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 flashbacks—until 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/

Honeymoons Can Be Murder

I took a brief hiatus from posting to celebrate my youngest son's wedding, but my mystery addict side, seeing the newlyweds' besotted bliss, began to speculate on the honeymoon's place in murder fiction. Some noted mystery/thriller writers have certainly plotted how a love story can transform into tragedy. Best-selling author James Patterson, for one, penned Honeymoon, in which an FBI agent John O'Hara investigates the alluring "black widow" Nora Sinclair, who practices a deadly sorcery on the men she enthralls, including O'Hara. In First to Die, which launched his Women Murder Club series, Patterson brings together a team of four female sleuths--a homicide inspector, a medical examiner, an assistant D.A., and a crime desk reporter--to catch a killer stalking newlyweds in San Francisco. Honeymoon to Nowhere by Akimitsu Takagi, a Soho Crime novel, adds international flavor with a Japanese setting: Etsuko insists on marrying a shy young university lecturer despite her parents' objections that his father was a war criminal and his deceased younger brother a murderer, but then, on their wedding night, the groom leaves in response to an urgent phone call and is still missing in the morning. For a tropical taste, check out Jaden Skye's Death by Honeymoon, first book in the Caribbean Murder series: Cindy and Clint are enjoying a dream honeymoon in Barbados when Clint is drowned in a freak ocean accident. Returning home to her wealthy husband's unfriendly family, Cindy begins to question how well she knew her husband when an anonymous photo of a woman she has never met arrives in the mail. Digging into Clint's e-mails and files, she discovers secrets from his past that convince her that Clint was murdered, and she returns to Barbados to find out what really happened. Of course, mystery queen Agatha Christie leads the way in the famous Death on the Nile, with Hercule Poirot seeking the murderer of a new bride among a river cruise boat's many suspects. For true crime tales of honeymoon murder, check out Listverse.com's 10 cases of spouses committing murder on their honeymoons. One important lesson for honeymooners: If your new beloved convinces you to get a big insurance policy before the honeymoon, avoid romantic trysts near the cruise ship railing or cliff's edge. For details, see http://listverse.com/2018/01/02/10-newlyweds-who-killed-their-spouses-on-their-honeymoons/

The Sport of Catching Red Herrings

Red herrings swim happily about in mystery fiction pools and challenge readers to net them. FYI, the origin of the term "red herring"--in this case meaning a clue that leads mystery readers towards a false conclusion--is supposedly based on the use of a kipper (a pungent, reddish smoked fish) to train hounds, either to follow a scent despite distractions or to divert them from the correct scent. Most authors are not so obligingly obvious as Dan Brown in The Da Vinci Code, where he creates the red herring Bishop Aringarosa, a highly suspicious cleric, and names him for a red/pink (rosa) herring (aringa) in Italian! Apropos of the dog training origin of "red herring," Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles, about a family supposedly cursed by a demonic hound, contains famous red herrings in an escaped convict and a sketchy butler. However, Agatha Christie is really the queen of red herrings. Just a few examples: In The ABC Murders, the alphabetical order of murders is a red herring planted by the killer to fool the police (and the reader), while The Moving Finger's poison pen letters are red herrings that fail to hid the murderer's true motive from the sharp-eyed Miss Marple. In Death on the Nile, when an heiress is murdered on a Nile cruise packed with suspects, Hercules Poirot uses his "little grey cells" to spot red herrings like the bad blood between the heiress's husband and jilted fiancee. Another good example is found in The Withdrawing Room by bestseller Charlotte MacLeod. The red herrings begin with Barnwell Augustus Quiffen, an obnoxious old lodger at young Sarah Keeling's Beacon Hill boardinghouse full of eccentrics. Quiffen dies suddenly by falling under a train, but a bag lady appears to tell Sarah that it was no accident, that she saw an unknown person push Quiffen to his death. Next the lodger replacing Quiffen is murdered in a random street mugging. Sarah and her friend Max Bittersohn investigate, uncovering a carefully planned crime. In more recent fiction, red herrings dart through last year's New York Times' bestseller I Let You Go, a debut novel by Clare Mackintosh. The novel begins with a grim prologue about the hit-and-run death of a 5-year-old boy in Bristol, leaving police with few clues to a crime witnessed only by the boy's distraught single mother. The story is next narrated by Jenna Gray, who has escaped to an isolated shack on the Welsh coast to try to forget her traumatic memories, while another narrative follows the police doggedly investigating. Spoiler alert: There's a big plot twist ahead! For more examples of red herrings in popular books, TV shows, movies and even video games, check out https://literaryterms.net/red-herring/

