Found a booklover's dream

Quite a while ago, I ordered a reprint of Bram Stoker’s “The Lair of the White Worm” over amazon. It came from a publisher I had not encountered before, but that happens every once in a while.

Today, while surfing the net and waiting for my desktop pc to be done with a defragmentation, I got the idea of checking the site of Forgotten Books. That was the publisher I got Stoker’s novel from. Now, forgotten Books isn’t just a publisher, they do much more. For a one-time payment, you gain access to their much better membership e-books (pdf-files which you can also read on your computer) of all volumes they keep on their servers. And there’s lots of stuff on their servers... You can download all of them in a low quality without any payment, giving you the chance to read the classics which quite often are hard to get otherwise today. You don’t need space on a bookshelf for them (I love books, but I’m running very, very low on space for them by now). You can check out books without having to buy them, read them on the whole and then decide whether you need a paperback (which you can then buy over amazon).

And it’s not just fiction, there’s also old science texts, philosophical ones and many, many more. Given the fact that the membership isn’t all that expensive, it’s quite an idea for me. A hoard of texts I’ve always wanted to read lie ahead of me.

Evil under the Sun

Actually, this is my favourite Hercule Poirot story. Most people know “Murder on the Orient Express” better, but I prefer this one. It has a lot more to offer and there’s a lot more to take into account when solving this crime.

“Evil under the Sun” takes place on an island (well, in the novel it is a land tongue that is cut off from the main land at all times but low tide), so the stranger who arrives unseen to murder the victim is out of the picture quite soon. Apart from only be reachable for a short period of the day, there’s a guard at the path people have to take to get there.

This, of course, leaves the reader – and Monsieur Poirot himself – with enough suspects on the island who have a reason to kill Mrs. Marshall, the murder victim. There’s the former lover from whom she has taken an expensive jewel. There’s the husband who knows she’s cheating on him. There’s the stepdaughter whom she bullies at every chance she gets. There’s the current lover’s wife who has to watch the two of them flirt. There’s the owner of the hotel who is secretly in love with the husband and could want the wife out of the picture. They all have alibis – but one must have done it.

I will not spoil the solution here and tell you who did it (and how and why). If you want to find out, either go and read the novel or watch the very good movie with Peter Ustinov as Hercule Poirot. I will, though, give you a few hints if you want to solve the murder yourself:

First of all, the time of death is not as clear as it might seem.

The bath which nobody took is important, as is the bottle that almost hit one of the guests on the head.

Some of the guests are great actors.

Not all alibis hold up to a good test.

The reason for the murder is not the one everyone is expecting.

Always keep in mind the first thought about bodies on the beach that is uttered in the novel.

But now back to the story itself. Why do I like “Evil under the Sun” more than the big classic, “Murder on the Orient Express”? There’s various reasons.

First of all, in the big classic you have a very classical setup (a wider variety of the locked room). The murderer has to be someone on the train, because nobody could have entered or left it unseen and without traces during the time at which the crime occurred. It plays a lot with the question of “who did it?” and then gives a surprise solution: everyone (except for Poirot, of course) did it. And they all appear to have no reason to kill the man – until Poirot finds the motif and all falls in line.

“Evil under the Sun” presents the reader with a lot of possible suspects and a victim that surely has done nothing to prevent bad things from happening. Arlene Marshall is not a nice person, she is vain, self-serving and rude towards others. Still, even she doesn’t deserve being strangled. (And compared to the kidnapper and baby murderer killed in “Murder on the Orient Express”, she’s a nice person, indeed.) Despite the same cut-off setting, “Evil under the Sun” has a different scenario. We’re not talking about a train wagon here that holds room for fourteen or so people. It’s a complete island with a hotel on it, three beaches and a lot of free space. People will find it a lot harder to have an alibi on a island than inside a train wagon that’s stuck in the snow. Still, at first all of them have an alibi, it seems. The hotel owner has seen the husband type, the stepdaughter has been swimming by a beach on the opposite side of the island from the crime scene, the wife of the lover was with her. The guy whose jewel she took is the only one without an alibi, it seems.

As the story unfolds, the alibis mostly disappear. Everyone, it seems, has either lied or was mistaken. So, who was it? Why did she have to die?

The solution Poirot presents at the end of the story is logical, even though most people might overlook one clue or two. As with many mysteries, the secret of solving them is paying a lot of attention to details.

