Tired of Politics? Try Other Planets' Troubles

By late October, I find myself exhausted by our political mud-wrestling and yearning for escape to some other galaxy. The sci-fi mystery genre is rife with tales of a futuristic, usually post-apocalyptic, Earth, but I'm hearing enough apocalyptic talk in the election race! I long to sleuth where the sky is red and home to two moons, where the aliens come from other worlds and not other countries, and where our unhappy Earth is a spaceship's time-warp away. So here are some choices for those seeking justice in an alternative universe. Start with Red Planet Blues, by Robert J Sawyer, who is a Hugo and Nebula award winner. Set on Mars, the story takes place in the domed city of New Klondike (a future Elon Musk destination maybe). The town was built for miners seeking "fossils" that sell for big bucks on Earth, but the fossils ran out and the town has gone bust. Alex Lomax, a traditional PI character, is hired to find out who has killed the miners who first started the fossil rush, with the possibility of finding a cache of fossils worth millions. Then there's KOP by Warren Hammand. It's about a policeman named Juno Mozambe whose family moved from Earth to the planet Lagarto, a promised utopia unfortunately dependent on a single export that has been replaced by cheap knock-offs. Amid the planet's slums and poverty, cop Juno faces bribes from organized crime and a frame-up by a new partner. Now if you want to land on a planet without unethical Earth pioneers, try acclaimed writer Lois McMaster Bujold's Hugo and Nebula award-winning Mountains of Mourning, set in an imaginary galaxy. Interstellar investigator Miles Vorkosigan is sent to uncover the truth about a murder in a society that values physical perfection. A baby has been killed because of a physical defect, calling up an outlawed custom and prejudices against "mutants." With the Village Speaker determined to hide the truth, Miles and his team, despite the advantages of special truth serum, must use all their skills to find the real killer. Finally, there is the Retrieval Artist series by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, which portrays a universe where humans and alien races try to coexist and respect each other's differing laws. The penalties in this inter-species legal balancing act can be severe, and Miles Flint, a "retrieval artist," is tasked with tracking down fugitives across worlds, torn between the demands of his police job and his sense of justice. Rusch is deft with cross-genre writing, as proven by her Endeavor and Hugo sci-fi awards as well as her Edgar mystery award nominations. For more options, check out http://bestsciencefictionbooks.com/best-science-fiction-mystery-books

Mysteries with a Mystical Bent

I just spent a wonderful weekend in Sedona, Arizona, with girlfriends, including visits to shops stocked with religious icons, New Age literature and rocks claiming various mystical properties. We also hiked to a famous "vortex" to imbibe its earth energy. Now I must admit that a number of curious things occurred near the vortex; for example, a strange man suddenly appeared on the trail and handed out free heart-shaped pieces of red sandstone to our group of gals before moseying on. Divine Messenger or Loco Local? Choose the most satisfying answer. Now as a rule, I tend to avoid detective fiction that relies on the workings of angels, fairies, witches, vampires, ghosts, psychics or otherwordly powers, animal or mineral, as plot devices in solving mysteries. But I also make exceptions. Here are some popular mysteries with a paranormal bent, starting with favorite author Dennis Lehane's Shutter Island, about U.S. Marshals who go to an island asylum to investigate the disappearance of a criminally insane patient. Some detecting powers I'd rather not have. In Chuck Wendig's Blackbirds, Miriam Black can tell with a touch when you're going to die, and the hero of The Cypress House by best-selling author Michael Koryta can sense imminent death. If you like folks who can use magical powers to catch criminals, try prolific author Heather Blake's It Takes a Witch, whose heroine casts spells to grant wishes, with some murderous consequences. If you believe in psychic sleuthing, read any entry in Kay Hooper's series about the FBI Special Crimes Unit's psychic detecting. For ghost lovers, there's Night of the Living Deed by E.J. Copperman, about a haunted guesthouse where the ghosts expect the new owner to solve their murders. And that brings us back to Sedona, and Mathew Marine's Devil's Moon about a troubled FBI agent who gets involved in investigating a Sedona "murder-suicide" after a young woman is found mutilated in a police officer’s basement, his confession scrawled on the wall above his dead body. Sounds like a straightforward who-done-it? Hey, it's set in Sedona, so psychic powers, premonitions, angels and mystical experiences abound. For more paranormal mysteries, check out readers' recommendations at https://www.goodreads.com/genres/paranormal-mystery

