popular as the Who-dunnit or the How-dunnit. Although quite a few submissions have combined all three types of mysteries, the full why-question-centric tales are not forthcoming.
I guess many writers believe that if you already have the ‘who’ and ‘how’, then the ‘why’ (although important) is just not [...]

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When Red Herrings are added

A red herring is a ‘fake clue’ that leads the hero away from the true solution. Its purpose is to frustrate, confuse, and misdirect both the hero as well as the reader.  Variations of Red Herring:

The discovery of motive, means, and opportunity of multiple characters;
Physical evidence with multiple interpretations. For example, objects founds at a [...]

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Deriving ‘rules’ from what we’re NOT about…

One of the first posts I wrote for this blog dealt with Speculative Mystery rules and focused on the rules for the Mystery genre developed by the Detection Club. Beyond those rules, a rival set was developed and outlined by S.S. Van Dyne (a.k.a. Willard Huntington Wright) in an article called Twenty Rules for Writing [...]

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