Mysteries From the Viewpoint of a Witness

Most murder mysteries focus on the victim, the killer and the sleuth (detective, PI, prosecutor, etc.). But there is a third group of essential characters: the witnesses. Authors present witnesses and their narratives to the readers for evaluation based on the same elements used by legal teams. First, expertise and experience are key to witness credibility, ranging from specialized education to ordinary familiarity. Witnesses are also evaluated in terms of consistency, meaning both consistent telling of his or her story by the witness and consistency with input from other witnesses. A certain level of detail makes a witness more believable, too--as long as details don't vary with each telling. Readers (and jurors) also judge reliability by witness "demeanor," or a gut "feel" evoked by dress, body language, speaking style, and assumptions (perhaps wrong) about social, racial or ethnic background. Finally, perceived "neutrality" counts in how much weight readers are going to give to a witness; readers are more likely to suspect self-serving bias if the witness has a clear stake in the outcome, such as financial gain or a personal relationship. Witnesses don't have to be supporting cast members in mystery fiction. Authors can choose to unfold a story from the viewpoint of a witness for a number of good reasons: to mislead with partial or unreliable narration, to hide or highlight the reasoning of the detective, or to create empathy and emotional tension. A recent example of this is The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins, in which the main character Rachel witnesses a shocking scene involving a couple she has observed during her daily train commute past their neighborhood, but her emotional problems, drinking and personal bias cause the police (and the reader) to question her reliability as a narrator. Another example where witnesses take center stage is Agatha Christie's Murder in Retrospect, in which Hercule Poirot solves the 16-year-old murder of a philandering painter, for which his wife was convicted, based solely on narratives of five witnesses. If you want a witness protagonist plus romance, check out The Witness by Nora Roberts, about a young woman who flees after witnessing a Russian mob killing and emerges years later in a small Ozarks town as a quirky freelance programmer protected by high-tech security systems, guard dog and firearms--and so she naturally attracts the sexy local police chief! Unfortunately, fictional justice does not necessarily mimic reality in terms of credible witnesses. Check out these 10 famous lying witnesses, and the miscarriages of justice that resulted from their false testimony: http://listverse.com/2015/08/04/10-people-who-brazenly-lied-on-the-witness-stand/

Avoiding Cliches in Mystery Plot Twists

There's nothing worse than a mystery "plot twist" that you can see coming for many chapters ahead. There is an art to the plot twist that requires writers to avoid the obvious (the cruel stepfather) and gimmicks ("it was just a dream") and then to plant clues that obscure, redirect or contradict suspicions so that the final twist surprises and impresses readers by fitting the right puzzle pieces into a believable solution. Although there are very few plot devices that are completely original, some plot twists slip more easily into cliche if attempted by less skilled mystery writers. Here are some of my pet peeves. The first is a mystery tale that, in a desperate effort to create a twist, injects some last-minute new suspect, deus ex machina event, or unrealistic "coincidence." This abuses the basic mystery-solving pact with the reader. But I'm equally irritated by authors who create so many suspicious characters, red herring clues and dead-end turns that following the plot line becomes mentally exhausting. Then the eventual solution of the mystery goes from an "aha" moment to an "at long last" moment. Plot twists often focus on one of four characters: the victim, the suspect, the detective or the narrator. For victims, there's the old "I'm not really dead" resurrection (usually because the victim was trying to fool the law, an enemy, a loved one or an insurance company). Other victim surprises include mistaken identity or a twin/doppelganger killing. In the wrong hands, the not-a-real-victim twist undermines the mystery and reader interest. When it comes to suspects, plot surprises often involve a guilty "but who would ever think" character (the granny, the kid, the pretty girl) or a not-guilty "but sure looks like a villain" character, a la Harry Potter's Professor Snape. Writers can unwittingly flag a suspect by overly disguising a character as either too nice or too nasty. When it's the detective who delivers the plot twist, a dusty ploy is the surprise appearance of a character or motive from the detective's "tortured past." That so many fictional detectives are tortured (alcoholics, loners, etc. ) is another cliche worth discussing elsewhere! Finally, there's the "unreliable" narrator. This plot device has created some classics, like Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd or Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl, but it's not easy to pull off (please don't have the killer's creepy italicized commentary throughout a story). And finally, it is not really a plot twist when a death ruled to be accidental or a suicide turns out to be (shock) a homicide. We know we're reading a "murder mystery" after all. For some examples of mysteries with critically acclaimed plot twists, see the https://the-line-up.com/plot-twists-books

