The Twist by Nancy L. Eady

When I was in the ninth grade, my family lived in a Northern Virginia suburb. I was standing on our back deck one Saturday afternoon in the fall, enjoying the sight of the meadow at the back of our house surrounded by colorful leaves while I leaned into the cool, crisp breeze blowing towards me. Above me was one of those perfect cerulean blue skies you only see in October. But then I heard an unearthly, wailing sound that reminded me of whale song. For about two beats of my heart, it was eerily beautiful. I won’t ever forget the shock I felt in my stomach when I realized I was hearing the howling of a dog in pain. I whirled inside, found my mom, and the two of us tried to figure out where the sound was coming from, and if there was an animal that needed help. About the time we figured out the sound was coming from behind a house across the street and up the hill a little bit, it had stopped. When we got to the house, we knocked on the door and the man who came to the door told us that everything was fine and there were no problems. Mom asked around and found out the next day that the neighbors on either side of the man suspected him of beating his dog, a beautiful 1 year old golden retriever and wanted to report him to the Humane Society. I immediately agreed to testify to whoever I needed to about the sound I had heard. Fortunately, the shelter didn’t need my help, but very quickly the dog was removed and re-homed.

What I experienced in that second of shock was the twist, a shift in my perspective, a turn from the reality I thought I was living in to the reality that was. 

A couple of years later, we had moved to Alabama, my parents had gotten a difficult divorce, and my mom had full custody of myself and my sisters. Burning with filial piety and the desire to do something really nice for her, the three of us very inexperienced cooks decided we would surprise her when she got home from work with Crepes Suzette for supper. It didn’t go well. By the time Mom got home, the kitchen looked like the Swedish Chef and the garbage disposal had gotten into a food fight with pancake batter and cream. She smiled, showed us how to finish the dish correctly, and told us how much she appreciated our efforts. We were so proud to have done something nice for her. 

I never knew how much that moment cost her until I walked into my own house twenty years later after a long day at work to see the mess my daughter had made while trying to make me a cake. To be fair, her mess was a lot worse even than ours had been because she believed recipes were unnecessary. Flour mixed randomly with eggs and sugar and scorched at 400 degrees for an hour in the oven has a very distinctive smell. Just as with the more horrifying incident with the golden retriever, I experienced the twist, my brain latching on to the existing reality rather than the reality I thought I had been living in when I tried to make my mother Crepes Suzette. 

Good mystery writers have mastered the twist. Carefully, they send us down a cultivated trail of clues, red herrings and misdirection guiding us to believe one thing, then showing us at the end how the truth was something else entirely.  

What techniques have you found helpful when plotting (or editing, for you pantsters out there who were just as surprised as everyone else to find out who the culprit was when you finished your first draft) your own mysteries to send the reader in one direction while making sure the truth lies in another? Are there any hard and set rules you like to follow? What was the best twist you ever read in a mystery novel? 

Perspective by Nancy L. Eady

One day, I was driving to work, approaching a gas station built of beige cinder block, when I noticed a huge gallon of milk floating over the store. That’s not something you see every day, and I’m afraid I spent more time staring at it than paying attention to my driving. I had to slam on the brakes when my attention suddenly switched to the car in front of me. Avoiding a collision, I switched my attention back to the floating gallon of milk, which is when I realized the gallon of milk adorned the side of a straight truck that was on a street behind the station, but just high enough to create the illusion of the floating milk jug.

This weekend, while driving down the interstate, I saw ahead of me in the distance a huge black rectangle with flashing yellow lights driving down the road. I puzzled over what kind of construction project would need a road sign quite that big until I drew close to the rectangle. That’s when I discovered that instead of a huge road sign, the big black rectangles were monster size tires so big that four of them not only filled but overlapped the trailer of an eighteen wheeler, and the blinking lights were of the pilot car traveling behind it. 

