My Brainwave for a Great Mystery Novel... or Perhaps Not. By Griselda Heppel

By -
Murder on the Orient Express by
Agatha Christie
I’ve had a brainwave. Why hasn't anyone thought of this before? 

(Ah, turns out they have. See below. Never mind, I'm not stopping now.)

So many stories – detective and mystery ones in particular – are set in a closed community that your characters can’t get away from. A train perhaps. Or a boat. (Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile.) An office block (Die Hard, one of my favourite films) or a hotel on fire (The Towering Inferno). 

The reasons for this are obvious: throw a bunch of different characters together in a tight cauldron, add some kind of disaster or threat, and BOOM, you have all the ingredients for a gripping, heart-in-mouth tale.

Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie

For children’s authors (including, cough, me) the enclosed setting is more likely to be a holiday camp, or a school – boarding, if possible, meaning that your beleaguered hero really is stuck with all the problems you’ve created for him/her, and has to deal with them alone. (See Robin Stevens’s Murder Most Unladylike. Also my The Fall of a Sparrow.)

The Fall of a Sparrow
by Griselda Heppel
So, back to my Great Brainwave: why not plot a story in a different kind of closed setting? 

One which takes boarders; but not a school or university. Where all kinds of personalities are brought together, learn to get along and are well looked after; but not educated. Because this is a place you go to in the later years of your life, not the early ones. 

A care home, in other words. 

Your main character could arrive as a new resident – nervous, shy, keen to make friends  – and come up against the invisible hierarchy among the seasoned occupants. Toes are trodden on – perhaps literally – people go off in a huff, and your poor hero, now isolated, comes across a dead body… Pretty soon others start to disappear and your hero, along with one stalwart friend in loose cardy and slippers, turns detective. Together they comb the home for clues, lie in wait at dead of night, break open the lock to the strong room and...

No. Not going to work.

Life is exhausting enough for the elderly without
having to solve murders. Photo by Vlad Chețan:
https://www.pexels.com/photo/
monochrome-photo-of-an-old-man-2586537/





The sad fact is that people enter a care home when they are no longer able to look after themselves. When every act, from getting up in the morning to going to bed at night, is so exhausting they can’t do it unaided. When getting from place to place involves a walking frame/wheelchair and someone on hand to help. When chatting and relationship building are made almost impossible by loss of hearing, while the brain, no longer working at its best, tires easily. Creating a group of quick-thinking, agile, problem-solving sleuths under these conditions just isn’t feasible. 

It also feels unfair, not to say patronising, to turn the lives of the elderly into this kind of fiction, when the battles they are fighting against the debilities of old age are very real indeed. Yes, I know, Richard Osman does it, extremely successfully, in his Thursday Murder Club series. I should give his books a try, perhaps. 

I just have the nagging suspicion I may not be able to suspend my disbelief enough to enjoy the stories.
OUT NOW
The Fall of a Sparrow by Griselda Heppel
BRONZE WINNER in the Wishing Shelf Awards 2021 
By the author of Ante's Inferno  
WINNER of the People's Book Prize
www.griseldaheppel.com 
https://griseldaheppel.wordpress.com

Comments

Umberto Tosi said…
This definitely works, with your talents and despite your misgivings -- maybe by virtue of them. It's the writer, not the plot. Sounds like a great opportunity to create memorable characters. Go for it!
1 September 2023 at 08:02
Cecilia Peartree said…
It isn't really a care home that Richard Osman uses as his setting, more like sheltered housing (if that's what it's called now) where people have their own flats and there's a manager or something but they don't do actual care. I tend to agree with you that the inhabitants of an actual care home wouldn't generally be able to do much detecting. Though I think I've seen some episodes of murder mysteries on tv that were at least partly set in care homes.
Sometimes relatively young people go into sheltered housing for various reasons. My father-in-law started to nag about wanting to live in a sheltered flat when he was about 60 or so, because he hated having to get anything done around the house or garden!
Re the Richard Osman books - I've listened to a couple of them rather than reading, but I found the second one a bit too long for my taste.
1 September 2023 at 13:11
Peter Leyland said…
Closed communities are great for writing stories about Griselda. My absolute favourite of recent years is that of Hailsham in Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, a school which has such a chilling reason for existing...

Richard Osman, now his first book kept me going on a recent thirteen hour plane journey, half of it there and half on the way back, and you've just given me a great idea for another closed community - the people closed up together in a Premium Economy Cabin on a long flight!! But, oh no, didn't Agatha Christie get there first with Death in the Clouds? She is the mistress of closed communities as you rightly say, and that's a brilliant tale if you've never read it.

Thanks for the post.
1 September 2023 at 16:12
Griselda Heppel said…
Thank you, Umberto! Glad I was more convincing than I realised. Care homes are certainly full of memorable characters. This post was inspired by the fact that my mother has just moved into one, and I'm fascinated by the way nothing changes in the way people relate to each other, from primary school on. It's all there: the old guard taking their time before accepting the new recruit, who causes umbrage by sitting in the Wrong Chair/being too chatty/not chatty enough... all exacerbated by the sheer difficulties of deafness and immobility. I'm sure there's a novel in there somewhere.