Senior Themes: Proving Mystery Never Gets Old

Because I'm in the process of moving my 91-year-old father to an assisted living facility, I've been researching the mysteries of aging--and aging in mysteries. Most mysteries about seniors feature amusing, quirky "golden-agers" of the "cozy" mystery variety. I guess it's reassuring to read about older characters who aren't "cognitively impaired" and "mobility challenged" while "facing mortality." But, after dealing with real senior issues, I began to hanker for a realistic senior detective without a sweetening dose of cute humor. And I wanted characters and social issues more contemporary than Agatha Christie's Miss Marple in an English country manor! My search of senior-themed mysteries turned up one non-cozy example in Daniel Friedman's Don't Ever Get Old, winner of the Macavity Award for Best First Novel and nominee for both Anthony and Edgar awards for best first novel. Ex-Memphis detective "Buck" Schatz starts on the trail of an old nemesis, partly to settle scores and partly to recover a possible treasure in gold. Though 80-something Buck is literally “too old for this,” his instincts remain, and he does have a grandson's help with things like “the googles” and other technological hurdles. Violence and realism are laced by humor that acknowledges mortality and old age's physical and mental limitations. Another discovery was Thirty-Three Teeth by British author Colin Cotterill, which won a 2006 Dilys Award from the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association. Dr. Siri Paiboun, one of the last doctors left in Laos after the Communist takeover, has been drafted to be national coroner and must unravel a series of mysterious murders. Untrained for the job, the 72-year-old has outstanding qualifications undimmed by age: curiosity and the courage to follow clues despite political pressure. But I'm not opposed to a spunky elder sleuth if he or she is the credible product of a spunky elder author! Start with Macavity Award nominee A Valley to Die For by 81-year-old Radine Trees Nehring, which introduces widow Carrie McCrite and retired detective Henry King to her "Something to Die For" series set in the Ozark mountains. From 83-year-old Lorena McCourtney comes the gray-haired Ivy Malone, protagonist of a series that includes two Daphne du Maurier Award winners, Invisible and On the Run. Finally, Edgar Award-winning screenwriter Rita Lakin, 87, offers the Gladdy Gold series, starting with Getting Old Is Murder, in which 75-year-old Gladdy Gold and her gang of Fort Lauderdale retirees hunt down a killer. For cozy senior options, see http://www.mystery-cozy.com/Mystery-Cozy-Senior-Sleuth-Cozies.html

Halloween As a Murder Backdrop, in Fiction and Fact

Halloween is around the corner, and murder mystery authors can't help but be drawn to this celebration of restless dead souls and dark forces in the chill, autumn night. Fictional tales using the holiday setting include the great Agatha Christie's Hallowe'en Party, in which Hercule Poirot is called on to solve the murder of a 13-year-old girl after she boasted at a Halloween party that she once witnessed a murder. For those who prefer their mysteries a little cozier, there's Susan Wittig Albert's Witches' Bane, her second mystery featuring herb shop owner China Bayles, who must solve a Halloween murder in which her friend, a New Age expert in tarot and astrology, is a prime suspect. For a Western flavor, read Tony Hillerman's The Fallen Man. Newly retired Joe Leaphorn investigates a skeleton discovered on Halloween at one of the holiest of Navajo places and soon realizes the skeleton is that of a missing person from one of his long-unsolved cases. In reality, crime statistics do spike on Halloween. After all, the holiday involves alcohol-infused parties, opening doors to masked people, and vulnerable children approaching strangers to ask for candy--and most of that happens at night. Actual murders that have taken place on Halloween include the sensational death of Martha Moxley (which inspired numerous books and for which Kennedy family scion Michael Skakel was eventually convicted and later released on appeal). Another horror tale that inspired film and TV documentaries is the Halloween rape and torture-murder of 16-year-old Shirley Ledford, which led to the capture of a pair of serial killer ghouls known as the Tool Box Killers. Now I've never liked the holiday's excessively macabre aspects, so some real Halloween crimes that disturb me involve hanging or decapitated bodies left in plain sight and ignored for hours by passersby who assume they are just realistic "decorations." For more real-life Halloween murder mysteries, read http://listverse.com/2015/10/30/10-sinister-halloween-horror-stories-that-really-happened/

