I usually blog about mystery or thriller writing, but during the holiday season, the dark side of human nature just seems an inappropriate topic. Luckily, even serious fiction can create light moments, especially when authors struggle (and fall) in coming up with new ways to describe sex scenes. So for some holiday merriment, I'll pass along excerpts from the annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award, established back in 1993 by London's Literary Review. The 2017 winner is American author Christopher Bollen for The Destroyers and a scene in which protagonist Ian describes his male equipment as a "billiard rack," creating some confusion over how many balls were involved. In the same scene, Bollen describes the female love interest's skin as "tan like water stains in a bathtub," which is erotic only for those who like their love action a tad grimy. The runner-up nominees include The Seventh Function of Language by Prix Goncourt winner Laurent Binet, who calls a felating female a "mouth-machine" and has a male lover whisper "with an authority that he has never felt before: 'Let’s construct an assemblage.'" The purpose of the award is to "draw attention to poorly written, perfunctory or redundant passages of sexual description in modern fiction," hopefully to inspire writers to do better. Alas, every year there are still plenty of nominees! For more laughable, cringeworthy or simply baffling excerpts from 2017's nominees, see http://www.newsweek.com/bad-sex-writing-fiction-award-2017-728981
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— just wasn’t written badly enough, calling the sex "very discreet".
Heading into the holidays, I like to stock up on mysteries to help relax from the season's whirlwind of shopping and socializing, and I always check out the new crop of award winners. This year's Edgar Award for best novel, for example, went to Before the Fall by Noah Hawley, creator of the "Fargo" TV series. A private jet leaves Martha's Vineyard for New York, carrying 11 people, including two multimillionaires and their families as well as one failed artist invitee. It crashes into the Atlantic without even a May Day call, and the only survivors are the artist and the 4-year-old boy he saves. A media frenzy paints the artist by turns hero or villain, while the investigation tries to decide between tragic accident and sinister intention. Meanwhile, the 2017 Edgar Award for best first novel tapped Under the Harrow by Flynn Berry, a novel for fans of The Girl on the Train. Londoner Nora goes to visit her sister in the countryside, only to find her brutally murdered, and Nora soon becomes obsessed and fearful as the search for her sister's killer uncovers dark secrets. if your taste for foreign sleuthing is whetted, try British publishing's Dagger Awards, which selected The Dry by Jane Harper for a Gold Dagger and gave an International Dagger to The Dying Detective by Leif G.W. Persson. In The Dry, Federal Agent Aaron Falk arrives in his Australian hometown for the first time in decades to attend the funeral of his best friend, Luke. Twenty years ago Luke lied to provide Falk with an alibi in a murder accusation. Now, amid an historic drought, Falk reluctantly joins a local detective to investigate Luke’s death and its connection to long-buried mysteries. You have to go north to Scandinavia for The Dying Detective, about a retired detective recovering from a stroke. In a race against mortality, the detective takes on the unsolved murder of a 9-year-old girl, conducting an investigation from his hospital bed with the help of his assistant, Matilda, an amateur sleuth, and Max, an orphan with a personal stake in the case. Meanwhile, the 2017 Anthony Award for best mystery selected Canada's veteran Louise Penny and A Great Reckoning. Penny's Quebec Chief of Homicide Armand Gamache is drawn into the death of a professor that involves an old map, a mysterious stained glass window, four police cadets, and Gamache's past. All together, that's a great trove of top mysteries to explore. For more ideas, see Amazon's mystery/thriller best-sellers: https://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Books-Mystery-Thriller-Suspense/zgbs/books/18
The recent California fires in Sonoma County really struck a chord for me. Not only do we have close friends in Santa Rose affected by the fires, but fire is one of my phobias. As a result, I generally don't choose murder mysteries involving arson, whether flames are used to cover up murder evidence, as the main murder weapon, or express a pyromaniac obsession. However, the terror of killers who use fire does spark (no pun intended) a deep desire for apprehension, which makes the solution at the end of these mysteries especially satisfying. Among arson-murder mysteries, 7th Heaven by James Patterson and Maxine Paetro (part of the Women's Murder Club series) is a good example. As Detective Lindsay Boxer and her partner Rich Conklin are searching for leads in California golden boy Michael Campion's disappearance, they are drawn into a series of arson fires that kill suburban couples in wealthy homes. The plot of Douglas Preston's White Fire intriguingly combines modern arson murders and a long-lost Sherlock Holmes story. FBI Special Agent Pendergast comes to help protege Corrie Swanson when her examination of remains from a Colorado town's fabled 19th century grizzly attack on miners turns up shocking results. But the pair soon face modern mayhem as fires burn down multimillion-dollar mansions with families