How Mystery Writers Can Color in Emotion

Passing through a bookstore, I noted the now-common section devoted to adult coloring books, and I began to think about the role of color in fiction writing, including mysteries.  Color has a proven ability to evoke emotion; there's a reason fast-food logos and ads lean toward appetite-stimulating red and yellow, business materials opt for a trust-inspiring blue, and European prisons paint their walls a calming pink. But the power of color is not limited to the visual arts, online and offline advertising, or interior decor. When we read, we create pictures in our minds, and mystery authors' descriptions of settings, characters and clues are rarely black-and-white snapshots. The color of a suspect's dress, the colors of a winter forest or tropical jungle, or the color of a murder-scene carpet can offer both symbolic meaning that enriches the plot and clues to solving the mystery. A character's color choices can be used to reveal personality traits or emotional states, for example; note that psychiatrist Carl Jung found that introverts and extroverts prefer different colors--blue and red respectively. So if the writer introduces a woman wearing red, she probably does not want to be a wallflower. Sometimes the contrast between color choices and character hint at deception or conflict. Is the big guy in a pink shirt just supremely confident, disguising his aggression or hinting at a less masculine side? Doubt that color has a place in even the most "noir" of mysteries? Consider color's frequent evocative use in mystery titles. As an example, Walter Mosley's Devil in a Blue Dress sets up tension before the first page by pairing the evil and power of "devil" with the trustworthy and inviting aspects associated with "blue." Meanwhile, P.D. James' The Black Tower purposely paints the tower black--the color of power, death, and evil--to create a looming gloom.  (For the literary, it also evokes W.B Yeats' poem of the same name where "in the tomb the dark grows blacker.") Some mystery writers even make color a title theme, such as Ann Cleeves' Shetland series, which includes Blue Lightning, Red Bones, White Nights, and Raven Black. John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee series uses color in all 21 titles, starting with The Deep Blue Good-by through National Book Award-winner The Green Ripper to the final The Lonely Silver Rain. One caveat on coloring fiction prose: Be aware that color psychology differs by culture. For example, white is the color of purity and innocence in Western cultures and the color of death and mourning in Eastern cultures. For a quick overview of color psychology, see http://changingminds.org/disciplines/communication/color_effect.htm

Start the New Year With New Mysteries

January can be a frigidly bleak start to the new year, but it's also a great month to stay cozily indoors enjoying the year's first crop of mystery debuts. For fans of J.D. Robb's Detective Eve Dallas, and her sexy husband Roarke, January brings a 46th entry in the Robb series: Dark in Death. A young woman is murdered with an ice pick during a screening of Hitchcock’s "Psycho" (during the most appropriate scene), and Dallas soon finds a link between the murder and a recent strangulation—with both deaths echoing scenes written by an author of procedural thrillers. Every mother's nightmare propels the tense Two Girls Down by Louisa Luna: Single mother Jamie Brandt leaves her 8- and 10-year-old daughters in the car for a few minutes while she buys a birthday present, and returns to find they've vanished. Brandt's sister enlists tough-as-nails bounty hunter Alice Vega to find the girls, and, when the police resist her help, Alice teams up with a disgraced former cop named Max Caplan. If you want to tap into marital nightmares instead, January offers a twisty psychological thriller in The Wife by Alafair Burke. After a tragic past, Angela is enjoying a quiet life with her son when she meets and marries Jason. Several years later, Jason’s writing career takes off and puts the family in an uncomfortable spotlight as several women make troubling accusations against Jason, and Angela realizes she may not know her husband as well as she thinks. Finally, for a dark exploration of how family legacies can shape us (and destroy us), read A Map of the Dark by Karen Ellis. When a teenage girl named Ruby disappears under mysterious circumstances, FBI agent Elsa Myers takes the case even though she’s already struggling with a dying father and dysfunctional family. As Ruby’s case unfolds, it stirs up long-buried secrets, and Elsa’s own painful history threatens to derail her investigation and her life. For a list of more mysteries and thrillers ahead in 2018, see https://www.amazon.com/Mystery-Coming-Soon-Thriller-Suspense/s?ie=UTF8&page=1&rh=n%3A10457%2Cp_n_publication_date%3A1250228011