Let Detective Sidekicks Take a Bow

Most mystery readers enjoy imagining themselves with the sharp detective wits of Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Inspector Endeavour Morse or Inspector Thomas Lynley. I'm sure emulation is a lot rarer for the sidekicks of those noted fictional sleuths, who are, in order, Dr. John Watson, Captain Arthur Hastings, Detective Sergeant (DS) Robbie Lewis and DS Barbara Havers. But sidekicks play a very important role. Imagine the mystery plot without them! A sidekicks helps move along the plot by engaging with the main detective character to convey thoughts and feelings quickly and conversationally, by acting as a sounding board for theories and courses of action, and by delivering both red herrings and hot leads. The "duo" concept moves the plot much more naturally and interestingly than if the writer had to resort to big chunks of internal monologue to provide clues and revelations! Sometimes the sidekick can even take over as narrator (reliable or unreliable) a la Dr. Watson. The sidekick narrator, always close to the action, is especially useful in artfully placing clues while keeping the detective's inner process veiled right up to the climax. All sidekicks also offer a way to humanize or deepen the main detective's character by adding humor, emotional interaction, personality contrast, or social commentary. The loyal sidekick can smooth off-putting traits of a complex lead detective, such as Holmes' cold arrogance, Poirot's petty fussiness, Morse's morose overthinking, Lynley's aristocratic maleness. And, of course, sidekicks can be very useful as agents for sudden twists and exciting confrontations and rescues. If you want to meet more mystery fiction sidekicks, in addition to the well-known sleuthing teams noted above (from the pens of Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Colin Dexter and Elizabeth George), see Wikipedia's list of detective teams at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fictional_detective_teams and Colin Dexter's favorite sidekicks: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1383782/Dr-Watson-Detective-Sergeant-Lewis-Colin-Dexter-greatest-sleuthing-sidekicks.html

Senior Lady Sleuths: Gray Locks Join Gray Matter

Now that I'm joining the ranks of senior citizens in a few years (I'm holding off true membership till age 65), I find myself more interested in mystery tales featuring older lady sleuths. Of course, Agatha Christie's Miss Jane Marple, the shrewdly observant spinster of St. Mary Mead, has an international fan base. And Jessica Fletcher, Donald Bain's retired English teacher and novelist, even won a TV following for the "Murder, She Wrote" series. There are many other outstanding examples: M.C. Beaton's Agatha Raisin, a retired PR agent turned PI; globe-trotting Mrs. Emily Pollifax, grandmother and spy, of the eponymous Dorothy Gilman series; and Eugenia Potter, widowed chef and star of the culinary cozy mysteries of Virginia Rich and Nancy Pickard. I wondered if there was some special set of skills offered by older ladies to make them appealing to mystery writers. And I came up with five reasons a mystery author might choose to create a gray-haired female detective. For one thing, as retirees, and often widows or spinsters, older women have more time to devote to detection without the constant, complicating drag of career and/or family on character and plot. Second, their judgment can be informed by age rather than years of police training, so they can draw on long experience with personal and social interactions to pick up the subtle clues to murder. Third, these fictional characters can be freed by age, maturely comfortable in their own skins and less constrained by worry over social conventions and sexual politics. This allows authors to create an eccentric, independent, adventurous or even comical character that would be less believable as a 20-something or 30-something heroine. Fourth, older ladies can approach evil obliquely and catch it unawares, because there are few people seen as less threatening than a grandmother or maiden aunt. And, finally, these fictional sleuths are not just older people, they are older women. Even today, most societies reward men for action, control and dominance, and encourage women to be more observant, emotionally attuned and socially participant. Female detectives can turn that gender bias into an advantage in terms of honed human observational skills. For some more senior sleuths, check out author Chris Well's post at http://chriswellnovelist.blogspot.com/2010/07/retirement-is-murder-10-senior-sleuths.html

