Make Mine Mystery

April 5, 2019

L Lee Kane

An old genre is making a comeback. Why am I telling you this? Primarily because I've been asked to write a short story with this type of theme that will be going into a book shortly.  It’s the old locked-door subgenre. Your protagonist enters a secret door, an abandoned cave, or boards a train, etc. These are some of the puzzle box genres of thrillers going back to Edgar Allan Poe’s classic “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.”

The mystery books came during the reign of the Golden Age of Detection, anywhere from Agatha Christie to John Dickson Carr, writing the “impossible crime”-and began to fade away until now

 Debut authors and bestselling authors are writing thrillers that people in confined places where they could become victims of a psychopath with a ticking time bomb.

So why are these types of thrillers experiencing a resurgence? Is it because of fake news, Cultural anxiety or computer games?

A few possible reasons could be the emergence of cellphones, computers, which have taken the suspense out of most mysteries. We exist in a world of instantaneous gratification, and readers get their information in real time. So how do we get back to the thrillers and mystery stories to create suspense?

You can write your novel before the time of the internet, cell phones, or social media, or you can take away these technologies and place your protagonists in a location where the mystery can begin.

Think elevator, train, jungle, space station, use your imagination. Use this situation to create a backstory of how your characters got themselves in this closet type of situation and the relationships they develop in that environment.

The backstory is critical to a thriller’s success-with no ability to change the setting and having limited action, your characters are the main focus.