Articles and Book Reviews

      A participant in one of my writing classes, an elderly man who read widely, who first gave me the idea of writing a mystery. He pointed out that the setting and subject matter could be anything that I was familiar with. THE ONLY REQUIREMENTS ARE THAT A CRIME OF SOME MAGNITUDE BE COMMITTED AND THAT IT MUST BE SOLVED IN THE END. In his view, a writer could write the book that she wanted to write - say, a coming of age novel, or a social satire, or a historical novel, and make it a mystery as well.

      A library user once pressed a busy librarian to define the difference between a mystery and a mainstream novel, and the librarian allegedly said, "If there's a dead body in it, it's a mystery."

      Well, maybe that's too simple but the point is that in this day and age not every novel fits into a clear category. In my view, the best mysteries rise above type or category because of their originality, engaging characters, and skill in storytelling.

      So, for those of us who want to write mystery novels, our first task is to begin with round, multi-dimensional characters. Also, the novel should be about something above and beyond the crime and its detection. You should be original, not so much in the way the crime is committed, but in the characters and setting you use.

      The old adage, "Write about what you know," applies here. Among my friends are several medical professionals, a biologist, a carpenter, a specialist in graphic design, and an individual who worked and travelled for an international organization. If these people chose to write mystery novels using aspects of their life experiences as settings, I would be intrigued, and would read them not just to find out "who done it", but also to have a new experience.

      Novels like mine, which take place in everyday settings, among ordinary people, where the interest lies not only in the "who done it", but also in the "why" of the crime, are known as cosy mysteries.

      Crime fiction came into its own as a type of literature in the 1920s, but of course fiction involving murder was written earlier than that. One landmark work was published in 1846, Edgar Allan Poe's story, "The Cask of Amontillado", a revenge story told by a narrator. The narrator is angry at a former friend and fellow wine connoisseur, but we never learn exactly what the grudge is about. The narrator lures his former friend, ironically named Fortunato, to a wine cellar beneath his palazzo to taste some amontillado - a kind of Spanish sherry. Then he chains the unsuspecting man to a wall in a dark recess and walls him in forever, and of course his cries are never heard.

      Poe also wrote tales of "ratiocination", (rashiocination) which means "the reasoning process". He wrote "locked room" stories, about crimes committed in closed settings where it seemed that no one or nothing could get in, and the reader was challenged to find out how the crime was committed before being told the answer at the end.

      In 1887, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created the famous Sherlock Holmes, who also emphasized the art of detection, involving logical deduction based on minute details and the elimination of false clues. Sir Arthur also created the character, Dr. Watson, Sherlock's friend and roommate, who serves as a sounding board for Sherlock's mental processes. "Elementary, my dear Watson," Holmes is always saying. Nowadays, the side kick character in any mystery is called a Watson. In my novels, the Watson is Delia's husband, Rupert.

      In the 1920s, when mystery fiction by Agatha Christie, Dorothy M. Sayers and others became very popular, the novels usually involved a closed environment such as an English country house, a village, a train, a women's college. A murder occurs, and of course at first no one among the cast of characters appears to have a motive. Then, the detective-figure, the Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple, starts snooping around and soon everyone is found to have a motive. Gradually, evidence eliminates more and more people until the actual killer is identified.

      This sort of novel, the classic mystery novel, also known as the cosy mystery, was very popular in its day. The recent Robert Altman movie, Gosford Park, is a satire on this type of novel. The cosy mystery still exists. I consider Alexander McCall Smith's novels about the Number One Ladies' Detective Agency to be cosy mysteries. One also thinks of the TV series of some years ago, Murder She Wrote.

      In my novels, which are set in Ontario, I have used more-or-less closed settings. I used a village book club for Tea With Delilah, a small northern Ontario community in the early 1950s for The Secret of White Birch Road, and, for Illusions Die, the same northern community in the present day, plus a fictional retirement residence here in Ottawa.

      In a classic mystery such as those by Agatha Christie, the pleasure lies in figuring out who the killer is. On a broader level, for many people the satisfaction of any kind of mystery lies in seeing the social fabric, which has been torn by the crime, knit up properly at the end, with the guilty person not getting away with the crime - something that doesn't always happen in real life.

      I sometimes find it hard to make the criminals pay for their crimes, because there always seem to be extenuating circumstances, so I have had to find ways to combine mercy with the justice that a mystery reader expects.

      The classic mystery usually involves two murders, one as a consequence of the other. The killer learns that someone has found out about his crime, so he kills that person to shut him up. The victims are not someone with whom the reader can identify. Finally, the detective, having made use of his little grey cells, as Hercule Poirot calls them, usually assembles the whole party in the library or some such place and reconstructs the real chain of events from beginning to end. Then he zooms in on the only person, often the least likely suspect. Sometimes he bluffs the murderer.

      Obviously this kind of summing-up scene becomes old hat rather quickly, and, in fact, the classic mystery fell out of favour for a while. During the Great Depression, the 1930s, North American readers got impatient with quirky detectives, contrived plots and English settings. Some felt that this type of novel trivialized murder. Readers like intellectual games, but they also like stories.

