Welcome to the show! 

So, what the heck is a mystery? I would love to claim to have come up with all of this stuff myself, but I didn't. Valerie Peterson wrote a wonderful article on the topic. So good, in fact that I would have a hard time improving on it. So, instead of doing that, I am going to follow her outline closely and add my own commentary. 

But You Can Read The Article Here

I think we can all agree that ultimately when we write or read a Mystery the most important element of that work is having a question or a puzzle we are trying to solve. The antagonist (and in some cases a protagonist) can be the person trying to solve a mystery.

Tradition has had it in the past that the protagonist is a detective or private investigator of some sort. By the way, we make the mistake of calling Sherlock Holmes a detective when we discuss him. He would correct you and tell you that he is a consulting detective. But those are not the only types of protagonists we have. It is not uncommon for regular old people to become the protagonists involved in solving a mystery. Remind me when we get to the topic of cozy mysteries to tell you a story about one of my favorite cozy mystery novellas. 

As Valerie would remind us in her article, the mystery can include easily a theft or kidnapping. Lies, deceptions, and red-herrings (false clues) and these add to the story. One of the things that I hate in a mystery is if I have figured it out in the first chapter. That is just wrong. Give me something to go off of. Make me thing. The best books are ones that make you lay in bed wondering about that next page and what is going to happen to the characters.

Mysteries fall into a few general categories. 

• Hard-boiled
• Soft-Boiled 
• Cozy Mysteries 
• Procedurals
• Criminal Fiction
• And lost of sub categories

Victoria does, in her article, make a few other distinctions, but I will keep my distinctions truncated. There were a few on here list that I would not necessarily agree with, but I understand why she put them on there.

I also mention the book, Death is Long Overdue, by Amy E. Lilly. If you want to check out her book, see it here! 

Remember that next week there will be no show, but then I will come back with a couple of new shows. I want to do another show like this where I dissect, pun intended, horror novels and what the different types are.

Then, I want to do a deep dive into my Dramatic Dead series and talk about them a bit.

At any rate, thank you for spending some time with me. This is Bryan the writer, for all things writing, signing off.

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