Mystery writing group?

Michele Palmer, who is writing a mystery, would like to know if anyone else on this blog is writing one as well.

Agatha Christie

Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie, DBE (née Miller; 15 September 1890 – 12 January 1976) was a British crime writer of novels, short stories, and plays. She also wrote six romances under the name Mary Westmacott, but she is best remembered for the 66 detective novels and more than 15 short story collections she wrote under her own name, most of which revolve around the investigations of such characters as Hercule Poirot, Miss Jane Marple and Tommy and Tuppence. She also wrote the world's longest-running play The Mousetrap.[1]

Born to a wealthy upper-middle-class family in Torquay, Devon, Christie served in a hospital during the First World War before settling into married life with her first child in London. Although initially unsuccessful at getting her work published, in 1920, The Bodley Head press published her novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles, featuring the character of Poirot. This launched her literary career.

According to the Guinness Book of World Records, Christie is the best-selling novelist of all time. Her novels have sold roughly 4 billion copies, and her estate claims that her works rank third, after those of William Shakespeare and the Bible, as the world's most widely published books.[2] According to Index Translationum, Christie is the most translated individual author, and her books have been translated into at least 103 languages.[3] And Then There Were None is Christie's best-selling novel with 100 million sales to date, making it the world's best-selling mystery ever, and one of the best-selling books of all time.[4] In 1971, she was made a Dame by Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace.[5]

Christie's stage play The Mousetrap holds the record for the longest initial run: it opened at the Ambassadors Theatre in London on 25 November 1952 and as of 2012 is still running after more than 25,000 performances.[6] In 1955, Christie was the first recipient of the Mystery Writers of America's highest honour, the Grand Master Award, and in the same year Witness for the Prosecution was given an Edgar Award by the MWA for Best Play. Many of her books and short stories have been filmed, and many have been adapted for television, radio, video games and comics.

Novels by Agatha Christie

(Click on a title to find the Wikipedia article on the novel.)

• The Mysterious Affair at Styles, The Secret Adversary, The Murder on the Links, The Man in the Brown Suit, The Secret of Chimneys, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, The Big Four, The Mystery of the Blue Train, The Seven Dials Mystery, The Murder at the Vicarage, The Sittaford Mystery, Peril at End House, Lord Edgware Dies, Murder on the Orient Express, Why Didn't They Ask Evans? Three Act Tragedy, Death in the Clouds, The A.B.C. Murders, Murder in Mesopotamia, Cards on the Table, Dumb Witness, Death on the Nile, Appointment with Death, Hercule Poirot's Christmas, Murder Is Easy, And Then There Were None, Sad Cypress, One, Two, Buckle My Shoe, Evil Under the Sun, N or M? The Body in the Library, Five Little Pigs, The Moving Finger, Towards Zero, Death Comes as the End, Sparkling Cyanide, The Hollow, Taken at the Flood, Crooked House, A Murder Is Announced, They Came to Baghdad, Mrs McGinty's Dead, They Do It with Mirrors, After the Funeral, A Pocket Full of Rye, Destination Unknown, Hickory Dickory Dock, Dead Man's Folly, 4.50 from Paddington, Ordeal by Innocence, Cat Among the Pigeons, The Pale Horse, The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side, The Clocks, A Caribbean Mystery, At Bertram's Hotel, Third Girl, Endless Night, By the Pricking of My Thumbs, Hallowe'en Party, Passenger to Frankfurt, Nemesis, Elephants Can Remember, Postern of Fate, Curtain, Sleeping Murder.

Cozy mystery

From Wikipedia,

Cozy mysteries, also referred to simply as "cozies," are a subgenre of crime fiction in which sex and violence are downplayed or treated humorously, and the crime and detection take place in a small, socially intimate community. The term was first coined in the late 20th century when various writers produced work in an attempt to re-create the  1

Characters

The detectives in such stories are nearly always amateurs (village policeman Hamish Macbeth, featured in a series of novels by M. C. Beaton, is a notable exception) and frequently women. They are typically well educated, intuitive, and often hold jobs (caterer, innkeeper, librarian, teacher, dog trainer, shop owner, reporter) that bring them into constant contact with other residents of their town and the surrounding region.[2] Like other amateur detectives, they typically have a contact on the police force who can give them access to important information about the case at hand, but the contact is typically a spouse, lover, friend or family member rather than a former colleague.[3] Dismissed by the authorities in general as nosy busybodies (particularly if they are middle-aged or elderly women), the detectives in cozy mysteries are thus left free to eavesdrop, gather clues, and use their native intelligence and intuitive "feel" for the social dynamics of the community to solve the crime.[2]

The murderers in cozies are typically neither psychopaths nor serial killers, and, once unmasked, are usually taken into custody without violence. They are generally members of the community where the murder occurs, able to hide in plain sight, and their motives—greed, jealousy, revenge—are often rooted in events years, or even generations, old. The murderers are typically rational and often highly articulate, enabling them to explain, or elaborate on, their motives after their unmasking.

