How do you open a mystery novel?

This is the first installment of our analysis of 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 my posts on The Dutch House and The City We Became, so this time I want to get straight to French’s first chapter and dig into the questions we’ve been asking of all openings:

Because this is a mystery novel, we are also going to be wondering what is the mystery? French is 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 French delivers instead of a body.

Here is the first paragraph of the novel:

French plays with our expectations here, letting us think that we’ve got our dead-body moment right in the first sentence before disillusioning us at the end of the paragraph. Instead, all we can do is pay attention to Cal. We are drawn so deeply into his point of view that we don’t have another choice. Let’s look more closely at the structure of that first sentence. Why, for example, didn’t French choose a more straightforward way to establish these two unremarkable pieces of information—that Cal has walked out of his front door and there are birds in the yard? Compare this stripped-down version to the original:

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

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 weight and attention of the sentence then falls on the rooks and whatever they’ve gotten hold of.

Notice also 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 backward 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.” As readers, we automatically assume it is Cal who is doing the seeing; by stripping out the verb, French takes us deeper into his point of view. It is like we are inside Cal’s mind as he processes what he sees when he steps outside.

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 establishes Cal as an outsider who comes across an ongoing conflict involving creatures who were here before him. The grammatical structure of that first sentence, which gives the rooks rather than Cal the starring role, hints at Cal’s tendency to recede into the background. He wants to be a passive viewer not an active participant in the scenes in front of him and will have to be dragged into the action of the story.

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

Rather than interfere, he sits down to observe.

As the scene progresses, with Cal continuing to watch the rooks kill and then 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 learn where he is, in a passage that gets full-dress treatment from French:

The wonderful fruitcake metaphor and the sensory details that come with it are the stars of the show, but French continues to deliver bits of backstory in this passage: Cal is from a city (Chicago, we learn on the next page) and he decided to move to the West of Ireland 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.”

By this point we’ve got a few intriguing story questions pulling us into the novel:

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 that last question—who is watching and why—is the one that really stokes the suspense because neither the readers nor Cal know the answer 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?

I often work with writers who are so enamored with their protagonist’s complex and emotionally resonant backstory that they want to deliver it to the reader first—which also makes intuitive sense because it happens first chronologically. However, backstory is essentially old news to the protagonist and to readers, even though they are encountering it for the first time. Readers want to see your protagonist encounter a suspenseful question they don’t know the answer to yet either. Backstory can be snuck in along the way—tripping up your protagonist just as our unprocessed emotional baggage does to us in real life.

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 during his short time living in this house. And he’s also considering other details that have triggered his “cop sense”:

Let’s take a moment, before moving further into the scene, to admire the sentence-level writing in this passage. The first two sentences are, technically, not sentences at all but fragments, without the anchor of a verb. (To ‘unfragment’ these sentences, you’d do this: “Engines rev at three a.m. . . . A huddle of guys sit . . .”) By withholding the verbs, French helps that last, quieter sentence land harder, carry more gravity and weight. What would those loud guys do if they did know he was a cop?

Cal, still cooking his dinner, recalls the long-simmering, intergenerational feuds he’s heard about from his next-door neighbor, Mart, who 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 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 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 we still don’t know 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.

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