Writing a Mystery: Introducing Jade Riley

In this Writing a Mystery series, I plan to share some of the steps in my journey to the publication of my debut novel, The Godfather of Dance and the sequel, A Killer Among Friends. This decade-long venture to write the Jade Riley Mysteries, with a novel set in each of the countries where I’ve lived, has been in keeping with my blog title, The Winding Narrative. To kick off, I’d like to introduce the main character, Jade Riley.

Jade is an everyday hero. In Book 1, she’s a rookie journalist with more ambition than experience, more passion than finesse. She’s Australian, from my hometown, Melbourne, but she’s living in The Woodlands, Texas, a satellite suburb of Houston, where she works for a local newspaper. By no coincidence, this is where I lived with my family for five years. She’s also passionate about ballroom and Latin dance.

In part, Jade moved to the US to escape Melbourne, where she was constantly confronted by reminders of her best friend Elena, who suicided eighteen months earlier. Jade never understood why Elena did this, and solving crimes is a way for her to find closure for this emotional wound. When the novel opens, she’s been in Houston for six months. She’s lonely living miles apart from her parents, brother and friends, and while she’s afraid to start caring about anyone else after losing Elena, she also craves connection.

The story premise is as follows: Journalist Jade is determined to write a career-defining article. Her dance instructor Anton wants to find out who killed his fiancée. Caught between the glamorous world of ballroom dance and Anton’s dark past in the Valencio crime family, can they solve the murder before they become the next targets?

When I first decided to write a mystery series, I wanted to create a relatable protagonist, not someone with superhero skills and strength. I had no desire to write a police procedural or an ex-military protagonist, partly because I had no lived experience of that life so I’d have to do extensive research and even then I probably wouldn’t get it right, but also because I wanted to keep the idea of an ordinary person in extraordinary situations.

In early drafts, Jade was a psychologist, married, with kids. Feedback from editors suggested that to become a series character, she needed to have more agency in the story – more reason to keep stumbling across these murders – so I changed her to become a journalist. I’m not a journalist but I am a writer and I have journalist friends, so I felt I could write that convincingly.

I changed Jade’s age because her husband and children had no real place in this story, so their characters grabbed page time without adding any momentum. Also, early readers, even with suspension of disbelief, struggled with the idea of a mother taking risks to solve a mystery. As a mother of two, I resisted that feedback because I didn’t want to limit what a woman could on the page (or in life). I turned to other well-known mystery/thriller series to find examples.

Sherlock Holmes, probably the best-known fictional detective, wasn’t married and had no children. The queen of the cosy mystery, Agatha Christie used Miss Marple, an old spinster unencumbered by family. Hercules Poirot was similarly unattached. Turning to Lee Child, Jack Reacher is famous for avoiding any attachments to people, property or possessions. Looking further afield, I found many lead detectives, male or female, who didn’t have family commitments, but this wasn’t true for all. Family life plays a greater role for Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch, who is divorced and has a daughter, Maddie. Those familial relationships feed into the story, and in the TV series, Maddie and Bosch discuss the risks of the job, especially when Maddie follows her father into the police force. David Baldacci’s Simply Lies features a single mother with two children, and while she questions her involvement in crime, she ploughs ahead.

I reached the conclusion that rather than any sexist or anti-parent sentiment, the reason for more single detectives was to gives the author more creative freedom. Having written The Godfather of Dance both ways, I found it a lot easier to write about Jade working into the night or dropping everything and travel when she didn’t have to worry about childcare or driving kids to extracurricular activities. On the other hand, the risk to family can add emotional weight to a story.

The other advantage of writing a single detective is the potential for romance, which I’m sure is why so many television detectives are divorced. A big bonus of writing about Jade as a younger woman was that Jade and Anton could develop a more intimate relationship. Early readers wanted more of that will-they-won’t-they tension, so I played that up in later drafts.

All in all, the change in Jade’s age and family life worked well for this book. However, I created a problem for the series as a whole. Originally, The Godfather of Dance was the third book in the series. With the changes, it became book one. The original books one and two require Jade to have a life partner: her husband is pivotal in one, and her children are critical in another. If I made them books two and three, I faced the issue of a 10-year time jump between books, which is possible, but not ideal.

Next time, I’ll explain how I’m addressing these issues, along with some of the other challenges I faced in creating a series, in which Jade develops further and divulges more of who she is in each subsequent book. If you have any other questions you’d like me to address, please let me know in the comments and I’ll try to address them in future blogs.

Next time: A review of The Godfather of Dance by Dark Fantasy Reviews
Next writing post: some thoughts for authors starting out on a project, The Why, What and How of Storytelling
Next post about the Jade Riley Mysteries: Writing a Mystery: Crafting a Series