ERIC'S BIT or BOARD WITH LIFE
Since the mystery board game Clue (Cluedo outside North America) was invented in the UK in the late 1940s there have been endless variations. Card games, DVDs, a junior edition, a movie, a computer game....I played Clue when it was relatively new (long before the Simpsons version) and before I ever read a mystery. My friends and I were crazed on board games back in our grade school days. I was still reading Tom Swift Jr and science fiction juveniles by Lester del Rey, Andre Norton, and Robert Heinlein. The Hardy Boys never interested me. They were stuck on the surface of the planet and all the suspects they encountered were carbon-based life forms, or so I gathered. How boring!
My first mysteries were the Sherlock Holmes stories. Holmes had something of the mad scientist about him. If he hadn't been solving mysteries he might very well have been inventing time machines or invisibility potions, and maybe he did. His breathtaking, if often incomprehensible, intellectual leaps reminded me of those spaceship engineers who would figure out, at the last moment, how to rig the Aldebarean Framistan Device to take advantage of the rotational velocity of the doomed asteroid to escape the gravitational beams of the pursuing raiders from Ophiuchi.
Miss Marple, on the other hand, didn't remind me of any science fictional character. But I didn't get around to her until years after I'd discovered Sherlock. So when I first played Clue I knew nothing of mysteries, let alone the body-in-the-library genre on which the game was based.
What I liked about the game was how you could roam around the mansion in any direction you wanted, visiting whichever room took your fancy. The board games I first came in contact with, from Candy Land to Chutes and Ladders and Uncle Wiggly, all involved racing along a path to a finish line. Even The Game of Life, which had plastic mountains jutting up from the board, or the game about the conquest of Mount Everest, where the board was a triangular mountain (magnetized so the playing pieces could climb it) involved moving along a path to the end. The same was true of Monopoly where you went around and around tediously, one Pay Day following another until it all ended in happiness for the winner, and tears for all the bankrupts. Alas, I rarely ended up being the rich man.
When I played Clue I was vaguely aware that I was supposed to figure out that Colonel Mustard did it in the Conservatory with the Wrench. (And why is it, Colonel Mustard always seems to be the first suspect who springs to mind? Why does no one ever finger Mrs. White?) But I could barely handle the deduction even when there were only two of us playing. I just enjoyed wandering the halls and gawking, which is pretty much the way I read mystery novels, that is, with no hope of figuring out the killer and not much effort put into it.
Although one player wins Clue the ending isn't quite so simple as that of most board games. With 6 different characters, 6 possible murder weapons, and nine different rooms there are 324 possible solutions. That's a lot of possibilities, and maybe too many since I was never quite sure why, if the body had been discovered, there would be a question as to whether the crime had been committed with the rope, for example, as opposed to the gun. I would have thought it would be obvious.
One of the attractions of the mystery novel may be that there is more to the ending than winning or losing. At the conclusion of most books the protagonists either succeed or fail in reaching their goals, overcoming the obstacles they face, or resolving the conflicts that beset them. And for the most part we have to fool ourselves into believing the protagonist might lose because few books -- at least of the genre variety -- end in such a totally unsatisfactory fashion. We keep reading in large part to find out exactly how the successful outcome will be achieved and perhaps what it all means.
Classic mysteries offer a bit more suspense as to the outcome. Of course, the detective will find the murderer, no surprise there. But as in the game of Clue, we don't know who the murderer will turn out to be from amongst the cast of characters. That part of the end of a mystery novel is also satisfyingly concrete. We might not like the way an author wraps up a book, or how the author has the protagonist reach the end, or what the author makes of it all. But with a mystery, at the very least, we are left with a solution to a puzzle.
I have to confess, aside from my predilection for exploring mansions, I also liked Clue because of the lead pipe. Not to mention the candlestick, the dagger, the gun, the rope, and the wrench. I found those miniature accessories beguiling although I would have preferred that the rope wasn't plastic. Those objects are not actually required for game play. They could have been pictured on cards, or the players might have been instructed to simply allude to them verbally rather than placing them in the room where the crime was suspected to have occurred. But it was a stroke of genius to include them. Perhaps they served as an example of "show, don't tell.."
Then again, maybe I don't have a clue.
NECESSARY EVIL or THE BSP TICKER
The ticker has been chugging like all get out since our last newsletter, and here's the news it brought.REED ALL ABOUT IT or MAYER WE TALK?
