Not at all. The author isn't talking about constructing the story per se, he's talking about constructing the underlying "problem of logic and deduction" (as Ch

Not at all. The author isn't talking about constructing the story per se, he's talking about constructing the underlying "problem of logic and deduction" (as Chandler called it) that's demanded by the mystery genre. That is, he means writing out just where the murderer was going when he dropped his left cuff-link, and whether it happened before or after the second gardener potted that prize-winning tea-rose begonia. Even if those scenes don't appear in the story's narrative, the clues related to them will need to be consistent and form a satisfying puzzle for the reader to pit themselves against (since mystery stories are usually expected to give the reader some kind of chance to guess whodunit). So the author's saying to work all that out in advance, before considering what scenes to write and what happens in them and so on.