Today I'm stopping here on my blog tour, which is winding down, but there are still chances to win prizes and see what's going on with Seamus.

Schedule: Peg Herring’s Blog Tour for May (and one post in June) consists of a mix of interviews with Seamus, the Dead Detective, and posts on writing. The previous stop was on May 16 at http://its-not-all-gravy.blogspot.comThe next stop on the tour will be on May 25^th at http://www.preciousmonsters.com/ A complete schedule is posted at Peg’s blog, http://itsamysterytomepegherring.blogspot.com/ When the tour is over (June 11^th) the complete Seamus interview will be posted there.

Prizes: People who comment on any blog post on the tour will be entered in drawings for several prizes: Dead Detective T-shirts, copies of THE DEAD DETECTIVE AGENCY and DEAD FOR THE MONEY (paperback or e-books available), and the chance to be a character in the third of the series DEAD FOR THE SHOW. Multiple winners will be drawn.

Links: DEAD FOR THE MONEY (e-book) http://tinyurl.com/c6pzz5z

THE DEAD DETECTIVE AGENCY (paperback) http://tinyurl.com/7f6yc2r

Peg’s website: http://pegherring.com

Taking Stock

There’s a line of commercials lately that traces minor events in life that snowball and lead to disaster. In one, a guy frustrated by his cable service ends up beaten bloody in a ditch. I’m not sure that’s true for mystery writing, but the life of a mystery writer goes a little like this.

When you start writing a mystery novel, you want to know more about crime. When you want to know more about crime, you begin paying too much attention to television. When you pay too much attention to television, you begin to think that every action has a secret motive. When you think every action has a secret motive, you suspect everyone. When you suspect everyone, scenarios form in your brain. When scenarios form in your brain, you write them down. When you write them down, you have a mystery novel!

When I take stock of who I am today and who I was before I started writing, I see major growth in the area of in-brain storytelling. Passing a person on the street who’s fumbling through his clothes brings up the idea that he’s the victim of pickpockets, when it’s likely he just forgot where he stashed his keys. A sighting of an armored car brings up visions of armed gunmen pulling the driver to the ground and driving it away before anyone can stop them. A story in a newspaper of an unidentified body found in the woods of northern Michigan creates a whole list of possibilities, none of them as mundane as the truth, that it’s some pitiful Alzheimer’s victim who wandered away from home and couldn’t get back.

It isn’t life that’s changed; it’s me. Mystery writing is an addiction, and like all addictions, we can recognize it, admit to it, and struggle against it, but it’s always there. It’s partly the fault of others, those who say, “Oh, that was such a clever twist in your last book!”

“Oh,” I say to myself, “they think THAT was clever—wait till they see what I do next time!”

Friends in the mystery-writing community confess to the same thoughts. We start viewing the world in terms of plot-lines, people in terms of character possibilities, and even aspects of nature in terms of a great line for the next book. We don’t look at the world the way others do, or maybe even the way we used to: it isn’t just life anymore: it’s all fodder for the next book or the one after that.

I sometimes feel that I should warn my friends. Like a karate expert who must register his hands as lethal weapons, maybe all mystery writers should be made to wear that T-shirt you see at conventions that says: Be careful or you’ll end up in my next novel.

Manuscript Euthanasia

There comes a time when an author has to admit that a manuscript just isn't working out. When that time comes, the kindest thing to do is kill it, quickly and with finality.
I had an idea that I thought was really cool, but I had a lot of other things going, so I worked on my "cool" thing in bits and pieces. It took a couple of years, but I finally got it done and started what I always do, reading it aloud.
It stinks. There's way too much repetition; it takes forever to get to a bit of excitement; the characters talk too much; and there are places where I need a Greek god to come down from Olympus and fix the plot.
So what should I do?
I'm going to kill it, or at least cryogenically freeze it until some date in the future when it can be thawed and perhaps revived. That's the nice thing about writing, I guess: dead doesn't always mean dead, it can be "mostly dead," a la The Princess Bride, which means it's possible that someday, my manuscript will become a movie starring Andre the Giant--no, wait. He's dead.

Jest For Fun - April Fools Mystery

Plotting mysteries has never been easier.

It's been almost two month now since I wrote and produced the mystery 'Jest For Fun' to help raise awareness of the Radium Hot Springs Public Library. The best part was that I used a book I am writing on how to plot a mystery cluetrail to write the show and it made the plotting so much easier!

The evening was a smashing success - as in we got to smash eggs on each other and wrap people up in toilet paper and other fun pranks.

What Mystery Writing Demands

Mystery as a genre is often dismissed as...well...genre fiction. It's true that there are expected, almost required elements that can make a mystery formulaic. Events sometimes veer from reality for the sake of plot. The police ignore possibilities outside the box. The protag loses his cell phone. He goes alone to a place where every sense should be screaming, "Don't!" A convenient character shows up and drops an essential bit of information without any real reason for doing so.
(In the book I'm currently reading--big name author--the protag is just wandering through an area and two complete strangers venture out of their homes, one after the other, and invite him in. Each provides valuable information about the case. Maybe I'm lacking social sense, but I cannot recall the last time I saw someone passing on the road and asked him in for tea!)
Mystery writing--at least the best of it--requires writing talent along with an additional skill: mystery construction. To create characters who resonate, plots that hold interest, and settings that pop is one thing, and we certainly want that. To at the same time drop hints for the reader, hints that add up later but don't give the whole thing away, is both different and difficult. Everything has to contribute, every blind alley must be believable at first but then not. As a reader, I feel cheated if a character has shown no sign of evil and yet is in the end. I hate it when the crime is so elaborate there is little possibility of it succeeding, and yet it does. I'm angry when the evildoer is not even on the radar until the final revelation.
In addition to good story-telling, then, a mystery writer has to do good mystery-telling. Unlike other genres, mystery is a maze. The writer knows the layout, and the reader must follow his lead. He should not meander, should not examine unrelated avenues. He should guide the reader deftly, with a clear reason for every twist and turn taken.
A reader of mystery should be entertained by good writing, but she should also find at the end that she was given, within the maze, a fair chance to solve the puzzle by herself. One hopes that she missed it, being so entertained by the journey.

Mystery Writing Tips from a Master

Everything I learned about planting clues for a 'fairplay' murder mystery I learned by studying and dissecting the works of the most brilliant cluemaster of all time, Agatha Christie. 'Fairplay' means that the reader has all the same information as the detective, and could solve the mystery, if they were clever enough. Writing performance corporate mysteries for nearly twenty years, honed my skills in this regard. Here's one priceless gem from Dame Agatha, hidden deep within one of her novels. If memory served me correctly, it was The Mirror Cracked From Side to Side.

"What you have to account for is if one person did see something why didn't that person say so? ... Possibility one - The person who saw it didn't realize what they had seen. That would mean, of course, that it would have to be rather a stupid person. Someone let us say, who can use their eyes but not their brain.

It might have been a person whose action in putting something in a glass was natural. It would be quite possible, audacious but possible, for someone to pick up that glass which as soon as it was in his hand or her hand, of course, would be assumed to be his or her own drink and to add whatever was added quite openly. In that case you see, people wouldn't think twice ... it would be a gamble, a risk, but it could happen.

Possibility three ... Somebody saw what happened and held their tongue deliberately ... if so, it's a very dangerous thing to do. - Agatha Christie.