Twist Endings: You're Doing it Wrong!

It must be difficult being a writer. You spend so much of your time crafting a work of fiction which you hope will meet all the criteria. Trying to create credible characters, a good atmosphere, and a sense of time and place… and if you’re a mystery writer, you’re probably also trying to craft a good plot, maybe even one with a surprise twist ending.

Unfortunately, it seems as though the art of the twist ending has been lost. I have seen plenty of writers try their hands at twist endings in several mediums: in film, on TV, in books, on the radio… And sometimes, I see the same mistakes cropping up, the same heavy-handed clichés which make the twist ending very easy to guess with little-to-no brainpower. So I figured I’d compile a list of these approaches, the mistakes writers often make in trying to disguise their twist ending.

Now, I just want to be clear here: I’m not saying all of these approaches are inherently bad. In fact, many authors have done brilliant things with them. But I’ve seen the items on this list used very, very poorly over and over again. So if you’re planning to use this kind of twist ending, go ahead, but you want to make sure you’re not stepping into any of the obvious traps…

And so, without further ado, I present to you the post Twist Endings: You’re Doing it Wrong!

The Father Brown Maneouvre

It involves the suspects playing a merry game of ring-around-the-rosy, waltzing around the obvious, and saying things like: "My God, the killer could be absolutely any one of us! We are all suspects! Except Bob. Clearly Bob cannot be the killer. After all, he was having lunch with the Chief Constable in Nairobi at the time! Good old Bob. What a nice guy that Bob is. Good thing we can trust Bob! Because everyone else is a suspect!"

Dishonourable mention: This approach is named after the BBC series Father Brown, which first aired in 2013. It has the bad habit of going back to this method over and over again, as though it gets more shocking with repetition. This approach also shares much common ground with the Faux Christie Approach, in which the killer is the least likely suspect, and the least likely suspect is very obviously the least likely suspect. Father Brown has a bad habit of resorting to this twist ending as well.

Elementary, My Dear Holmes!

This article was originally written for and published in the e-zine Mysterical-E. Now that there is a new issue with a new article, I am reposting this article on the blog, complete with the images that I usually illustrate my articles with.
 

In Bloody Murder, Julian Symons’ famous survey of the mystery genre, Symons writes that “successful comic crime stores, short or long, are rare. One turns away with a shudder from the many Holmes parodies (…)” Perhaps Julian Symons didn’t have much of a sense of humour, though something resembling one does shine through in his book from time to time. Either way, Symons does Holmesian literature – both parody and pastiche – an enormous injustice by dismissing it as he does. He doesn’t really take the time to appreciate the Holmesian literature that has been written over the years.

Symons’ caution is justified in some cases, but with such a huge output of Sherlock-related literature, you can only expect some pastiches to be less successful than others. Holmes seems to have particularly bad luck when he is brought to Canada. Ronald C. Weyman’s Sherlock Holmes: Travels in the Canadian West is one of the worst collections of Holmesian pastiches I have ever read. The mysteries are frankly laughable, and the premise is absurd: apparently, during Sherlock’s Great Hiatus (after his disappearance at the Reichenbach Falls) the detective wasn’t really in hiding… no, no, Dr. Watson and he were just in Canada, chilling with the Indi–– er…I mean, Native Americans (for we must be Politically Correct, my good Watson). No, really—he doesn’t even bother to use a fake name, he keeps introducing himself as Sherlock Holmes. But throughout this time Holmes potentially has Colonel Moran’s rifle aimed at his head from any window. Certainly not the Great Detective’s smartest move, and indeed, the entire book often reads like a fictionalised history textbook, with Watson spending too much time telling you about historical figures, customs, etc. The book is even illustrated with well-known images of Canadian history, making the whole thing that much more like a history textbook… and that much duller.

Elementary, My Dear Holmes!

The new issue of Mysterical-E is now up after a delay, and I'm back with a column I wrote back in November. The column is entitled Elementary, My Dear Holmes! and you can find it here. In the column I take a very general look at some notable Holmesian pastiches, both good and not-so-good. I spell out my conclusions about Sherlock and its American derivative, Elementary, and why one show gets Holmes so right and the other gets Holmes so wrong. 

Note: Unfortunately there are no accompanying images to break up the block of text, but some day I will reprint the article on here complete with illustrations.

Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? : The Smackdown

A Quick Word of Introduction: I originally wrote this piece back in March, submitting it to an online publication. Unfortunately, there seems to have been a major delay in the publishing of the next issue. Being infamously impatient, I have at last decided to publish this essay on my blog to share with my readers. I have made a few more-or-less minor revisions and have added images. In this piece, I tackle Edmund Wilson's infamous essay Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? using all the tools Wilson used, particularly sarcasm. Throughout my analysis I will challenge the claim that this essay "destroyed" the typical Agatha Christie mystery by claiming the precise opposite: it is an entirely useless essay from a critical standpoint. And so, without further ado, I give you:

Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? : The Smackdown

Edmund Wilson, Professional Troll

As a university student, I was seriously tempted to sign up for a course in Detective Fiction last term. What made me decide otherwise was seeing the book list: there was no Agatha Christie nor Raymond Chandler, and in fact, all the books were contemporary. Not only was the selection highly limited, it gave no sense of the genre’s rich and varied history from what I could tell… my fears were confirmed when I found out that one of the readings for the course was Edmund Wilson’s infamous essay Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?

But why is it famous? As I recently discovered on a re-read, Wilson’s essay contains literally nothing of substance. He only proved one thing: Edmund Wilson did not like detective stories. Which is a perfectly valid point of view. But Wilson did not substantiate it even remotely. He simply looked down at the genre through the eyes of a “true intellectual” and sniffed at it. In other words, Edmund Wilson was a troll.