Urban Fantasy Murder Mystery: Do I have too many characters?

TulipMama

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Hello!

I am currently working through some critiques, and one that has popped up recently is that there appears to be 1-2 characters popping up each chapter in my murder mystery. I don't feel like I can smoosh any of these characters together though, and it's flumuxing.

This is going to be part asking for advice, and part exercise for me to try and hash this out some.

I'm doing first person POV.

To try and outline my characters and where they fit in the book, I'm going to go give some stats I worked out.

To keep it as simple as I can, I'm going to rate characters with the following:

1) Main characters - Show up very often, have large roles in the plot.
2) Secondary characters - Show up more than twice, have a significant role in the plot or character development of a MC.
3) Tertiary characters - May show up more than once, generally for information/clues.
4) Walk-ons - Show up once, may be mentioned in other chapters.
5) NPCs - You don't even have a name-tag, you've got no chance.

I've done the math on this (Engineer: I love spreadsheets) and got the following:

4 'Main' Characters, including my POV MC. POV-MC is in all 30, obvi, the other 3 are active in 13 - 19 chapters, and mentioned in 2-12 chapters.

8 'Secondary' Characters, which includes the BBEG, his lieutenants, my MC's BFF, a couple suspects, MC's boss and MC's secretary. They're active anywhere between 2-8 chapters, and mentioned in 4-10 chapters.

7 'Tertiary' Characters, including the MC love interest, office rival, witnesses and such. Activity nose-dives here, going to 1-3 active chapters and mentioned in 0-3 chapters.

14 'Walk-on' Characters, and another 12 un-named. These all only show up for 1 chapter, some have names, most are goons or don't have actual talking lines.

I feel like that's 12 characters (Main and secondary) that people have to remember while working through my crime drama. The tertiary characters have little reminders about who they are and what they do when I bring them up, so I'm not expecting them to take up much brain space. I know the reader doesn't instinctively know who to devote brain space to, but I'm trying my best to spread mention of my secondaries so they aren't forgotten.

Obviously I'm not expecting advice that says: Yes, you have too many characters, the hard and fast rule is 5 secondary characters, and you need to remove some goons too.

I'm just curious, compared to your own work, does it look like I have a lot of people in my book (total of 45 that are mentioned in some fashion)?
 

lonestarlibrarian

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Is the solution of the murder the focus of the urban fantasy story? Or is the story an urban fantasy story that happens to have a murder as a major plot point?

My go-to's on my shelf are more Christie/Sayers/Doyle/Carr/Stout/Chesterton/McGerr/Marsh/Knox, with a side of McInerney/Queen/Derleth/early-mid Elizabeth Peters and I usually write shorts between 2k-10k. So my personal habits probably aren't the best data point for comparison. I've tried getting into modern cozies, but I got frustrated with MC's who encounter a murder in chapter 1 or 2, continue on as life-as-normal for chapters 3-25, and then in chapter 26, accidentally stumble over the killer by total accident. ;)

But if you're feeling that there's an abnormal number of characters in comparison to what you'd normally expect in a mystery, especially if a number of the characters exist to support various subplots (ie, love interest, office rival, BFF, evil mastermind, etc), it's possible it's urban-fantasy-with-a-mystery, rather than a mystery that's urban fantasy.

On the one hand, if you feel like you have too many characters who are crowding into a small space, you can make it a bigger space by developing the preexisting subplots into something more substantial.

On the other hand, if you feel like you want to focus more on your mystery, you can ruthlessly prune away a few of the distracting subplots that help develop your MC into a three-dimensional character and flesh out your world, and re-distribute them into future works.
 

Woollybear

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I had more characters than that in my first novel, and more characters than that in my current novel. It was an effort to get there and did involve smooshing characters and deleting names in favor of titles. For what it's worth, in this WIP people wanted more names for the unnamed ones.

There are tricks to making it easy for the reader. A few that I've picked up you have already mentioned. Additional tricks include:


~Pairing named characters. I have Nell and Rinna, two little girls, and they always occur together.

~Adding a distinctive visual cue to the character. Missing a hand. Lightning bolt scar on forehead. Eyepatch. Etc. This sort of character description is easier to mentally hold onto than 'good looking' or 'young' or 'stern-faced' by virtue of specificity and unusual-ness.

~Telegraph to the reader if the character needs to be remembered, through some offhand thought from the viewpoint character. He'd need to keep an eye on that one. Or, He didn't seem worth the time of day to remember. (Bit on the nose, but you get the idea.)

~One I've not done, but which occurs to me as I type, is to foreshadow the existence of a character before they are introduced. He'd be meeting the realtors tomorrow. He hoped they weren't money-grubbing liars. Then, the named characters appear and we are ready to learn their names.

I have a couple of named characters who come in at the end of my WIP--I suspect that won't be a problem because it's clear from context that the names are incidental. There are a couple named characters who come in via a historical record. Again, because of context I think it's OK to have those names.

