A process of elimination…

Murder stories, films, TV shows nearly all work on the same premise – there is a victim, there are suspects, by a process of elimination the detective/cop/sleuth and sometimes the reader/viewer discovers who committed the crime. To make it an interesting puzzle the writers have to muddy the waters – but not unfairly, they have to mislead – but not annoyingly or untruthfully, and in the best stories, subtle clues should be given so the resolution/denouement/show down makes sense, and possibly even could have been guessed at.

Among the characters and suspects is the person ‘who done it’ but the characters must all be properly described and understood by the audience – or at least the lead characters who will become the inner ring of people who really could have done it, really had a motive, really had an opportunity…

Part of my next Radwinter novel is a puzzle set for the main character Thomas Radwinter; his client’s mother was a teenager at school in 1931, and she told her son when he was an adult that someone had been murdered at the school… he wants Thomas to find out not only who the murderess was (hoping it wasn’t the mother) and to find out which of her school friends was murdered and who did it! A tall order to go back over eighty years and some a crime that no-one else knew was committed! Thomas doesn’t travel back in time, there are no scenes set in the past, it is all Thomas’s research and genealogical tracking which I hope will bring him to a solution satisfactory to his client, but also, more importantly to my readers!

Here they are, the twelve girls… another has died in an accident…. or was it? The girl top left is Tomas’s client’s mother, so we presume she was not the one responsible…

These girls superficially look similar, and I think it would be impossible for the reader to imagine twelve characters, so Thomas attaches an adjective to each of them,

Cheeky
Anxious
Steady
Snooty
Unhappy
Confused
Determined
Steadfast
Lonely
Very sad
Disappointed
Ready
Frightened

They have names, of course, and then Thomas discovers that they made little clubs for themselves, Golden Dragons, Blue Lions, Silver Wings so there is something else for them to be associated with. I won’t explain what else I have done to try and make them into individuals, I don’t want to spoil anything should you read the book, however I hope that all will be clear, and when Thomas finds the truth, it is believable and more than that – understandable!

Some of the girls are “eliminated” quite early on, so before long there are just a manageable few “suspects”! By the way, my featured picture is of Cynthia Rhymes, the mother of Thomas’s client. You might wonder why she has an English name… all will be explained in my book!