Sunday, May 3, 2020

Isolation Can Deepen a Mystery's Impact

If you're like me, you're finding the isolation of social distancing increasingly tiresome, but it certainly improves understanding of why social, mental and physical isolation is such a powerful element in mystery writing. In a strange way it's also comforting; current isolation is lonely and boring, but at least danger is kept at bay, outside of a secure personal space. Not so, with mysteries and thrillers! For example, the great Agatha Christie traps 10 characters on a mysterious island as they are killed off one by one in And Then There Were None. In the lesser known The Sittaford Mystery, Christie puts six people in an isolated snowbound house on the moors. They amuse themselves with a seance until "spirits" announce the murder of a neighbor, and one of the group walks six miles through snow to check on the potential victim, who is indeed dead. There are motives aplenty; it's the means that seem impossible. Or try Ruth Ware's claustrophobic The Woman in Cabin 10 about a woman travel-magazine writer on an exclusive luxury cruise assignment. She believes she has witnessed a woman being thrown overboard, but when all passengers are accounted for, the ship sails on, trapping her at sea where something (or someone) has gone terribly wrong. Smilla's Sense of Snow, by Peter Hoeg, combines the icy loneliness of Greenland with a young sleuth, Smilla Jasperson, who is herself socially and emotionally distant and living far from her roots in Copenhagen. When she becomes convinced that a six-year-old boy, a Greenlander like herself, did not accidentally fall to his death from a building, Smilla follows clues back to Greenland, where an explosive secret waits under the ice. In the aptly named Isolation, an entry in Mary Anna Evans' Faye Longchamp series, archaeologist Faye Longchamp-Mantooth is on her Florida island home struggling to recover from a personal loss when a close friend at the local marina is brutally murdered. Faye must reach back over a century into her family's history to fight an insidious danger. A disturbing gothic homage to isolation comes in Dennis Lehane's Shutter Island. During the summer of 1954, two U.S. Marshals arrive on the island, now a hospital for the criminally insane, to investigate the disappearance of a murderess patient as a hurricane bears down. Unreliable narrators lead the reader into a nightmare maze of madness and Cold War paranoia. And just this year, Australian Jaye Ford debuts Beyond Fear about Jodie Cramer, a teen survivor of a terrifying assault by three strangers, who 17 years later joins three girlfriends for a fun weekend in a secluded cabin. When the isolation reawakens her fears, she tries to convince her friends they are in danger, but they dismiss her foreboding as flashbacksuntil two men knock at the door. For more fiction with themes of isolation, loneliness and alienation, see http://www.novelrecommendations.com/novels-loneliness-isolation-alienation/