Partners in Detection: Crime-Solving Couples

We're heading for the Labor Day weekend of family barbecues, end-of-summer trips and last-of-summer reading indulgences. So why not combine family and mystery themes with detective fiction that features married teams? After all, the detective couple is a cherished tradition. The era of mystery classics gave us Agatha Christie's Tommy and Tuppence Beresford and Dashiell Hammett's Nick and Nora Charles. More recently conceived sleuthing couples range from Anne Perry's Charlotte and Thomas Pitt in the foggy streets of Victorian London to Lt. Eve Dallas and husband Roarke fighting crime in the futuristic New York of the "in Death" series by J.D. Robb (aka Nora Roberts). Closer to our current time and place, there is the husband-wife team of Dillon Savich and Lacey Sherlock in the FBI Thriller series by Catherine Coulter and Faye Kellerman's LAPD Lt. Peter Decker and his Orthodox Jewish wife Rina Lazarus. What do couples have to offer readers that the lone detective can't deliver? Well, there is the spice of romance (yes, married people are still lovers, even outside of fiction) and the opportunity to add character interest--either extra tension/distrust (when the couple is in a rough patch) or amusing banter/camaraderie (when things are copacetic). Second, a sleuthing couple allows the author to combine mystery-solving styles to good effect; for example, one may be emotionally and socially intuitive, while the other is more scientific or legalistic. (If you assumed that the first description fits the wife and the second fits the husband, remember that good writers confound stereotypes.) Finally, the plot tension with a crime-solving couple is literally doubled as each half of the duo risks both personal safety and that of a loved one by confronting evil. For some more partners in detection, check out http://www.criminalelement.com/blogs/2013/01/novel-crime-solving-couples-corrina-lawson-geekmom-harriet-vane-eve-dallas

Intriguing Mystery Plot Twists, Fictional and Real

Mystery lovers, by their nature, are lovers of the plot twist. Just a few of my favorites with surprise twists include Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins, Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield, In the Woods by Tana French, Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane, The Secret Keeper by Kate Morton, and We Were Liars by E. Lockhart. Of course, the great Agatha Christie has multiple entries, such as The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, And Then There Were None, Death on the Nile and Murder on the Orient Express. Notice how often the "unreliable narrator" is key to the surprise twist, by the way. Sometimes fact is even more astounding than fiction, however. Just check out Listverse.com's post about 10 real-life mysteries solved by incredible plot twists. For example, there's seven-year-old Maria Ridulph's 1957 murder solved by a "murder will out" twist 54 years later. Although 17-year-old neighbor John Tessier was suspected of Ridulph's murder at the time, he had an iron-clad alibi: He had taken a train trip on the day the child disappeared. The police reopened the case in 1994 after a deathbed statement by Tessier's mother, but the alibi had them stumped--until one of Tessier's ex-girlfriends helpfully provided an old framed photograph. Investigators found the 1957 train ticket hidden inside, unstamped because Tessier had never used it to take the trip. Tessier was finally charged with murder in 2011. Science, not luck, played the key role in another seemingly insoluble murder. After a 13-year-old girl was found stabbed to death in 2011 in Italy, police took 15,000 DNA tests to compare with DNA samples found at the murder scene. One man's near-match led to testing of his family, including a long-dead uncle and the uncle's children--without an exact match. Police then learned the dead uncle had been a very active womanizer, and 500 women were investigated. Police finally found a married woman whose twins turned out to be the secret offspring of the dead uncle. One of the twins was a match for the killer's DNA, and he was charged with murder in 2014. For more real-life twists, read http://listverse.com/2015/03/25/10-mysteries-resolved-by-unbelievable-surprise-twists/.