Attack of the Creepy Clowns

"Creepy clown" hysteria has become so prevalent that it was a topic raised at a recent White House press conference. Calm is being urged by none other than horror maestro Stephen King, whose seminal 1986 novel It features a monster clown preying on young children. The panic began in August in Greenville County, South Carolina, with emergency calls about a clown, or someone dressed like one, “trying to lure children in the woods.” Since then, over a dozen states have reported sightings of scary clowns, and the phenomenon has gone viral on the Internet. An explosion of memes, teen hoaxers, arrests for threats related to "clown activity," even the establishment of a Clown Lives Matter effort by one threatened clowning practitioner--all have pushed the creepy clown panic right to the door of the White House. Now I must admit I've disliked clowns since childhood. My pediatrician used to have clown pictures on the waiting room walls in a misguided attempt at a kid-friendly environment, which forever connected clowns with fear and pain in my young mind. And I wasn't alone; most children are afraid of clowns, per studies. After all, clowns' painted faces and odd clothes hide their true selves and motives, and then they behave unpredictably with startling pranks and magic. For children, that's unnerving and scary. And there have been a few evil souls dressed in clown suits to foster adult fears, too, such as John Wayne Gacy, who killed 33 teenage boys between 1972 and 1978. But what is the psychology behind today's terror of imaginary "creepy" clowns? Clearly, even in our modern culture, we are not immune to the mass hysteria of the witch hunters of old Salem. And what if this year's overheated political discourse is fostering a free-floating fear of menacing "others," which distills into delusions of clowns, disguised and hiding among us, "luring children in the woods"? A troubling thought.  For more research on clowns as nightmares, there's Benjamin Radford's new book Bad Clowns. Or check out this CNN.com article for a quick overview of our "creepy clown" terror: http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/03/health/creepy-clown-sighting-psychology/,

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

Flashbulb Memories and Our National Psyche

We are about to embark on commemorations of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, reliving sights and stories that already seem indelibly burned into the national psyche. In the past, I have found that conversations about the now 15-year-old trauma include asking each other "Where were you when...?" And most people relate an especially vivid, emotional recollection of events. This phenomenon is what psychologists call a "flashbulb memory." People tend to have a detailed recollection of not only where they were when the dramatic public event occurred, but what they felt, what they saw, what they said, who they were with, etc. Other shared "flashbulb memory" experiences would include President John F. Kennedy's assassination, the Challenger space shuttle explosion, or even Princess Diana's death. These public traumas were unexpected, horrific and tapped strong feelings about an iconic person, institution or symbol. The emotional intersection between the personal and the public creates vivid memories, psychologists agree, but are such flashbulb memories really accurate, unchanging snapshots of our experience? Not exactly. Extensive research findings about 9/11 memories, for example, indicate that many of us forget or falsely remember more than we realize, both in terms of facts and emotional reactions. Those few who are closer physically and mentally to a public tragedy are apt to have more accurate recall than the majority who experience the event at a remove, say via televised reports. Yet, factual or not, the strong emotional context does have an especially deep impact on our minds, creating recollections that stand as landmarks in our personal and national stories. When revisiting your own 9/11 "flashbulb memories" in conversations this weekend, you can reflect on their accuracy while discussing them with others. But I bet the power of these memories will not be diminished by conflicting facts. Their emotional resonance is their truth, creating our shared popular history. For an interesting article on flashbulb memory studies, including those from 9/11, read http://www.apa.org/monitor/2011/09/memories.aspx

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