SOMETHING IS GOING TO HAPPEN

P.D. James once said, in an interview about her famous series sleuth Dalgliesh, “An experienced senior detective told Adam Dalgliesh, when Adam was new to the CID, that all the motives for murder came under the letter L: love, lust, lucre, and loathing. He added: ‘They’ll tell you, laddie, that the most dangerous emotion is hatred. Don’t believe them. The most dangerous emotion is love.’”

Since at least the early 1700s in England, an entire day has been associated with the celebration of this “dangerous” emotion—as the saint’s day for St. Valentine was transformed to focus on traditions such as sending notes and tokens, cards, candy, and flowers to loved ones. One of the legends as to why this day devoted to love and romance formed around the Christian feast day honoring an early Christian martyr named Valentine is that on being imprisoned by the Romans, the martyr Valentine fell in love with his jailer’s daughter and sent her a love note signed “from your Valentine” just before his execution. In the early 1400s, another legendary letter—a love poem—was supposedly sent from the Duke of Orléans, who was imprisoned in the Tower of London, to his wife on the feast day for St. Valentine. So it seems that Valentine’s Day as we know it has roots, in real life, in crime (or perceived crime) and punishment.

In mystery fiction, love often plays out in stories of obsession, or forms the motive for getting rid of a spouse who stands in the way of a new love affair, or explains the false confession of one suspect trying to protect another. And of course, Valentine’s Day in particular makes a great fictional setting for a suspense story: Secret admirers may be a source of pleasant puzzlement and guesswork in grade school, but the secretly admiring adult who sends an anonymous valentine is likely also to send a frisson of fear up the spine of the adult recipient—although I wonder if the cyber valentines of today can pack the full mysterious punch of those paper missives that used to be slipped surreptitiously into mailboxes.

Let’s not forget that Valentine’s Day also opens a Pandora’s box of devious methods for murder. All those irresistible boxes of sweets and bottles of wine—and bouquets of flowers too!—have the potential to conceal and deliver deadly poisons, while secluded lover’s lanes, country getaways for a little quality time together, and moonlit walks on the beach all offer opportunities for fatal “accidents” to happen. With that in mind, it might be safer to stay at home this Valentine’s Day and read something full of suspense rooted in love to commemorate the day. If you’re a subscriber to EQMM, 2024 has already brought right to your door a number of stories that fit the theme and in one way or another show how dangerous love can be.

In the January/February issue there’s “Where the Heart Is” by Jacqueline Freimor, and in our current issue (March/April 2024) there’s

“Turnabout” by Sheila Kohler, “Video Girl” by Manju Soni, and “A Second Opinion” by Fernando Santos de Oliveira (in Passport to Crime).

If that whets your appetite for more stories of love mixed with danger or obsession, our upcoming May/June issue will be a bonanza for you. There you’ll find “Blood and Butter” by Tyler Fiecke, “And the Moon Disappears” by Randall Silvis, “The Low Waters” by Larry D. Sweazy, “Artificial Hearts” by Twist Phelan, and Quick Change” by Michael Kardos.

Happy reading and happy Valentine’s Day from EQMM!—Janet Hutchings

The Black Mask department of EQMM’s March/April issue (on sale next Wednesday) features a story by Nils Gilbertson entitled “Apple Juice.” Despite the cosy-sounding title, it’s a gritty noir story. In this post, the San Francisco Bay area native tells us about a noir writer whose work he was introduced to in childhood, an author who influenced him much later as a writer. We’re willing to bet most of our readers don’t know much about Friedrich Dürrenmatt, but may want to look for his books after reading about him here. Prior to selling “Apple Juice” to EQMM, Nils Gilbertson had short stories in Mystery Magazine, Mickey Finn: 21st Century Noir Vols. 2 & 3, Rock and a Hard Place, Mystery Tribune, and elsewhere. His story “Washed Up” was named a Distinguished Story in The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2022.  —Janet Hutchings

My family has a habit of ending Christmas morning with a stack of new books halfway to the ceiling. Familiar with each other’s preferred genres, we do not always play it safe when it comes to book gifting. There is little excitement in watching someone open the latest release by their favorite author. Rather, the goal is to find a book they have never heard of, an author with whom they are unfamiliar. Hopefully, one they come to love. There is pride in facilitating that journey.

In my late teens, I devoured the noir classics. Hammett, Chandler, Cain, Thompson. Sure, they were dark. But they also shed light on oft-ignored truths. Truths we feel and think and see but are too afraid to acknowledge. I couldn’t get enough of those books, and my family knew it. So, when I tore the wrapping from the thin paperback, I was hoping for a familiar title. The Big Sleep, Red Harvest, Pop. 1280. On this occasion, though, the unfamiliar title surprised me: The Pledge by Friedrich Dürrenmatt.

“He’s an old Swiss author,” my mother explained. “We used to read him in school.” She smiled at my skepticism. “It’s dark,” she said. “Same as the ones you like. We know how to write over there too, you know.”

I came to learn that Dürrenmatt was a prolific Swiss playwright and novelist. His work spanned a variety of genres and incorporated dark comedy, irony, and existential themes. While best known for his plays such as The Visit and The Physicists, it was his psychological crime tales that grabbed my attention. His novel, The Pledge, begins:

Last March I had to give a lecture in Chur on the art of writing detective stories. My train pulled in just before nightfall, under low clouds, in a dreary blizzard.

The peculiar framing drew me in immediately. It is told from the perspective of a mystery writer who befriends a former chief of police, Dr. H, in a bar. The next morning (after a night of drinking whiskey until three a.m.), Dr. H gives the writer a ride back to Zürich. The writer does his best to fend off the hangover as they traverse the icy terrain.

The day seemed still dark, though the sun had risen a while ago. There was a patch of metallic sky gleaming somewhere through a covering of dense, sluggishly lumbering, snow-filled clouds. Winter seemed unwilling to leave this part of the country. The city was surrounded by mountain, but there was nothing majestic about them; they rather resembled heaps of earth, as though someone had dug an immense grave.

The Swiss mountainside has never sounded so grim. On the drive, Dr. H explains that he considers detective fiction to be a lie. A “waste of time” that only perpetuates the falsity that crime-solving is akin to a logical game—put the right pieces in the right spots and the truth will reveal itself. He laments:

What really bothers me about your novels is the story line, the plot. There, the lying just takes over, it’s shameless. You set up your stories logically, like a chess game: here’s the criminal, there’s the victim, here’s an accomplice, there’s a beneficiary; and all the detective needs to know is the rules, he replayed the moves of the game, and checkmate, the criminal is caught and justice has triumphed.


Dürrenmatt’s character suggests that honest detective fiction would tell of a world where the characters are so human that the plot doesn’t always make sense. This is the same world where we don’t know who killed the chauffeur. A world that acknowledges, as Dostoevsky put it, that man is not a piano key. It is messy and people are corrupt and act irrationally. In that world, tidy solutions are the exception to the rule. To Dr. H, for art to stray from this reality is a betrayal.

Dr. H goes on to tell the writer the story of Inspector Matthäi, a brilliant and stoic detective who becomes obsessed with solving the murder of a young girl after he makes a pledge to the girl’s parents. But Matthäi’s investigation is spoiled by poor timing and random, unforeseeable obstacles, leading to his downfall. In other words, the case unfolds in a manner that, to Dr. H, reflects the real world, not the “manageable world” often set up in detective fiction. “That world may be perfect, but it’s a lie.” Towards the end of the book, Dr. H reflects on Matthäi’s story, noting that:

[W]e have to realize that the only way to avoid getting crushed by absurdity, which is bound to manifest itself more and more forcefully and clearly, and the only way to make a reasonably comfortable home for ourselves on this earth, is to humbly include the absurd in our calculations. Our rational mind casts only a feeble light on the world. In the twilight of its borders live the ghosts of paradox.