Mystery on Board: Cruising Into Murder

It's vacation time, and maybe you're longing to sail away from it all. You may even be one of the folks actually taking a cruise ship to exotic destinations. But what if there is a murderer hunting among the passengers trapped on that floating hotel? If you don't mind a frisson of anxiety with your real or imagined cruise adventure, add some of these noted mystery authors' tales of shipboard murder to your reading list. A well-known classic is Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie, in which her Belgian sleuth Hercules Poirot plans a leisurely cruise down the Nile but ends up sifting through suspicious passengers and false leads to solve the murder of a wealthy young woman. Bestselling suspense author Mary Higgins Clark also penned a thriller with a cruise setting. In Clark's You Belong to Me, a killer stalks lonely women on board cruise ships as a radio-show psychologist rushes to catch the murderer before he can literally stop her dead. Famed New Zealand writer Ngaio Marsh even introduced her mystery series' police detective Roderick Alleyn to the high seas in Singing in the Shrouds, sending Alleyn on a ship voyage in pursuit of a serial killer. But the King of Ocean-Liner Fiction is Conrad Allen. Allen's eight mysteries in the "Murder on the..." series are all set aboard pre-World War I cruise ships, starting with Murder on the Lusitania, and feature a husband and wife sleuthing team. For an updated ocean liner tale, fans of the "Murder, She Wrote" mystery series will appreciate Murder on the QE2, by Donald Bain and "Jessica Fletcher," as Jessica, invited aboard as one of seven guest lecturers, tries to solve the murder of a fellow speaker. For more mysteries with cruise ship settings, see http://www.cozy-mystery.com/blog/mystery-books-that-take-place-on-cruise-ships-mystery-books-at-sea.html

The 'Bad Seed' in Fact and Fiction

Psychopathic villains--manipulative, aggressive, remorseless and unemotional--abound in murder mysteries, but when those psychopaths are children, an element of horror enters. Remember Rhoda, the too-perfect little girl murderess in the 1954 novel The Bad Seed by William March? Or Kevin, a school massacre perpetrator, whose mother suspects his evil capacity long before his final horrific acts in Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin. Agatha Christie's Crooked House also featured a deadly child in scheming 12-year-old Josephine Leonides, who kills her grandfather because he won't pay for ballet lessons--and almost gets away with it. Author Jonathan Kellerman, a clinical child psychologist who writes New York Times best-selling mysteries featuring psychologist sleuth Dr. Alex Delaware, gives support to fictional "bad seed" characterizations. He notes in his nonfiction Savage Spawn, inspired by the spate of 1997-1998 schoolyard shootings, that “psychopathic tendencies begin very early in life, as young as three, and they endure.” Though research shows psychopathy is 50% genetic, biology is not destiny for our complex human personalities, and nurture can guide nature. Budding pre-psychopaths can be tempered by a non-aggressive environment and by a parenting style that is neither too permissive nor too authoritarian while providing structure and limits, according to psychology experts. After all, children with psychopathic traits do not all become killers; many grow up to use the daring, charming and manipulative aspects of their personalities as successful business tycoons, political leaders or sports stars. Still, the fictional tales of young murderers are not just fantasy and are reinforced every year by headlines about preteen killers and school shootings. We need to be alert to signs in children that presage criminal acts--violence toward people or animals, lack of guilt or remorse, social isolation, defiance and sensation-seeking--and commit to timely intervention. For more on youthful violence prediction and intervention, see http://crimefeed.com/2016/01/predicting-violent-criminal-behavior-how-to-spot-the-warning-signs-intervene/

'Poison Pens' Find Dangerous Cyber Power

The poison pen letter has been a plot device in some classic murder mysteries. For example, Dorothy Sayers' Gaudy Night and Agatha Christie's The Moving Finger featured these cruel communications--anonymous notes sent to the targeted recipient or third parties to humiliate, intimidate and discredit. A pen and ink letter seems quaint in this digital age. But the malice of the poison pen not only still exists, it has been further empowered by technology. Cyberbullying is one modern manifestation. Hurtful words and images can be unleashed 24/7 with free, anonymous clicks and delivered to large online and mobile social networks. The consequences have been especially devastating for vulnerable teenagers. Statistics show that 15% of high school students reported they were victims of cyberbullies in 2013, and the rising number of highly publicized teen suicides due to cyberbullying has sparked national concern. Some well-known mystery authors have taken note and incorporated cyberbullying in their plots. Start with Val McDermid's Splinter the Silence, featuring psychologist Tony Hill and former police detective Carol Jordan. The plot centers on the mysterious deaths of several outspoken feminists who were the victims of vicious cyberbullying. It is assumed that the torrent of abuse overwhelmed them and caused them to silence themselves in high-profile suicides. But Hill begins to see something even more sinister at work. In Roadside Crosses by Jeffery Deaver, his protagonist Kathryn Dance of the California Bureau of Investigation is called in when roadside crosses start appearing along the highways of the Monterey Peninsula--not as memorials to past accidents but as markers for fatalities to come. After the driver in a recent fatal car crash, a gaming-obsessed teen who’s been the target of cyberbullies, vanishes, Dance's manhunt takes her into the illusory world of bloggers, social networks and cyberbullying. Finally, veteran mystery writer Nevada Barr has penned Boar Island (an Anna Pigeon Mystery). Anna Pigeon, a National Park Service Ranger, finds out that the adopted teenage daughter of a friend is being victimized by cyberbullies and offers an escape by asking them to join her at her new post in Maine's Acadia National Park, staying in a house on nearby Boar Island. But a cyberstalker follows them, and soon Anna is dealing with a brutal murder as well. For more information about cyberbullying, read https://www.stopbullying.gov/cyberbullying/what-is-it/

