 Mystery: October 24, 2007 Issue [#2026] |
  Mystery
This week: Edited by: Kate - Writing & Reading  
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2. A Word from our Sponsor
3. Letter from the Editor
4. Editor's Picks
5. A Word from Writing.Com
6. Ask & Answer
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“Life is a mystery ~ Living is finding and solving the clues.”
Truth, I may remind you, is stranger than fiction.”
Henry Berkolin in “The Lost Gallows”
If there were no mystery left to explore life would get rather dull, wouldn't it?
Sidney Buchman
Welcome to this week’s edition of the Mystery Newsletter. A mystery by nature is a question in search of an answer - a puzzle! And when we uncover the answer to the question, effectively solving the puzzle moments before the writer gives us the solution, follow clues tactile and cerebral, the momentary satisfaction is sublime! 
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The Locked Room Mystery story or poem is the purest form of a puzzle mystery. It’s often called a Puzzle Mystery because at first glance there appears to be no obvious rational solution. A crime, often a murder, is apparently committed under impossible circumstances, for example, in a locked room or other sealed site, i.e., virgin snow, unmarked sand dune, enclosed pool. No one could have entered or left the scene of the crime, i.e.,tire tracks that end in the middle of the bridge and the driver and car just vanish, as if into thin air along with the perpetrator. With no alien spaceship sightings around for a juicy alien abduction or sightings of prehistoric time traveling winged beasts , there just has to be a rational solution.
It’s a pure puzzle, the writer offering clues the reader is encouraged to solve before being presented with the dramatic, yet logical solution. In this form of mystery, perhaps more than others, the writer needs to be one with the perpetrator for a time, getting into his/her mind, in order to offers salient clues for the reader to find and piece together. With luck, the reader puts all the pieces together, discarding the occasional red herring, to arrive at the believable and logical solution just before the writer presents it in a satisfying, dramatic fashion.
Edgar Allan Poe is acknowledged as penning the first pure locked room mystery, as well as the first classic fictional detective mystery, in “The Murders In The Rue Morgue.” In place of shocking events and an eerie setting, solving the crime required that the reader get into the criminal’s mind (effectively conceived by the writer).
*** An interesting side note Edgar Allan Poe, while writing The Murders In The Rue Morgue, was employed as an assistant editor at the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond, VA where, in one year, he was credited with ‘between 80 and 90 reviews, six poems, four essays and 3 stories…’ (http://mysterynet.com/edgar-allan-poe/) (emphasis added).
”Let there be a spice of terror of dark skies and evil things,” wrote John Dickson Carr. He is the acknowledged master who perfected the locked room novel where apparently supernatural horrors were discovered to be the result of human motives and actions in The Three Coffins and his superbly twisted The Burning Court. In The Hollow Man, Collins even has his fictional detective, Dr. Gideon Fell, lecture the reader on how the murderer was able to deceive everyone about the locked room (by palming the key). (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locked_room_mystery)
Although S. S. VanDyne, Agatha Christie, and other American and English mystery writers made use of the Locked Room Mystery in some of their most creative work, it is not an English or American phenomenon.
French writers have, and continue to, embrace the locked room mystery, notably Gaston Leroux, whose The Mystery of the Yellow Room, is cited by John Dickson Carr as the greatest work in the genre. Martin Meroy and Bolieau-Narcejac joined forces to write several, and the novelist Paul Halter has written over 30 locked room mysteries, along with a collection of short stories entitled The Night of the Wolf, which has been translated to English. The Japanese writer Akimitsu Takagi has penned about 30 locked room mysteries, The Tattoo Murder Case translated to English. (http://mysteryfile.com/Locked_Rooms/Library.html)
The locked room mystery, now a true international form, has also found its way into film, television, comics, and manga. It is a dynamic, creative, challenge to the reader and the writer to get into the mind of the perpetrator. The writer is challenged to create a seemingly unsolvable crime, which seems to have no logical solution, and the reader to uncover the clues to solve a challenging, engaging puzzle that leads to the logical, earth-bound solution.
This dynamic form of mystery has stood the test of time - the impossible crime, in a locked room or other sealed site, incites reader participation in solving clues plotted by the writer which leads to the ultimately logical, realistic, believable solution. It’s as versatile and creative as the writer, the puzzle master, chooses to make it! I think the form is also conducive to the short story, and the editors of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine apparently agree. They have been running Edward Hoch’s locked room mysteries monthly since 1973.
Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, the two longest running mystery magazines, both accept direct submissions by published and not-yet-published writers, so I’ve included the links to their writers’ guidelines for your perusal and, perhaps one day I’ll read there a challenging locked room mystery devised by you, creative reader and inspired writer
(http://www.themysteryplace.com/eqmm/guidelines/)
(http://www.themysteryplace.com/ahmm/guidelines/)
Thank you for inviting me into your home and hope you’ve enjoyed this issue of the Mystery Newsletter. I invite you now to follow the example of the master, Edgar Allan Poe, and read and review some of our Community’s authors whose works I’ve cited, each with a locked room or other seeming unsolvable mystery for your reading pleasure and perhaps to incite the muse to design such a puzzle of your own.
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Here are several locked rooms and other 'impossible' crimes penned by the Writers i our Community for your reading and reviewing pleasure ~ and, be sure to check the Ask and Answer for clues to earning a few gps ~ Enjoy the Challenge ^_^
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Have an opinion on what you've read here today? Then send the Editor feedback! Find an item that you think would be perfect for showcasing here? Submit it for consideration in the newsletter!
https://www.Writing.Com/go/nl_form
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A Challenge for the Sleuth ~ read and review one or more of the featured items in this newsletter, post the item number for which you provided a substantive review of over 500 words, and cite for me in your post where in the story (how far along) you solved the mystery or, if you didn’t, how you missed it.
I will send 500 gps for each reply that answers the question and provides a review of substance as noted to the author by November18th. Read one, read several, read and enjoy them all ^_^
Until we next meet,
Keep Writing!
Kate
Kate - Writing & Reading
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