Despite my immediate suspicion that The Pledge fit alongside the noir and hardboiled traditions of mid-century America, it was only later when I read Raymond Chandler’s famous essay, “The Simple Art of Murder,” that I made a more concrete connection.

Chandler’s essay begins: “Fiction in any form has always intended to be realistic.”Chandler and Dürrenmatt work from the same premise: that there is inherent value in art reflecting the world as it is. Chandler and Dürrenmatt also agree that the folly of some mystery fiction is its rejection of the reality of crime.

As Chandler describes, some detective novels adhere to a specific formula and are “sold to the world as problems of logic and deduction.” He notes that truth and plausibility are not considered, which leads to stories that “are too contrived, and too little aware of what goes on in the world. They try to be honest, but honesty is an art.”

Chandler praises Dashiell Hammett as an example of an author who “wrote or tried to write realistic mystery fiction.” In doing so, “Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse.”

There, Chandler gets to the heart of what makes good crime fiction so intriguing. It is not only the intricacy of the plot or whether we can crack the case based on the crumbs the author leaves us. Rather, it is the glimpse it offers into the soul of the subject—whether it be the perpetrator, victim, or investigator. It is the psychological inquiry regarding why people act as they do. Crime fiction reminds us that we share a world with such people and that, under a particular set of circumstances, each one of us could be one of them.

While Dürrenmatt and Chandler both embraced the genre’s turn toward realism, they offered different solutions to how literature should confront the dark corners of reality. Dürrenmatt, through his character Dr. H, proposes an absurdist and somewhat nihilistic approach: to understand the limits of reason and logic and to humbly include the absurd in our calculations. Such a conclusion places him in the lineage of Kafka and Camus, and explains why many of his works are steeped in irony and self-labeled as tragi-comedy.

Chandler proposes that there can still be a hero in this grim world, even if it is a fallen hero. This is Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade, and others who stalked the pages of Black Mask. He closes his essay by describing such a person:

But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor – by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it.

Between the rich tradition of hardboiled and noir fiction and the countless talented writers it inspired, there is more to read than most of us can find time for. Nonetheless, I submit my humble proposal: to save a spot on the shelf for Dürrenmatt’s The Pledge. It is beautifully written, yet dread-inducing; chilling, yet honest. The world it takes place in, as Chandler would put it, “is not a fragrant world, but it is the world [we] live in.”

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Cited throughout:

Chandler, Raymond. The Simple Art of Murder, 1950. Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 1988.

Dürrenmatt, Friedrich. The Pledge, 1958. Translated by Joel Agee, The University of Chicago Press, 2006.

Lawrence Ong (who writes under a pseudonym based on a family name) is an instructor in the writing program at the University of Chicago, where he teaches academic writing. He will make his debut as a fiction writer in the Department of First Stories of EQMM’s March/April 2024 issue (on sale February 13) with the story “Murder Under Sedation.”  It’s an excellent “fair play” detective story—a story of a kind we see too seldom these days. I’ve long suspected that one of the reasons the classical detective story has fallen out of favor with writers is that it requires so much skill at plotting (not to mention a lot of subtlety!) to pull it off. In this post, through the analysis of a story by the iconic John Dickson Carr, Lawrence Ong shares some insights into how the misdirection of a classical whodunit is achieved.  —Janet Hutchings

When I was eleven, my parents bought me The Oxford Book of English Detective Stories, edited by Patricia Craig. I was already a seasoned veteran of Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle. But the other dozens of authors in the anthology were new to me. Among them were two of my future constant companions. Their surnames began with C: G.K. Chesterton and Edmund Crispin. So did the surname of the author of my favorite item in the book: “The House in Goblin Wood” by John Dickson Carr (who wrote it under the pseudonym Carter Dickson), which was originally published in EQMM in 1947. When I first encountered it, I thought it was the best mystery short story I’d ever read. Decades (and hundreds of stories) later, I still think that.

Back then, I likely valued the story’s solution (ingenious yet simple) and the impact of its final line. By my teenaged years, I appreciated the subtle (not overdone) spookiness of the atmosphere and the economy of characterization. But as I grew older, my orientation to mysteries changed. I became something I’d like to coin a term for: an encluesiast. (Rhymes with and is derived from “enthusiast.”) Encluesiasts do prize the solution itself. (Who doesn’t like a clever one?) But they attach far greater importance to how the solution has been signaled all along. They live for those little tidbits of pivotal information slipped into otherwise innocent paragraphs, like covert operatives trying to blend in with a crowd—the hints that cause you to smite your forehead with self-reproach when they hoodwink you, but pump you full of pride when you spot them before the detective does.

“The House in Goblin Wood” is an encluesiast’s Eden. It consists of a little over 7000 words. But Carr manages to pack in at least eight solid clues. That is more than one typically finds in novels many times longer, where clues have hundreds of pages to hide in. Goblin Wood may seem too sparsely planted for camouflage, and the trail leading out of it has breadcrumbs aplenty. Yet, how many readers have gotten lost in it?

“The House in Goblin Wood” is what taught me that mystery short stories can have the depth of cluing and misdirection typically associated with novels only. It is precisely that aspect that I propose to explore in this essay.

If you have not read “The House in Goblin Wood,” please stop reading this now, and start reading the story itself. Not just because I’ll spoil everything in the next section. Go read it even if you have no intention of returning to this essay afterwards. It is time well spent. And if you’ve read it before, re-read it. Carr’s transatlantic identity means that you can find it not only in The Oxford Book of English Detective Stories but also in Twelve American Detective Stories (edited by Edward D. Hoch). It’s also in the Longman Anthology of Detective Fiction and (of course) The Third Bullet and Other Stories, an all-Carr collection. (Or break out your handy copy of the November 1947 issue of EQMM!)

***

SPOILERS BEGIN HERE

Let’s begin with the story’s premise. Not the premise from the reader’s perspective. The premise that Carr himself most likely started with:

Solution: A body “disappears” by being dismembered and transported from the crime scene in picnic hampers.

Such a scheme has at least six crucial requirements:

(a) The hampers must be large enough

(b) The victim must be small enough

(c) The original contents of the hampers must be disposed of, to create room for the body

(d) The murderer must have expertise in dismembering

(e) There must be a way to commit the murder without creating a telltale mess

(f) There must be a way to transport the body in the hampers without creating a telltale mess

Before the solution is revealed at the story’s end, Carr has provided the readers with all six of these facts.

This is not quite enough, however. If the reader knows that a corpse has disappeared, their eyes will naturally alight on the picnic hampers—the only large receptacles removed from the house. Therefore, one essential piece of misdirection needs to be in place. The reader must think that the crime is an impossible escape, rather than an impossible murder. The victim must be seen or heard alive after their death. This adds an additional requirement:

(g) Someone must be capable of impersonating the victim

(About the supposed escape, little needs to be said. The house’s trick window is cheap. It suffices only because the escape is not the story’s true focus.)

Last, of course, is a requirement common to any good murder story:

(h) There must be a motive

Let’s proceed through the story in chronological order. The first of these requirements to be satisfied is (d). We are told very early that Bill is a surgeon. This is not one of those jobs or hobbies that immediately hangs a “culprit” sign around one’s neck. (“Hmm, the killer somehow left no footprints in the snow… I wonder which one did it: stockbroker Smith, journalist Jones, or circus acrobat The Amazing Antonio…”) Nonetheless, Carr clearly wants something more artful than (e.g.):

“Mr. Merrivale, this is my fiancé, Dr. William Sage.”

