What Makes a Mystery Writer Tick?

Saturday I attended a Northwest Arkansas Writers’  workshop. It was fun and encouraging. I like mingling with other writers and hearing them voice their concerns and triumphs. No matter how old I get, I always learn something new about a better way to write.

One of the presenters asked for a show of hands of people writing in different genres: romance, western, mystery. Mystery writers were not as numerous as some others and I wondered why. Don’t we all have a certain curiosity about why things happen? Aren’t most of us blessed with a part of the anatomy hidden somewhere in our skeletal structure called “a bone of curiosity”?

Maybe a mystery writer is just nosy.  She is not content to accept events at face value and she is more than a little suspicious of easy explanations. The most important question for a mystery writer is “Why?” From that one little question comes a protagonist with a problem, pitting her skills against the forces of evil. A mystery writer is a treasure hunter with a long handled spade she uses to dig up answers. Why did my two heroines, Darcy and Flora find themselves in a cave complete with a dead body and a wealth of gold after a sudden plunge down a steep mountain? What happened to Flora’s old friend found dead atop a brush pile at Goshen Cemetery? And where was he taken when his body disappeared? Why did all these things happen? These were questions that my co-author and I answered in  The Cemetery Club.

Why did a distraught mother ask for help in locating her recently married daughter? What secrets did the daughter’s husbands not want uncovered? And how did Darcy and Flora get entangled in a dangerous hunt? The answers are in Grave Shift.

Of course, these scenarios are entirely from my co-author Barbara’s and my fertile imaginations. There might be a germ of an actual event somewhere that started our thinking along these lines but other than that, they are gossamer tales spun into a web of make-believe. At times we even scare ourselves!

Writing a mystery is a natural outlet for someone with more than her share of curiosity.  It’s what keeps me writing when I’m confronted with a blank page. All I need is to ask is what if…maybe it could have been…and I’m on my way. Finding the answer to the eternal “Why” is what keeps this mystery writer going.