Chicagoan Charlie Donlea on Writing Best-Selling Mysteries

 

 

By Judy Carmack Bross

 

 

 

 

With titles like Don’t Believe It, Some Choose Darkness, and The Girl Who Was Taken, you know that you are in for a thriller where surprises lurk around every corner. No wonder Chicagoan Charlie Donlea is a USA Today and a number one best selling author internationally. Along with a Charlie Donlea mystery to get me through this week’s artic cold I added a further stay-at-home pleasure of speaking with the Chicago best-selling author himself about his craft.

 

Writing the manuscript for his tenth thriller is keeping Donlea indoors this week as well as working with a team to develop his Twenty Years Later into a television series. He may will have news to share soon. His newest hardcover Guess Again will be released in August 2025.

 

 

Not only do we love the plot twists that keep you guessing until the final pages, the clever red herrings we fall for and the great destinations where Donlea’s novels are set (including Chicago and Door County as well as faraway places like St. Lucia) we find characters you care for, something lacking in many mysteries.

 

Here’s what we learned from Donlea on a day when it was two degrees in Chicago.

 

CCM: Did you grow up in Chicago and do you find that you draw on our City or region as you write?

 

CD: Yes, I grew up on the north side. It took me until my fourth novel, Some Choose Darkness, to set one of my books in Chicago. But it was a blast to pull parts of the city into the story. I live in the suburbs now and took a trip to my old neighborhood to get a feel for what I was hoping to capture in the setting. This was years ago, and I took my (at the time) young kids with me to show them where I grew up. The questions they asked were quite hysterical about their dad growing up in the city. They included inquiries about small front yards, playing ball in the intersections, and the strange, little roads behind the houses called alleys.

 

 

I wrote about that quasi research trip in a Behind-the-Scenes blogspot here, if you’re interested in more details.

 

CCM: What are the skills that a writer of truly terrific mysteries—and yours are these– needs. The twists, red herrings, the dropped clues, you are a master at these. It seems almost like math.

 

CD: It is like math in the sense that everything needs to balance out in the end. But there is no simple formula. If there were, everyone would write perfect mysteries and thrillers, including me!.

 

I’ve never been able to articulate the skills I possess that allow me to write thrillers. This is probably because I was never much of a reader as a kid. I avoided reading like the plague during my childhood and made it through my entire academic career without reading an assigned novel. Cliff’s Notes were my crutch.

 

 

It wasn’t until my junior year of college that I read a novel for the first time—The Firm by John Grisham. It was then that I realized what I’d been missing my whole life. It was also when the seed was planted that I would someday write my own thrillers. I have no formal training and have never taken a creative writing class in my life. But once I discovered a love for reading thrillers, I studied novels by my favorite authors as if they were textbooks. I did it religiously until I thought I figured out how to write one myself. Then, I sat down and gave it a shot.

CCM: How do you construct a mystery? Do you plot it all out with charts? And how do you come up with the plots in the first place?

 

CD: Fiction writers fall into two categories. “Pantsers” or “Plotters.”

 

A pantser is someone who writes from the seat of their pants, with nothing planned when they sit down at their desk each day. A plotter is someone who writes from an outline.

 

 

I am a plotter. I write a detailed outline and always know how I want the book to end before I start writing. One of John Grisham’s rules for writers is to never write the first chapter until you know how the last chapter will end. For me to do it any other way would lead to dead ends and rabbit holes. And those lead to my worst fear when writing a one hundred-thousand-word manuscript—having to delete large swaths of what I’ve created after I realize they don’t work for the story. So, I plot everything out before I ever write a word.

 

Ideas for my novels come from scouring headlines until I find something that sounds interesting. For my sixth novel, I read an article about new DNA technology that was allowing the New York crime lab to identify victims of the 9/11 terror attacks. From there, a plot came to mind about one of those victims being identified twenty years later, and a reporter learning that the victim might have been falsely accused of murder at the time of her death. The reporter goes on a crusade to posthumously exonerate the woman. That idea became my novel, Twenty Years Later, which is now in development to become television series.

 

CCM: In creating characters for your mystery novels—and I use novels because they are both mysteries and novels to my thinking—do you create special characteristics in characters that make them lend themselves more to a mystery’s unfolding?

 

 

CD: Yes, I always start with a character when I begin crafting a new story. Mostly what I figure out about the character is what they do for a living and how those skills will lend themselves to whatever mystery I surround them with. To use Twenty Years Later as an example again, I had been wanting to create a character who was a host of a Dateline or 20/20-type show, and have them embark on a nail-biting investigation that would be great for their television ratings. So I had that character in mind when I read the article about new DNA technology that was leading to the identification of the 9/11 victims decades after the attack. From there, the character of Avery Mason was born. I can’t wait to see who plays her in the series! 

