Mystery books tend to have lots of characters but it is usually easy to remember who’s who. This is because most people in books fall into recognisable character categories.

We may not have met them before but we know their type.

Let’s start with the protagonist

Every fiction book has a protagonist. This is almost always the main character, and is sometimes the narrator as well, telling their own story. There can be more than one protagonist, as the main character often has a partner, a love interest – or in the case of my own books – a friend.

Sometimes the protagonists don’t recognise each other as allies. So initially they don’t work together. This is a great way to introduce a ‘character arc’. That’s a writing term for how a character changes as a result of things that happen to them.

Where there…