Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to Clued in Mystery. I'm Sarah. And I'm Brooke, and we both love mystery. Brooke. Hi, Sarah. Today we're going to have such a fun conversation with a returning friend. Would you like to introduce her?
Speaker: i will. Yes, I'm so excited that Frances has returned. She is a former bookseller, an author, lecturer, and all-around expert on mystery.
Speaker: Frances previously joined us on early episodes about Agatha Christie and noir and hard-boiled mysteries. Welcome back, Frances. Thank you for having me. That's wonderful.
Speaker: So we're going to talk about the rules of crime writing after the Golden Age. Yes, so excited. Brooke and I did an episode where we talked about some of the rules that came out, and we can't wait to hear what what you're going to tell us about.
Speaker: Yeah, it's a lot of, it'll be a lot of fun, I think. So um if we look at crime fiction in general, at that After the Golden Age and partway in the Golden Age, things drastically changed because of what people did for entertainment.
Speaker: So pulp magazines were an enormous field. Everyone had a radio and they listened to dramatizations of shows. A lot of them you can hear on Internet Archive for free.
Speaker: You just sign up for an account and It's a go-to place. They went to films a lot. And so even in 1932, the mainly first gangster film was called Scarface. And ah it was a ter it's a terrifying movie to even watch now. But gangsters were a big thing in the 1930s and 40s, in real life and in their fiction films, that sort of thing.
Speaker: Movie palaces were built that sat 5,000 people in them to go to a film. There were also chapter films that would appear before the movie. So every week when you went to see a movie, you would see the next chapter. They called them serials.
Speaker: So that was kind of cool. And they had them for kids and they had them for adults. And um they were usually adventure, mystery, or sci-fi.
Speaker: The ones for kids would have been...
Speaker: No, I've just drawn a blank on the name. ah It's a group of boys and a couple of girls that are in them. And I'll i'll get you the name for it. But they they were a riot. And in fact, in one serial, they started a detective agency.
Speaker: And they had a peephole in the door that was, you pulled a string on the inside and an eyeball came out and your head sat in the eyeball. so that you could see who was trying to get in.
Speaker: ah And detective magazines, pulp magazines, came out like Dime Detective, Mystery, Black Mask. But magazines in general, like Liberty and different sort of more general topics, also carried crime fiction in it.
Speaker: So that's sort of the setting. for people in that time period. And in the real life gangsters, you had John Dillinger and and people like that. So Bonnie and Clyde, that sort of atmosphere began changing crime fiction from the English country house or calmer, more intellectual investigator or detective.
Speaker: So that's setting the tone. And people like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler decided that people wanted more realism in what they were reading. They couldn't identify with the Golden Age necessarily.
Speaker: Just like they wanted to solve, you know, where John Dillinger was hiding out and that kind of stuff, they wanted to solve crime fiction. The tone changed considerably.
Speaker: and brought about all that pulp kind of writing where the atmospheres were dark. The investigators often, um rather than police, would be private detectives or independent operators. Hammett was a Pinkerton man, um and ah Pinkertons was a big detective agency that was throughout the country with an office in San Francisco, but he worked out of Baltimore at the Pinkertons. And because he did that, he had inside knowledge for the books that he wrote.
Speaker: And ah there's a reason I'm saying that. We'll come back to it. Moral ambiguity. It was also prohibition in the United States, which lasted for 20 years or so, as opposed to ours, which was much shorter in Canada.
Speaker: um And there was outright violence. that was described. That's a lot different than somebody in, say, an Agatha story where they might have used poison.
Speaker: This was out and out, shoot them up, because Chicago typewriters, or Tommy guns, as they were technically called, um were everywhere.
Speaker: Cars changed because people like Al Capone had his vehicle fully lined in metal so that they couldn't shoot through the doors and stuff.
Speaker: So all of all of this is changing the fiction that was getting read. So in 1930, in the a New York Evening Post, two issues in June and July, Dashiell Hammett wrote what he considered a set of rules, 24 suggestions. This is before Chandler's rules came out.
Speaker: So he had he was working at a time as a crime fiction reviewer for the New York Evening Post, And he was disgusted with five books that he read for one of his review things. And he thought, this is ridiculous. These people do not know.
Speaker: how to be realistic in their writing. They don't have the facts right. So he wrote down these suggestions, things like the Colts 45 automatic pistol has no chambers.
Speaker: The cartridges are put in a magazine. So, and they even are mentioned with the reference to that in Agatha Christie's, that ah forensics book, that's about how she learned forensics, they mentioned the fact that she had learned quite a bit more as she went through her books. And you could tell when she started to speak to investigators and find out about these different things.
Speaker: What he did was he wanted realistic police procedures in ballistics, forensics, and common blunders because it was taking away from the authenticity of the work.
Speaker: Another thing he said was that a lawyer can't impeach his own witness.
Speaker: The length of time a corpse has been, this is the 24th one, has the length of time a corpse has been a corpse can be approximated by an experienced physician, but only approximated. Remember, it's 1930.