Ah, that would make a difference, Cecilia, if Osman uses a sheltered village rather than a care home. Still, from reading Robert Crampton's analysis of the Thursday Murder Club books' appeal in the Times yesterday, it does all sound rather happy and idealistic. But it's fiction after all (and really I have no right to comment until I've read one!).

Agatha Christie is still the master, I reckon. I've never been able to guess whodunnit in any of her books (while I have in many recent writers' ones). I didn't know about Death in the Clouds, Peter, I'll have to hunt it down. I instantly thought of one of those films celebrated for being hilariously awful, called Snakes on a Plane... enough said!

Thanks for these great comments.
5 September 2023 at 12:36
Post a Comment

Popular posts

A Few Discreet Words About Caesar's Penis--Reb MacRath

By -
Image
Veni, vidi...Wiki! Not long ago I had the all-time greatest Great Idea: one, born of total ignorance, that nearly tanked a novel. As you may have guessed from my opening line, my subject is Julius Caesar. But you might not have guessed from the title that my Great Idea entailed his being reborn as a penis. Don't laugh, please, I beg you. I saw no way around this, even though showing JC as a 'dick' might lead some to think that I've written a spoof. In fact, it's a serious thriller. Without giving the plot away, I can say this: I needed JC's ghost, today, remembering his nights with Cleopatra on her fabled golden barge. There  was the heart of my book--a ghost trying for 2000 years to relive that lost boogie with Liz. And I'd begun to run with this when my memory corrected me: Mark Anthony, not JC, was on the barge with Cleo. And this was after JC's death. What the hell was I to do, lacking the good sense to check memory's 'facts
Read more

Margery Allingham and ... knitting? Casting on a summer’s mystery -- by Julia Jones

By -
Image
The Watchtower from the Saltings  (Photo Tom Barr)  How to connect a 1940s naval watchtower on the Tollesbury marshes, a brilliant Scottish knitwear designer and my all-time favourite novelist?   The investigation led me along the single-track lanes south-east from Tollesbury, heading towards the end of the old railway line to Tollesbury Pier. I began to get goosebumps as I remembered coming here before. Once on a long walk with my dog, when I was never quite sure where we were trespassing but was determined to explore anyway.  That was when I first saw the six-sided building, stark and guarded against the weather. Then I saw it again in my imagination: ‘It’s a t-tower,’ said David. Xanthe loved the way he said it with a shiver of excitement in his voice. ‘It’s in the m-middle of a f-field and it looks right down the r-river.’ ‘And when it was wartime the Navy built it so they could keep a lookout against invaders,’ added Kieran. ‘Then p-zow they’d press a button and the whole
Read more

As Time Goes By

By -
Image
 Dooley Wilson, Ingrid Bergman, "Play it, Sam." 1942 I turn 87 on the 16th of this month. That means I was five years old when Ilsa Lund asked Sam to play As Time Goes By . No wonder I've been a lifelong romantic (who writes about time travel a lot.) I vaguely remember first seeing Casablanca at a theatre with my mother. She elbowed me from a Hershey-bar stupor to see one of her Hollywood bit-actor friends, Frank Puglia, as a Moroccan vendor selling Ingrid Bergman a scarf. I posted about Puglia here in 2020. (See " The Phantom of Dream Streets .") It was 1943. I was a precocious kid who could read the funnies and the headlines of newspapers delivered to our front steps every day. I hid under a marble-topped coffee table during air raid drills, laughing at the game of sirens, closed drapes and wardens waving hooded flashlights.  My mother, wth my Nonna Rosa, c. 1960 My Rome-born Nonna Rosa, still kept milk in an "ice-a-box." She didn't own an elec
Read more

Dress to Impress your readers! by Elizabeth Kay

By -
Image
 Every so often you come across a book where what people are wearing is described in great detail. After a while it becomes annoying as you want to get on with the story, not the author’s attempt at visually fixing a character in your head with irrelevant detail. Their mannerisms, disabilities and speech patterns may be far more effective. So if you’re going to describe someone’s clothing, it must be important. My first example is from my children’s book The Divide , set in alternative world, where the different sorts of human-like mythical beings are distinguished by the colour of their clothing. "Tansy had never been to Tiratattle before, and Ramson was pretending to be more familiar with it than one school visit could possibly have made him. He refused point-blank to ask directions, and denied outright that they’d been past the chalice stall three times. The shops were full of candles and incense burners, their designs quite unlike anything Tansy had ever seen in Geddon. There
Read more

What's Your Angle--by Reb MacRath

By -
Image
You may be in either camp or be a hybrid, as I am. In the course, though, of writing a novel we may all come to the same block: we know where to go  and exactly what to do there...but we can't seem to figure out how to get there smoothly and efficiently. I found myself on a roll with my WIP when the ending of the seventh chapter threw me for a loop. Consider: Chapter 7 ends with two of the three main characters--let's call them A and B--engaged in risky business in a small Arizona town. They've arranged for C to follow them days later on a different pretext, apparently looking for work. But, unknown to them, something has happened in Tucson. Chapter 8. Change of POV. Cut to character C, left behind in Tucson. Because of what's happened, he chooses to leave a day early though he can't reach A and B by phone. The challenge: getting him on the road and to his destination, while filling readers in on the Tucson tragedy. Road trip? Flashbacks? I tried a dozen different t
Read more