“A doctor, eh? What sort?”

“A surgeon.”

Carr’s clues need to be “motivated,” as magicians use the word. In magic, every gesture a magician makes must seem justified. If they transfer an object from one hand to another, if they reach into their pocket, if they riffle through the deck face-up—there must be a good reason why. (A good fake reason, of course.) Likewise, Carr’s clues are motivated in the sense that there is a within-story justification for why this information is being revealed.

And so, Carr drops Bill’s occupation in the midst of a comic misunderstanding. H.M. has slipped on a banana peel, which he wrongly believes was placed there by Eve; and he suggests that the presence of a doctor is in case the slip resulted in injury. Bill quickly reassures H.M. that he’s not that sort of doctor, but rather a surgeon. One has to wonder whether Carr designed this whole banana peel incident as motivation, to justify why Bill volunteers this specific fact.

Elements (a), (b), and (g) are all provided in the space of two paragraphs. They do most of the story’s “dirty work” and are worth quoting in full:

H.M.—though cheered by three good-sized picnic hampers from Fortnum & Mason, their wickerwork lids bulging with a feast—did not seem happy. Nobody in that car was happy, with the possible exception of Miss Adams herself.

Vicky, unlike Eve, was small and dark and vivacious. Her large light-brown eyes, with very black lashes, could be arch and coy; or they could be dreamily intense. The late Sir James Barrie might have called her a sprite. Those of more sober views would have recognized a different quality: she had an inordinate sex appeal, which was as palpable as a physical touch to any male within yards. And despite her smallness, Vicky had a full voice like Eve’s. All these qualities she used even in so simple a matter as giving traffic directions. “First right,” she would say, leaning forward to put her hands on Bill Sage’s shoulders. “Then straight on until the next traffic light. Ah, clever boy!”

First, note that the hampers are not given a sentence all to themselves. (Perhaps Carr thought that would draw too much attention to them?) They are in a subordinate clause. This can have the psychological effect of diminishing their seeming importance. To establish (a), Carr doesn’t say “large” directly. He says “good-sized.” And in the penultimate paragraph of the story, when the hampers’ role is revealed, H.M. will again describe them as “good-sized.” (Only then do we know precisely what their size is “good” for…)

This sentence also reveals two other necessary facts about the hampers. They have lids. (Obviously, we need them to conceal the hampers’ contents.) And—as the phrase “bulging with a feast” implies—they currently have a lot in them. This is key. When a third of a corpse (presumably weighing at least thirty pounds) is placed in each, it cannot be noticeably much heavier than the original contents of the hampers, or H.M. might say, “Humph. Why is this hamper so heavy?” (Here, Carr might still be stretching a point, though. Just how much could there have been in them originally that the crockery and any leftovers alone could plausibly weigh that much?)

Then, there is the paragraph describing Vicky. Her crucial smallness, (b), is conveyed by one of three adjectives in the opening sentence, sitting innocently alongside “dark” and “vivacious,” so it doesn’t jut out. Carr will tell it to us again, however, in the fourth sentence, which is what also gives us (g). Despite Vicky’s smallness, her voice is as full as Eve’s. Note the brilliance of this. Thanks to the first sentence, the paragraph as a whole might seem to be about how unalike the two women are, and yet one of its two main purposes is to tell us that they are alike enough for one to impersonate the other!

Next, Carr lays the groundwork for (e). Bill needs to dismember Vicky in the bathtub. Truly, Carr didn’t need to clue this beyond mentioning that the bathroom contains a bath. (More on this soon.) But he is a virtuoso, and so he decides to provide a clue: that bath-tap will drip, even though no one has visited the house in a while, signaling that the bath has been used recently. Here is how he sets that up:

“I must apologize,” [Vicky] said, “For the state the house is in. I haven’t been out here for months and months. There’s a modern bathroom, I’m glad to say. Only paraffin lamps, of course. [….]”

Note that Carr has again justified why this fact was mentioned. He doesn’t just have the narrator say, “The house hadn’t been used for months.” Rather, Vicky mentions it to explain why the house is in disarray. The modernity of the bathroom is also juxtaposed with the antiquated lighting, so that she is not mentioning the former for no reason.

This brings us to (c). After the picnic is done, Carr writes:

It was only afterwards, when the cloth was cleared, the furniture and hampers pushed indoors, the empty bottles flung away, that danger tapped a warning.

Again: camouflage. The hampers and the jettisoning of their former contents hide mid-sentence.

All that’s left to prepare are (f) and (h). We get the motive first. But it’s not the motive the reader might suspect on a first reading—for Carr plants a false motive in addition to the true one.

H.M. asks Eve, “Are you pretty well acquainted with this Adams gal?”. The response:

“I’m her first cousin,” Eve answered simply. “Now that her parents are dead, I’m the only relative she’s got. I know all about her.”

Answered “simply,” indeed! This is the motive—a mercenary one. But Carr’s false plant is romantic jealousy, having Eve later cry out, “I won’t let her have him […] I won’t! I won’t! I won’t!”. Why this false motive? Because it’s the motive of someone working alone. It’s fine for the reader to suspect Eve. Carr, in fact, probably wants the reader to do so. But they should suspect Eve in a way that rules out the possibility that she’s in league with Bill.

Of course, this is not enough cluing for Carr. He has Eve say something else too, something that acquires new meaning by the story’s end:

“I’m patient,” said Eve. Her blue eyes were fixed. “I’m terribly, terribly patient. I can wait years for what I want. Bill’s not making much money now, and I haven’t got a bean. But Bill’s got great talent under that easy-going manner of his. He must have the right girl to help him. If only . . .”

This is less about motive itself (although the financial angle is highlighted by the fact that Eve and Bill are poor), and more about establishing that she has the temperament to hatch the scheme. If Vicky disappeared, it would take years for Eve to inherit the family wealth. Eve needs to be “terribly, terribly patient” about money. And she is.

There’s no way to be coy about (f). Carr needs to give us the oilskin and let us scratch our heads about how it could have been used. But when we consider (f) and (h) in close succession, it is worth observing how skilled Carr is at setting up retrospective reinterpretations of facial and vocal expressions. Eve’s “blue eyes were fixed” when she declares her willingness to wait for money, an expression that H.M. will later refer to when he says, “And, burn me, how her eyes meant it when she said that!”. Likewise, H.M. says, “It must have given young Sage a shock […] when I found that piece of waterproof oilskin he’d washed but dropped.” We see this shock when Bill asks H.M. (who has just run across the oilskin) “Have you found anything?” in what we are told is a “strained voice.” The source of strain has become clear.

The last new element, then, is (e). For once, Carr is so unartful here that one almost has to give him credit for the gall. (I have to admit, though, that this is my least favorite bit of cluing in the story.) He writes:

They had gathered, by what idiotic impulse not even H.M. could have said, just outside the open door of the bathroom. A bath-tap dripped monotonously.

This is what writers call “lampshading”: drawing attention to an implausible event’s implausibility rather than trying to ignore it. There is no good reason why Bill, Eve, and H.M. should have this conversation by the bathroom, except to give an excuse to mention the clue of the telltale dripping. So, Carr doesn’t try to give a good reason. They had an idiotic impulse, okay! What more do you want?

The way (g) is finally deployed is wonderful, precisely because it seems like something from another genre, like from a horror or suspense novel:

[Bill said,] “Anyway, we won’t hear from Vicky until tomorrow morning.”

“Oh, yes, you will.” whispered Vicky’s voice out of the darkness.

Eve screamed. They lighted a lamp. But there was nobody there.

Their retreat from the cottage, it must be admitted, was not very dignified.

How they stumbled down that ragged lawn in the dark, how they piled rugs and picnic hampers into the car, how they eventually found the main road again, is best left undescribed.