Speaker: And the longer it has been a corpse, the less accurate the approximation will be. So he had people that were writing in their books that, well, it's obvious they've been dead for 27 hours or something, you know, in a heated room with whatever. And it just really irritated them. And I like that he called them suggestions.
Speaker: Chandler's rules are very different because he tells how you should be doing the writing and the suggestions. But there is Chandler's law, which he abided by all the time. And that's what it became known as. When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.
Speaker: yes So that that became known as Chandler's law. In 1932, scientific methods began to change drastically. In that year alone, the FBI sent up its national crime lab in Washington, D.C.
Speaker: At the time, they were known as the Bureau of Investigation, not to become the FBI until a couple of years later. that's And it still exists, and it's a fabulous tour to do. What they showcased was um new inventions and methods for crime scene investigation.
Speaker: And this is what Hammett and Chandler both alluded to at different times because they figured out that they could use plaster molds to take a mold of a footprint or whatever.
Speaker: Ballistics analysis meant that they could match bullets and casings to firearms. And that's all because of the gangsters tearing around towns and in the countryside shooting up things.
Speaker: They started to build databases for tire trend patterns, typewriter typefaces, and watermarks. And it became it was national, so anybody could send stuff to them.
Speaker: And around that time, dictographs were also so, like almost like us sending an email now. These would come over the wires, and they could a get their analysis sent back quickly to police services.
Speaker: The ultraviolet light and comparison microscope were both invented then. So there was a lot going on and a lot for people to learn about if they were going to write accurate crime fiction.
Speaker: In 1944, Chandler wrote chandler wrote The Simple Art of Murder, which was put into the Atlantic monthly. And that is where he alludes to the rules. And and they're in that book, The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler, which is a great book too.
Speaker: um But it started these started out as magazine articles, these rules, which is just shows that it was made available to everyone to read about.
Speaker: So we'll jump ahead past, because we've got the noir podcast that you have, and these guys are still writing. But when we get to the 50s and 60s, you get a whole other kind of thing that happens.
Speaker: Because in the UK, Ruth Randell turned crime fiction on its head because she started writing psychological thrillers.
Speaker: And Patricia Highsmith, wrote them in the in the United States. And people started to go, wow, what is this? It made straight mystery fiction much more complex.
Speaker: You weren't told everything. You had to figure things out by reading about the person and why they might be doing what they're doing. And so characters focused on different things. Suddenly,
Speaker: characters were being asked, why are they doing that? The reader is asking, why are they doing that? And um they dug deeper into human behavior.
Speaker: So Highsmith and Rendell were the leaders at the time of that. People started looking at things very, very differently. But part and parcel of that, you now get police procedurals much more prominent than they had been.
Speaker: They were prominent in television, which had come about now. So you get Dragnet, which was also a radio show, which was also made into a film. So this all of this kind of stuff was coming out of the woodwork and police procedurals. Now, it's not that they didn't exist before because Meg Ray was started in 1930, but he continued up well on over 70 novels of just Meg Ray. And there were short stories and all that sort of thing.
Speaker: So Hilary Waugh in 1952 wrote Last Seen Wearing, and it is considered the first American police procedural, that is straight police procedural.
Speaker: um And then the great Ed McBain, or also known as his original name, Evan Hunter, began his first one, ah was written in 1956. And it was a highly unusual series because no one character is the main narrator.
Speaker: It switches for each book. So someone from the precinct homicide squad takes charge of the case. So you always get very different ways of investigating, different thoughts. All the characters are still in the books, but they're very minor roles. So that was quite inventive because that's an unusual technique. And he wrote, um well, there's tons of them.
Speaker: that he wrote. i don't have the exact number down, but. And in the 60s and 70s, Sajol Anwalu brought out Martin Beck, a Scandinavian police officer, investigator. And ah there were 10 books that he and his partner decided to write.
Speaker: And that's what they kept to, the 10 books. But they are considered classic police procedural work. And then there's van der Rettering in Amsterdam in 1975. He comes out with his pair of Amsterdam police officers. So you'll notice something else is happening.
Speaker: We're moving into other countries now. That's another big change that took place. um And so then... ah We get to the 80s, James Lee Burke and Dave Robichaux, set in New Orleans.
Speaker: That was in 87. Michael Connolly, 92. Harry Bosch, still pumping them out, these two guys. It's great. J.A. Jantz did J.P. Beaumont, so J.A. Vance, and that was in 85.
Speaker: And police procedures so are still popular today. So we're going to backtrack now. Brian Garfield was the writer that wrote Death Wish in 1972, which turned into a couple of different movies.
Speaker: But he came out with the next set of rules. So the first one was start with action, explain it later.
Speaker: Make it tough for your protagonist, give him a worthy antagonist, and make things look hopeless. Plant it early, pay it off later. Don't bring in new characters to or facts at the end to help solve the crime.
Speaker: So he wrote 10 of them. And choose your character according to your own capacities as well as his. And part of that is because if you're not a police officer, you don't know how to investigate.
