Robert Jackson Bennett On Crafting a Fantasy Murder Mystery ‹ CrimeReads

When I first trial-ballooned the idea of writing a fantasy murder mystery to a few other writer friends, the concept was met with a little skepticism: Could be really tough! Murder mysteries need people to know exactly how the world works. With fantasy, you can do anything, so it's hard to build a mystery out of that.

I knew instantly that this wasn't so. Fantasy magic works only when the audience knows exactly what it can and can't do: that's a core thesis of worldbuilding. But more to the point, I knew that a fantasy murder mystery had been done before - and had been so successfully that it had become a cornerstone of entertainment culture.

The first four Harry Potter books always focus on a series of mysterious crimes taking place within a tightly contained environment, with some of the crimes producing bodies (though not dead ones, just magically paralyzed ones). The mysteries always follow very tight, specific beats: there are clues built up during the start of school, and then more are carefully released at very predictable events after, like sports games, holiday parties, Christmas breaks, and exams. There are suspects, revelations, theories, and often a smaller set of crimes that the detectives confuse for the larger threat. All of it builds to a grand confrontation where the secret villain is revealed to have been present the whole time.