How often does the false evidence that a person is still alive send people fleeing with fear out of a house?

A reader, caught in the rush of the characters’ hasty exit, is liable to miss the reappearance (and removal) of the hampers. (This time paired with the rugs for cover.) There is another reward to re-encountering this passage after knowing the solution. How they piled those hampers in the car “is best left undescribed,” eh? I wonder why the narrator doesn’t describe it…

***

There you have it. A short road to a clever solution, but one meticulously paved with even cleverer clues. I hope you’ve enjoyed traveling down this road again. And perhaps we might observe a moment of silence for poor Vicky, who died so more encluesiasts could be born.

Sam Wiebe is a winner of a Crime Writers of Canada Award and the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize. He’s also been nominated for the Edgar, Hammett, Shamus, and City of Vancouver Book Awards. His several novels include four in a series set in Vancouver, featuring P.I. Dave Wakeland, who is also the protagonist of his first story for EQMM. Entitled “The Barguzin Sable,” the story is featured in our March/April issue, which goes on sale in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, Sam has provided some reading suggestions for those who like to see their favorite series detectives in a setting other than their usual turf.   —Janet Hutchings

Rebus and Edinburgh. Warshawski and Chicago. The detective is so linked to the city in which they operate that a cliché persists: “the city is itself a character.”

Yet often over the course of a series, a detective is called out of town, summoned to a locale foreign to them. Florida salvage expert Travis McGee ends up in New York City; Swedish detectives Martin Beck and Kurt Wallander make trips to Hungary and Latvia, respectively; Cajun Dave Robicheaux leaves Iberia Parish for Montana, while Wyoming sheriff Walt Longmire sojourns a while in Philadelphia.

So why send the detective out of town? What are the benefits of an unfamiliar setting?

W.H. Auden believed the traditional detective story required “a closely related society so that all its members are potentially suspect.” When a murder is committed, this idyllic community is thrown into chaos by guilt. The detective is, according to Auden, “a genius from outside who removes guilt by giving knowledge of guilt.” Once their job is done, they serve no further purpose in that community, and must move on. Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot functions in such a way. Perhaps no detective spent as much time abroad as Poirot. A Belgian expat, Poirot is equally not-at-home in Egypt, Siberia, or the English countryside. He arrives, detects, and leaves.

The hardboiled detective novel doesn’t recognize an innocent society: finding the killer in Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles no more restores order than temperance laws restored sobriety. Yet Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest functions in a similar way to Auden’s prescription: the Continental Op is sent to Personville to rid the town of violence and corruption. The PI is a working-class character; they go where the work takes them.

A foreign location highlights different aspects of the detective’s character. When Kinsey Milhone leaves Santa Theresa, she leaves behind her support system, including cops and attorneys who know her and make allowances for her methods. Establishing that same level of trust in a different town is impossible, so Milhone operates with no safety net, sans benefit of the doubt.

“New York is where it is going to begin,” Travis McGee ponders in Nightmare in Pink, describing how societal collapse will start in Manhattan, until “by dawn of the next day there will be a horrid silence of sprawled bodies and tumbled vehicles, gutted buildings and a few wisps of smoke.” Of course this says less about New York than about McGee himself. His reaction to the crowds and turbulence of the urban landscape adds a paranoid edge to the usually confident detective.

New cities bring new perils. Bringing Edinburgh’s John Rebus to London in Tooth and Nail pits the detective not only against a serial killer, but against an English culture that looks down on the Scots. Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo’s Man Who Went Up in Smoke and Henning Mankell’s Dogs of Riga send their detectives behind the Iron Curtain, where the justice system operates in a vastly different manner. When Spenser leaves Boston to stop a terrorist plot in Montreal in The Judas Goat, or when VI Warshawski heads to Lawrence, Kansas in Fallout, they move into a world that functions differently than the world they’re used to.

Of course some detectives don’t need to leave their city to be in a hostile place: Easy Rawlins and Mas Arai only need to leave their Los Angeles neighborhoods to find social circles where their skin color marks them as other. Qiu Xiaolong’s Inspector Chen frequently interacts with a US Marshal named Catherine Rohn, both in Chen’s hometown of Shanghai and in Los Angeles; this friendship shows the similarities and differences between Chinese and American cultures.

Authorial considerations also apply. When Reed Farrel Coleman took over Robert B Parker’s Jesse Stone series, he brought the police chief of Paradise, Massachusetts to New York for the reunion of Jesse’s minor league baseball team. An unfamiliar setting was a way to clear the slate, focusing on aspects of Stone’s character that Parker hadn’t previously mined.

But perhaps the best reason for an out of town entry in a detective series is what it brings back. If a city is indeed a character, then defining that character is easier by comparison and contrast. While most of Henry Chang’s Jack Yu novels take place in New York’s Chinatown, Red Jade travels as far afield as Victoria, B.C.: the Chinatowns in these far-flung cities are similar, different, and linked to New York’s, painting a larger picture. When Philip Marlowe or Kinsey Milhone leave L.A. for Mexico (in The Long Goodbye and J is for Judgement), it’s to find answers to cases originating in their backyard.

The risk of an out of town book is also its reward. Who is this person outside of their natural habitat? New relationships are formed, and old ones change. In Gasa-Gasa Girl, Beverly Hills gardener Mas Arai travels to New York to aid his daughter, strengthening their relationship and coming to terms with his hakujin son-in-law. In Dogs of Riga, Kurt Wallander falls in love with a Latvian officer’s widow, who becomes a character in further novels. The professional relationship between Absarohka County Sheriff Walt Longmire and Deputy Victoria Moretti becomes briefly romantic when the pair visit Moretti’s hometown of Philadelphia. When Dave Robicheaux is framed for murder, he takes his adopted daughter Alafair on the run with him to Montana. In Robicheaux’s case, solving the murder doesn’t just mean finding the guilty person and clearing his name: it also means being allowed to go home.

Done right, a brief trip out of town re-invigorates a series, bringing out hidden aspects of the character and the place where they function best.

A Brief List of Out of Town Detective Series Novels

Burke, James Lee. Black Cherry Blues

Chandler, Raymond. The Long Goodbye

Chang, Henry. Red Jade

Christie, Agatha. Death on the Nile

                        Murder of Roger Ackroyd

        Murder on the Links

                        Murder on the Orient Express

Coleman, Reed Farrel. Robert B Parker’s Blind Spot

Grafton, Sue. J is for Judgment

Hammett, Dashiell. Red Harvest

Hirahara, Naomi. Gasa-Gasa Girl

Johnson, Craig. Kindness Goes Unpunished

MacDonald, John D. Nightmare in Pink

Mankell, Henning. The Dogs of Riga

Mosley, Walter. Devil in a Blue Dress

Paretsky, Sara. Fallout

Parker, Robert B The Judas Goat

Qiu Xiaolong, A Case of Two Cities

Rankin, Ian. Tooth and Nail

Sjowall, Maj, and Per Wahloo. The Man Who Went Up in Smoke

Andrew McAleer is the author of 101 Habits of Highly Successful Novelists and co-editor, with Gay Toltl Kinman, of the mystery anthology Edgar & Shamus Go Golden. He recently completed a short story collection featuring his father John McAleer’s Golden Age detective, entitled Henry von Stray: A Casebook of Crime (forthcoming from Level Best Books), and he is now at work with Gay Toltl Kinman on two mystery anthologies: Shamus & Anthony Commit Capers (Level Best Books) and Agatha & Derringer Get Cozy (Down & Out Books).  Previously he’s contributed posts to this site about Edward D. Hoch, Rex Stout, and James M. Cain. Here he gives us a look at a few of the interviews included in 101 Habits of Highly Successful Novelists.  —Janet Hutchings

While writing the 101 Habits of Highly Successful Novelists: Insider Secrets from Top Writers, I had the honor of interviewing some of crime fiction’s most successful authors. These industry giants generously shared their writing tips and secrets in order to help a new generation of mystery and suspense authors fulfill their own writing dreams. The following selected tips from Mary Higgins Clark, Bill Pronzini (MWA Grand Master), Hank Phillippi Ryan (The House Guest), William G. Tappy (Brady Coyne mysteries), Gregory Mcdonald (Fletch), Rhys Bowen (The Molly Murphy mysteries), Thomas B. Sawyer (Murder, She Wrote; A Major Production!), Peter Lovesey (Diamond Dagger winner), Michael Bracken (Black Cat Magazine [editor]; The Eyes of Texas), and William Link (Columbo) make their first online appearance anywhere—as does this vintage Polaroid of Gregory Mcdonald and Mary Higgins Clark—exclusively for EQMM’s “Something is Going to Happen” followers.