 

In my upcoming novel, Guess Again, the main character is a renegade detective turned ER doctor who left law enforcement to preserve his mental health. But he gets pulled back into his old life when his former partner asks for his help solving a ten-year-old cold case.

 

I’m a strong believer that if I love the characters I’m writing about, then the readers will love them, too. 

 

CCM: Do you ever have writer’s block and if so, how do you deal with it? What advice to writers to work their way out of that?

 

 

CD: Writing is difficult. And completing a 400-page manuscript is monumental. But the process is made harder when a writer sits in front of a blank screen with no idea what they want to write about. And this is why I believe an outline would help struggling writers finish their manuscript. I hear from so many aspiring writers who tell me they have half a manuscript written but can’t figure out how to finish it. Creating an outline is the key.

 

The common belief if that writer’s block means not knowing what to write. But I believe writer’s block comes from not knowing what to write next. I don’t always know what comes next during the writing of a 400-page manuscript. But my outline always tells me what will come later, because I always know how I want the book to end. So, if I ever get stuck during one section of the story, I just write a later section that I know is going to happen. By the time I finish that later section, some new idea comes to me about the spot I was struggling with. Voila. Writer’s block cured!

 

CCM: Are there certain careers that work well with your characters? A certain age group you like to write about?

 

CD: One of the things I like most about writing fiction is that for the few months that it takes to write a manuscript I get to immerse myself in whatever occupation I choose for my character. To date, this has included a reporter, a medical examiner, a true crime documentary filmmaker, a forensic reconstructionist, a famous newsmagazine television host, a legal investigator, a medical student, and an ER doctor.

 

 

What my characters do for a living is the starting point for each of my books. If I can create a character that I’m interested in writing about and put them into a scenario that gets me excited, then it usually translates into a story readers care about.

CCM: 
Who are some of your favorite authors and why?

 

CD: John Grisham, for sure. I read The Firm when I was in college. It was the first novel I’d ever read, and it planted the seed in my mind that I would someday write my own thrillers. I also love John Grisham’s story—a lawyer with no formal training in writing who has gone on to become one of the most popular novelists in the world. It gives me hope.

 

I also love Robert Ludlum, Dennis Lehane, Thomas Harris and others. They were the authors I studied before I started writing my own stories.

 

CCM: Advice for someone who wants to write a mystery?

 

CD: Write about something that’s meaningful to you, and that you are excited about. Be prepared for a rocky road. Very few authors make it on their first attempt. If you do, good for you. But if you run into rejection, brush it off and keep going. It took me four full length manuscript, many years, and hundreds of rejections before I found a publisher for my first novel.

 

CCM: Do you have characters or plots floating around in your head that you plan to bring to life at a later time?

 

CD: I wrote a two-book series about a forensic reconstructionist named Rory Moore. She recreates cold case homicides and looks for answers that even the best detectives could not find. The Rory Moore books are Some Choose Darkness and The Suicide House. Ever since those books were released, readers have asked for another book in the series. So, Rory is always running through my mind, and I think she has another story or two when the time is right.

 

CCM: Why do so many people love to write mysteries?

 

 

CD: Because writers know that good ones are fun to read. The best ones lure the reader into trying to piece the puzzle together themselves. If mysteries are done correctly, an invested reader will race through the pages to see if they guessed the ending correctly. If they did, the reader feels a sense of satisfaction that they figured it out. If they get it wrong, and the final twist comes as a shock, even better!

 

CCM: You take readers to such great places like St. Lucia. Do you like to travel and then your destinations end up in your books or do you travel sometimes to find good book locations?

 

CD: A little bit of both. The way St. Lucia became the setting for my third novel, Don’t Believe It, was because my family vacationed there for spring break just after I finished my second novel. I was working to figure out what I would write next when we took a snorkeling trip to the Twin Pitons and ended up spending the day on Sugar Beach—a little stretch of sand that sits between the pitons. While at the beach bar, my wife and I came up with the story of an American medical school student who is killed in the Caribbean, the girlfriend who is convicted of the crime, and the documentary filmmaker who investigates the crime ten years later.

 

 

After a couple of pina coladas, we had a pretty good plot summarized. So much so that the following year my wife and I returned to St. Lucia for a “research” trip, which is where I finished the novel. I wrote about that trip here, if you want to know more about the making of the novel and flip through the photos of my writing process on St. Lucia.

 

For More information on Charlie Donlea, please visit: charliedonea.com.