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.

The Keep-Your-Mouth-Shut Files #1: Mickey Spillane

I’ve been blogging for more than two years now, and I like doing it. I use this blog to record my thoughts, feelings, and opinions on the mystery genre, and to steer readers in the direction of books they might enjoy. I try to read every book based on its own merits and to judge them all fairly. And I think I’ve done a decent job overall. That being said… I’m only human. I make mistakes. It took me a while to figure out just what a “proper” review was and how different criteria will apply to different subgenres. It took some time for me to accept that the modern crime fiction scene is far more interesting than I at first gave it credit for. And every once in a while, I went out and said something very… er, opinionated.

The funny thing about opinions is that they can change. And it can take you off guard. And boy, I’ve sure thrown around a lot of opinions here on this blog. Sometimes, I think back on what I wrote a year or two ago, and wonder just what on earth I was thinking at the time. And so I’d like to introduce a new feature on this blog, one which I hope will prove interesting: “The-Keep-Your-Mouth-Shut Files”. Although I might change the title if I think of something better, this is the part of the program where I revisit old blog posts and confirm everyone’s impression of me as an opinionated jackass who should just keep his mouth shut sometimes. And I can think of no better an inaugural subject than Mickey Spillane.

The Grandest Game in the World

Okay, here’s the situation: some crazed maniac is out there killing people left and right. With victims dropping like dead flies, the murderer leaves taunting messages for the police in the form of a crazed “dialogue”, chock-full of riddles, puns, and clues to the next victim. The press has gone insane over the story and have dubbed this lunatic “the Wordman”, and the chase is on. Sounds just like a mystery from the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, doesn’t it?

But surprisingly enough, this is the plot summary for Dialogues of the Dead by Reginald Hill, a book that was published in 2002. In this book, Hill’s regular detectives (Andy Dalziel and Peter Pascoe) find themselves duelling against the Wordman, a killer who writes stories about his murders after the fact and submits them to a short story competition.

It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key...

There’s plenty of stuff going on in The Plot Against Roger Rider. So perhaps the best way to summarise the story is to use this blog’s time-honoured method of stealing someone else’s words. In this case, you can get a feel for the story’s direction from the opening paragraph alone:

“You could say that the plot against Geoffrey Paradine started at the same time as the plot against Roger Rider. That would not be wrong, although it might be a little misleading. And you could start the story of both plots at several different points. The moment when Henry Princeton stepped off the plane at Heathrow, for instance. Or the day when John Burlington Summers told his landlady in Sydney that he was going to pursue his researches into the Russian royal family elsewhere, and left for Spain. One of the plots might be said to have started when Sheila Rider saw her father coming out of a teashop with a woman. Or you could say that the whole thing began when Amanda Rider took Geoffrey Paradine to bed. But upon the whole the best starting point is the warm July day when Roger Rider went to consult a private detective.”

Several plots, subplots, counterplots, and bizarre events later, we finally learn who was plotting against whom and what exactly the plot against Roger Rider was. But it’s quite a journey and it takes several twists and turns, and more than once it turns out that what you thought was going on was something else altogether. This is a tough story to sum up, complex and full of interesting twists and turns. And what makes it all the more unusual is that the author of this novel was none other than Julian Symons.

Psycho

The iconic cover with "cracked" lettering

Life isn’t easy when you’re running a motel in the middle of nowhere. And Norman Bates is doing just that with his life, stuck running the Bates Motel and taking care of his elderly mother, a monster in frilly clothing whose hobbies include psychological torture and preventing her son from having a life away from her. She will go to extreme measures to do this… even commit murder…

… which is precisely what Mother does when Mary Crane comes to the motel, fresh from stealing $40,000 from her employer. Mary is en route to see her fiancé, hoping that the money will help pay off his personal debts and get married sooner. But she decides to drop in at the Bates Motel, where Norman develops a boyish crush on her, even though the years of psychological abuse have left him afraid to so much as touch a woman. Mother doesn’t like this, and so when Mary goes to take a shower, Mother storms into the bathroom:

Mary started to scream, and then the curtains parted further and a hand appeared, holding a butcher’s knife. It was the knife that, a moment later, cut off her scream. And her head.

Not-so-funny funny books

Comic books are destroying the youth of America! Consider the evidence: they promote and glorify violence as a way of life. They actively promote racism and intolerance. Some comic books, such as the tales of Batwing and his young ward Sparrow, promote some of the ghastliest sexual perversions. And how do we know all this? Simple. Dr. Werner Frederick says so.

As a result, the comic book industry is in a tough place. Congress is getting set to examine the problem of comic-books and how they defile the moral fabric of America’s youth. Angry parenting groups are burning comic books and the industry is losing money. Enter Jack Starr, the Starr syndicate’s troubleshooter. Whenever trouble rears its ugly head, Jack has to go and take care of it, and Dr. Frederick’s passionate anti-comic-books crusade certainly qualifies… This forms the plot of Max Allan Collins’ Seduction of the Innocent.

