A mystery is a promise: the reader will be given the same clues the detective has, and a fair chance at the answer. The craft is in keeping that promise while making the wrong answers look right. This page assembles the site's mystery tools as one path: study the masters, build a skeleton, place the beats, then find a market. Everything runs in your browser, and nothing you type leaves it.
Before you build, read the writers readers keep coming back to.
Start from a skeleton, use the patterns readers already know, and place the reveal where it lands hardest.
Build a re-rollable mystery skeleton: protagonist, stakes, a Mystery/Crime trope and a twist, then map it onto beats.
Skeleton a mystery→The sleuths, locked rooms, red herrings and twist villains readers already recognise, defined with named works.
Check the tropes→Opening situations for a mystery: the object that should not exist, the town that waited, the debt that comes due.
Find an opening→Era-accurate names from real birth records, for the detective, the victim's family, or the suspect next door.
Name a suspect→Place the reveal, the false peak and the final twist at word positions in your own manuscript.
Place the beats→The live databases, with the fiction and short-story lines front and centre. You filter for your sub-genre, fee and deadline on the page.
The live contest database, filtered by fiction and short story — search for your sub-genre, entry fee and deadline.
Browse contests→Every deadline on one chronology, soonest first, or filtered by genre in your calendar app.
See the calendar→One weekly email on the craft: a plotting or suspense tip, a tool that deserves a look, and a fresh contest deadline. Unsubscribe anytime.