The same, of course, goes for writing a mystery novel (which brings us back to why this post is in the “Writer’s Block” blog). You can’t just pull the solution out of a hat like a stage magician. You need to know it first, then build the story around it. You need to drop hints for the reader, even though they might not recognize them at first. You need to make all of the characters interesting – including the victim, the investigator (whatever his or her job might be) and the criminal. You need to create false leads (red herrings, as they’re called so nicely in English, German misses such a nice word for them). You need to give the reader various suspects, give them all good reasons to commit the crime. There will be false alibis and true ones (and people without one).

At the same time, try to stay away from clichés – unless, of course, you want to play with them. The locked room has been used a lot and most readers will know the obvious solutions (such as stabbing through the keyhole or locking the room with a strange device while leaving or the victim locking the room after being attacked or a device inside the room killing the victim). If you can find a novel way to use one of those concepts, go ahead and use it. Just don’t recycle old ideas and think people won’t realize.

Writing a mystery is a lot like solving one: You need to look at everything from every angle and pay a great attention to details. But if you like that kind of thing, it’s a great way to spent some time.

Characters

I’ve been reading “Bullies, Bastards & Bitches” by Jessica Page Morrell in stages for a couple of weeks now. Unlike most other books about writing I’ve read, I never managed to just start at the beginning and then read it till I reach the end. I’ve browsed through the chapters, finding all of them so interesting I couldn’t wait until I reached them ‘the normal way’. Now I force myself to read it from beginning to end.

The book is extremely fascinating to me, because I believe it’s much closer to my kind of writing than all the other books about the topic I’ve read so far. I have never found it hard to create new characters. I usually start with a character, not a scene or a concept for a story or something like that, and then think about what kind of story could happen to that character. Where one character appears, others usually follow, enemies as well as friends and allies.

Up until I stumbled over this book, all the books about writing I’ve read concentrated on story. I work out story lines, chapters, scenes and so on once I know where the characters are going, but usually, I don’t start with a scene or a basic story. So I always felt a bit left out, because as ingenious as for instance “First Draft in 30 Days” is, I never needed that much time with the story. Once I knew who would be in it, sketching out the story was just a minor problem and often happened (with the basics at least, I like the adventure of filling out the scenes as I write them) within a day.

Most books about writing are rather secretive when it comes to creating characters. You get the basic tips, such as ‘stay with real-life characters’ (ever met a vampire or werewolf in real life?) or ‘stay away from stereotypes’ (which should, indeed, be avoided at all costs).

“Bullies, Bastards & Bitches” concentrates on the characters, on the characteristics of different types (especially the darker ones, but you get the hero by turning it all upside down then … or back on its feet). Wherever I have opened the book, I found interesting things I wanted to read immediately – which is why I have owned it for quite a while, but haven’t completely read it by now.

I’ve by now read about dark heroes and anti-heroes and I have glimpsed chapters about villains and female dark characters (heroes or otherwise). I just can’t wait to finish the book.

Corpses on my hard drive

Yes, I admit it. I do have two old corpses on my hard drive. If they were humans and had just been left somewhere in a cellar, they would be skeletons by now. They’re old – they’ve been around longer than I have had my own flat so far.

They’re stories – novel material, even – and I just seem unable to finish them. Why? Can’t I think up to the end? Far from it. I know how they’ll end. I have a concept for each of them, with the main characters and a complete line-up of the story. Yet they are not finished and out there to find a publisher. Why?

I really can’t answer that question, to be honest. When I started them up, I really liked them. I still like the stories and the characters, but I can’t bring myself to write them down completely. (I also have devised a complete story line for a slash version of “Dracula”, but I haven’t finished it yet, even though it’s good…)

It’s the concept, I think. Knowing how it will end takes quite a bit of the adventure out of writing for me. I know that’s stupid – I can’t write a novel without having a concept first. I can’t finish that long a story without knowing where I am going. And I know I will enjoy writing the scenes, making them come alive inside my mind (my very own mind-movie theatre inside my skull). But I can’t continue.

This ends now!

I have read over most of one of the stories so far and will continue to write it. It’s a mystery story (they both are) and I will finish it, even if it kills me! “Der Fall des Cornwall-Vampirs” (“The Cornwall Vampire Case”) spans over 100 pages already (and is good for about 200 more). I’m about one-third through the story and just about to introduce the real villains. Maybe that’s the point. I’m going to change my point of view for the first time in the story and I’m a bit worried about that. I’m good at looking into a villain’s mind, so that’s not the problem. By now I’m out of the story, too, but that can be remedied by reading through the story again a couple of times. The Cornwall Vampire is not going to get away, that much is for sure!

This time I will hang in tight and finish the story. I promise!