The Truth beneath the Tangle
I've written a mystery
But why a murder mystery? I’m notoriously squeamish. Despise torture porn in any form. Won’t touch a book that graphically describes the infliction of harm. So why?
Because there are no larger stakes. I could write a mystery about the discovery of a lost heir, what happened to a missing person, how an online scam was uncovered. Each has potential for being an absorbing intellectual puzzle and I love a good puzzle. Parsing a tidy little problem is akin to sitting on a riverbank unraveling a wind knot: it becomes its own pleasure (and, to those eyeing that sentence skeptically because they have tried unraveling their own wind knots, yes, really).
But the mysteries I relish most are those that arrange themselves not around an act of violence, but around the motive for the violence. “How” is usually a matter of following a map of clues. “Why” takes a writer on a trip no map covers, navigating the places between what a person did and what allowed them to do it.
Which brings me to my corpse. I mentioned him in a early post, then followed up with one about parsnips. For the record, that was me being arcane. This is me being frank. My mystery is set in a forgotten corner of turn-of-the-century Manhattan. It is finished, and it is currently off seeking its fortune while I wait. I hate waiting. So, I’ll be bothering you with these essays? posts? in the meantime.
Some of you who have known me as a romance writer may be reading this with a raised eyebrow. I get it. I spent more than twenty books exploring how people fall in love, which has to be one of the Great Mysteries. But while writing those books I often opened doors that led to more mysterious places. Some dark. All of them fascinating. And some irresistible. I had to regretfully close those doors, because what was inside them had no place in my romances.
Well, it turns out, not only am I bad at waiting, I am bad at resisting. And, eventually, I didn’t.
The past several years of exploring the world have filled me with questions I didn’t realize I was collecting. Questions that led back to those doors. My home in the Driftless has given my curiosity room to wander. Here, I can stand in a spring-fed stream teasing apart a wind knot (literal and figurative) and follow one stubborn strand wherever it leads.
Sometimes it leads to murder.
And why.