The Writer as Magpie

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I am not the kind of writer who finds every plot twist, detail of setting, and character description in my imagination. I am like a magpie when it comes to developing a story, shamelessly borrowing from and building on whatever I see and hear. Here’s an example. As I was beginning to work on the 14th book in the Key West food critic mystery series (no title yet, but coming next summer), I had an email from a fan. She said: “I recently finished your new book and enjoyed it very much.  Especially the part where you talked about the hippies living down in the Keys in the past. I was one of those people that ended up down there in 1978.”

Immediately I was interested in her story, wondering how I could manage a book with two timelines, an old story from the 70s, probably with a murder, and a current story with one of those former hippies returning to the Keys to figure out what really happened. I asked my reader if I could build on part of her story for my next novel and she agreed. In the end, the book won’t look much like her experience, but her email definitely jumpstarted my story.

I know I’m not the only mystery writer who finds plot twists, settings, and even characters in bits of real life. 

For Deborah Crombie, a one paragraph story in the Dallas Morning News caught her eye. A couple renovating a house in west Texas had found a baby in their wall. Not a newborn, but an infant about a year old. That little story nagged at her. Why would someone do such a terrible thing? And why had no one noticed a missing child? That germ of an idea became part of the plot of her novel, Water Like a Stone, in which her detective’s sister, a contractor, finds an infant walled into the old stone barn she’s restoring on the banks of the Shropshire Union Canal in Cheshire. 

The idea for Hank Phillippi Ryan’s The House Guest germinated from the experience of an acquaintance—she’d said goodbye to her husband every morning as she went off to her office.  His next big deal was always around the corner, and the next big sale was always about to happen, and she was incredibly supportive. After a few years, the police arrived at the door. And arrested him. Turned out the husband had never been to work at all! The job was imaginary. Hank said: “Now, that’s not what happens in The House Guest at all. Not at all. But it made me wonder: how well do we know the people who are sleeping next to us? The very ones we trust the most? Could they be doing something we have no idea about? My pal got me thinking about how even a smart person can be completely fooled.”

Barbara Ross recently spoke about Hidden Beneath, number eleven in her Maine Clambake Mystery Series, at the Boothbay Harbor Memorial Library in Maine. Because Boothbay Harbor residents know their town is the model for series’ fictional Busman’s Harbor, the most popular question at the event was, “Who is this character really?” There’s only one character in the books who is based on someone both local and real, and that’s Gus, a restauranteur so curmudgeonly that he only serves food to people he knows and people who arrive with people he knows. Yes, there really was a Gus and that really was his policy. His restaurant was in the aptly named Cozy Harbor (or inaptly named, in Gus’s case). Barbara’s mother-in-law, who owned a Bed & Breakfast in Boothbay Harbor, once snuck her accountant and his wife into Gus’s place claiming they were her cousins. Barbara said, “I didn’t really know the late Gus, which made it easy to create a fictional person inspired by him, but who wasn’t him. I wanted to preserve the kind of Maine character who is disappearing in my books.”

Sarah Stewart Taylor’s second Maggie D’arcy mystery, A Distant Grave, opens with the discovery of the body of an Irish aid worker on a Long Island beach. Maggie eventually uncovers his identity and his role at the NGO he runs in Dublin. A few years before writing that book, Sarah read an article about international aid workers and was fascinated by the character portraits in the piece. The people profiled in the article talked frankly about the PTSD they experienced from their work, and also about the concrete satisfaction they got from helping people in need with the most basic things necessary for survival. Some found themselves “addicted” to the work and had had trouble adjusting to other kinds of jobs or to regular domestic life. Sarah said, “My mind started turning with all of the possibilities for getting a dedicated aid worker into a dangerous situation — not out in the field, but once he’d returned. Those fragmented thoughts became the basis for A Distant Grave.”

And that’s both the magic and the secret of the mystery fiction writer. While everyone else is watching or reading or listening to things in the real world and thinking ‘how interesting,’ or ‘that’s a shame,’ or ‘I could never do that,’ the writer is thinking ‘how can I use that,’ or ‘that would make a perfect murder motive,’ or every writer’s best tool, ‘what if?’

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