A Chill in the Air With These Fall Mystery Imports

Cooler, darker fall days are around the corner, so it's time to stock up on mysteries for cozy holiday reading--including several foreign imports. If you miss genius punk hacker Lisbeth Salander, read The Girl in the Spider's Web by Sweden's David Lagercrantz, who continues the series of the deceased Stieg Larsson. This time Salander and unlikely investigative partner journalist Mikael Blomkvist take on the case of enigmatic computer scientist Frans Balder, a prominent expert in artificial intelligence ensnared in a global intrigue that even involves America's National Security Agency. The New York Times review praises Lagercrantz's "instinctive feel for the world Larsson created," his characterizations and high-velocity writing despite a less-than-convincing plot. Meanwhile, British author Ruth Ware has a debut for those who liked Paula Hawkins' best-selling Girl on the Train. In a Dark, Dark Wood is a psychological thriller in which reclusive crime writer Leonora, known to some as Lee and others as Nora, is invited by a friend she hasn’t seen in years to a weekend party in an eerie glass house deep in the English countryside. Forty-eight hours later, Lee/Nora wakes up in a hospital bed with the knowledge that someone is dead and wondering not only "what happened?" but "what have I done?" Then there is Those We Left Behind by Stuart Neville, author of the popular Belfast crime series featuring DI Jack Lennon. Those We Left Behind is a standalone mystery set in Northern Ireland and centers around Ciaran Devine, who made headlines seven years earlier as the 12-year-old “schoolboy killer" whose confession to the brutal murder of his foster father mitigated the sentence of his older brother. Now Ciaran's release brings big trouble to his probation officer DCI Serena Flanagan, who has always harbored doubts about his confession. Meanwhile, on this side of the pond, Louise Penny has brought back Chief Inspector Armand Gamache for an 11th installment set in the quaint Quebec village of Three Pines. The Nature of the Beast begins with the disappearance of a little boy who always cried wolf--except perhaps one of his tall tales was dangerously true. A search for the boy uncovers murder, an old crime, an old betrayal, and some soul-searching for Gamache. For more top fall mysteries, see the Publishers Weekly list: http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/new-titles/adult-announcements/article/67177-fall-2015-announcements-mysteries-the-mystery-thriller-boom.html

Best-Seller Mysteries for Your Summer Reading

It's time to gather up mystery fare for the long, lazy days of summer. If you are a fan of Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl, you'll like two new best sellers. For those attracted to mean-girl protagonists, try Jessica Knoll's The Luckiest Girl Alive. Ani FaNelli has reinvented herself as a New York magazine writer, boasting a wealthy fiancé and a brand-name wardrobe, but the past threatens her perfect life when she agrees to participate in a documentary about a long-ago shooting at her fancy private high school. If twists by an unreliable narrator were your Gone Girl turn-on, then The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins is your English cup of tea. Protagonist Rachel is a boozy, fantasizing mess who has been fired from her job but structures her days by continuing her London train commute, a trip that conveniently allows her to spy on the street where her ex-husband and his new wife live. She fantasizes about the street's other inhabitants, including a young couple, and when the young woman goes missing, Rachel injects herself into the police inquiry and the lives of the missing woman's husband and her own ex-husband. Of course, there are many well-known writers on the best-seller list this summer--James Patterson, David Balducci, John Sanford, etc.--but if you're tired of urban crime detectives, try these alternatives. First, how about a trip to Wyoming's high plains to meet Craig Johnson's Sheriff Walt Longmire? In Cold Bones, Longmire investigates whether a local Cheyenne man's murder is related to valuable dinosaur bones unearthed on his property. Another alternative detective is "enigmatologist" Jeremy Logan in Lincoln Child's The Forgotten Room. Logan is called in by a prestigious think tank to investigate the suicide of a respected doctor following suddenly bizarre behavior and, in the organization's sprawling mansion, discovers a secret room full of old equipment for mysterious experiments. Finally, Stephen King's 2015 Edgar Award-winning Mr. Mercedes plays with the trappings of the hard-boiled detective story but transforms it with unlikely heroes, including a nervous 43-year-old spinster, who take on the unsolved murder of 23 people run down by a stolen car and then race to prevent the crazed killer from more deadly mayhem. For more options: http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Books-Mystery-Thriller-Suspense/zgbs/books/18