Injecting Poison Into the Mystery Plot

Poison is a rare murder weapon statistically but not fictionally. And here's a case where mystery plots may be more revealing than crime data. Many homicidal poisonings go undetected per experts, and only one in five verified murders by poisoning is ever solved. As an introduction to the topic, read The Poisoner's Handbook by Pulitzer Prize-winning scientist Deborah Blum. It's a historical thriller about how a medical examiner and toxicologist team uses trailblazing forensic science to bring to justice poisoners in early twentieth-century New York, setting new standards for forensic detection along the way. Structured as a series of linked stories about poison death investigations, it was a finalist for the 2010 Agatha Award for nonfiction and a New York Times bestseller in 2011. Or, you can turn to fictional inspiration. Agatha Christie counted many poison victims in her mystery books, from Cards on the Table, in which an evil doctor salts anthrax on a shaving brush to kill with a razor nick, to The Pale Horse, where tasteless, odorless thallium is the poison of choice. Another British mystery queen, P.D. James, used insecticide in a whiskey to poison a trainee in a nursing home in Shroud for a Nightingale. But how close are the fictional mysteries to real poisonings? Author-scientist Blum lists carbon monoxide, arsenic, radium, cyanide, nicotine, aconite, chloroform, mercury and thallium (kudos, Agatha) among her favorite poisons from historical homicides. And based on convicted poisoners (recognizing that they represent the minority of poisoners who have been caught), criminal profilers can say that, contrary to the popular notion that poison is a woman's weapon, the majority of convicted poisoners are male. The homicidal poisoner is also more likely to be in the medical field (doctor, nurse, lab technician) or in a care-taking role (wife, mother, nursing home attendant) where he or she has ready access to poisonous means and vulnerable, trusting victims. Psychological profiling of convicted poisoners shows that they tend to be clever, methodical, self-centered, emotionally immature and certainly unburdened by morality and empathy. And they are sneaky, often skillfully masking their true natures by pretending to be a loving spouse or caring nurse. For examples of more famous poisonings in literature, check out http://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/jan/16/ten-best-poisonings-john-mullan

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

Christmas Magic Inspires Classic Mystery Writers

It's almost Christmas, and, for mystery lovers, that means a slew of seasonal mysteries. Besides all the "cozy" murder tales rife with small-town festivities and pie recipes, the holiday has inspired some classic mystery authors. For example, Agatha Christie penned Hercule Poirot's Christmas: The Belgian detective, spending Christmas with a friend in an English village, offers to help the Lee family solve the bloody murder of a tyrannical patriarch at their holiday family reunion. Christie also wrote The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding, a gathering of short mysteries featuring Poirot and her other beloved sleuth Miss Marple. If Christie doesn't satisfy your thirst for British Yuletide mayhem, you can curl up with Silent Nights: Christmas Mysteries, a short-story collection of vintage British mystery writers' holiday-themed tales. For a more recent holiday mystery offering, read New York Times bestselling author Anne Perry. Perry writes a Christmas-themed mystery each year, and this year's 13th seasonal tale is A Christmas Escape: On the Mediterranean island of Stromboli, protagonist Charles Latterly arrives at a small hotel hoping that the island’s blue skies will brighten his spirits. Although orphaned teenager Candace Finbar helps introduce lonely Charles to the island's beauty, his fellow guests turn out to be unhappy, quarrelsome, suspicious company. As the local volcano stirs ominously, a body is found, and Charles suspects a killer among the other guests. Now, for those readers who want to focus on the mystery of Christmas without the murder, check out this list of the 50 best Christmas books for adults or kids, ranging from A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, O. Henry's The Gift of the Magi, and Truman Capote's A Christmas Memory, all the way to Dr. Seuss's How the Grinch Stole Christmas: http://www.stylist.co.uk/books/50-best-christmas-books