Possibly the feedback of too many characters per chapter has a different fix than reducing the number of characters, and it sounds like this is your sense as well.
 

ChaseJxyz

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I, too, have all my character info in a spreadsheet lol. I made a copy of the data and re-categorized things to match your groupings, so for my epic fantasy novel, there's:

-7 main characters, 4 being POV (I put the Big Bad in there since he shows up quite a bit)
-10 secondary characters
-13 tertiary characters
-5 walk-ons
-and 8 background characters (they're not alive/active in the story, but they're mentioned or still important in some way)
-as well as 1 "narrator" (the "author" of the book, which is her own character but it's not in-your-face or anything and she has no actual influence of the story)
-plus a bunch of unnamed extras/NPCs I didn't even bother to put into the sheet, shopkeepers or nameless guards or whatever

I know I'm missing people, though, so the data is incomplete. But what really got me to realize what characters were important was when I sat down to write a ~500 word synopsis for the story (like the kind you'd submit to agent). In that, there are only 7 characters (2 POV, the other 3 main, and 2 background, though they're not named in this doc). The background characters are more "it's their fault things are bad," so those 5 named ones are the most-most critical. Does that mean that the other 2 POV characters or any of the secondary characters are unimportant? No, they still have their place and still are important to the plot, but not in the same way. But it does help me think about what to focus my efforts on in editing.

A murder mystery is going to have a lot of characters who only do one or two things (giving clues, processing evidence) and that's fine and expected for the genre. But how much detail are you giving us about them? Are you putting more weight on them compared to the characters that are more critical?
 

TulipMama

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First off, thanks for the good advice, I'll look into implementing some of these thoughts!

This book is definitely a police procedural, but with fantastical elements, so the murder is really the driving force of the plot.

I think a part of my problem is that I'm writing the first book in a series. Some of the characters that I'm introducing here are tertiary for this story, but will be more important in the next one, or the one after that.

For instance, I have a necromancer Medical Examiner named Hector. I go into decent detail about his workspace, his abilities, appearance and he has a memorable personality quirk in that he can't easily talk to living people. In this first book, he appears twice to animate a couple witnesses and is mentioned only a couple other times in passing.

The next book will center a lot more around necromancy as a subject, so Hector is going to bump up from a tertiary character to a secondary or main character depending on how much I want to use him.

Otherwise, I feel a little re-assured that I may not be over-doing it with a character count. Mysteries need suspects, witnesses, foils, the detective and the detective's supporting cast.
 

BlackKnight1974

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I had to cut characters out of my current WIP (which is out for beta) during the editing process. It was too long to be considered by anyone and so that meant getting rid of three secondary characters (including two I really liked) and several other tertiary characters who were removed as a result.

I think the number of characters is influenced by the length of the book (there's probably a formula you could work out in Excel! :)). Smooshing characters together may be frustrating, but ask yourself, would you prefer it if your reader had to stop to think about whom you were referring instead and thereby disrupting the flow of reading? I'm revisiting some old Tom Clancy novels at the moment and there have been several points where I've thought "who the hell is this guy?" and had to stop to remind myself - although that may be to do with getting older!

Following on from Woollybear and ChaseJxyz, I would suggest a couple of techniques I have used.

Use something about the character as a cue. My WIP is set in the US, and so I've used nationality when describing a character as a reminder. I've also double-down by adding things like job title i.e. "The British detective", in the hope of reminding the reader who I'm referring to.

Catchphrases - for a minor character, introducing a catchphrase or verbal tick might be useful. I have a FBI agent who finishes most sentences with "I can tell you" i.e. "that guy is a son of a bitch, I can tell you"
 

TylerJK

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I’ve had the problem of thinking I have too many characters. If you do decide this, it’s been helpful to me to deeply question what each characters role is. Sometimes I discover that I can combine a few characters into one and have that character do the job of several.
 

mccardey

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If you can merge them (and I'm guessing you can, but it means going back to the first draft) you have too many characters.

You owe me 2c
 

Ellis Clover

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Gosh, I've got nearly that many POV characters in my WIP! (Not really - there's eight - but they've all got partners/friends/kids/colleagues who make regular appearances too.)

I see a lot of apprehension around large casts in these forums, but honestly - if each of your characters has a distinct purpose that serves the story, and that purpose is clear to the reader ('don't confuse the reader' is a golden rule of writing, as far as 'rules' go), and you're hitting a commercial word count and the story is complete and satisfying, isn't that all that matters?

And I do think crime mysteries in particular are more forgiving of large casts anyway because of the suspects, the witnesses, the number of cops on the case (I read a lot of Ruth Rendell and Sophie Hannah and there's always at least half a dozen), all the red-herrings paths into family histories and suss acquaintanceships that need following, etc etc.
 
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