Blindsided: Murder Mystery Plot Twists

Skilled mystery authors can use an ingenious plot twist to surprise and stump even veteran mystery readers. Here are some favorites that continue to inspire imitation and inventive variation. Let's start with the Narrator Culprit. Readers tend to trust the mystery narrator, especially if he or she is a victim, sympathetic witness or helpful aide to investigators, so it's a real shock to find out they've been bamboozled by a villain (and the author). It worked in The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie and the more recent Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. The Impossible Murder twist is another favorite in which the evidence seems to contradict logic and science, including the many variations on the classic "locked room" murder. Read John Dickson Carr's The Three Coffins for an ingenious example that includes a locked room death followed minutes later by the shooting death of the main suspect on a snow-covered street, surrounded only by his own footprints yet with a powder burn showing he was shot at close range. The Supernatural Killer is a popular way to play mind games with readers, too. There's often a spooky house, a ghost sighting, a curse, an old crime and a new one, and clues that fit both natural and supernatural explanations. A recent example is Tana French's The Secret Place, in which adolescent girls at a posh Irish boarding school claim to police investigators that they see the ghost of the boy victim of an unsolved murder. Similarly, The Chinese Gold Murders, the second entry in Robert van Gulik's Judge Dee series set in ancient China, involves sightings of a murdered magistrate's ghost, as well as a murdered monk in the wrong grave and a tiger at large, events Judge Dee traces to a common cause to solve the mystery. Finally, there's the Not Really Dead Suspect ploy, in which the author misdirects reader attention away from a supposedly dead character as in Agatha Christie's famous And Then There Were None. For more classic plot twists courtesy of Queen of Mystery Christie, read http://flavorwire.com/537670/agatha-christies-10-best-plot-twists/10

April Is the Month for Civil War Mysteries

With states rights and minority rights currently sparking passionate political clashes, April is a great month to gain historical perspective on the issues. After all, the first shot in the American Civil War, the ultimate battle over states rights and equality, was fired 155 years ago on April 12, 1861, when Confederate shore batteries opened fire on Fort Sumter, South Carolina. Four years later, with 650,000-850,000 killed per recent estimates, the nation's bloodiest war essentially ended on April 9, 1865, when Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union General Ulysses S. Grant in Appomattox, Va. Today, when victory is measured in bombast and votes rather than blood, and when politicos fret over party rifts, Abraham Lincoln amazes with the compassionate, inclusive leadership of his Second Inaugural, "with malice toward none, with charity for all." If history books put you to sleep, murder mysteries may be an easier way to revisit that watershed time this April. For example, Faded Coat of Blue by Owen Parry won the Herodotus Award for historical fiction and started Parry's Abel Jones mystery series about a Union officer courted by General George McClellan as a spy. On the distaff side, Miriam Grace Monfredo penned the Cain Trilogy about Bronwen Llyr, a spy for the Treasury Department, and her sister, Katherine, a nurse for the Union Army. She also won the Herodotus Award with Brothers of Cain, the second in the trilogy. For more Civil War mystery suggestions: http://www.criminalelement.com/blogs/2012/06/civil-war-mysteries-in-time-for-the-sesquicentennial-anniversary-tony-hays-historical-miriam-grace-monfredo-michael-killian-owen-parry-ann-mcmillan

Plotting Murder by the Real Numbers

Murder mysteries are fiction. The reality of murder is both more mundane and more inexplicably tragic. If you want to write a murder tale that accurately reflects crime data, you will describe a handgun homicide involving two male friends engaged in an argument that escalated. It would be more interesting if that argument involved a tabloid-favored motive, but conflicts over romance, money and drug/alcohol-fueled temper rarely lead to deadly consequences as it turns out. Here are the statistics about real homicides: FBI data shows about 69% of 2013 murders involved firearms, mainly handguns. In contrast, knives/cutting instruments accounted for 12%, blunt objects 3.5%, and strangulation less than 1%. As for who is most likely to end up a murder victim, FBI 2013 data shows that 77.7 % of murder victims were male and 51.7% were black (compared to 45.7% white). And when it comes to the killers, where gender was known, 89.3% were male, and where race was known, 53.6% were black and 43.9% white. Although mass killings rose in 2015, one-to-one murder is still the norm, with nearly 47% of homicides single victim/single offender situations. And while people worry about evil serial killers, they should be paying attention to the people at the kitchen table. In incidents of murder for which the relationship of murder victim and offender were known, 55.9 % were killed by someone they knew (acquaintance, neighbor, friend, boyfriend), and 24.9% were slain by family members. For a fiction writer looking for a realistic motive, here's the scoop: Of the murders for which the circumstances of the crimes were known, 24.4 % of murders occurred during the commission of a felony (rape, robbery, burglary, drug deal), and 39.6% involved "arguments." Digging into those personal conflicts, you find the cliché motives of murder fiction are rare: Love triangles accounted for just 1% of homicides, 2.3% involved an argument over money or property, and 2,6% involved a fight fueled by drugs or alcohol. If you want to go deeper into the numbers, see https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in-the-u.s.-2013/offenses-known-to-law-enforcement/expanded-homicide/expandhomicidemain_final

Unconventional Crime Fiction, California-Style

If your mystery bookshelf is overstocked with British-accented capers, hard-boiled noir and "cozy" cat-lady sleuths, it's time to add crime fiction titles that will take you off the beaten path. And what better setting for the unconventional than California? Here are four examples of wilder, weirder California-style crime fiction. Start with The Sisters Brothers, Patrick DeWitt's Wild West tale, shortlisted for the 2012 Booker Prize, about hitmen brothers Eli and Charlie Sisters, who are hired to track down and kill a prospector named Hermit Kermit Warm. The psychopathic brothers' misadventures as they travel on horseback from Oregon to San Francisco involve violent fur trappers, floozies, con artists, drifters and dentists, in a flurry of Western cliches subverted. The West Coast scene stays grim into modern times with The Royal Family by William T. Vollmann, final entry in his “Prostitution Trilogy” set in San Francisco’s seamy Tenderloin District. The plot revolves around a struggling private investigator, obsessively in love with the wife of his brother, a successful lawyer in the Financial District, who is hired by a shadowy tycoon to track down a "Queen of the Whores" overseeing the city’s underworld of sex workers and addicts. Head south to L.A.'s underbelly next, with Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon, famed for the classic Gravity's Rainbow. Drawing on his life in Manhattan Beach in the 1960s and '70s, Pynchon offers protagonist Larry “Doc” Sportello, a pothead Philip Marlowe who sets out to help an ex-girlfriend worried about a threat to her married real-estate tycoon lover. The business mogul disappears, his bodyguard is murdered, and Doc is drawn into a psychedelic web of police vigilantes, assassination plots, drug deals, shady businesses and political radicals. For more L.A.-weird, read The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death by Charlie Huston. When down-on-his-luck Webster Fillmore Goodhue takes a job with the Clean Team, a firm doing “trauma scene and waste cleaning” (inspiring the title), he gets involved with a seductive female client whose father has blown his brains out--and is quickly sucked into a world of hijackers, smugglers and cold-blooded killers. Of course, other places besides California fit into strange, original crime novels. For more, read http://www.allthingscrimeblog.com/2013/06/24/ten-best-weird-crime-novels-that-will-keep-you-up-all-night-reading/