Mary Higgins Clark: Where to get the idea? Easy. Pick up your local newspaper. The odds are that on the first page or two it contains news of at least one homicide, an aggravated assault, a bank robbery, a mugging, a jailbreak. There also may be a recap on a criminal trial that merits national attention, an update on a series of unsolved murders, and an item about a child who has been missing. In other words, you’ll find material for a dozen short stories or novels.

Bill Pronzini: Always do your own work. Never try to imitate favorite or bestselling authors. Never follow current trends; what is a hot topic today may well be ice cold by the time a novel is written and submitted for publication. Imitators are seldom successful. An individual’s unique style and vision are what editors are looking for.

Hank Phillippi Ryan: During my thirty years as a television reporter, I got used to writing news stories on wet notebooks in the middle of hurricanes, with mittened hands as the snow swirled, and jouncing in the backseat of a news van on the way to make a deadline. Of course, it’s easier at my desk, and writing novels is much more civilized at your own computer or under a tree with a yellow pad or wherever your favorite spot is. Writing a novel is all about getting it done, but it’s very easy to put it off. You say, I’m at Mom’s, on vacation, too hot, too hungry, or at an unfamiliar computer, and then the time goes by, and your book is unfinished. A hundred little delays have added up to blank pages. When I’m on the trail of my own plot and the lives of my characters, nothing can keep me from writing, wherever and whenever. The thrill of having a good idea and getting it down means some chapters get written on the backs of envelopes while riding the subway or in the blank back pages of someone else’s paperback. Transcribe your ideas later. Get them down now.

William G. Tapply: Don’t be afraid to sprinkle “he said” and “she said” liberally through dialogue exchanges. Don’t let more than three dialogue exchanges happen without adding an attribution. You do not want your readers to lose track of who’s speaking, but attention-getting tags such as “he exclaimed” or “she expostulated” are cumbersome and
distracting. Write “he said” directly after the first natural pause in the spoken statement, and it will be virtually invisible to the reader while still signifying who’s speaking.

Gregory Mcdonald: People ask me how to write a book. That’s the wrong question. The question ought to be, how does one write this book? I don’t know. Only the person who conceives of a book, short story, poem, painting, or piece of music really has the ability to bear it and birth it . . . fulfill it, in accordance with itself.

Rhys Bowen: The best tip I was ever given was: If you want to be a writer, write. If you wanted to play a concerto at Carnegie Hall, you’d practice and practice, wouldn’t you? But I can’t tell you how many people have said, “oh, I plan to write a book some day’ and yet they are not writing now. Like any craftsperson, you practice until you become comfortable in the medium.

Tom Sawyer: The next time you watch your favorite sitcom or drama, observe that all of the scenes are arguments. If they aren’t, you’ll be changing channels in a hurry. Once you begin thinking of your characters in this manner—the ways in which they disagree and don’t get along with each other—you’ll quickly find that they will talk to you.

Peter Lovesey: Beware of the cliché. By this I mean not only the cliché phrase (“It’s an old trick, major, but it might just work.”), but the cliché plot (the murderer turns out to be the narrator) and the cliché style. Don’t try to be a second Raymond Chandler or J.K. Rowling. By all means learn from successful writers, but be yourself, and say it freshly.

William Link: When I lecture, I tell the mystery writers if they’re interested in clever clues and unique surprises that they should read old masters such as John Dickson Carr, Ellery Queen, and Erle Stanley Gardner. The contemporary people to study are Ross MacDonald, Michael Connelly, and P.D. James. They are experts at credible characters part and parcel of beautiful, intricate structures.

Peter Lovesey: F. Scott Fitzgerald once said “Action is character.” Make sure things are happening, and the way the characters react or speak will make them live.

Michael Bracken: Writing is an art. Publishing is a business. Once I learned to separate the two, to wear my “artist” hat while writing and my “businessman” hat the rest of the time, it became easier to deal with rejection, rewrite requests, and editorial changes.

Mary Higgins Clark: The plot, like the foundation of a house, is the structure on which all else is built. No matter how glib the writing, how enchanting the characters, if the plot doesn’t work, or if it works only because of flagrant coincidence or seven-page explanations at the climax, the book is a failure.

101 Habits also includes insider secrets from romance, western, fantasy, and science-fiction New York Times and USA Today best-selling authors. While working with these authors from many different genres and getting to know them, they had at least one universal personality trait—no matter how tough the writing world treated them they never quit. 

The author of nearly a dozen acclaimed novels, Sheila Kohler is also a distinguished short-story writer; among the honors she’s received for her short fiction are two O. Henry Prizes and inclusion in several volumes of the yearly Best American Short Stories. A contributor to EQMM for many years, Sheila’s next story for us, “Turnabout,” is in our March/April 2024 issue, on sale toward the end of February. When she’s not writing fiction, the Johannesburg-born author teaches at Princeton University. She has contributed several essays on literary classics to this site. We think you’ll enjoy this one. I had never before thought of Middlemarch as a mystery, but I see that Sheila is right—contemporary ideas of the broad scope of crime fiction could place the novel within our genre.  —Janet Hutchings

George Eliot’s Middlemarch, published in 1871/2 is generally considered a masterpiece. It has all the elements: a wise and witty narrator, many mysterious strangers who come to Middlemarch, a vividly described though imaginary town based on the Coventry of George Eliot’s childhood at a time of change, 1829-1832, all reflected through the interlocking (almost everyone is related to everyone else) and changing lives of complex and original characters. There is much romance, attempts at reform, and searches for the true religion; there is humor and almost a happy ending, and, what interests me here, a many-page-turning plot. Why do we turn these pages with such pleasure?

Much of our interest depends on our concern for the two main characters, two attractive young people put in danger of various kinds because of their idealism: Dorothea Brooke, who is impossibly and implausibly in love with learning in the form of the moribund Casaubon, and Tertius Lydgate, a European-educated doctor who is bent on medical reform. These two characters are rendered vulnerable chiefly because of their worthy aims and their unworldly and trusting interactions with conniving partners and other devious characters, which endears our heroes to us but also puts them in increasingly dangerous situations. From the first page to the last, the seeds of betrayal, dangers of impoverishment—money plays a great role here, and even violent death are cleverly and subtly planted in the very soil of the place and grow and spread and threaten the characters’ existence at times.

Middlemarch was published in serial form with a cliff hanger at the end of each section: book three of the eight books is called “Waiting for Death” and book five “ The Dead Hand,” followed by “The Widow and the Wife,” surely good murder-mystery titles. There are two important testament tales: both Featherstone and Casaubon use their wills to punish the living from the grave, the former in the form of a bequest to a love child and the latter with a codicil that attempts to separate the lovers for many pages.

