 Mystery: June 28, 2023 Issue [#12041] |
This week: Mystery calling Edited by: Arakun the twisted raccoon  
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Quote for the week:
"Mystery spread its cloak across the sky.
We lost our way.
Shadows fell from trees.
They knew why."
~From "House of Four Doors" by the Moody Blues |
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Amazon's Price: $ 14.99
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Imagine getting a phone call in the middle of the night from an unknown or blocked number. The voice on the other end just says, "Run!"
Was this a threat, a warning, or maybe both? Mysterious phone calls are a great addition to mystery stories. Even though telephones have been familiar to most of us for our entire lives, there is still something mysterious about a disembodied voice transmitted through a machine.
Phone calls are often an important part of actual criminal investigations. Investigators will usually look through any victim or suspect's phone records to find possible clues.
In one real life murder case, a dropped phone call was the first clue that something was wrong. Dru Sjodin was talking to her boyfriend on her cell phone as she walked through a mall parking lot after finishing her shift at a store in the mall. Suddenly, she said something like, "Oh my god!" and the call was disconnected. Dru was never heard from or seen again until her body was discovered five months later. The man eventually convicted never admitted anything associated with the crime, but it is believed that the phone call was disconnected as he abducted Dru by knife point.
Here are a few suggestions for ways a phone call might figure in to a mystery story:
~Murder victims all receive hangup calls before being attacked.
~A ransom demand comes by phone.
~Calls appear to come from a public phone at a time no one was seen using it.
~ A wrong number caller becomes obsessed with the person they called by mistake.
~ A character's phone is stolen and they and their friends and family start getting blackmail messages based on information stored in the phone.
Phone calls are a little less mysterious since the invention of caller ID, but callers still have ways of hiding their identity. They might make the call from a phone in a library or other public place or might simply block their number before calling. They might use a burner phone or clone another person's cell number. Or they might make the call from another person's phone to deliberately throw suspicion on them.
With modern cell phones, ransom demands and threatening or mysterious messages might also come by text, facetime, or instant messenger. Since our phones are used for so much more than making calls, a person's identity might be stolen due to information stored on their phone.
Something to try: Write a mystery story that involves a strange phone call. |
|  | Death Wink (13+)
First prize in two contests. A gambler encounters his addiction's end in a deadly game.
#1018243 by Kotaro  |
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| Question for next time: What subjects would you like to see discussed in future mystery newsletters? |
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