Mystery Writing Tips

By Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

There’s an interesting phenomenon when you comb through your RSS reader—even if you have a large number of blogs that you’re following. Sometimes it’s as if everyone got an idea for a particular blog post at the same time. This is natural when you’re talking about posts on a topical issue (publishing news) but a little eerie when it happens spontaneously, with nothing prompting it.

So I recently came across and shared or scheduled for sharing, four different posts in a week’s time, that either linked to material on the same topic, or posted on that topic. So we’ve got “400+ Ways to Kill a Character” from Clever Girl Helps, “How to Successfully Kill a Character—the Checklist” from K.M. Weiland, “How to Kill Your Main Character” from Rhiannon Paille, and “Murder 101—7 Reasons to Kill Your Character” from Robert Smedley.Continue reading

by Joe Benevento

In Edgar Allan Poe’s third and final story featuring C. Auguste Dupin, “The Purloined Letter,” Dupin explains to the narrator why the police were unable to find the letter in question, even though it was left in plain sight (though somewhat disguised) on the culprit’s desk: “Had the letter been deposited within the range of their search, these fellows would, beyond a question, have found it.” The Paris police had undertaken a ludicrously exhaustive search of the Minister D’s premises and person, always seeking the stolen letter in the most ingenious of hidden nooks or hollowed out chair legs or other “secret hiding places” of that variety. Since they could not themselves conceive of anyone being so stupid (or, in this case, so smart) as to place the precious letter right where anyone could see it, they were almost physically and certainly mentally disabled from seeing it. However, because he knew what kind of thinker the Minister was (both Mathematician and Poet) and because he knew the Minister comprehended how the Police would approach uncovering the letter, Dupin was able to retrieve the letter without much complication.Continue reading

Category: Mystery Writing Tips

Reasons and Methods of Killing Characters—And One Reason Not To

The Range Of Search: A Key to Understanding (and Writing) Mystery Fiction