Ghosts and Witches, Oh My!

            When I started writing mysteries, I certainly had no intention of getting into the realm of the paranormal. I saw myself as following in the footsteps of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, rather than H.P. Lovecraft, Oliver Onions, and Jack Mann. But once you start writing, stuff happens.

            The first Quill Gordon mystery, The McHenry Inheritance, was entirely rational and grounded in the everyday. The second, Wash Her Guilt Away, which will be out in a couple of weeks, started out that way, but at the beginning I threw in, almost as an aside, one brief supernatural reference — to a rumored witch placing a curse on the place where the action occurs.

            It turned out to be like taking one piece of candy from a box of chocolates, and the next thing you know, you’ve eaten the whole damn box. By the time the book was written, it had an entire coven of witches, a headless boatman, and a suspicious death with possibly supernatural overtones. How did it get out of hand like that?

Was it Carr’s Influence?

            The easy way out would be to blame John Dickson Carr. He was one of the great practitioners of the locked-room mystery (the murder is committed in a locked room, which the killer shouldn’t have been able to enter or leave), and a couple of his books, notably Below Suspicion and The Burning Court also had a strong witchcraft angle. Wash Her Guilt Away is dedicated in his spirit — which, come to think of it, is a loaded word.

            My second book is something of an English country-house mystery, in which a group of people are brought together for a short time, tension develops, and a crime is committed. But it also has a locked-room mystery in it, hence the dedication to Carr. That mystery has a natural explanation, as they all do, but I started to see how other supernatural elements might come into play.

            Because the setting of the book is a lodge in the remote forests of Northern California, it lent itself to an air of the supernatural. After all, there’s a reason that Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” and Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” were set in the woods. I stole from both of those, by the way. If you’re going to steal from an author, do it to a dead one whose copyright has expired.

Two Feet Firmly on Ground

            At the moment I’m trying to figure out how much to make of the paranormal angle in marketing Wash Her Guilt Away. A lot of people eat that stuff up, but the fact is that I’m a pretty rational man when it comes to such issues. My favorite ghost stories are the ones written by authors such as J.S. LeFanu and M.R. James, in which the supernatural elements are reflections of the emotional states and consciences of the characters. For a really good example of this, see LeFanu’s story, “The Familiar,” about a man driven mad by mysterious footsteps that follow him through the city at night.

            I’ll probably compromise by teasing to at least the witch element in the dust-jacket blurb, but otherwise not making too much of a deal about it. Any future books I write will appear in the mystery section of Amazon, not the paranormal, and that’s the way I prefer it. The third mystery, which I am now outlining in detail, should again be perfectly rational, and the general ideas I have for books beyond that are also paranormal-free. After all, the real world is scary enough.

           

           

           

The Limits of Realism

            Watching an episode of Elementary recently, I perked up when it got to a scene where the detectives were visiting a witness who had just emerged from a coma after being shot by a multiple killer. Sherlock Holmes had already deduced the identity of the killer and the detective in the hospital room whipped out a photo of the perp and held it up, at which the guy in the hospital bed pointed to it and said “Yeah …”

            So not right.

            Also not so big a deal.

            It wasn’t right because any competent defense attorney could have raised questions about the identification; the victim was essentially asked a leading question of the type not allowed in court. That’s one of the reasons most modern police departments seeking an ID from a photo give the witness a half-dozen pictures of potential perps to choose from. That way the identification does a lot better if the case ever comes to trial.

When a Mistake Doesn’t Hurt Too Much

            On the other hand, the scene occurred in the context of a show in which the basic premise is that the New York City Police Department is using Sherlock Holmes and his associate, Dr. Joan Watson, as consultants on major crimes. Not to put too fine a point on it, but there’s a certain amount of reality avoidance in the show to start with.

            From that perspective, a violation of police procedure for the purpose of wrapping up the story within an hour is at most a minor infraction. Had the scene occurred in a drama that prided itself on being grittily realistic about the details of police work, it would have been a howler.

            Similarly, in the novels of Golden Age writers like Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and Josephine Tey, a mistake about the effects of arsenic on the spleen is not a deal-breaker, provided, of course, that the solution to the mystery doesn’t revolve around the reader catching the mistake. Those authors were more concerned with the motives of the suspects, and having one of the suspects behave out of character would be far more serious in their books than getting a scientific detail wrong.

Yielding to the Story

            Nobody who writes a book wants a glaring and laughable mistake in it, and a certain due diligence in that regard is important for all authors. But there are ways of dealing with it other than rigorous research. For example, Catriona McPherson, author of the Dandy Gilver mysteries, said in a newspaper interview that one of the reasons she did a series set in the 1920s was so she wouldn’t have to waste a lot of time learning forensic stuff and writing it into the books. Like Christie, Tey, et. al, she wanted to focus on the characters and situation.

            In the course of doing the final revision for my first mystery, The McHenry Inheritance, I had to make a call in that regard. Re-reading the book, I realized that at one point I had the local sheriff doing something the FBI chief on the scene would surely have done himself. The scene was unrealistic in the same way as the one-photo lineup in Elementary.

            On the other hand, the story was at that point barreling toward its climax, and introducing and developing a new character at that point would have sapped its narrative drive. So, reality be damned, I let the sheriff go ahead and do the FBI chief’s job. When you’re writing fiction, there are times you can’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.