  Mystery
This week: There's a time and place for crime Edited by: Kate - Writing & Reading  
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All that I see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
Edgar Alan Poe
A mystery is an answer in search of a question; knowing what's been done and journey to discovering the how and why of it. It deals with something unknown to the reader, which the writer reveals in bits and pieces with both subtle and overt clues, drawing the reader into the puzzle. Welcome to this week's edition of the WDC Mystery Newletter, where we enter and explore the puzzle for ourselves and our readers.
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Greetings, fellow Sleuths ~
There's a time and place for every crime or act of mayhem you design for your readers. The place can be familiar, even famous, or one made real and infamous by your puzzle.
Yes, I'm talking about the setting of the crime, the foundation for your puzzle. Setting, the time and place of a story, is particularly important in the mystery genre. Carefully selected details can not only make the story more vivid, but may provide clues to help or impede the investigation, even after possibly being an accessory to the crime.
Some settings are so familiar they define the tone of a mystery - even so far as having subgenre status, i.e., a Cape Cod mystery. In such regional mysteries, the setting is more than mere background; it adds familiar influences to the mannerisms of characters and drives the story - consider the anomaly in such a familiar setting as a clue - or perhaps 'herring' - i.e., the urban transplant to the 'Cape.' Just as you interact with your environs daily, so too your characters in and among their surroundings. The setting in a mystery can influence the characters and drive the story.
If you intend to write one of these mysteries with a well-known, familiar setting, know the area (i.e., don't write about Bangor, Maine unless you've spent some considerable time there). Although much information is available on line and in print, readers will quickly catch on ithat you aren't versed in local customs or how your characters interact with their environs.
Consider your mystery an interactive puzzle where your reader enters your town/city/village or its library/school/corner store and is made welcome for a time as he/she becomes familiar with the reality of your setting as well as the characters who inhabit the story. And, along with the characters, will want to find the anomalies, the clues that will lead them to solve the crime and bring along a return to normalcy.
Consider setting your mystery in your town or village or farm or city. Here, at home, you have a sense of the place because of the time you've spent here. You have actual sensory images: smells and sounds, the taste of the drinking water, the heaviness/stickiness of the afternoon air.
You know the details, what belongs and what doesn't, i.e., layouts of the cities, the direction of the highways, the current of the rivers. Details are important. Few things will irritate a reader as much as turning the page to find a one-way street going the wrong way or a building placed in an incorrect block.
You have knowledge of the people. A mid-west family farmer is not a New York banker. They will talk differently, act differently, and think differently. Part of that is the job as much as the environment but remember that the job is a product of the environment. So your home town doesn't have to be the most boring in the world ~ you've plotted a crime and within the space of home turf, the clues to solving it.
But you still have poetic license as a writer, to then take your home town and, if you desire, make of it an 'otherworld' of fiction. Change the name, a couple of cross-streets, add a river or a park, and you have the base for a puzzle in a fictional town or city or village. This one may have two firestations, where your town had one, or a grocery instead of a general store. With but a few adjustments, you can create a livable scene for your crime, where your characters interact among themselves and with their environment. Set the anomalies here as well as clues or herrings for your characters and readers. A fictional setting is also prudent if you want to explore a crime among dishonest politicians or invoke a corrupt police force. You might not want them in your own backyard
Within your chosen setting you may have sub-settings. A college or police department is a world unto itself. There are certain cloistered environments which have their own rituals and traditions separate from the place that they're situated. A hospital in Cleveland is more like a hospital in Alaska than like a factory down the street. Whether you are writing about real or fictional places, you should visit and research these common sub-settings if you intend to use them.
Now, interact with the environment. Your character is sitting in an office, driving a car, eating at Moe's Diner. Make the reader share the experience. These short-term environments illustrate character: why hang those photographs, own that particular car, eat at Moe's of all places?
Settings can also expose character by creating stressors. The person in the next cube listens to obnoxious music too loudly. Traffic went from stop-and-go to stop-and-stall. The food is undercooked and the glass dirty. How does your character react? Again, plot a few anomalies for your characters and readers, or put the clues right out in the open and see if they pick up on them
Examine some of your favorite mysteries to see how the authors use setting. If you plan to base a mystery in your own back yard, consider adding to your own knowledge with a guidebook or a book on local history. You'll be amazed what you took for granted or never knew.
Mystery readers enjoy reading about places they've visited or always wanted to, places they've lived, places they've driven by, as well as places that become just as real as told by the writer. That said, they don't like mistakes or careless shifts in seasons, topography, places and people. Use your sense of time and place to convince the reader that everything that follows is real. Make them feel at home. Then let them trip over a body.
Kate
Kate - Writing & Reading |
I invite you to explore a couple of puzzles recently submitted to our newsletter for your sleuthing pleasure by BIG BAD WOLF is Howling 
Now, check out these mysteries and see how the places, both factually real and real by design of the writer, impact and interact with the puzzle
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And, why not, share one of your own in this ever-intriguing challenge
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Mystery: November 16, 2010 Issue [#4077]
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