Rob Kelley here, thinking about upping the stakes in mysteries, suspense, and thrillers.

I’ve been working on revising my third novel (title TBD) and have been thinking about the suspense-heightening technique “Enter Late, Leave Early” (ELLE), as illustrated with Dick Wolf’s television show “Law and Order.” The credits finish rolling, you get the “dun-dun” sound, the scene opens, there’s a minute of dialogue or a little action, then someone is dead. No screwing around, no lead up, just the minimum to set the scene, and we’re off. That’s Enter Late. Same thing on the back end: Leave Early. The district attorney and their staff maneuver, respond, and strategize then the jury returns the verdict. Case closed. Maybe we see a very brief dialogue on the courthouse steps. And we’re done.

Master of suspense Alfred Hitchcock said it a different way 65 years ago in a BBC interview:

How does one describe drama? Drama is life with the dull bits cut out.

In fact, ELLE is usually applied to screenwriting. The story starts and ends with a bang, fitting lots of action and excitement into the 45 minute television show or the 2 hour-long feature film.

What does that mean for a novel, though? Well, you can distill down a story to action and dialogue, both of which move quickly. You certainly don’t have to describe every meal a character eats, and you can probably ignore waking up and going to bed for them every day of the narrative.

Instead you start with a death, or an attack, or some other act of violence. Or maybe it starts with a look forward. You see this in television in which a high energy scene starts the show, you get the title card “2 days earlier,” then we learn how we got to the terrorist threat or the character standing on the edge of the roof ready to jump.

The Boys Club by Erica Katz gives us a taste of that. The book opens with a court transcript and a bit of internal monologue that warns you something terrible has happened to young attorney Alex Vogel in her first few months at a prestigious law firm, resulting in this serious legal action and fearful memories that cause her to “wipe the sweat from [her] brow and close [her] eyes.” The narrative then unfolds with Alex’s meteoric rise in her law firm while we readers are holding our breath knowing that something exceptionally bad is coming. We’re just not sure what it will be or when it will happen.

But we need not go to the future to increase narrative tension. An author can open right up with incredibly high stakes that draw the reader in. For example, the first chapter of Gayle Lynds’ international spy thriller Masquerade portrays the memory-challenged protagonist, Liz Sansborough, inexplicably under attack by intruders. And when Sansborough is handed a gun, knowing what it is–an automatic–and even more surprisingly to herself, knowing how to use it, we have a literal opening with a bang. That high tension moment anchors the subsequent revelations of conspiracy and deceit which the reader is desperate to unravel along with Liz.

As a reader, I really enjoy Enter Late, Leave Early, but, as a writer, I’m often challenged to answer the question how do you actually do that?

It may just be me, but I almost never pull off Enter Late in my first draft. I usually do a lot of what I call throat clearing. Who is my protagonist? What brought them to this particular set of circumstances? Why do they react the way they do? Why are they a beer drinker and not a wine drinker? All the stuff you may need to have considered, but that doesn’t need to be in the final opening of your book. In the end, it may never make it into the book at all. Instead, in revision, you might take this fully-formed character with their history and their habits and drop them straight into the fire.

And Leave Early? Ideally, you wrap up the major plot points, and the characters face their uncertain future, no epilogue, no happily ever after, at least not entirely. Some things are broken, some people are dead, and maybe there’s hope and resilience, but no certainty.

That’s at the level of the book, but to really crank up the action, writers wanting to create high narrative tension apply ELLE at the chapter level, with each chapter starting strong and ending strong, with a cliffhanger or killer scene. This is one of the features of  a real page-turner. You know, the book that you are still reading at midnight thinking, “yeah, I can live with one less hour of sleep as long as I know what happens next!”

I’ve opened my books with a murder by an anonymous mob thug, an assassination of a Mexican politician by cartels, and the mass murder of striking miners in Africa by government troops and a private military contractor. Each of those violent acts comes around to threaten my very ordinary and vulnerable protagonists here at home, making their lives very, very difficult.

What are some of your favorite high octane openings of suspense, murder mysteries, and thrillers, dropping you right into the action and wanting more?