Write What You Hear . . .by Molly MacRae

The characters wandering around in my head don't talk to me. Maybe they would if I approached them, but I prefer to eavesdrop. They chatter to each other and I have the enviable position of being the fly on the wall. Although, as this all happens inside my skull, maybe that image doesn't quite work. Anyway, they're alive and yakking around up there and that's fine by me.

Margaret, Bitsy, and Leona are especially entertaining as they snipe and maneuver around each other. They seem to have a fondness for interrupting while I'm cooking supper. Are they clamoring for my attention? I don't know, but as I always stop to transcribe their conversations, their gabbing often leads to setting dinner on the table later than I intended or to snatching a dish from the jaws of the oven in the split second before it's too late.

I don't know what part of my brain my characters inhabit, but they offer comfortable, witty, contemplative, sometimes confrontational, and always imaginative conversations. Distracting though they are, it's great fun listening to them and I hope they never move out.

(Illustration - copyright Hank Blaustein - from the short story "Missing Something" in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, May 2000.)

IS SOMEONE WATCHING ME? by Sarah Wisseman

My husband Charlie, a retired pathologist, is a ghoul. On an airplane from Luxor to Cairo, Egypt, I told him I had a new plot for an archaeological mystery, The House of the Sphinx. He listened to my ideas for skullduggery set in the Temple of Luxor and the fabulous site of Karnak. “Fine,” he said. “But what about adding a little bioterrorism?”


This sparked an interesting discussion about which diseases could be used as bioweapons.  Instead of reliving our wonderful visit to the Valley of the Kings, I grilled my husband on the symptoms and treatment for smallpox and how Europeans transmitted the disease to Native Americans using contaminated blankets.


Back home, I researched the terrifying saga of smallpox in books, articles, and on the Internet. Because it is a virus that is easy to transmit during the early and unrecognizable stages of the disease, smallpox is difficult to contain and treat. Over thirty percent of people who get sick die, and survivors are often blinded or otherwise disfigured. Officially, smallpox was eradicated worldwide in 1979, but the virus stocks in select research facilities were never destroyed...


What if, I asked myself, my archaeologist heroine stumbled upon a plot to infect Western tourists with smallpox? What if there really was a stash of smallpox virus somewhere that terrorists could obtain and weaponize? Not a new I idea, I discovered, as I read Richard Preston’s The Demon in the Freezer. Although nonfiction, it read like a thriller, and scared me silly.  Preston’s descriptions of smallpox laboratories and frozen virus stashes in the former Soviet Union and Iraq provided me with plenty of fodder for further research, including how to manage a modern smallpox epidemic (I visited the website of the Centers for Disease Control).


Some research can make you paranoid. As I googled how to turn frozen smallpox virus into a stable, disease-transmitting powder, I wondered if other people were tracking my Internet use. Would someone show up on my doorstep to investigate me as a terrorist? Would being a mystery writer be a good enough excuse to get me off the hook? It didn’t happen, but I discovered my own ghoulish tendencies in my fascination with the history of one of the deadliest diseases in human history.


Many writers now say, “write want you want to know,” instead of “write what you know.” I say, use what you know as a jumping off point for new research, no matter how grisly. I’m an archaeologist, not a physician or medical historian, but being married to a doctor has taught me just enough about medicine to be dangerous, to want to learn more. And perhaps I was getting a little tired of killing my villains with priceless Greek vases and Roman statues—it was time for a change.

 

Lawn Order coming in December 2010! by Molly MacRae

Lawn Order, a tale of southern sisters and poisoned pigeons, is Margaret & Bitsy's debut novel. Margaret & Bitsy have been entertaining readers since 1990 in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine.

WHY I WRITE MYSTERIES by Sarah Wisseman

I grew up in a house full of readers where everyone’s favorite pastime was to gather around the fireplace and read, talk about books, or read aloud from books such as The Hound of the Baskervilles. Gradually I became aware that some of my parents’ favorite books were mysteries, but I didn’t really understand why until I started to write one.

Traditional mysteries are layered puzzles, like archaeological digs. The best ones are rich in character and setting, hard to put down but satisfying to finish because (usually) evil is contained and chaos is tamed. Such stories offer a welcome respite from daily life, where bad guys thrive and events and personalities are usually messier and more complicated than in fiction.

I like layers and puzzles—that’s not surprising, since I am an archaeologist at the University of Illinois in my “day job.” Although I no longer shovel much dirt myself, I spend many hours reconstructing the history of excavated objects with incomplete information, much like a detective trying to ferret out clues when suspects refuse to talk.

My heroine, Lisa Donahue, is an archaeologist and museum curator with a background suspiciously like my own. She works in a Boston museum that resembles a dusty labyrinth and deals with layered complications in her job—difficult bosses, jealous colleagues—and in her personal life—a troubled stepson and an overworked, oblivious husband.

In my most recent mystery, The Fall of Augustus ( October 2009), Lisa’s museum loses two directors in quick succession in the middle of a nightmarish move to a new building. The first director is crushed by a falling statue and the second turns up as a mummy. The plot layers include the machinations of a vicious woman—the sort of villain we all love to hate—the theft of valuable Celtic artifacts, and the rocky relationship between Lisa’s best friend, Ellen, and their oversexed colleague, Dylan.

Hopefully, as the reader “digs” into my mystery, she will enjoy excavating layered personalities as well as occasional esoteric facts about Greek vases and Egyptian mummification. The tricky part for me was embedding those facts deep into the plot so they become essential clues to the murders, like Roman coins found six feet under that help an archaeologist date an entire civilization.

If I’ve done my job as a writer, I’ve created something like an excavation-in-a-box for public schools: a rich micro-environment full of clues and quandaries—easy enough to reconstruct, complex enough to serve as a setting for future stories.