Trace Evidence

The writer who sets her mysteries in an historical era must “translate” the customs and assumptions of the past to make them accessible to the contemporary reader. The writer who sets her mysteries in a foreign culture must also translate the cultural milieu for (at least in AHMM) an Anglo-American readership. I. J. Parker, who sets her Sugawara Akitada series in 11th-century Japan, faces the daunting prospect of double translation. But as this How’d That Happen post reveals, the tales and traditions of a world well removed from ours can also provide a rich source of inspiration.

As a writer of historical novels and stories I do a great deal of reading in early Japanese literature.  Not only do such works provide useful and necessary background for setting and culture, but they frequently suggest ideas for stories and novels.  While there are no detective stories among the varied types of fiction by the early Japanese, crime seems to have been both common and violent. Usually, the original story does not go beyond the telling of the shocking event, though occasionally it attaches a religious moral to it.  This offers a challenge to the author of crime fiction.  We not only want the crime solved and the killer punished, but we are also curious about motives and the psychology of the characters involved.

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For such verbal creatures, writers often identify the genesis of a particular story in a compelling image, whether sought out deliberately or serendipitously served up by the universe. In this “How’d That Happen” post, Shelley Costa  discusses a disturbing photograph that helped give rise to her story “Strangle Vine.”

A few years ago, I came across an account somewhere about Leo Frank, a Jew who was lynched in Georgia in 1915.  At that point, I wasn’t looking to create a new story from those old materials, but it’s what led me to the next piece of story-history: lynching photography.  The photo of Leo Frank, lynched, led to other photos – appalling pictures of hapless victims dangling from tree limbs.  Strange fruit, indeed.  No due process, no rule of law, but plenty of murderous mobs and smiling spectators in straw boaters.

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In our second “How’d That Happen?” post, Rex Burns describes keeping the balance between logic and emotion in his story “Constable Smith and the Lost Dreamtime,” which appears in our October 2012 issue (on newsstands now)

The story “Lost Dreamtime” had its beginning in a feeling about place: the empty Northwest Australian coast that gazes across a stretch of Indian Ocean toward the Lacepede Islands. I wondered what Constable Smith would do if he was called to a death at such an isolated spot in this Aboriginal Reserve.

That question led to the familiar litany of queries that contribute to the structure and population of a story: Who died? How? Continue reading →