All of this violence cleverly echoes the situation in the country at the time with the increasing public clamor for democratic reform: reform of the penal code, reform of the murderous medical practices, the suspicion of the coming railways, the new machines, the hostility to all these changes and even the objects themselves.

Amongst the objects sold at auction, for example, which are praised for their utility is a sharp-edged fender. Here is how the auctioneer, Borthrop Trumbull, sells it:

“and most uncommonly useful to have a fender at hand that will cut, if you have a leather shoe-tie or a bit of string that wants cutting and no knife at hand: many a man has been left hanging because there was no knife to cut him down. Gentlemen, here’s a fender that if you had the misfortune to hang yourselves would cut you down in no time—with astonishing celerity—four-and-sixpence…”

Death, murder, or anyway a hanging appears early on in the book’s many pages: Dorothea, our principal heroine asks her guardian, Uncle Arthur Brooke:

“What news have you brought about the sheep-stealer, uncle?”

“What, poor Bunch?—well, it seems we can’t get him off—he is to be hanged.”

Dorothea’s brow took an expression of reprobation and pity.

“Hanged, you know,” said Mr. Brooke, with a quiet nod. “Poor Romilly [ Sir Samuel Romilly, an English statesman who worked for criminal law reform] he would have helped us. I knew Romilly [ of course he did—Arthur Brooke is a name dropper and knows everyone including Wordsworth]. Casaubon [who Dorothea is set on marrying] didn’t know Romilly. He is a little buried in books, you know, Casaubon is.”

Casaubon is almost entirely buried in books and seems intent on burying Dorothea with him even after his death.

Casaubon’s motivation for marrying the beautiful, idealistic, and twenty year old Dorothea from the first seems almost murderous. He seems to feel she will be less critical of his magnum opus than would be a secretary.

Will Ladislaw, Casaubon’s young cousin, puts it this way speaking of Casaubon: “If he chose to grow grey crunching bones in a cavern, he had no business luring a girl into his companionship. It is the most horrible of virgin sacrifices.”

Our Casaubon, who is 27 years older than Dorothea, tells her himself that he lives with the dead. What he says exactly explaining his motivation is:

“The fact is, I want a reader for my evenings; but I am fastidious in voices, [Dorothea, though she is not musical, has a beautiful voice] and I cannot endure listening to an imperfect reader. It is a misfortune, in some senses: I feed too much on the inward sources; I live too much with the dead. My mind is something like the ghost of an ancient, wandering about the world and trying mentally to construct it as it used to be, in spite of ruin and confusing changes. But I find it necessary to use the utmost caution about my eyesight.”

What dear Dorothea—for we cannot help loving her—sees in Casaubon is “a living Bossuet, whose work would reconcile complete knowledge with devoted piety; here was a modern Augustine who united the glories of doctor and saint.”

We fear for poor Dorothea, who is in reality in love with learning, which she erroneously believes Casaubon, despite his moles and his blinking eyes and the slurping he makes while eating his soup, possesses. “It would be like marrying Pascal, ” the unfortunate girl thinks, rapturously. George Eliot is nothing if not wonderfully funny.

Lady Chettam and Mrs. Cadwallader, two aristocratic women of the town, describe Casaubon thus:

“The bridegroom—Casaubon. He has certainly been drying up faster since his engagement.”

“I should think he is far from having a good constitution, ” said Lady Chettam.

“Next to Sir James he looks like a death’s head skinned over for the occasion. Mark my words: in a year from this time that girl will hate him. She looks up at him as an oracle now and by and by she will be at the other extreme.”

We are not quite sure who will kill whom!

Again and again the narrator uses the tomb as a metaphor to describe their marriage:

“She longed for work which would be directly beneficent like the sunshine and rain and now it appeared she would have to live more and more in a virtual tomb, where there was the apparatus of a ghastly labour producing what would never see the light.”

This becomes exacerbated once she has incurred the delight of meeting the young, fresh Will Ladislaw, Casaubon’s cousin, with all his blond curls. “Today she had stood at the door of the tomb and seen Will Ladislaw receding into the distant world of warm activity and fellowship.”

It turns out, though, that the women in the book do quite well, though Dorothea suffers bravely.

Mr. Casaubon has a delicate heart which is easily shocked by the ardent flash of Dorothea’s bright eyes, her frank words. Not many months after their wedding there is an argument at Lowick Manor.

“You speak to me as if I were something to contend with. Wait at least until I appear to consult my own pleasure apart from you,” she says.

“You are hasty,” Casaubon says.

“It is you who are hasty,” Dorothea dares to reply, after which Mr. Casaubon’s pen trembles while Dorothea’s does not shake. Indeed the Latin she is learning seems clearer to her until she hears the bang of a book and the butler announces that “Mr. Casaubon has had a fit.” Though he recovers and Dorothea tries desperately not to upset him again she is obliged to refuse his final demand. In the middle of the night he asks her to promise to carry out what he wishes even after his death, without telling her what it is. She is afraid he will demand of her the work on his unfinished and obviously unworthy book. “You refuse?” Mr. Casaubon asks her when she does not respond immediately and demands at least until the morning to make her decision. She keeps silent until late the next morning, when she finally decides to give the answer he requests: “I am come Edward; I am ready,” she says, but finds him already dead in the summer house (and I am afraid we are not sorry) and it is Lydgate to whom she explains her motivation in a sort of delirium.

In Lydgate’s case, the young doctor, the nearest character to a hero in the book, who has recently arrived in Middlemarch, though he makes two successive attempts at love, commits the same mistake twice, choosing first a literal and then a metaphorical killer. Lydgate, the attractive stranger with the European education and the aristocratic connections, even before he arrives in Middlemarch, has fallen in love with Laure, an actress who stabs her lover in a play night after night while Lydgate watches, admiring the actress’s dark eyes and Greek profile. The lover she stabs on the stage is actually played by her husband, until one night she veritably stabs him and he falls to his death. Lydgate rushes onto the stage and helps the fainting Laure, making her acquaintance and finding a contusion on her head. He lifts her gently in his arms and carries her off.

He firmly believes it is an innocent accident, a slip that has caused the man’s death, and that the notion of murder is absurd until later, having tracked the actress down and proposing marriage to her, she tells him she meant to do it, that her husband wearied her, he was too fond of her. “I do not like husbands,” the woman said.

This sets up Lydgate’s marriage in Middlemarch ominously. He comes to town interested in reforming the murderous medical profession of those years. Bloodletting and leeches are common practices as well as the administration of medicines which seem to poison rather than cure even if they enable the doctors and apothecaries/surgeons to remain solvent.

Apparently Lydgate does not learn much from this first love affair. Instead he marries the beauty of Middlemarch, moved by the joy he gives her, not understanding that Rosamund Vincy is at heart a superficial snob who is attracted to the doctor only because of his aristocratic relations. She leads him into increasing debt so that the reforms he had planned can never be performed. She becomes what he calls his “ Basil plant, and when she asked for an explanation said that basil was a plant which flourished wonderfully well on a murdered man’s brains,” referring not just to his own brilliant mind and projects but to Boccaccio’s story from the Decameron, about the murder by her brothers of a girl’s lover who comes to her in a dream and tells her where his body is buried. She buries his head in a pot of basil and weeps on it until the brothers take it away and she dies.

