My post this week on Inspired by Life . . . and Fiction:
I’m currently working on a mystery novel for an upcoming Guideposts series, so I’ve been thinking a lot about mysteries lately. The truth is I love mystery stories. I love reading them and watching them. But before now, I was scared to tackle writing one! And yet here I am. It’s been a learning curve, for sure, but it’s been fun to figure out how to set up the clues and the tension and them make it all come together—with a twist at the end, of course!
So while I’m deep in revising this story, I thought I’d share with you some of my favorite mystery series, both print and video. Let’s go with TV series first.
Foyle’s War—WWII England, mysteries on the home front.
Vera—present day England police detective inspector
Love the continuation of character in all these series. Endeavor is Morse’s backstory as a young detective in the 1960s, then Lewis arrives in the Inspector Morse series as a young detective and continues on in his own series as Inspector Lewis.
I’ve long loved the Victorian mystery series by Anne Perry, both the Charlotte and Thomas Pitt mysteries and the William Monk mysteries. And now she’s writing the next generation with the Daniel Pitt mysteries, Charlotte and Thomas’s son!
A new to me mystery series writer: Anna Huber. I’ve enjoyed the first couple of books in both the Lady Darby and the Verity Kent series. Two different time periods, both series set in England, both enjoyable reads. I’ll eventually make my way back to these series!
And of course who doesn’t love Agatha Christie novels in both their book and movie/tv show forms? Miss Marple and Hurcule Poirot as favorites around our house.
Hm. See a theme? Yep, these are either British TV shows, authors or settings. So I guess my love of mystery rose out of my love of all things United Kingdom. Or maybe it was the other way around?
Of course many other books I enjoy have a mystery element to them, but they do not technically fall in the mystery genre. And while most of these I’ve suggested to you involve a murder of some kind, I’m writing a mystery about an object, not a murder.
I’ve always been a bit in awe of mystery writers. And I still am. It is no easy feat to set up and solve a mystery for the reader without being too obvious or having too much of a pull-a-rabbit-out-of-a-hat solution.
I don’t know if I’ll write another mystery-heavy novel again, but it sure has been fun figuring it out and realizing I can do it, even if it has taken a bit more effort for this seat-of-the-pants writer!
What is your favorite mystery book or tv series?