Category: Mysteries

  • 3 Writing Tricks To Steal From Fleur Bradley’s MIDNIGHT AT THE BARCLAY HOTEL

    A couple weeks ago, I was the lucky duck who received an advanced reading copy of my dear friend’s (hi, Fleur!) newest novel for middle grade readers: Midnight at the Barclay Hotel. My review of the story is up at Criminal Element which you can check out here. But I thought it’d be useful for…

  • Two Different Ends to Two Different Series

    I just finished reading Curtain, Poirot’s last case. (I promise I won’t give away the end.) And recently I’d also read Sleeping Murder, which is Marple’s last case. In both cases the books were written years (decades) before they were published. Also in both cases the sleuths are still sharp, still the same old human-observers,…

  • The Literary Portion of the Detective Novel

    Strange that I should be talking about the accusations leveled against genre and literary writers when, lo, I come across an article by George Grella entitled “Murder and Manners: The Formal Detective Novel,” published in NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, which contains an example of exactly the type of rhetoric aimed at genre writing in…

  • The Observant Character

    The key to Miss Marple’s sleuthing is her insight into human behavior. Regardless of the violent act that has occurred, there is a simple, human reason/motivation behind it. By observing people and comparing those observations to other observations of human behavior in her history (which Miss Marple has quite a store of….), Miss Marple manages…

  • The Character Who Got Away…Maybe

    The first Miss Marple novel is Murder at the Vicarage. It’s narrated by the Vicar Leonard Clement and the entire story centers around a murder that – as the title so elegantly shows – happened at his vicarage (a.k.a his home…talk about a rough night!). The reader is introduced to his family, spends time with…

  • The Character Who is You

    We’ve spent the last few days talking Poirot, and next week I’m gonna talk Jane Marple, but today I wanted to talk about a recurring character in Christie’s work who has been noted to mirror Agatha Christie herself: Ariadne Oliver. Ariadne Oliver is a sixty-ish woman who writes mystery novels about a foreign detective named…

  • Working the Setting

    So many of the Hercule Poirot novels (and Miss Marple too!)depend upon the setting to contain the story. Often, Christie puts her characters in a small village, brings them into a closed suite of rooms, or, most legendarily, puts them on a train. Let’s look at the pros and cons of this closed-circuit kind of…

  • Can Series Characters Get in the Way?

    In An Appointment With Death, Hercule Poirot is on vacation in Jordan. He is called into a case involving the death of a woman in the historic city of Petra. This sounds pretty straightforward, doesn’t it? Christie’s sleuth on the case. Unfortunately, in the actual narration of the story, Poirot shows up just in time…

  • Consistency of Physical Description

    I have trouble keeping track of the various eye colors of my characters through one book. In my last completed draft of a book, I caught at least three variations of eye color of my main character’s eyes. Apparently I just couldn’t decide. So, as I read through Christie’s body of work, my main thought…

  • Plato and Aristotle Weigh in on Agatha Christie

    Back in the olden days, Plato made the argument that still resonates today: Violence on T.V. causes violence in real life. Okay, maybe that’s not a direct quote. But the essence of the argument is there. According to Plato in his Republic, poets specifically should not be allowed into a well-ordered society because, well, they…