locked inside. Pendergast discovers a long-lost Sherlock Holmes story that may be the key to solving both the mystery of the long-dead miners and the modern-day arson killings as well! Fireproof by best-selling author Alex Kava brings back his protagonist special agent Maggie O'Dell, who is leading the search for a serial arsonist in Washington, D.C., a search with a personal stake now that Maggie's brother Patrick is back in D.C. and working for a private firefighting company frequently called in to the fires. I'm a sucker for Irish settings like Graham Masterton's Dead Girls Dancing (part of the Kate Maguire series). DCI Maguire investigates the tragic deaths of 13 promising Irish folk dance stars who die when their studio goes up in flames in Cork. A small Australian town is the setting of 2017's Little Secrets by Anna Snoekstra. Would-be journalist Rose Blakey thinks she can win acclaim with a big scoop about strange porcelain doll replicas of the town's daughters that are turning up on doorsteps, terrifying parents already shaken by an arson fire at the town's courthouse, which killed a boy trapped inside. Community paranoia, ugly secrets, a suspicious stranger, and subtle red herrings propel this psychological thriller. For more arson mysteries, see https://www.alibris.com/search/books/subject/Arson-investigation
After the Las Vegas massacre of concert-goers by a heavily armed gunman firing from high in a hotel, it dawned on me that, while there are often fictional treatments of family annihilators or terrorist attackers, mystery writers rarely dwell on the more typical American mass murderer represented by the Las Vegas shooter: a white male using legally purchased firearms. Of course, the who-done-it element is missing, since the shooters are almost always captured or suicides. Second, the means is known; only details on the extent of planning, the existence of confederates, police response, etc., are hashed out after the fact. The victimology and opportunity can offer some hope of detection and prevention if there is a relationship to the killer or his expressed grudge, such as a gathering of workplace, racial, governmental, religious, or familial "enemies." But what if the killer chooses strangers in a place that optimizes kill zone, as in the Las Vegas, 2012 Sandy Hook elementary and 1966 Austin clock tower massacres? Then the opportunity becomes any time and anywhere people gather, and the victims are anybody. So the only mystery left to decipher is the motive. The "armed white male" can be amended to "angry armed white male" or "disturbed armed white male," but what explains the destructive fury? In this country, there are a lot of unhappy loners, losers and loonies, and many own scary arsenals. They all don't aim their bullets at crowds. Unfortunately, no matter how deeply we dig for motive, for a "trigger event," grievance, violent creed or mental aberration, that mass shooting motive is likely to remain incomplete or incomprehensible. So mystery fiction, without satisfying solution or justice to offer, avoids this kind of crime. But the real world pays a terrible penalty for ignoring mass shootings. It's time to talk about the fact that, on average, there is a mass shooting (4+ victims including shooter) every day in America. While dwelling on the everyman "who" and the unknowable "why" is likely to be nonproductive and nonpredictive, we can discuss the very concrete "how." For more about the reality, not the fiction, of gun violence, see these statistics: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/2/16399418/us-gun-violence-statistics-maps-charts
In the latest headlines, American football has collided with politics, corruption and social conflict. So it's no wonder authors have been drawn to the gridiron for murder mystery and crime thriller plots. Consider Paydirt, by Edgar nominee and best-selling author Paul Levine: Bobby Gallagher is a broken man, fired from his prestigious job, disbarred from the legal profession, divorced from the wife he loves, and in debt to the mob. So he decides to win it all back by rigging the Super Bowl. Assisted by his 12-year-old son, he must fix the game, win a huge bet and avoid getting killed. Also focusing on the Super Bowl is Thomas Harris' best-selling thriller Black Sunday (later a movie) about a plot by terrorists to commit mass murder during the Super Bowl in New Orleans, turning the innocuous blimp into a death machine. Harlan Coben, Edgar Award-winner and master of the surprise twist, turns to football with Deal Breaker. Myron Bolitar is a sports agent whose prize client, a rookie football quarterback, is poised on the edge of the big time. Then the young quarterback gets a phone call from a former girlfriend—a woman believed dead—and Myron must confront the dark side of the sports business and unravel dangerous truths about a family tragedy, a woman’s secret, and a man’s lies. Of course, as a University of Michigan grad, I can't resist mentioning Bleeding Maize and Blue by Susan Holtzer. In football-obsessed Ann Arbor, computer consultant Anneke Haagen is swept up in the UM President's Weekend festivities where her boyfriend, police lieutenant Karl Genesko, is set to be honored as one of Michigan's brightest former football stars. Then a student sportswriter breaks the story of an NCAA probe of UM recruiting, and the agency's investigator turns up murdered in the stadium end zone. Anneke uses her analytic mind to help probe deadly secrets and shady deals involving deep alumni pockets. Finally, before either pro football or college football, there is high-school football, the proving ground of young athletes and community pride. In The Prophet by best-selling author Michael Koryta, the murder of a teenage girl reopens decades-old wounds and forces two estranged brothers, one a bail bondsman on the social fringes and one the beloved coach of the local high school football team, to unite to stop a killer. For more football-themed mysteries and crime thrillers, see http://themysteryshop.com/murder-at-the-super-bowl-other-football-crime-fiction/