Remembering Mystery Author P.D. James

Some mystery authors transcend the genre in style and originality, and P.D. James, the British "Queen of Crime," who passed away at age 94 this November, is one example. Her last book, Death Comes to Pemberley, was published in 2011 when she was already in her 90s and combined two of her passions, which happily coincide with mine: Jane Austen's social novels and detective fiction. But I fell in love with her poetical Scotland Yard detective Adam Dalgliesh long ago, from his first appearance in Cover Her Face, published in 1962, through 13 other Dalgliesh books, including the award-winning Shroud for a Nightingale, The Black Tower, and A Taste for Death, as well as the last Dalgliesh mystery, The Private Patient, published in 2008. Another favorite was Unsuitable Job for a Woman, which introduced female detective Cordelia Gray, an inspiration/aspiration for female mystery fans back in 1972. James provided this deceptively simple definition of a mystery novel in a 2011 NPR interview: "What we have is a central mysterious crime, which is usually murder. We have a closed circle of suspects, with means, motive and opportunity for the crime. We have a detective who can be amateur or professional who comes in rather like an avenging deity to solve it. And by the end, we do get a solution." The difference between James and most other genre authors is how masterfully she led us on the literary journey through twisted psyches and plots to solution. James, who said she drew inspiration from grande dames of mystery such as Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham and Ruth Rendell, her longtime friend, has earned her own special place in the mystery writing pantheon, and her voice will be missed. For one obituary, see http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/11/27/366997584/british-mystery-novelist-p-d-james-dies-at-94

Try Paranormal Mystery Treats for Halloween

Halloween is a perfect time to indulge in mysteries with the extra spice of the supernatural--ghosts, curses, magic, haunted houses and dark forces. I've always had a soft spot for Jonathan Kellerman's best-selling Alex Delaware mysteries set in Los Angeles, so I'll start with The Golem of Hollywood by Jonathan Kellerman and his son Jesse. This new contemporary mystery pulls in religious mythology and the supernatural to produce "an extraordinary work of detection, suspense, and supernatural mystery," per Amazon's quote of Stephen King. Solving the mystery of a severed head in an abandoned living room takes burned-out LAPD detective (and rabbi's son) Jacob Lev on an odyssey from Los Angeles to Prague to Oxford and back again. His standard crime-genre investigation is complicated by a mysterious woman and a monstrous being of Jewish mythology (the title's Golem), built to render justice upon the wicked—including serial killers. If your appetite for the spine-tingling is still not sated, read Mateguas Island, a debut novel by Linda Watkins and winner of the gold medal in Amazon's 2014 Readers' Favorite International Book Award Competition for the Supernatural Fiction category. A troubled family comes to a remote island off the coast of Maine, not realizing that their inherited property is steeped in destructive forces. An arcane locked box, a foreboding trail into the woods, a seductive young woman, and tales of a malevolent Native American spirit ratchet up the suspense. Then, for a modern haunted house story, turn to Christopher Fowler, award-winning author of the Peculiar Crimes Unit series. His original thriller Nyctophobia isolates newly married architect Callie in a grand house in southern Spain, a house split between rooms flooded with light and rooms locked away in darkness and neglect. As Callie begins to research the history of the strange house, her nyctophobia (fear of the dark) is awakened, along with haunting secrets. But when it comes to seeing ghosts, hysterical, attention-seeking adolescent girls would seem to be most susceptible. So no wonder the girls at a posh Irish boarding school keep seeing the ghost of the boy victim of an unsolved murder in Tana French's The Secret Place, another installment in the Dublin Murder Squad series. The narrative alternates between flashbacks by clique of schoolgirls and the perspective of a cold-case detective and his partner, who spend a long day and night investigating. As any parent of an adolescent might guess, the private lives of teenage girls, their friendships and betrayals, can be more mysterious and dangerous than the detectives imagine. If psychic sleuths rather than psyched-out sleuths are your cup of tea, then pick up veteran paranormal mystery writer Kay Hooper's Haunted, the latest entry in the Bishop Special Crimes Unit series. For more reviews of paranormal mystery releases, check out http://www.iheartreading.net/genres/paranormal-mystery-mystery-and-suspense-3/