Once a Rare Breed, Female Sleuths Proliferate

Ever since Nancy Drew, I've liked female sleuths in mystery fiction, especially because they were once a relatively rare breed. Now women mystery-solvers--police detectives, medical examiners, journalists, psychiatrists and detecting psychics--proliferate in publishing. In fact, the 2015 Edgar Award nominees included two good examples. Karin Slaughter, known for her Will Trent crime-solving bestsellers, was nominated for her first stand-alone effort, Coptown, about two disparate police women, one defying her privileged background by entering the force and one out to prove herself to a family with a police background. They become uneasy partners in 1974 Atlanta on the hunt for a serial killer targeting cops. Another finalist for the 2015 Edgar, as well as the Mary Higgins Clark Award, was Invisible City, a debut work by Julia Dahl. Protagonist Rebekah Roberts, whose mother abandoned her as an infant to return to her Hasidic faith, moves to New York to pursue a journalism career, also putting her near Brooklyn's Hasidic community, where her mother might still be living Covering the story of a murdered Hasidic woman, Rebekah ends up immersing herself in her secretive, unwelcoming world to get at the truth. Of course, I put both books on my bookshelf, but, as I did so, I noticed titles featuring favorite female detectives of the past. I think they're worth a visit from modern mystery fans. I mean, who doesn't love Agatha Christie's sharp-eyed old spinster Miss Marple? Join the village gossips in A Murder Is Announced, a deftly plotted piece of misdirection, to appreciate her. While you're "across the pond," drop in on Harriet Vane, the mystery novelist extraordinaire paired with dashing Lord Peter Wimsey in Dorothy Sayers' Gaudy Night, sometimes called "the first feminist mystery novel." And of course, re-read P.D. James' An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, where England's mystery queen championed her first woman detective way back in the 1970s. To see the other 2015 Edgar Award nominees and winners, go to http://www.theedgars.com/nominees.html

Have You Been Fooled by an Unreliable Narrator?

The popularity of Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, now a hit movie, shows that the "unreliable narrator" is still a potent fictional device. The unreliable narrator is a fictional character--sometimes a protagonist, a witness to events or a third-party storyteller--who misleads the narrative audience (and eavesdropping real readers) by outright lies, concealment or omission of information, and misjudgment or misrepresentation, intentional or unintentional, of characters and situations. There have been many famous unreliable narrators in fiction. Children and naifs are naturally chosen for their poor skill at evaluating people and circumstances, a la Huck in Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. A mentally disturbed narrator creates another type of unreliable voice; consider many Poe stories or Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Characters also mislead to justify or reinvent their actions, like pedophile Humbert Humbert in Nabokov's Lolita, or the fabulist Pi in Yann Martel's Life of Pi.  There is an obvious utility in mystery writing to an unreliable narrator who can provide clues and red herrings while revealing and obscuring motives, all in order to take the reader the long way through the woods to that surprise turn that reveals the truth. One of the most famous mystery examples of an unreliable narrator is Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. This year, Sophie Hannah's paranormal mystery The Orphan Choir offers a seemingly unreliable housewife narrator who complains of hearing children singing liturgical music, music that appears to be all in her head--but maybe not. Now if an astute mystery reader wants to avoid being fooled by an unreliable narrator device, there usually are built-in clues. Consider signals such as narrator contradictions, unexplained memory gaps, lies to other characters, and negative reactions or contradicting input by other characters. Be alert when a narrator's story defies common sense, logic, normal experience or probability. But when a mystery is well written, it is probably more enjoyable to take the twists and turns with the unreliable narrator, right to that satisfyingly unexpected ending. For more examples of unreliable narrators in fiction, see http://flavorwire.com/410468/10-of-literatures-most-unreliable-narrators