Lydgate’s life in Middlemarch becomes even more dangerously compromised by his links with the man who may be seen as the main murderer in the plot. This is the rich banker, Bulstrode, with a dark past. Slowly, imperceptibly, and subtly the information is trickled into the novel, and a murder unfolds, seeds of which are cleverly planted from the first chapters of the book. This is an act or lack of action committed by Bulstrode, who is gradually and plausibly led to the possibility of murder by the insufferable, swaggering, red-faced man with his false bonhomie and swinging leg called Raffles, who has information about the banker’s past that he uses to blackmail Bulstrode. Bulstrode has offered to finance many of the medical reforms and a new hospital where Lydgate is to be employed. Lydgate, who is spurned by the other medical men of the town, turns increasingly to Bulstrode unaware of his past. Bulstrode professes to be a deeply religious Evangelical Christian, but he has made his fortune as a pawnbroker selling stolen goods. He has also married Will Ladislaw’s grandmother. Will is our other golden-haired hero, who falls desperately in love with Dorothea. After the grandmother’s first husband dies, leaving her his fortune, she marries the young Bulstrode, who works for the family. Raffles knows that Bulstrode has inherited his money from his wife and that this money has come from an illegal source and also through the lie Bulstrode tells his wife, that her daughter, Sarah, has disappeared when he knows where she is, so that the wealthy woman will marry him and leave him her money when she dies. Raffles comes to Bulstrode again and again with his desire to torment, insinuating himself into his household and demanding money and making himself increasingly obnoxious so that Bulstrode can only hope he will die. Finally, ill with alcoholism, he comes to Bulstrode’s house, and Lydgate is called in. Bulstrode, who was willing to see Lydgate in a debtor’s prison, now gives him a large cheque, thus involving Lydgate seemingly in Raffles’s death. For Bulstrode ignores Lydgate’s advice in the care of his patient and leaves Raffles with the housekeeper, who gives him opium and alcohol which probably kills him.

Lydgate is thus associated with the scandal that results when the townspeople hear of Raffles’s story and Raffles’s suspicious death. This causes Lydgate’s downfall, as he loses his medical and financial independence. Thanks to Dorothea, in perhaps one of the most touching scenes of the book, Lydgate is able to clear his name at least in his own wife’s eyes. Dorothea tells Rosamund he knew nothing about Raffles except his illness, and had accepted the money thinking it came from the goodness of Bulstrode’s heart. Rosamund then tells Dorothea that Will loves only her and has never loved anyone else, despite the appearances of a moment Dorothea has glimpsed of Ladislaw leaning toward her and holding Rosamund’s hands while she stares tearfully up at him. Lydgate then leaves Middlemarch with his Rosamund and becomes a successful doctor for the rich, though his ambition is destroyed. Dorothea is finally able to marry Will Ladislaw, who becomes an ardent public man whom she helps and loves despite having to relinquish the fortune she should have inherited from Mr. Casaubon, who has left a codicil in his will to this effect.

Thus the two characters we care the most about in the book escape at least with their lives if not all their ambitions intact. Lydgate dies in his fifties— providing if not a completely happy ending, at least a realistic and believable one. They live out unsung lives and are buried in unvisited tombs and yet hold our attention to the last word as the best of murder mysteries do through the almost 800 pages of this wonderful book.

Charley Marsh is the pseudonym of a writer who has authored novels in several genres, mostly science fiction and mystery. Her first story for EQMM, “Streets of Joy,” appears in our current issue, January/February 2024. She told EQMM that she never set out to be a storyteller, but that looking back on the elaborate lies she made up as a troubled teen, it’s obvious to her that she always had the makings. Now she puts that skill set to a more acceptable use—writing stories for entertainment. This post, however, deals with a subject that is terrifyingly real, even if it often finds its way into dark comedy. And despite the topic seeming to be inherently one that would interest mystery writers, it hasn’t been addressed before on this site.  —Janet Hutchings

No, it’s not a Wanted Poster. It’s a disturbing, legitimate question. At what point should a body be declared without-a-doubt-dead?

I came across an article this past November in the MIT Technology Review, titled,The Biggest Questions: What is Death? by Rachel Nuwer. She says, “Dying is in fact a process—one with no clear point demarcating the threshold across which someone cannot come back.”

Seriously? I thought dead was dead. The heart stops beating. The lungs stop expanding. The person has become a dearly departed.

Apparently not.

In a nutshell, the brain can survive without oxygen much longer than previously thought. Likewise, our organs. This is great news for organ recipients and family members who aren’t ready to let go of a loved one, but it then begs the question: When do you declare a person deceased?

Rachel Nuwer’s MIT article sent me down a twisted rabbit hole of humankind’s relationship with death. I discovered no clear answers, but came across some interesting—and in some cases, cringe-worthy—facts.

When the first person was mistakenly buried alive is lost in the mists of time, but archaeologists know that mankind has been burying its dead for at least 100,000 years (possibly as long as 300,000 years, but that time frame is currently in dispute, so I’ll go with the safer, for-sure number). I suspect the fear of being buried alive showed up soon after not-dead bodies were covered with dirt.

Who hasn’t seen the “Bring Out Your Dead” plague scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail?

Crying. Wooden cart wheels creak. A triangle clangs.

“Bring out your dead!”

“Here’s one.”

“Ninepence.”

“I’m not dead.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Here’s your ninepence.”

“I’m not dead.”

“Here. He says he’s not dead.”

“Yes, he is.”

“I’m not.”

“He isn’t?”

“Well, he will be soon. He’s very ill.”

“I’m not dead yet,” has become a modern catchphrase. A joke we chuckle over. But in not-that-long-ago times, it was often true. Plague epidemics often resulted in premature burials due to the population’s fear of contagion. Careful scrutiny of the presumed dead was ignored and bodies tossed into mass graves, only to have a few crawl back out.

Mystery writers spend a lot of time thinking about death. You could even say we are obsessed with it. It’s our bread and butter. I’m always looking for new and interesting ways to bump off a character, or coming up with characters deserving of being bumped off in nasty ways. In mysteries, there’s never any question that the victim is dead. In real life, that hasn’t always been the case.

In general, death is viewed as an event signifying the end of an organism. Until around 1960, if the heart stopped, it was assumed the person was dead. Then along came CPR, and suddenly the dead could be brought back to life. Mechanical ventilators began to pump air into lungs to keep brain-damaged people alive for extended periods, in some cases, years, even decades.

Taphophobia (or taphephobia), the fear of being buried alive, is as old as the folk tales told about it and all manner of methods have been used to avoid it. Holding a mirror under a person’t nose to see if they were breathing no longer sufficed.

According to D. P. Lyle. M.D, in his book, Murder and Mayhem, as recently as three hundred years ago, a variety of unusual and mostly painful means were employed to verify that a body had truly deceased. Tobacco smoke enemas, nipple pinching with pliers, hot pokers shoved into—I can’t even write it. You’ll have to use your imagination.

Another popular method of checking for life involved a device that clamped onto the tongue and yanked it in and out for several hours. If the victim didn’t complain about any of these, they were pronounced dead.

Fortunately these methods faded in popularity, but the fear of being buried alive did not. Patents proliferated for Safety or Security coffins coffins fitted with devices that allowed the occupant to signal they weren’t dead. “Saved by the bell,” a term used when we are saved from a perceived catastrophe at the last minute, rose from the use of a bell to alert those above ground that the corpse was not a corpse. As dead bodies often jerk and move—even flipping over in their caskets—many were hastily dug up, only to be reburied.

Putrefaction was the only certain way to tell that a body was truly dead, but most people don’t go for rotting corpses lying around their homes. One answer was to send the recently deceased to a Vitae Dubiae Asylum, or the Asylum of Doubtful Life, the brainchild of German physician Dr. Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland.

The Waiting Mortuaries, as the asylums were commonly called, were kept well-heated to hasten the rotting of the flesh. The first asylum opened in 1792 and they soon popped up all over Germany and Austria. The last one closed in Brussels in the 1870s. The smell of liquifying bodies in an enclosed space must have been unbearable. I can only imagine how difficult it was to hold on to employees.

