I recently lamented that I don’t really do much in the way of think-pieces on The Invisible Event any more, and some of you in the comments were like ‘Yeah, so do them again, then, idiot’. So here goes.

I recently read a book — I’ll not tell you the title, though this is hardly a spoiler — in which a murder victim was found clutching a piece of material, assumed to be torn from the murderer’s clothing. We’re told it was a piece of a white scarf. Later on, when our main character is poking around somewhere they shouldn’t be, they find a white scarf which has a piece torn out of it. Duhn-duhn-duuuuuuuhn.

Now, this discovery in that book is not supposed to be hugely subtle, it’s very much not the sort of book that’s engaging in fair-play detection, but it got me thinking. See, having written a novel which relied on laying out lots and lots of clues for the reader to miss but remember, and being currently between drafts on a follow-up to that book which is hopefully going to do the same thing, what if you did want the reader to know that someone was wearing a white scarf, and for there to be some delicacy about telling them? It could be that only one character wears one and therefore this is what Anthony Berkeley might call a Dominant Clue, or it could be that you want to drop it in subtly so that the attentive reader will pick up on it thinking they’re being clever and end up having been red-herring’d.

However, in novels of detection — assuming from this point on an archetypal novel that wants to engage the reader in solving the mystery — I’d suggest that the subtlety with which the ownership of said item of clothing is made is in direct proportion to its relevance to the context introducing it. Thus, if you know a murder victim was found with fibres of white scarf material under their fingernails, and then you get told…

Jeff walked in, wearing a white scarf.

…chances are that Jeff is as blameless as the driven snow which has seen him resort to said apparel. Chances are there will be a reference to Jeff’s house having burnt down or his man rushing Up North to visit an ill relative, meaning that Jeff is now living out of his club rooms for the first time since May. And as he was last there in May, our detective will infer that it’s unlikely he’d have a scarf among his possessions there, and so it’s revealed that he actually borrowed the scarf from Monty, who doesn’t have an alibi for the time the murder was committed…

The point is, in attaching importance to Jeff wearing the scarf, the reader misses the ancillary detail that makes the scarf important independent of Jeff’s wearing of it. This can be achieved any number of ways, but you hopefully get the idea.

But let’s imagine that the person sporting the white scarf is guilty, or at least that possession of a white scarf is an indicator of something more sinister. In a film or a T.V. show you can show the person wearing a white scarf, even for a fraction of a second, and distract attention by any means — a butler drops a bottle of wine, there’s a car crash, someone screams in the next room — having technically played fair. I’ll tell you now, in the first draft of my second novel there’s a scene where it matters that someone doesn’t have dirt under their fingernails, and trying to communicate that without explicitly stating “She didn’t have any dirt under her fingernails” was so bloody difficult that I doubt it will feature in any future draft (or will it…?). Filmmakers, frankly, have it easy.

When clewing via prose, the trick is not just to tell the reader what you want them to know, but also make it so that the reader remembers — or at least those paying attention do. Ideally, you want a striking image or a memorable event to underline the thing you’re trying to impress on their memory, and I’ve been playing with ways to infer the existence of a white scarf without actually saying the words “white scarf”, and thought it might be of interest to those of you who enjoy playing the game. Of course, now you know we’re looking out for a white scarf all subtlety will be lost, but humour me anyway.

So, a book could open…

We were running late.

Elaine had refused to come down to the taxi until she’s found the clutch that exactly matched the gloves she was wearing, and despite a honking horn outside and my insistence that she could just as easily, and probably more quickly, change into the red gloves or the blue ones or even the yellow, she’d brushed me aside with a laugh, pointed out that it was Michaelmas and insisted that she wouldn’t be seen dead accessorising in anything but seasonal green.

So here we were at last, twenty-seven minutes late, but Elaine impishly delighted in an adorable green cloche hat over her hair, a glimpse of green wool at her neck, the green boots on her feet and, yes, the gloves and clutch to match.

The insistence of the matching accessories tells us something about Elaine, so could be taken purely as character work, and it trades on the outdated ‘You know how women be about their clothes’ attitude which could be taken as telling us something about our narrator. You absorb it, hopefully find it reinforced by something about these characters later on, and think little more of it. And then, later on, when our narrator is putting something back in Elaine’s closet, he notes wryly:

There they were, the rainbow of shoes for every occasion: the blue ones from Venice, the white she found in a shop in Oxford, the black ones only ever worn once (to dinner with the Mayor)…all neatly lined up, all waiting for their day in the wind, rain, and snow.

It’s not watertight, but since we open with Elaine’s insistence on matching accessories, and since we then later establish her possession of white boots — and the final four words establish that they’re ready to be worn in lousy weather, implying the need to keep dry and warm — well, I think Ellery Queen could get at least seven pages out of that.

You think I’d stop there, but no.

The logical connection in that example is good, but not rock solid. What if I actually wanted, a la television, to show you someone wearing a white scarf? Sure, Jeff walked in wearing one earlier, but to hell with Jeff; that can be improved, can’t it?

Elaine reached out silently to brush Jeff’s cheek, her eyes glistening. As she was about to speak, the handle of the front door turned and the door was flung open, a blast of cold air sweeping through the hallway, freezing the words on her lips. A figure stepped through the entrance, a figure unlike anything they had seen before.

