Mystery in White was published in 1937, and is a Christmas mystery of the type we might today consider, ‘cosy’. A group of passengers travelling in the same carriage on Christmas Eve are left stranded when their train encounters a snow drift. Tired of waiting, they decide to brave the weather and attempt to reach a nearby village, but only succeed in getting lost in the snowstorm, and end up taking shelter in a house where tea has been laid, but no one’s around to drink it…

Note: This article contains some mild spoilers.

TIGHT SPACES

Working in such confined spaces as the train, the house, a car, and some tracks between the three, Farjeon nevertheless manages to weave a fairly plausible plot, and create enough tension to keep you hooked.

Here are some suggestions for creating a similar effect:

1 | Compartmentalise – divide the space into smaller spaces. Trains and houses are already conveniently subdivided, but Farjeon frequently emphasises the contraction by focusing on a single chair, the back seat of the car, the four-poster bed, or a stairwell.

2 | Separate the characters – so each goes their own way, and doesn’t know what the others are doing. In Mystery in White, Farjeon’s characters form smaller factions, mostly dependent on their personalities: how independent is each character? Who do they admire? Who do they dislike? Who are they influenced by?

3 | Limit movement – so that characters can’t easily move through the space to gather information. Farjeon is particularly cunning with this technique. On the macro level, there’s the snowstorm that impedes progress throughout the country, but on the micro level there are characters who are blocked from going up stairs by other characters, stopped by locked doors, hampered by fear, psychic visions, twisted ankles, fever dreams, and by the simple presence of other characters.

4 | Retrace steps – have characters follow footsteps or other traces, have them repeatedly walk up and down the same narrow tracks that link the confined settings of the story, and allow them to occupy and reoccupy the same spaces. By these expedients you can create tension as the reader wonders whether the characters will encounter each other; increase the atmosphere of isolation; and complicate the timeline of the murder or mystery.

5 | Switch points of view – limit the characters, but not the narrator. Farjeon employs an omniscient narrator who can jump agilely between the characters’ minds, while remaining strangely silent around the thoughts of Edward Maltby, the main “detecting” figure. He even throws in a few diary entries that allow the “psychic” chorus girl to express her fear of the bed where she’s lying with a sprained ankle, as well as her suspicions about her fellow travellers.

6 | Contract time – Farjeon’s narrative takes place over Christmas Eve and Christmas Day – a time of year that naturally lends itself to urgency, and even more so for the characters who are all hurrying to some destination where they intend to celebrate (or at least pass) the holidays. While this urgency is always present, the pace of the story varies, slowing down as characters try to make their way through the snow, and speeding up in their attempts to apprehend a suspect. Characters becoming lost or falling unconscious lead to further contractions of time. This keeps the story from becoming a headlong rush, and allows Farjeon to make better use of the limited space.

I hope you get to try out some of the ideas in this article. I’ll leave you with the opening paragraphs of Mystery in White, because I think that in addition to his skill in narrative construction, Farjeon was also a stylistically brilliant writer:

The Great Snow began on the evening of December 19th. Shoppers smiled as they hurried home, speculating on the chances of a White Christmas. Their hopes were dampened when they turned on their wireless to learn from the smooth impersonal voice of the B.B.C. announcer that an anti-cyclone was callously wending its way from the North-West of Ireland; and on the 20th the warmth arrived, turning the snow to drizzle and the thin white crust to muddy brown.

“Not this year!” sighed the disappointed sentimentalists as they slipped sadly through the slush.

But on the 21st the snow returned, this time in earnest. Brown became white again. The sounds of traffic were deadened. Wheel marks, foot marks, all marks, were blotted out as soon as they were made. The sentimentalists rejoiced.

It snowed all day and all night. On the 22nd it was still snowing. Snowballs flew, snowmen grew. Sceptical children regained their belief in fairyland, and sour adults felt like Santa Claus, buying more presents than they had ever intended. In the evening the voice of the announcer, travelling through endless white ether, informed the millions that more snow was coming. The anti- cyclone from the North-West of Ireland had got lost in it.

More snow came. It floated down from its limitless source like a vast extinguisher. Sweepers, eager for their harvest, waited in vain for the snow to stop. People wondered whether it would ever stop.

It grew beyond the boundaries of local interest. By the 23rd it was news. By the 24th it was a nuisance. Practical folk cursed. Even the sentimentalists wondered how they were going to carry out their programmes. Traffic was dislocated. Cars and motor-coaches lost themselves. Railway gangs fought snowdrifts. The thought of the thaw, with its stupendous task of conversion, became increasingly alarming.

This article is excerpted from the Lady Writers League Reading Room.