The supporting characters in cozy mysteries are often very broadly drawn and used as comic relief. The accumulation of such characters in long-running cozy mystery series, such as those of Charlotte MacLeod, frequently creates a stock company of eccentrics, among whom the detective stands out as the most (perhaps only) truly sane person.

Content

Cozies virtually never dwell on sexuality or violence, or employ any but the mildest profanity. The murders take place off stage, and frequently involve relatively bloodless methods such as poisoning and falls from great heights. The wounds inflicted on the victim are never dwelt on, and seldom used as clues. Sexual activity, even between married characters, is only ever gently implied and never directly addressed, and the subject is frequently avoided altogether.

The cozy mystery usually takes place in a town, village, or other community small (or otherwise insular) enough to make it believable that all the principal characters know, and may well have long-standing social relationships with, each other. The amateur detective is usually a gregarious, well-liked individual who is able to get the community members to talk freely about each other. There is usually at least one very knowledgeable, nosy, yet reliable character in the book who is intimately familiar with the personal history and interrelationships of everyone in the town, and whose ability to fill in the blanks of the puzzle enables the amateur detective to solve the case.[2]

Cozy mystery series frequently have a prominent thematic element introduced by the detective's job or hobby. Diane Mott Davidson's cozies, for example, revolve around cooking, Parnell Hall's around crossword puzzles, Monica Ferris's around needlework, and Charlotte MacLeod's "Sarah Kelling" series around art. Other series focus on topics ranging from fishing, golfing, and hiking to fashion, antiques, and interior decoration. Cat-lovers are well represented among the ranks of cozy-mystery detectives, notably in the work of Rita Mae Brown and Lilian Jackson Braun, as are herbalists (of whom the best known is Ellis Peters' medieval sleuth Brother Cadfael).[4]

Avoidance of explicit sex and violence, emphasis on puzzle-solving over suspense, a small-town setting, and a focus on a hobby or occupation are all frequent elements of cozy mysteries. The precise boundaries of the sub-genre remain vague, however, with the work of authors such as Aaron Elkins and Philip R. Craig considered borderline cases.

Notable examples of the genre

The Miss Marple character, created by Agatha Christie, who appeared in twelve novels that have been adapted numerous times for film and television.

Hetty Wainthropp Investigates: An English drama starring Patricia Routledge as the eponymous old busybody, who solves mysteries around her Lancashire neighbourhood.

Murder, She Wrote: An American series starring Angela Lansbury as mystery novelist Jessica Fletcher, who finds that her work often has parallels with her own life.

The Cat Who... series by Lilian Jackson Braun began as a more "hardboiled" mystery series in the late 1960s, but transformed into cozy mysteries when the author resumed writing them almost 20 years later.

Rosemary & Thyme: a British mystery television series that combines accidental amateur sleuthing and gardening. A few episodes have been adapted and expanded as full length novels.

Pie in the Sky: a British mystery television series that combines sleuthing and cooking. A police detective and gourmet runs his own restaurant in between solving crimes.

The Mrs. Murphy series written by Rita Mae Brown and "co-authored" with Sneaky Pie Brown, her cat whom the main cat character, Mrs. Murphy, is based on. The Jane Arnold series also falls in to the sub-genre.

The Hilary Tamar Series, written by Sarah Caudwell, featuring Professor Hilary Tamar and a cast of clever and trouble-prone young London barristers.

Mr. and Mrs. North novels, written by Frances and Richard Lockridge, which feature an ordinary couple who live in Greenwich Village with their cats Gin, Sherry and Martini and solve mysteries.

"The Dixie Hemingway Mysteries" by Blaize Clement, chronicling the adventures of a cop turned pet-sitter in Siesta Key Florida.

The Aunt Dimity novels by Nancy Atherton feature American Lori Sheppard, who settles in an English village thanks to an inheritance from "Aunt" Dimity (an old friend of her late mother's). Dimity herself communicates with Lori via a magical journal to help solve mysteries involving Lori and her neighbours.

Preliminary Survey

Your interest (or lack of it!) in mysteries or detective fiction?

Detection you enjoyed or despised in various media: 

In the movies:

On television:

In books/magazines:

Favorite mystery authors:

Favorite sleuths:

History of Detective Fiction

Das Fräulein von Scuderi", an 1819 short story by E. T. A. Hoffmann, in which Mlle de Scudery establishes the innocence of the police's favorite suspect in the murder of a jeweller, is sometimes cited as the first detective story and a direct influence on Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue".[10] Also suggested as a possible influence on Poe is ‘The Secret Cell’, a short story published in September 1837 by William Evans Burton, describing how a London policeman solves the mystery of a kidnapped girl. Burton’s fictional detective relies on practical methods - dogged legwork, knowledge of the underworld and undercover surveillance - rather than brilliance of imagination or intellect, but it has been suggested this story may have been known to Poe, who in 1839 worked for Burton.[11] However, true detective fiction is more often considered in the English-speaking world to have begun in 1841 with the publication of "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" itself,[8] featuring "the first fictional detective, the eccentric and brilliant C. Auguste Dupin". Poe devised a "plot formula that's been successful ever since, give or take a few shifting variables."[12] Poe followed with further Auguste Dupin tales: "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt" in 1843 and "The Purloined Letter" in 1845.

