The problem with mystery novels is you can basically tell what's going to happen based on how far along in the book you are. You're only a quarter of the way in and the detective has a promising lead? Red herring. There are 30 pages left? The bad guy's going to get caught momentarily. It takes some of the fun out of it.
So what they should do is put the chapters out of order. You start on page 1 and Chapter 1 is right there. Then when you hit the end of Chapter 1, it says "Turn to page 132" and Chapter 2 is on page 132. Then at the end of Chapter 2 it says "Turn to page 47" and Chapter 3 is on page 47. And you keep jumping around the book until you lose track of how many pages you've read and how far along you are. Then when you get to the end of the story, you don't know that it's the end of the story so the surprise is better.
3 comments:
Such books would also need extra blank pages so that when ending a chapter, you don't concurrently see from a future chapter's opening page that so and so (the red herring) is now dead, etc.
I've read a Spillane novel which gave away its final page surprise ending because it was on the right hand side.
I'd settle for seeing an average book jacket's inside description that doesn't blurt out the entire story outline.
I'll bet there are book-binding geeks out there somewhere who could work out the optimal pages on which to put key plot twists so people don't turn to them accidently. You could probably make a computer program to work out the ideal chapter order too.
You're right about the jacket blurb though - I read a book recently where I was 75% of the way through before I got into new material that wasn't covered by the blurb.
I hate blurbs like that - also book reviews like that. It's so wrong!
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