Although rare, there are still cases when a person is declared dead only to come to life again. Consider Beck Weathers, who was left for dead—twice!—on Mt. Everest in 1996, only to awaken and stumble down to a low-level camp where he was airlifted to a hospital and survived to write a book about his ordeal.

As recently as this past October in the UK, the BBC News reported on an ambulance service that declared a patient dead only to have him wake up in the hospital morgue. The key to avoiding premature burial is to avoid being taken for dead when you are still very much alive. If you suffer from a neurological disease that gives the appearance that you have died, consider getting a prominent tattoo that warns paramedics you might not be dead. And then there’s always the security coffin.

According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, “Risk-Free Burial”: “In Italy, Tuscan watchmaker Fabrizio Caselli introduced a special coffin for people who fear they’ll be buried prematurely. The $4,500 casket is equipped with a two-way microphone-speaker, a flashlight, a small oxygen tank, a heart stimulator, and a beeper to alert an above-ground monitoring station.”

The price has probably gone up, but if you truly fear being buried alive, this could be the ticket.

Erica Obey makes her EQMM debut with “The Problem of the Vanishing Sopranos,” in our current issue (January/February 2024). The story is a centerpiece of our annual Sherlockian tribute, for it features series character Mary Watson, a librarian who has coded an AI program named Doyle to write mysteries. The adventures of Mary Watson and Doyle take place in the Hudson Valley, which is also the setting for some of Erica’s novels, including the well-received The Curse of the Braddock Brides. In this post, the Fordham University professor gives us a look at how readily the historic stately homes of the Hudson Valley can be made to serve as settings for mysteries. —Janet Hutchings

From Henry Hudson’s lost men playing at ninepins with the Catskill gnomes to the Pine Bush UFO sightings, the Hudson Valley has long had a reputation for being a place where the bounds between realities are thinner. The Headless Horseman rides long after Halloween. White ladies roam the cliff tops, while black submarines plow the great river beneath.

The curtain between past and present is always twitching against the specter of yesteryear. Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny still dust off their ancient costumes to make their appearances at fire department pancake breakfasts. The churches still run craft fairs and penny socials. What’s a penny social, you might ask? It is a kind of silent auction, where you buy quantities of raffle tickets, rather than bidding on items directly, and bid by placing your tickets in bowls for the items you are interested in. The more tickets you place in a bowl, the more likely you are to win.

The most eloquent witnesses of the Hudson Valley’s past are the buildings that still dot the landscape, from the churches that have been repurposed as everything from yoga studios to the home of a radio station to the Odd Fellows’ Hall in Bearsville, outside of Woodstock. Further north, in Cairo, one can still view the giraffe house in the remains of the Catskill Game Farm.  Then there’s the neo-Victorian Doll House on Route 28, which has spawned the dreams of a thousand toy collectors (as well as several unfounded rumors of a strip club). Further down the road, the ersatz totem poles of the Brunel Sculpture Park peek over the trees. Most of the great Borscht Belt resorts, such as the Nevele and Grossinger’s, are just shuttered remains, but a few have found new life as casinos. All of them bear witness to the years when the Catskills provided a respite from New York City for both day trippers taking steamboats up the Hudson and the millionaires who summered in the grand mountain hotels.

The first time I ever hiked in the Catskills, I went up Overlook Mountain and discovered the imposing ruins of the (final) Overlook Hotel. I was immediately hooked on the Catskills—as are so many other hikers. The Overlook Hotel has one of the most checkered histories of all the Catskill grand hotels. It could boast of welcoming President Ulysses S. Grant, but it was never particularly successful and burned to the ground at least twice. When its last proprietors finally gave up hope of making a profit on it, it was leased to the Unity Club, which eventually helped to create the Communist Party of America, putting Woodstock on J. Edgar Hoover’s radar long before the beatniks showed up.

The legend of the Overlook Hotel was also burnished by two books of folklore: The first is the beautifully produced The Land of Rip van Winkle, by the redoubtable Mrs. A.E.P. Searing, who intended it to attract visitors to the hotel, which her husband then owned. The second is a privately published (and very scarce) The Traditions of the Overlook Mountain, edited by Dexter Hawkins, a lawyer and champion of free and independent public education. It is thus ironic that this collection, penned by idle guests on a rainy evening, features such tone-deaf “traditions” as a rock that served as a sacrificial altar and a beautiful Native American oracle who delivered her prophecies from a yellow birch that grew above a cave. You can still see both the rock and the birch if you hike up there today. You can also see more than a few rattlesnakes, so keep an eye out.

The stately homes that line the opposite bank of the river echo the grand hotels on only a slightly lesser scale. But even far more modest buildings have a tale to tell, bearing testament to the lives lived within their walls long after the people have gone. Enclaves such as the town of Jewett and the glassmakers’ houses that gave Glasco Turnpike its name remind us of the industries that thrived alongside the tourism that has always been the Catskills’ life blood. Gingerbread Victorians, hand-hewn log cabins, and the arts and crafts cottages in Byrdcliffe, the historic artists’ colony where I live, all echo with the untold stories that are catnip to any mystery writer. After all, as Jo Walton has said, “The gothic is at heart a romance between a girl and a house.”

Like any mystery lover, I cut my teeth on Agatha Christie. But even before Mrs. Christie came Victoria Holt, Mary Stewart, and Phyllis A. Whitney, complete with their heroines in flimsy dresses fleeing the looming present of . . . A House.  From Ann Radcliffe’s Castle Udolpho to Wuthering Heights, Northanger Abbey and Manderley, the house is often one of the most vivid characters in a Gothic novel.

I write mysteries rather than Gothics, primarily because I agree with Whitney’s laughing assertion that she would never marry one of her brooding, complicated heroes. But it’s no coincidence that Whitney was also an MWA Grandmaster. Mysteries have a lot in common with Gothics – especially houses and the stories they guard. The hand-drawn map of the various exits, staircases, and guest bedrooms is a staple of any Golden Age country house whodunnit. And the list of Christie’s fictional houses alone is almost as long as that in Gothic novels: Styles, End House, the Vicarage, Chimneys and Crooked House, not to mention her own Greenway, which has in turn become the setting of several recent mysteries. Phyllis Richardson has put it aptly: “If du Maurier re-invigorated the Gothic house[…,] Agatha Christie turned it into something of a three-dimensional game-board in which to[…]act out the varied plots of her [stories].” And those stories are as important as the houses themselves. As Tsvetan Todorov argues, the Golden Age mystery novel is first and foremost a story about reading and writing stories, in which the reader and detective join wits against the writer and murderer to unravel the story of the murder itself.  

For those who would prefer to think in less abstruse terms (and really, who wouldn’t?), let just say it’s no surprise that when I moved to the Hudson Valley, my first and enduring love was the buildings that provide a tangible link to the stories of a vanished past. Resorts, tourist traps, stately homes, and abandoned Grange Halls: what they all have in common is that they beckon you, saying “Something happened here. Aren’t you dying to find out what it was?”

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Works Cited

Hawkins, Dexter, The Traditions of Overlook Mountain, Herald Power Press Print, 1873

Richardson, Phyllis. “The ‘Three-Dimensional Game-Board’ of Agatha Christie’s Country Houses.” CrimeReads.com. 11 May 2021

Searing, Mrs. A.E.P., The Land of Rip van Winkle. Putnam, 1884

Todorov, Tsvetan. “The Typology of Detective Fiction,” The Poetics of Prose. Cornell UP, 1977

Walton, Jo. “A Girl and a House: The Gothic Novel,” Tor.com. 24 Sept 2009