Illegitimacy and the consequential stigmas of extramarital children have played a key role in the works of great authors, including Shakespeare, Voltaire, Austen, Dickens, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Hardy, to name but a few. Some noted mystery writers also have used out-of-wedlock birth as a plot centerpiece, including Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White and Dorothy L. Sayers' The Nine Tailors. But there's no arguing that times have changed. As of 2015, 40.3% of all births in the U.S. occurred outside of marriage (compared with 7% in 1940). And today's illegitimacy rates are even higher for most European countries. The majority of births (over 50%) are outside of marriage in Iceland, Estonia, Bulgaria, Slovenia, France, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Portugal, and nearly half of births also are extramarital in the Netherlands, Czech Republic, United Kingdom, Belgium, Hungary, Spain, Austria and Finland. As out-of-wedlock birth has become more commonplace, the social and legal status of illegitimate children, unwed mothers and cohabiting couples has improved. In the United States, for example, U.S. Supreme Court decisions in the 1970s found that most legal disabilities imposed on illegitimacy violated the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause. Yet extramarital children can still provide mystery writers with murder motives. Even the old "Secret Shame" plot can be updated. For example, while illegitimacy alone may no longer be as socially unacceptable, illegitimacy resulting from other taboos--such as incest, rape or even adultery--can create a secret that someone will murder to conceal or avenge. Another plot device that still resonates is "The Unwanted Heir." When there is an inheritance to divide, even legitimate siblings can turn on each other, and a family outsider who stakes a claim can spark more than rude confrontations. "Cain and Abel" is one of the oldest plots around, so it's easy to imagine bitter feelings between marital and extramarital siblings going to lethal lengths as they vie with each other for social status, financial gain or parental affection. Finally, there's the traditional "Revenge" plot. Although many loving couples raise happy children outside of marriage today, there are less sanguine situations in which the violent feelings of a spurned lover, a betrayed spouse or an abandoned child can lead to murder. For more famous fiction works with an illegitimacy theme, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegitimacy_in_fiction
Murder disguised as suicide, accident or natural death is a popular trope of mystery fiction and TV crime drama. In murder mystery plots, common "perfect crime" accidents include the trusty fall down the stairs or over a cliff; the bathtub head-injury slip or electrocution; drowning (the at-home convenience of tubs and pools is popular, but lonely spots of ocean and river are handy, too); the traffic accident (ranging from car crash to pedestrian hit-and-run); the accidental medication overdose or unknowingly ingested deadly allergen; the hunting accident (if VP Dick Cheney can misfire...); and, a new favorite, strangulation covered up as an autoerotic asphyxia hanging. Mystery writers can find many models from real crime cases. For example, the less than godly Pastor Arthur Schirmer used different types of accidents to cover disposal of two wives: Wife No. 1 died from a catastrophic "fall down the stairs" in 1999, a murder which escaped punishment until it was revisited after Schirmer was convicted of killing wife No. 2 with a crowbar and staging a car accident in 2008 to cover up the injuries. We can't know how many murders go undetected, but the "perfect crime" killer today needs to jump through more hoops than ever, and the mystery writer can deliver more clues to an ace detective, thanks to forensics and society's ever-expanding technological surveillance. Of course, the killer must make sure there are no fingerprints, DNA (blood, saliva, hair, etc.), or fibers in incriminating places. Plus, in staging the crime, the murderer now needs to be aware of the ubiquitous security cameras recording movements for gas stations, stores, ATMs, hotels, and even neighbors. To avoid being caught in a lie, perpetrators also need to worry about telltale credit card receipts and even bar codes that will direct police to an incriminating purchase or location and timing contradiction. A murderer's alibi today can be checked against location tracking via mobile phone and car anti-theft device, while suspicious Internet interactions leave telltale cyber tracks. And, if in search of a perfect alibi, a killer hires/persuades someone else to create an "accidental death," then the murderous instigator is either in thrall to a potential blackmailer and betrayer--or forced to plan another perfect murder! For an interesting discussion, see https://zmprofiler.wordpress.com/the-perfect-murder-2/