The Reviewedbyliz Summer Mystery Reading Challenge is ending this month. While readers will have through the end of August to complete their six books, we'll be acting as bookends in that we're the last featured authors and will be gracing Liz's blog on August 17th. Subscribers may recall on our original attempt to participate we broke it...but now we have another opportunity to say a few words and answer questions. Point your clicker at http://www.reviewedbyliz.com on August 17th and say hello!JOHN'S NEXT ADVENTURE or IT'S NO SECRET
Three days ago we received official word that Seven For A Secret will be published by Poisoned Pen Press in April.A few words about John's latest adventure:
The day after meeting a mysterious woman who claims to have been the model for the little girl in his study mosaic, John finds the woman's red-dyed corpse in a subterranean cistern. Who was she? Why had she sought John out? Who wanted her dead -- and why?
The answers seem to lie among the denizens of the smoky streets of that quarter of Constantinople known as the Copper Market, where artisans, beggars, prostitutes, pillar saints, and exiled aristocrats struggle to survive within sight of the Great Palace and yet worlds distant.
John encounters a faded actress, a patriotic sausage maker, a sundial maker who fears the sun, a religious visionary, a man who lives in a treasure trove, and a beggar who owes his life to a cartload of melons. Before long John suspects he is attempting to unravel not just a murder but a plot against the empire.
BACK TO BRETANIA or ONEFER MARCHES ON
Recently spotted: an August 2006 piece in the British paper The Guardian devoted to reads inspired by holiday destinations, http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2006/aug/11/restandrelaxation.onlocationfilminspiredtravelor, as James Anthony and Sarah Crown put it, "classic literary accompaniments to your summer escapes". What authors would not be thrilled to find one of their books mentioned in such an article? And there was One For Sorrow, one of the titles representing Turkey, along with such notables as For Whom the Bell Tolls (Spain), Madame Bovary (France), A Room With a View (Italy), and Ulysses (Ireland)! We're still amazed.
FOURFER GOES FORTH FIRST or BRETANIA INVADED
Four For A Boy how now escaped in the UK. One For Sorrow, John's first appearance at novel length, will follow this autumn, with the rest of John's adventures released in due course. Info on these and other PPP novels can be found on the website of Poisoned Pen Press (UK), the publisher's British arm http://www.poisonedpenpressuk.com UK subscribers may be interested to hear that while the site features the publisher's catalogue, printed copies can also be requested.
THE TRIPOD CAT or MR PICKWICK'S KENTISH TRAVELS
Accompanied by Mr Tracy Tupman, that jolly fellow Mr Samuel Pickwick will shortly be off to Kent in an investigation overshadowed by The Three-legged Cat of Great Clatterden. We plead guilty to being the awful pair of scriveners who sent them there as our contribution to Mike Ashley's forthcoming anthology The Mammoth Book of Dickensian Whodunnits. Intended to celebrate Dickens' fascination with crime, it will be published towards the end of the year and includes stories by Edward Marston, Charles Todd, Peter Tremayne, Robert Barnard, and Kate Ellis among others.
A DEER MEMORY or OFF TO NARNIA
Mary contributed a nostalgic piece to the Lady Killers Blog in July. She opened her essay with the following words:"My parents owned one of those enormous wardrobes made of dark wood -- perhaps mahogany -- and fitted with a mirror on the door taking up the middle third of its vast frontage. As a youngster, more than once I poked my head into the wardrobe's dark cavern of garments, leaned in, and groped past its mothball-scented hanging population. And once or twice it really felt, just before the tips of my fingers met smooth wood, they would go further than they should and I would be poking them into Narnia. Years later, when I lived in Oxford, I finally got there."
Subscribers can follow her footsteps by pointing their clickers at:
http://theladykillers.typepad.com/the_lady_killers/2007/07/mary-reed-goes-.html
A BRUSH WITH FAME or GET YOUR TEETH INTO A MYSTERY
We were surprised, to say the least, when we recently learnt John's adventures will soon reside in the National Museum of Dentistry in Baltimore. Lois Hirt, writer of a column dealing with dental matters in any media, particularly fiction and non-fiction books, is currently cataloguing her collection of archival material, which includes dental paraphernalia such as dolls, puzzles, toys, puzzles, etc., for donation to the museum, and Six For Gold is among items to be transferred there in due course. It's certainly the most unusual honour we have been awarded thus far, and we thank Lois for it.
GOLDEN DAYS or WEARING A NEW HAT
The Maywrite Library, our ongoing effort listing etexts for classic and Golden Age novels, now features over 250 links, a number of them to collections of short stories. It can be viewed at http://home.epix.net/~maywrite/golden.htm. In connection with this project, Mary has boldly put on her Apprentice Reviewer hat and scribbled a few thoughts about a number of these works for the Mystery File site run by Steve Lewis. These reviews are enhanced with biblios, book covers, and the like. Go to http://www.mysteryfile.com/blog/ and search for her moniker in the box on the right hand side, whereupon All Will Be Revealed.
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