In a more serious incident from my teenage years, one fall Saturday afternoon I was standing on our deck in Northern Virginia admiring the gorgeous color in the surrounding trees when I heard an odd sound that reminded me of whale song. Floating across the hills, the sound, which repeated, was both eerie and beautiful. Until something in my mind clicked and, to my horror, I realized what I was hearing was a dog yowling while he was being beaten. I rushed inside and told my mom. Someone in the neighborhood reported the man, and ultimately the situation was resolved. I never heard the sound again, for which I was grateful. 

What changed with each situation was my perspective. When my perspective changed, my understanding increased. In a well-crafted mystery, we attempt to do the same thing for our readers—present them with one picture or sequence of events that looks like one thing, only to have that picture change to something else once all the clues have been found and the truth obtained by our intrepid sleuths. The movie The Sixth Sense was like that; I didn’t see the twist until the very end of the movie. Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd also handled the switch well; again, it wasn’t until the very end of the novel that I finally understood the entire picture that had been drawn. 

What perspective switches have you used in your own mysteries? What mysteries have you read that do a good job managing a switch of perspective at the end? 

Burial For the Dead, Rite II--a guest blog by Ben Furnish

Linda Rodriguez here. This is a guest blog by my husband, scholar, editor, and publisher, Ben Furnish.

Burial For the Dead, Rite II

by Ben Furnish

Yesterday, I was reminded of an ultimate remedy for that perennial affliction of the publishing world—self-pity. The remedy? Try attending the funeral of someone who is close to your own age.

That remedy was not the reason why I packed my wife, Linda Rodriguez, into the car and drove three hours to Springfield, Missouri. I wanted to pay my respects to Jane Hoogestraat’s surviving family and colleagues. I had edited Jane’s poetry book Border States for publication last December after it won the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry. When I last heard from her, she felt optimistic she had beaten breast cancer. But her students became alarmed when she did not show up for class one day. She was already gone by then. 

Unlike the deaths that populate the imaginations of the fine regular writers on this blog, hers was of natural causes. But not only is death always a shock, but her sister even pointed to the death date on the front of the funeral program and said, “This is the wrong date. It’s just wrong.”

Jane was beginning to achieve some major success for her poetry. I was gratified to hear from family and colleagues how much the book meant to her, including the reviews and award it received, especially Garrison Keillor’s selection of a poem from the book for his syndicated Writer’s Almanac radio program. The trials and tribulations of publishing, including worries about rankings and sales—never large for poetry—dwarf in the face of Jane’s unexpected fate.

I almost did not attend the service because my office desk and email in-box were groaning from the accumulated pressures of serial mini-catastrophes over the past year: Linda’s surgeries and treatments, a truck that totaled our car, whiplash, bronchitis, a maintenance-hungry house. Every morning, I would wake up knowing that I must get my act together, do more on behalf of my authors’ books and my own peripatetic teaching and writing. Every evening, I would confront the certainty of my daily failure to do enough, to get caught up, to get life under control again.

But listening to The Book of Common Prayer’s “Burial for the Dead, Rite II,” (“In your boundless compassion, console us who mourn,”) I cringed at the comparative indulgence of my previous days’ despair. Rather, my burdens are opportunities, gifts even, in comparison to the card Jane drew. Not that my turn isn’t coming one day—of course it is, as for all of us. Perhaps this is one reason why we humans endeavor to treat death with respect, whether in ritual or in fiction as writers and readers, because doing so reminds us to appreciate our own lives and seek to live them more fully.  

Bio

Dr. Ben Furnish is the author of Nostalgia in Jewish-American Theater and Film: 1979-2004 (Peter Lang) and many scholarly articles and essays. He is the managing editor of BkMk Press at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and the publisher of Scapegoat Press, a micro-press specializing in literature from marginalized communities, and he teaches at the Kansas City Art Institute. He lives in Kansas City where he divides his affection unevenly between his Plott hound and his wife.