What a Tangled Web we Weave!

I haven’t really tackled Polish mystery novels all that often on this blog. I wrote something about them as a guest post for Beneath the Stains of Time— which was still known as Detection by Moonlight at the time. And last year I read a book by “Joe Alex”, a Polish author named Maciej Słomczyński who was the only person to have translated all of Shakespeare’s works. I hope that this year I’ll be able to cross the language barrier a bit more often and give readers a small taste of the stuff that is currently being written in Polish… and hey, we might even get a novel that slips through the cracks and gets translated into English.

What are the odds of that happening, you might ask? Well, the odds are better than you might imagine, because I’ve found one. Zygmunt Miłoszewski is an award-winning Polish author, author of one of the few Polish crime novels to cross the language barrier into English. The novel is Uwikłanie, translated as Entanglement and published by the Bitter Lemon Press in 2010.

The setting is modern-day Poland and our hero is Teodor Szacki, a public prosecutor in the nation’s capital, Warsaw. He’s about 35 or thereabouts, and he’s married and has a daughter. He’s also got a tough job, one that can get depressing as hell. Take this latest case, for instance. A body was found in a Catholic convent, rented as a retreat centre. At the time, it was being used by a psychotherapist for a weekend of group therapy sessions, where each session revolved around a different person. The point of each session was for the participants to role-play as important people in X’s life, and X would have to come to terms with [insert your favourite psychological issue here]. One pseudo-scientific explanation later, we find out that a child’s heart disease can be caused by his father’s failure to attend his parents’ funeral. Sounds like a fun time!

Meh.

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is a novel by Michael Chabon that takes place in an alternate history. Nominated for the Edgar Award for Best Novel and winner of a Hugo Award, the novel postulates that during WWII, Alaska was set aside as a place for Jewish refugees. As a result, only two million Jews died in the Holocaust, Hitler defeated Russia, Berlin was destroyed by a nuclear bomb, and John F. Kennedy married Marilyn Monroe.

But the Jews’ time in Alaska is up, and the territory is set to revert to the United States’ control. In the chaos of the reversion, a dead Jew is found in a hotel room, a bullet in his head. This looks like a job for Detective What’s-His-Name (I can’t remember), a typical hardboiled detective who’s an alcoholic, has daddy issues, a bad love life, and all the world’s bad luck. In other words, a charming fellow.

A Demon in My View

Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins has just lost his job at the factory. He is desperate for money in order to pay his mortgage on his home. But you see, Easy is a black man in post-WWII Los Angeles, and the world isn’t particularly kind to people of his race. But Easy’s luck is about to change. He is introduced to DeWitt Albright, a shady character who takes care of people’s problems. Albright wants to find a white girl, and his only lead is that she may have been frequenting the kind of clubs that Easy visits. So DeWitt subcontracts: Easy is to find the girl and let Albright know where she is.

That’s easier said than done. Easy is very soon arrested for a murder, and he finds himself thrust into a racially segregated world where rich men fix election results from the comfort of their office and where police treat black men like they are the scum of the earth. The result is a highly stylised, dark, and tough private-eye novel in the vein of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.

God Bless Donald E. Westlake

Fred Fitch has got a problem. Actually, he’s got several – you see, Fred Fitch is a conman’s dream: a born mark. Fred simply is so naïve that any convincing person can come up to him and walk away with Fred’s money, and only after the fact does Fred tumble to the whole trick. Here, let him explain for himself:

“I suppose it all began twenty-five years ago, when I returned home from my first day of kindergarten without my trousers. I did have the rather vague notion they’d been traded to some classmate, but I couldn’t remember what had been given to me in exchange, nor did I seem to have anything in my possession that hadn’t already belonged to me when I’d left for school, a younger and happier child, at nine that morning. Nor was I sure of the identity of the con infant who had done me in, so that neither he nor my trousers were ever found.”

Set Sail for Murder

I was asked to review Marsali Taylor’s Death on a Longship all the way back in August, but I still had a summer job and school was around the corner, not to mention I had other review requests to get out of the way. So I had to decline an opportunity to be part of a book tour, although our good friend the Puzzle Doctor participated. The review was extremely positive, and so it made me eager to get around to reading this book. Unfortunately, with midterms, work, and unexpected stuff happening left and right, it took me well over three weeks to read this book. However, I’m glad to report that I easily kept track of everything. I never felt lost and when I picked up the book to read some more, I never felt like I had to refresh my memory on what I had read before. Marsali Taylor has written a very pleasant read.

But I’m getting ahead of myself here. The whole story revolves around Cass Lynch, a native of the Shetland Isles who returns to her homeland as part of a film crew, proudly skippering the replica Viking longship Stormfugl. This is being used for Ted Tarrant’s latest film, starring his beloved wife Favelle. They are Hollywood’s Golden Couple—Ted directs, Favelle stars, and come Oscar season they sweep all the awards out from under Steven Spielberg’s nose. (Seriously, how else do you explain his being snubbed as Best Director for Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark, or Munich? For that matter, how did Martin Scorsese not win for Goodfellas?)

The Doc it Was That Died

"[W]hy in the name of literature must I be fobbed off with long discussions of the detective's personal problems? Am I a couch?"

—Jacques Barzun

Dr. Mawsley, the Harley Street gland specialist, was not universally liked, but everyone agreed that he knew his stuff. He was, in effect, the top man in the country for all things gland-related, which makes his sudden death all the more mysterious. You see, Mawsley was alone in a room while his butler stood outside the door. Suddenly, there comes the sound of a crash, and when the butler enters the room, he sees his master lying on the floor, dead, having given himself a fatal dose of strychnine. It happens in John Rhode’s Death in Harley Street.

Was it suicide? Of course not—Mawsley simply wasn’t that kind of man. Utterly self-centered, his practice was thriving and he had much to look forward to. (In fact, he had just spent that evening discussing an unexpected £5,000 legacy that he had inherited.) Besides, suicide was far out of character. So was it murder? Equally unlikely, for several reasons that John Rhode details thoroughly (but which I can’t afford to go into). So it must have been an accident. But how could such an eminent doctor make such a stupid mistake and willingly give himself a lethal injection?

'Tis the eye of childhood / That fears a painted devil

Maciej Słomczyński

Joe Alex was the pen name of Polish author Maciej Słomczyński (1922-1998). His most famous accomplishment is that he was the only person in the world to translate the complete works of William Shakespeare – an accomplishment I mention because it is relevant to today’s review. Unfortunately, his translations have been criticized as unclear, unfaithful to the source material, and lacking “literary value”—whatever that is. Still, the accomplishment itself is an impressive one, and it is a work of Shakespeare’s – sort of – that lends his novel Jesteś tylko diabłem (You’re Only a Demon) its title.

I say “sort of” because the text in question is The Birth of Merlin, which although originally credited as a co-production between Shakespeare and William Rowley, most scholars nowadays agree that Shakespeare didn’t write any of it. Another reason I say “sort of” is because the book kicks off with the following quote of The Birth of Merlin, translated into Polish… and the lines I have highlighted are all condensed into the phrase “Jesteś tylko diabłem”.

Wolfe Steps Out

To set the plot of The Second Confession in motion, James U. Spurling, a wealthy industrialist, comes to Nero Wolfe’s brownstone and hires the famous detective to do a bit of tricky work for him. Spurling is convinced that his daughter Gwenn’s suitor, Louis Rony, is a Communist. Spurling asks Wolfe to prove this, but Wolfe decides it would be simpler to look for evidence that will convince Gwenn to drop Rony. And so, Archie Goodwin is sent down to the countryside to get some fresh air and do some undercover sleuthing.

But before you know it, Nero Wolfe gets a telephone call from Arnold Zeck, who introduced himself in the previous book in the series, And Be A Villain. Zeck demands that Wolfe cease the investigation, and when Wolfe refuses, Zeck arranges for some armed goons to shoot up Wolfe’s brownstone, completely destroying the plant rooms. This means war, and Nero Wolfe reacts to this threat by breaking one of his most sacred rules: he steps out of his house.

The Case of the Starved Semite

Earlier this year I had the pleasure of meeting Rabbi David Small in Friday the Rabbi Slept Late. I found it a delight, with plenty of colourful characters, a pleasing detective figure, a fascinating Jewish backdrop, and an excellent mystery. And so, you had to figure that it was only a matter of time before I got around to the sequel: Saturday the Rabbi Went Hungry.

After the events of the previous book, Rabbi David Small’s contract has been renewed and he is working in the community of Barnard’s Crossing. A major Jewish holiday, Yom Kippur (The Day of Atonement) falls on a Saturday this year, and so Rabbi Small prepares for the day-long religious service, which requires him to fast (hence the title). The entire Jewish community, it seems, is at the temple for most of the day.

An Air of Evil

Someone needs to buy Christopher Fowler a drink. I’d do it myself, except I’m not in the UK area. Here is a modern writer who understands that, generally speaking, a mystery is only as good as its story. And he comes up with a terrific plot idea in this one: Bryant and May and the Invisible Code. Two children are playing “Witch Hunter” outside a church, and decide that a sad-looking young woman is a witch. “So how are we going to kill her?” one of the kids asks. The woman then enters the church… and then, as the kids watch from the door, the woman drops to the ground, dead! Nobody approached her, and the CCTV cameras clearly show that she died alone.

Arthur Bryant gets to hear of this death from his doctor and is intrigued, but the Home Office refuses  to hand him the case. Instead, Oscar Kasavian calls Bryant and May to his office. Kasavian, it turns out, needs help. His wife has been going crazy of late—covering the mirrors in the house, talking to strangers on the street, and insisting that a coven of witches is after her life. Kasavian doesn’t understand what is going on, and he’s due to make a major speech in a week’s time. He asks Bryant and May to investigate his wife and try to help her—and if they succeed, Kasavian promises to stop trying to shut down the Peculiar Crimes Unit.

About the Murder of a Nobody

Mr. Marcus Smallbone was found dead under most original circumstances. Due to the lawyer Abel Horniman’s extremely sophisticated sorting system, a variety of clients have their own deed boxes, which are sealed in an air-tight manner in order to prevent the accidental destruction of documents. A key goes missing, a key belonging to the deed box of the Ichabod Stokes trust fund, of which Messrs. Smallbone and Horniman are the sole trustees. Mr. Horniman is now dead and Mr. Smallbone is nowhere to be found. Fearing the worst, that perhaps Mr. Smallbone has run off with the money, the box is forced open… and the firm’s employees make a grisly discovery: Mr. Smallbone, or rather his corpse, is in the deed box, and apparently has been there for weeks.

It is the plot of Michael Gilbert’s Smallbone Deceased, a book that everyone has told me is an absolute masterpiece—a must-read for detective fiction fans. But of course, that’s what people were telling me about Hamlet, Revenge! and I didn’t quite agree. So is this book really as good as its reputation suggests? Or is this just a lot of hype?

Jumping the Shark

It is with a heavy heart that I write this review—and there is a high risk that it will turn into a rant. I have genuinely enjoyed the work of Canadian mystery novelist Louise Penny in the past, and I really looked forward to her newest book, The Beautiful Mystery. It had an intriguing plot idea, and with an author as skilled as Penny behind the wheel, I thought there was no possible way for the book to fail. I was wrong.

The Beautiful Mystery takes place in the monastery of Saint-Gilbert-Entre-les-Loups, a reclusive order of monks who have taken a vow of silence. Ironically, despite their vow of silence, the monks have become famous worldwide for their beautiful singing voices, having released a best-selling CD of Gregorian chants. But then, someone at the monastery murders the world-famous choirmaster, and it is up to Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec to investigate, along with his sidekick Inspector Jean-Guy Beauvoir.

I am Chief Superintendent Lookout; Lookout of the Yard...

H. H. Crippen was one of the 20^th century’s most infamous murderers—or, at the very least, accused murderers. Over time, much doubt has been cast upon the “guilty” verdict, and some controversial new DNA evidence suggests that the remains found in Crippen’s basement may not have been his wife’s after all. (This evidence cannot be completely trusted, however.) Whatever the truth of the matter, Crippen and his lover, Ethel le Neve, fled to Canada, but thanks to the miracle of wireless communication, were arrested upon arrival by Inspector Walter Dew, who simply took a faster ship to get there first.

It is this infamous real-life murder case that inspires The False Inspector Dew by Peter Lovesey. In it, a dentist named Walter Baranov decides to murder his shrew of a wife Lydia on board the ocean liner Mauretania. The plan is a perfect one— he will be free to live with his lover Alma, a girl absolutely devoted to him. And in a touch of irony, to get away with the scheme he registers under a false name as Walter Dew, after the famous inspector who caught Crippen. There’s no way the scheme could possibly fail. But, irony of ironies, when a body is found bobbing in the ocean, the captain of the ship quite innocently asks the eminent Inspector Dew to investigate!

How long have you been a lonely guy?

I have been a reader of Martin Edwards’ excellent blog, Do You Write Under Your Own Name?, for quite some time. I can’t recall when I started to read it, but it was one of the first blogs to make it onto my blogroll. His blog is literally one of the very best mystery blogs on the Internet; he shows great admiration and respect for masters of the form, both past and present, such as Agatha Christie, John Dickson Carr, or Peter Lovesey. But much to my shame, I had not read any of Martin’s books. The shame was only compounded when a fellow blogger, PuzzleDoctor, began to review Martin’s books on his own excellent blog. The praise was consistent and recommendations were handed out as freely as Hallowe’en candy. I finally visited my Amazon shopping cart and added All the Lonely People to my digital cart, purchasing it for my Kindle.

Why All the Lonely People? Well, the Doc’s praise was of the very highest calibre: “this is one of the best mystery novels that I’ve read in ages” he declared. And you could tell that he meant every word of it. So I eagerly began to read, hoping that I would see the same things in this book.