      The reaction was the hardboiled mystery by writers like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane. The hardboiled mystery is part of the school of realism in American fiction, and is set in a gritty hostile world of corruption and urban decay. The private detective is isolated from established institutions such as the police force, and is unconventional in his methods. He is often a troubled character and his troubles give the novels depth.

      Most importantly, in a hardboiled mystery novel the reader doesn't get the feeling that good has triumphed over evil and that a disorderly world has been set to rights. If order is restored, we have the feeling that it's only temporary. In a hardboiled mystery the detective may eventually find basic values and fundamental justice, but in some, usually called "noir" mysteries, evil triumphs.

      As time passed, of course, and more hardboiled novels were written, the elements of this type of novel became cliches, too.

      Nowadays, under the umbrella category of "Mystery" or "Crime" novel there are many subcategories. There are noir mysteries in which evil triumphs, there are police procedurals, there are hardboiled mystery novels, there are suspense stories, psychological novels of the Barbara Vine variety, and of course, cosy mysteries.

      These days, there is a blurring of the major characteristics of fiction. You find novels advertised as western romances, as romance science fiction, as mystery romance. Within the overall category of mystery, I have observed a blurring of the subcategories. For instance, in a Sharyn McCrumb mystery set in Appalachia, a professionals; that is, a sheriff and his deputies solve the crimes, but they get a lot of help from a local mountain granny who has a sixth sense, and can foretell the future. The supernatural comes into play, and there is also a lot of interesting information about folk music and customs. So would you call those mysteries police procedurals - or cosies?

      This blurring of the rules and conventions is good news for writers who would like to write something popular, like a mystery, while bringing in other aspects of life that interest them.

      Prior to writing my first mystery, Tea With Delilah, I paid attention to the way other mysteries unfolded, and tried to uncover some universal rules that applied to all types. I noted, for instance, that there are always two plot lines, the one that the reader reads, and a parallel story of what really happened, that the author knows and divulges bit by bit.

      I read books for ideas on structure. It seemed necessary to create a mood of uneasiness by having something jarring happen every five to seven pages. Another basic principle is to end each chapter with a question waiting to be answered.

      When writing Tea with Delilah, I paid attention to the conventions of mystery novels, but in writing the second and third I felt less bound by rules.

      In Illusions Die, the deaths that occur do not seem, at first, to be murders - one may be a suicide, the other, an accident. In Illusions Die, I also depart from the convention of having the second death come as a result of the first. In many mysteries, the murderer kills someone and then must kill another person who has figured out what he's done, but in Illusions Die, the deaths are not related in this way. Instead, they're connected by theme - both have to do with parent/child relationships.

      Tea With Delilah began as a mainstream novel manuscript, a romantic novel about two older people. It never got published, for various reasons, but since I liked the characters I decided to use them in a mystery, so I harvested parts of the unpublished novel for both Tea With Delilah and Illusions Die.

      I chose to write cosy mysteries with an amateur detective because I don't know much about police procedures, forensics, DNA, etc, though I'm open to learning more. Some people are knowledgeable about these specialized areas or love researching that kind of thing, and they should definitely use this expertise in their writing, but I'm interested in character and motivation.

      If you don't want to study up on the science and technology of detection, you can do as Maureen Jennings does with her Inspector Murdoch series and set novels in the past. In her Victorian Toronto, it was not yet widely accepted by police that that each person has unique firngerprints which can be used as identification. My second mystery, The Secret of White Birch Road, is set in the early 1950s in a remote part of Ontario, where the local cop and the country doctor were the only experts available. Things like the time of death and details of evidence might well elude everyone then, whereas they shouldn't, nowadays, in an urban setting.

      Another reason for choosing to write cosy mysteries is that they are character-driven rather than plot driven. While there must be action, to keep readers interested, the story can originate with the complexities of human nature.

      Also, cosies don't exploit violence to sell books. They aren't full of blood and guts.

      In my view, a cosy mystery is just as realistic as a hardboiled novel. Not many of us here tonight earn our living as police officers and private detectives, or live on the mean streets of Chicago or LA, nor do we run across dead bodies in everyday life. Yet when something violent or mysterious occurs in the world around us we sit up and take notice, and mull it over, and try to understand it - we apply what Poe called 'ratiocination' to the extent that we have information - and we don't take violent death for granted, but feel alarmed and appalled. This is the world that I present in my novels.

      I have never started at the beginning of a story and worked chronologically to the end. I always know in my head how the story will turn out, and I have notes and jottings, but not an elaborate outline. I first write the scenes that come easily, which I can visualize. At some point the bits and pieces come together and it is easy and even exciting to write the missing parts. That way you can surprise yourself, too, and use new ideas as they occur to you.

      I urge aspiring writers to think of writing as an activity. Certainly for some of us it may be a profession, a career, a vocation, a hobby, an obsession or a compulsion, but first and foremost it's a human activity. It's akin to singing. Some of us sing in the shower, some in a choir. Some get recording contracts, some sing opera, some go out to karaoke nights. Singing can be a pleasant and fulfilling activity in all of these circumstances.

      In writing, there are wonderful moments, of losing oneself in the process of creation, or of feeling very clever for having solved a problem in the narrative. Someone has said, "The worst day fishing is better than the best day at work," and in my experience, "the worst day writing is definitely better than the best day at work."