Over six feet tall, the apparition was all angles like a vulture, with ghostly hair streaming down over its face, hiding the features from view. An ill-fitting black coat clung to the figure’s corners, snowflakes glistening in the brightness of the chandelier, before expiring into drops that ran down the coat and dripped onto the floor. Slowly, wordlessly, awfully, the thing withdrew black-gloved, clawed hands from its pockets and reached up to its own head, taking hold of its hair and pulling it back from its face…

Elaine suppressed a scream just in time, realising that this vision of horror had instead a long train of woollen fabric draped over its head to protect itself from the snow. This was lifted away to reveal a wrinkled, bald head beneath, and an unexpectedly kind face that smiled as it shook until-then-invisible snowflakes from the scarf onto the floor.

Now, okay, you’re paying attention to the scarf because I told you to, but there’s enough contrast there — the image of some eldritch vision pulling off its own hair, the surprisingly kind face beneath, the fact that Elaine was interrupted as she was about to speak and so you’ll be able to have a scene later where Jeff reminds her she was about to say something when they were interrupted by this (hopefully…!) memorable entrance. Notice, too, that the whiteness of the scarf is only implied: it’s “ghostly” originally, and then the snowflakes — which are understood to be white by, like, everyone — are “invisible” against it.

Of course, what you didn’t notice is that the person coming into the house somehow opened the door by the handle despite still having their hands in their pockets — implying a second person outside, indeed — so hopefully you’ll believe me when I say that you’re only picking up on the things you’ve been told are going to happen.

You can do a lot merely with suggestion, too, even if it does loosen the rules of declaration somewhat:

She was a vision in opalescence from head to toe, setting out on her snowy excursion like Hecuba voyaging to Greece to discover the fate of Polydorus.

I feel that authors like Edmund Crispin do this sort of thing from time to time, telling you a pertinent detail but then dressing it up with a literary reference which, while not essential to understanding the scene being described, manages to distract the ignorant by giving them just enough so that they can follow by paying attention to the literary allusion, and distract those who understand the reference — and the inference of death in the example above — by making them feel smart about getting it.

And, then, of course, you can hide it in comedy — give the reader an amusing scene in which a seemingly incidental detail is in fact the entire purpose. I’ve tried being funny to illustrate this, but I’m simply not a funny man in prose — or in person, some would say — so instead please accept this heavily-bowdlerised scene from The Gilded Man (1942) by Carter Dickson:

In sheer exuberance he bent down and scooped up a handful of snow, fashioning it into a snowball. His jubilant eye, roving the white landscape, alighted on an object which appeared to be resting just on or beyond the crest of the wall: a top-hat.

Betty read his thoughts. Bending down, she scooped up snow and kneaded it.

“I’ll bet I can hit it before you do,” she challenged.

“Done!” said Nick. Removing his coat and scarf, he set himself and threw his snowball like a rifle-bullet.

The hat, struck squarely, took flight, turned over twice in the air, and disappeared into a snowdrift. Nick breathed on his half-frozen hands as Betty launched her own missile.

No-one was prepared for what followed.

Up over the wall arose, in awful majesty, a face so terrifying in its wrath that at first glance it hardly appeared human. “What the goddam holy blazes do you think you’re doin’?” bellowed an irate voice.

The figure had just time to say this before Betty’s snowball landed squarely in the centre of its face.

After this, the figure did not say anything.

Betty found her voice first. “I say,” she called, “I’m terribly sorry!”

A series of little shivers or twitches went over the large bulk of the man leaning on the wall. He wore an overcoat with an old-fashioned astrakhan collar, and had knitted mittens on his hands.

“One of ‘em,” said the man dispassionately, “one of ‘em lures me into lookin’ up by knocking my hat off. And the other is waitin’ to cop me square in the mush when I do. And then they say they’re sorry. Oh, Lord love a duck!”

Nick took a step forward. “It was thrown before you got up, sir! She wasn’t trying to hit you. She was only aiming at your hat, just as I was.” Seeing the poor effect this had, he continued: “I mean, we didn’t know it was your hat. We thought it was only an old cast-off hat that didn’t belong to anybody.

“And anyway,” insisted Nick, pulling on his coat to hide his grin, his eyes roving in search of his scarf, “what were you doing down on the other side of that wall?”

“I was taking a pi–“

The change of focus in each short paragraph keeps you attention fixed on the moment, not the incidental details, and the event being funny recalls it more easily when it matters that you’re reminded Nick couldn’t spot his scarf quickly on the layer of white snow. Other details — listing the clothes the man hit by the snowball is wearing, for instance — simply feeds the idea in the reader’s head that these things are incidental as a way of filling detail, and Nick’s eyes roving in search of the scarf seems therefore to be associated with this: he’s trying not to look the other gentleman in the eye in order to mask his amusement, and the reader is likely to jump to this assumption rather than notice that the scarf is probably white. Add the borderline obscenity in the final line to distract the attention from the action and, well, I think we’ve achieved perfection.

Anyway, you get the idea by now. It can be hard work having to go around the houses like this, but the effort is generally worth it when the reader fails to spot something they can’t deny was at least very heavily implied in the text. Far better you argue over the implication of “a glimpse of green wool at her neck” than have to admit that you simply didn’t want to do the work of implying the existence of the scarf because it would otherwise give everything away.

As the man said: Play up! Play up! And play the game!

~

Oh, hey, and you might also be interested in this episode of my hilariously occasional In GAD We Trust podcast, where I talk about Grice’s maxims and how they can be used to misdirect. This was fun to explore, and if the above interests you I’d recommend the below: