Young Writers Society

As I struggle through the big reveal of my current, main project, I have gotten it into my head that a short mystery might help me pick up some skills for writing those lovely "and the fault is yours" scenes.

I already have an idea founded for my short, and I've written one short mystery before (two years ago), but I like to do my homework before getting to the nitty-gritty. It would be helpful to know some common tropes, tips on red-herrings, and whatever other advice you might like to offer. (Please avoid mentioning cliches, as I already looked into those--it was actually the only thing I could find information about.)

Thank you very much!

As far as red herrings go, a piece from livejournal (das-sporking) on their slightly "dead"er counterparts -

A story with a truly successful red herring does not have the truth come out of nowhere, but all subtle hints are so successfully masked and your attention so entirely diverted, that when the truth is unveiled, you slap yourself in the forehead because all the evidence was there but you just didn’t see it.

[...]A dead herring is when an author tries their best to establish a red herring, but goes about doing it in the worst way possible, not by distracting you with something else, but rather by loudly insisting what it couldn’t be—namely, the exact thing it actually is. It’s like the kid being called into the principal’s office on some innocuous matter and immediately denying involvement in some sort of misbehavior that he’s previously not known about.

So, effectively, the way to go about a red herring is to mislead with other small details, rather than stating "well it CERTAINLY ISN'T THIS". Which may seem obvious, but no advice can be repeated too much. (Right?)

Of course there's a lot of reading that can be done, and a huge part of writing a mystery would be knowing what other mystery writers have done and how they pulled it off, not to mention the TVTropes mystery index. So read Agatha Christie and other mystery writers (maybe a more contemporary name catches your eye) if you want to get a grasp on the genre as a whole.

Mystery elements are worked into fantasy, sci-fi, and other fiction as well a lot of the time - I mean, if there weren't mystery elements, that eliminates a lot of the cliff-hangers and plot devices that writers use to keep a reader turning pages. Even looking into tropes that permeate other styles of fiction, you'll find that some of them inevitably relate to mystery/detective fiction as well.

I think a large part of pulling a mystery off well is planning out the moves your antagonist makes - they need to have a successful, and believably so, plan. If your antagonist isn't smart enough to work through a plan, then a reader's suspension of disbelief probably just fell on the floor and shattered.

In any case, there are a few different styles of mystery fiction, too - is this suspenseful mystery fiction you're writing? Detective fiction? Noir fiction? Each of those has a different style to them, and a different basis behind them. Something else?