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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."
Hiding places can be very important in mystery stories. Anything from a dead body to a buried treasure to a live person might be hidden away by one character for another character to find.
Choosing a hiding place depends on what is hidden and whether the character wants it to be found again.
A killer would probably not want a body or other evidence of a crime to be easily found or recovered. They might not care if they could easily find it again as long as nobody else could either.
A character who hides money or other valuable items would need to hide it in a way that they might easily recover it, but nobody else would be likely to find it.
The character in the movie "Fargo" did not really do a good job of hiding the ransom money when he buried it in the snow marked with his ice scraper. Snow can melt, blow around, or be covered by more snow. Even if the character had not met his end in the wood chipper, he might have had a hard time finding the money again.
Sometimes the easiest way for a person to hide might be in plain sight. A person who wants to hide from the authorities or other characters might change their appearance and appear in the story as a character nobody really notices such as a member of the cleaning crew or a homeless individual.
If the hiding place of a person or item is a major part of the mystery, you might want to make it an type of hiding place that isn't used too often or use it in an unusual way.
Something to try: Write a mystery story in which an important item is hidden.
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Mystery: July 26, 2023 Issue [#12087]