Poe referred to his stories as "tales of ratiocination".[8] In stories such as these, the primary concern of the plot is ascertaining truth, and the usual means of obtaining the truth is a complex and mysterious process combining intuitive logic, astute observation, and perspicacious inference. "Early detective stories tended to follow an investigating protagonist from the first scene to the last, making the unraveling a practical rather than emotional matter."[12] "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt" is particularly interesting because it is a barely fictionalized account based on Poe's theory of what happened to the real-life Mary Cecilia Rogers.

Émile Gaboriau was a pioneer of the detective fiction genre in France. In Monsieur Lecoq (1868), the title character is adept at disguise, a key characteristic of detectives.[13] Gaboriau's writing is also considered to contain the first example of a detective minutely examining a crime scene for clues.[14]

Another early example of a whodunit is a subplot in the novel Bleak House (1853) by Charles Dickens. The conniving lawyer Tulkinghorn is killed in his office late one night, and the crime is investigated by Inspector Bucket of the Metropolitan police force. Numerous characters appeared on the staircase leading to Tulkinghorn's office that night, some of them in disguise, and Inspector Bucket must penetrate these mysteries to identify the murderer.

Dickens's protégé, Wilkie Collins (1824–1889)—sometimes referred to as the "grandfather of English detective fiction"—is credited with the first great mystery novel, The Woman in White. T. S. Eliot called Collins's novel The Moonstone (1868) "the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels... in a genre invented by Collins and not by Poe",[15] and Dorothy L. Sayers called it "probably the very finest detective story ever written".[16] The Moonstone contains a number of ideas that have established in the genre several classic features of the 20th century detective story:

• English country house robbery

• An "inside job"

• red herrings
• A celebrated, skilled, professional investigator
• Bungling local constabulary
• Detective inquiries
• Large number of false suspects
• The "least likely suspect"
• A rudimentary "locked room" murder
• A reconstruction of the crime
• A final twist in the plot

Although The Moonstone is usually seen as the first detective novel, a number of critics suggest that the lesser known Notting Hill Mystery (1862–63), written by the pseudonymous "Charles Felix", preceded it by a number of years and first used techniques that would come to define the genre.[17][18] In 1952, William Buckler identified the author of the novel as Charles Warren Adams and in 2011 American investigator Paul Collins found a number of lines of evidence that confirmed Buckler's initial claim.[17][19]

In 1887, Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes, the most famous of all fictional detectives. Although Sherlock Holmes is not the original fiction detective (he was influenced by Poe's Dupin and Gaboriau's Lecoq), his name has become a byword for the part. Conan Doyle stated that the character of Holmes was inspired by Dr. Joseph Bell, for whom Doyle had worked as a clerk at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. Like Holmes, Bell was noted for drawing large conclusions from the smallest observations.[20] A brilliant London-based "consulting detective" residing at 221B Baker Street, Holmes is famous for his intellectual prowess and is renowned for his skillful use of astuteobservation, deductive reasoning, and forensic skills to solve difficult cases. Conan Doyle wrote four novels and fifty-six short stories featuring Holmes, and all but four stories are narrated by Holmes's friend, assistant, and biographer, Dr. John H. Watson

Detective fiction

Main article: Detective fiction

• The whodunit The most common form of detective fiction. It features a complex, plot-driven story in which the reader is provided with clues from which the identity of the perpetrator of the crime may be deduced before the solution is revealed at the end of the book.

• Locked room mystery: A specialized kind of a whodunit in which the crime is committed under apparently impossible circumstances, such as a locked room in which no intruder could have entered or left.
• Cozy: A subgenre of detective fiction in which sex, profanity or violence are downplayed or treated humorously.

Later and contemporary contributions to the whodunit

• The historical whodunit is also a sub-genre of historical fiction. The setting of the story and the crime has some historical significance.
• The inverted detective story, also known as the "howcatchem." The commission of the crime and the identity of the perpetrator is revealed to the reader first, then the rest of the story describes the detective's attempt to solve the mystery.
• The American hard-boiled school. Distinguished by the unsentimental portrayal of violence and sex, the sleuth usually also confronts danger and engages in violence.
• The police procedural: The detective is a member of the police, and thus the activities of a police force are usually convincingly depicted.
• The  legal thriller: The major characters are instead lawyers and their employees, and they become involved in proving their cases.
• The spy novel: The major characters are instead  spies, usually working for an  intelligence agency.

• Caper stories and the criminal novel: Stories told from the point of view of the criminals.

• The psychological suspense novel: This specific sub-genre of the  thriller genre also incorporates elements from detective fiction, as the protagonist must solve the mystery of the psychological conflict presented in these types of stories.