When There Are No More Tomorrows

 Last January I blogged about our recently adopted dog, Dirk, and that we had brought him into the household as an emotional bulwark against the impending loss of my other dog, Scout. Now it finally happened. Scout has left us. I won't share stories about him because we all have similar memories about the departure of our beloved pets. However, I will admit that I miss Scout more than I miss most people.

I'll use this opportunity as a springboard into a discussion on grief, not in how to deal with it, but in how grief affects, or doesn't affect, our story narratives. Considering the common theme here on Type M for Murder is writing about criminal homicide, and homicide is the death of a human being, what we don't dwell much on is the grief caused by that death. Understandable since our protagonists are often the ones responsible for solving the murder and they can't afford to dilute their focus in sifting through clues by bringing grief into their process. Cops, especially, deal with grief and tragedy using gallows humor. Trauma surgeons and nurses have to distance themselves from the heartbreak if they are to remain functional. 

In World War Two, a phenomenon in the US Army was the indifference shown to replacement troops, particularly in the infantry who suffered the most casualties. The veteran soldiers figured out that those new to the outfit wouldn't last more than a few days, and the grief in dealing with those fresh losses was too painful and demoralizing to bear. "Just tell me your last name. That's all I need to know about you for now."  It wasn't until a new soldier survived for a month before the old timers closed ranks around him. 

An author friend wrote of a similar situation among spouses of soldiers who were deployed overseas during the Global War on Terror. The strain of waiting for the horrible news about the death of a loved one was too much of a burden to harbor day in and day out. So the wives shut down, numbing themselves, smothering their emotions: both happiness and sorrow. When the husbands returned home midway during their tour, randy and ready to party, to their surprise, the wives remained closed tight. It was too difficult of an emotional transition to let their defenses down, only to bring them back up in a few short days.

One police show that leans on grief as a story trope is Monk. Already since childhood, the detective Adrian Monk was burdened with phobias, and the murder of his wife Trudy drags him deep into an existence defined by obsessive-compulsive disorders and sorrow. His quest to find Trudy's killer is driven equally by the search for justice and as a means to deal with his grief.

 

Let's Talk Tropes

by Thomas Kies

 I taught a class last week on the campus of NC State University to room of fifty mystery buffs.  The subject of the talk was Mysteries and the Importance of Settings and Tropes.  I loved the ninety-minute time I had with those people because they’re my tribe.  They love mysteries.  We talk the same language.

And in doing the research for the class, I had a chance to think about settings (which I wrote about in my last blog) and, obviously, tropes. The big question that came to my mind was, can you write a mystery, or for that fact, any novel, without using tropes?

First of all, what are tropes?  

According to Merriam Webster:

: a word or expression used in a figurative sense 

: a common or overused theme or device   

In its most basic sense, it’s something that’s used over and over again.  Let’s talk about a few examples:

-Red Herrings—a false clue meant to mislead the audience or protagonist

-The Detective with the Tragic Past—a protagonist that has a haunting backstory

-The Corrupt Cop—An officer of the law obstructs or manipulates an investigation

-The Journalist Sleuth—Okay, okay…I use that one in my Geneva Chase novels.

-The Twist Ending---Yikes, don’t we all use that one?

-The Overlooked Clue---overlooked, that is, except by our eagle-eyes sleuth

-The Hidden Passage or Tunnel—I don’t know, this one kind of feels like cheating to me.

-The Serial Killer Pattern—How else would we know it was a serial killer?

- The MacGuffin--an object, event, or character in a film or story that serves to set and keep the plot in motion despite usually lacking intrinsic importance

MacGuffins are really something we could spend a whole blog talking about.  Some famous MacGuffins are the Maltese Falcon, the briefcase in the movie Pulp Fiction, the Ark of the Covenant in the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark, Rosebud in the movie Citizen Kane, A secret letter in the Sherlock Holmes tale The Adventure of the Second Stain.

So, if tropes are used over and over again, are they cliches? They can be, obviously. But the skilled writer will know how to use trope and sometimes subvert them, making the story unique and fresh.

Like Gone Girl. First of all, that trope is the missing housewife, presumed dead and killed by her spouse (don’t we always suspect the husband or wife?) But the story is subverted by using another trope, the unreliable narrator.  In this case…two unreliable narrators. 

Is the Unreliable Narrator a new trope?  Of course not.  Agatha Christie used it in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. 

Are there any stories that don’t have tropes?  I thought that the novel The Maid by Nita Prose came close.  Her protagonist is a hotel maid who is neurodivergent.  Except that really isn’t new after all.  Think about the television series Monk. And possibly the Sherlock Holmes stories.  Was Holmes actually an investigative savant with Aspergers Syndrome?

So, my personal conclusion is that no, you can’t really write a story, any story, without using tropes.  That’s the nature of our beast.  But the true gift in storytelling is making those tropes your own and make them feel new or special with your own words.