The New York mystery is one of the most important subgenres of spooky fiction. But, like living in the city that never sleeps, writing about it can be pretty darned intense. One big advantage, however, of writing this subgenre, is that, unlike other types of mysteries, you can do it at any hour of the day or night, and order takeout, even on Sunday.

What It Is

1. The action must take place in Manhattan, although fleeting references to Brooklyn, The Bronx, and Queens are permitted. Staten Island must never be mentioned, at least not seriously.
   • the setting may be San Francisco, but only if plenty of concrete is presented as a backdrop to the action

   • the protagonists may not cross the river to New Jersey, because that would turn the novel into a police procedural, or even a horror story.

2. Nicknames for the city are not only permissible, they are necessary to verisimilitude. These nicknames should include the standard batch (The Big Apple, Gotham, New Calcutta, etc.), but the narrator must also coin his/her own nicknames. Examples I have seen include The Big Burg, Hell on the Hudson, and The Gap Capital of the United States.

3. Writers in this subgenre always give exact street addresses where scenes take place, but if you actually go to any of those addresses you will find, instead of the building described in the novel, a Gap store or the New York Coliseum.

4. Wildlife is confined to three species of rats:
   • Eight million real rats (one per human inhabitant)

   • Pigeons (known as flying rats)

   • Cock Roaches (known as floor rats and often used as murder weapons when the victim has a heart problem)

5. The New York Mystery lends itself to the development of amateur detectives. Problems that amateurs encounter in other subgenres (i.e., how come these librarians, art teachers, shoe salesmen, and housepainters keep stumbling over bodies?) do not arise for New York City amateurs.

   In the Big Apple, dead bodies can be found under every table, on every park bench, stuffed in all the mailboxes, riding in subway cars, occupying Gracie Mansion, at the perfume counter in Bloomingdales (in fact, that is the likeliest place to discover that a New Yorker has keeled over), stuck in traffic, in an off-off Broadway theater after a performance of "Everybody Loves Opal," or on 34th Street just beside the Empire State Building — proving that if you drop a penny from the observation deck you probably will kill someone down on the sidewalk and that New York legends are true.

6. The biggest problem faced by the author of this kind of novel is explaining not HOW the amateur stumbled across a body but rather WHY, after stumbling, the amateur didn't simply curse the inconvenience and move on.

7. The crime in a New York Mystery may NOT be a crime of passion. New Yorkers are all entirely accustomed to hating each other, and a crime of passion would indicate faulty research on the part of the author. When New Yorkers hate each other, they use their fingers, not their guns. Unless the Mets are involved.

8. The motive for murder will be Big Money, Ego, simple annoyance with a tourist, ticket scalping that goes beyond what even New Yorkers will tolerate, or a parking place.

9. Chase scenes always involve taxis with rigged meters.

10. The jacket art always includes the most famous skyline on earth. Otherwise, the reader might think he/she is in the presence of Science Fiction.

11. Jimmy Breslin or Pete Hamill must write one of the jacket blurbs.

12. The book will eventually appear in a courtroom, where the experts will testify that it inspired an actual murder. This is known as the "Barnes & Noble Discounted Defense."

13. Conversations in elevators cannot be avoided.

14. No character may be seen jogging beside Lake Michigan.

15. The neighborhood bartender always knows something.

16. Finally, there must be such an overwhelming amount of descriptive passages regarding concrete that part of the suspense derives from the feeling that the continent will at any moment tip into the Atlantic.

Submitted by Polly Whitney, from the city that never sleeps, the place so nice they named it twice.