If Jean Harrington's name is familiar, it's because she just wrote a guest blog for B&N's Mystery Forum earlier this month:
I'm a sucker for anything Agatha Christie-related, though, so when Jean showed me this blog I instantly offered to post it here.
If you're an Agatha Christie buff (or even if you're a new fan), type "Agatha Christie" into the white search box at the upper right and you'll find LOTS of discussions about her books at the Mystery Forum, including a number of other guest blogs by other authors.
While you're at it, check out Jean's book, too:
About: Jean Harrington
Writing has me hooked though the realization was a long time coming. As a child I wanted to be a foreign correspondent when I grew up. I must have been a romantic even then, but reality set in and instead I went to the exotic University of Rhode Island for a degree in English literature and stayed on as a teaching assistant while I earned my master’s degree.
In the meantime, I had married John (he loves it when I give my heroes his name), and we have two grown children, Mary Lee and Chris, and three granddaughters, Amy, Laura and Carolyn.
Following URI and a stint writing PR and advertising copy, I taught writing and lit for sixteen years at Becker College in Worcester, Massachusetts. I enjoyed this period of my life tremendously, but when I think back, I realize that always simmering on the back burner of my brain was the old adage, “Those who can do; those who can’t teach.”
Not necessarily true, but after I raised my children, left Becker and moved to Florida with Big John, the gig was up. I began to write, and write, and write, and, well, you get the picture . . . .
My debut novel tells the tale of the captivating, defiant Grace O’Malley, THE BAREFOOT QUEEN, who risks everything she loves for a vow she holds dearer than life itself.
To meet Grace O’Malley, please press Book Excerpts.
Jean's website is here: http://www.jeanharrington.com/index.html
Her Facebook page is here: https://www.facebook.com/JeanHarringtonNaples?sk=i
And she's on Twitter as: @JeanHarrington1
WRITING AND THINKING OUTSIDE THE BOX
by Jean Harrington
Author of recent e-book release, Designed for Death
This past month I reread Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None (also published as Ten Little Indians). My purpose was to see how Christie handled a cyanide poisoning. Lightly, I’d say—the poison is slipped into the victim’s drink, he chokes, turns purple, dies and that’s that.
In rereading this book, often cited as the most popular mystery novel ever written with over 100 million copies sold, I discovered something far more interesting than the poisoning scene. As writers, we’re told that certain rules exist and to break them is to sound a death knell to our publishing hopes. One of these “rules” is don’t have too many characters at the story’s beginning, or you’ll confuse the reader.
In Indians, by page twenty, the reader has met eleven characters—count ‘em, eleven--and these are not flat characters with walk-on parts. They’re major players, the ten victims and the skipper of the boat who brings them to the island where they will be killed. Even this boatman, in his cameo appearance as a symbolic Charon ferrying the doomed across the River Styx, has a passage of chilling interior monologue.
Now have you, in your WIP, introduced eleven characters in the first twenty pages? Probably not. I haven’t dared to either. But Christie did, in a world-famous book that has been translated into multiple languages, produced as a stage play and made into a movie. If you’re tempted to say, “Well, a famous author can get away with breaking the rules, Indians was first published in 1939 when Christie was a relative unknown. And today, seventy some years later, it has morphed into an e-book currently selling for $6.99.
And Then There Were None ($6.99 for Nook)
Wait . . . there’s more. Backstory. The plot of Indians is based on isolating ten people so they can be murdered in punishment for crimes they committed in their pasts. So as each character is introduced into the story, the nature and circumstances of his crime have to be revealed to the reader. Backstory, backstory, backstory.
On page two, we meet one of the victims, Vera Claythorne, as she touches on her past: She was indicted in the accidental drowning of a child in her care. She swam out to save him but didn’t reach him in time. As she thinks of this, she remembers a Hugo who loved her.
That’s all. So though the possibility of something having gone wrong is dropped into the plot, we’re only given a teaser. There is no information dump, nor are there any in the tales of the other nine characters. All is anticipation, from scene to scene, as past transgressions are revealed a little at a time, luring us on like the proverbial rabbit with the carrot.
Twenty pages later, for example, the second time we meet Vera she murmurs to herself: “Drowned . . . Found drowned . . . Drowned at sea . . . Drowned . . . drowned . . . drowned . . . No, she wouldn’t remember . . . She would not think of it! All that was over.”
Now reading that passage, aren’t you intrigued? Don’t you wonder what happened? Why won’t she think of the drowning? Was she responsible? As in this instance, Christie handles the backstory of each victim so masterfully, clue by clue, that she keeps the reader panting for more until finally, at last, all secrets are revealed.
The point here is that you can introduce a plethora of characters up front and get away with doing so. You can write a book larded with backstory and succeed in that as well. This is your world, and in it you can do anything you like.
Success, however, lies in how you handle your material. Handle it well and you’ll get away with literary murder. In fact you might not even have to explain
a) where a character obtained the cyanide,
b) if he hid it in his luggage or on his person,
c) or how he disposed of the poison vial after he bumped off his victim.
But don’t take my word for it. Look to Agatha. She’s the one with the answers to writing a stunning mystery.
Blog written by Jean Harrington, author of Designed for Death, the first in her e-book and audio murder mysteries. Set in Naples, Florida, the light-hearted Murders by Design series feature an interior designer as amateur sleuth. She knows the devil ‘s in the details, but not that this devil has designs on her. Read an excerpt at Jean’s website: www.jeanharrington.com
becke_davis wrote:If Jean Harrington's name is familiar, it's because she just wrote a guest blog for B&N's Mystery Forum earlier this month:
I'm a sucker for anything Agatha Christie-related, though, so when Jean showed me this blog I instantly offered to post it here.
If you're an Agatha Christie buff (or even if you're a new fan), type "Agatha Christie" into the white search box at the upper right and you'll find LOTS of discussions about her books at the Mystery Forum, including a number of other guest blogs by other authors.
becke, just so you and the other members here know, I put in Agatha Christie in the white search box earlier this morning and got a message that B&N was having technical difficulites, and that function was not available at present. Maybe that will have changed by the time I'm writing this, or later in the day.
I wanted to see if my blog on Parker Pyne was still available. Well, shucks, I will just have to try again later.
A big "Thank you" to Jean for her article on Agatha Christie as a rule breaker! I hadn't thought of the large numbers of characters as problematic, but that's probably because of a writer like Agatha. She used that technique to such effect that the reader doesn't even think of it as being a problem. Now that I think of it. I'm pretty sure she's the one who more or less invented the denoument scene where the detective(most notably her Hercule Poirot) gathers the suspects in a room, and goes down the list of their suspicious actions, finally revealing the real criminal. Conan Doyle certainly didn't do that with his Sherlock Holmes novels and stories, and neither did Edgar Allan Poe, the two authors who are most commonly thought of as the originators of the Detective Mystery. And, of course, by her creation of the elderly Miss Marple as a crime solver, Agatha went even further in her rule breaking.Huzzah for Agatha!
P.S. I particularly appreciated Jean's choice of And Then There Were None to discuss, as I recently attended a dramatic production of that story. Since it had been some time since I had read the book, I was an interested audience member, wondering who was the murderer.
Fricka wrote:
A post cript to my above post: I just tried again, only this time I put the quotation marks around the name Agatha Christie, thus "Agatha Christie" and did have success in being taken to the page that has the list of all the articles that have been published here concerning Dame Agatha.
Darn those gnomes anyway! Well at least it's SORT OF working!