Speaker: And all that research that has to be done to do it. And he and Hammett said the same kind of thing. If you don't know something, go to someone who does know what you need to do.
Speaker: Spend time with police officers. They're totally willing to talk to you about stuff. Same with if you're getting into forensics and things. The volume of material now that you need to know is so different from the 1920s and 30s.
Speaker: I like this rule, number six. Give the protagonist a tight time limit and then shorten it because it heightens at the suspense. So he always has a reason for something. Give the protagonist a personal stake. No longer is it acceptable for the hero to solve a mystery just because it presents an interesting puzzle. The more intimate his involvement in the main conflict of the story, the better.
Speaker: So he was very big on the rules. And he's not someone, he he mainly wrote Westerns, but he did write some pulp stories and a few other series that he did. And he was very prolific, went by about 15 different pseudonyms for whatever he was writing.
Speaker: It's interesting the number of crime writers that also write Westerns. So it surprises me, but I guess it's the... They are kind of, a lot of Westerns are like crime stories. It's just a different feel and time period for it.
Speaker: The idea of having forensics mysteries also became a subgenre of crime fiction. And that because of the modern and scientific um advancements, it puts a different twist on solving a crime.
Speaker: And these aren't the forensics people are out at a crime scene. And so they're seeing things very differently than how a police officer would see things. So it brought a whole new twist. And the first one was in 1982. Um,
Speaker: um Aaron Elkins wrote it. And he did a forensic anthropologist, Gideon Oliver, which was then made into films about him. Very, very good books. They're good. And then, of course, Patricia Cornwell, 1990. She started the Case Scarpetta series postmortem. I still remember when I first read that.
Speaker: That was funny because a friend lent me the book and said, you're going to love this. And I said, I don't really like the forensic side of things. And she goes, you won't stop reading it. And I stayed up all night and read it.
Speaker: I still think it's one of her best in the series. And then, of course, in 97, so she, Cornwell was 1990. In 97 is when we first see um Temperance Brennan in Deja Dead Kathy Wright's book, which, of course, then became huge series and television series.
Speaker: And there's something that I noticed that no one has ever really gotten into. Female protagonists became extremely strong, starting in the 70s and continuing on to today.
Speaker: They became female detectives, private detectives or police detectives, but especially that private detective genre. we They had them in the thirty s and 40s, female protagonists. They were in the pulp magazines. They had their own series. There were a few of them. I'll send you a list.
Speaker: But it it really turned around in the 1977 to, I would say, 1998. ninety ninety eight It just rocked with female protagonists. So you get Marsha Muller writing the Sharon McCone series in 77, Grafton, the Kinsey Milhone series in 82, and Paretzky also in 82, the VI Warshawski series.
Speaker: Linda Barnes does Carlotta Carlisle in 85. Val McDermott in the UK brought out Kate Branigan in 92. You don't see them so much in the UK as you do in the United States.
Speaker: S.J. Rosen, love her stuff, does Lydia Chin. And Anne Holt does Hannah Wilhelmsen, who is a Norwegian. um character.
Speaker: And then, of course, you get Alexander McCall Smith doing Precious in the number one ladies detective agency. And that's another big hit, of course. And how can we ah skip Stephanie Plum and Janet Ivanovich's Bounty Hunter series?
Speaker: So in 2000, Stephen King wrote a memoir called On Writing, and he did 20 rules for writing. Write for yourself and then worry about the audience.
Speaker: Whereas almost all of the other rules are the reader should come first. You've got to write for the reader. yeah So that kind of blew things out of the water.
Speaker: um He hates the passive voice, so don't use it. Avoid adverbs. ah Don't obsess over perfect grammar. Read.
Speaker: Now, That's an important key. Read everything you can that will make your character grow. Write one word at a time. Some of them are kind of...
Speaker: um Then Elmore Leonard's Rules came out. Ten Rules for Good Writing in 2001. So King was 2000. Elmore Leonard 2001.
Speaker: elmo leonard is two thousand and one Never open a book with weather. That's the first one. Avoid prologues.
Speaker: ah Never use a verb other than said to carry dialogue, which I find quite boring, but that's just if you're reading a whole page of said, and he was quite prolific with said, I'd be interested to take a manuscript of his and count the number of saids that he had in it. um Never use an adverb to describe said.
Speaker: Keep your exclamation points under control. You're allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. Never use the word suddenly or all hell broke loose.
Speaker: Use regional dialect patois and patois sparingly. That I can, that I agree with. In my Spooner books, he's a 12-year-old newsie and he's But he cuts G's off his words because it's part of who he is. So use it sparingly, but at least to for the reader to get the picture of the character.
Speaker: Avoid detailed descriptions of characters. Don't go into great detail describing places and things. Most of his books carry on as if they're all dialogue, which can be a bit distracting because we're not really used to that kind of thing and try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.
Speaker: I agree with that too. And then that he said he can sum it all up by saying, if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. So that came from a New York Times article, essay on the adverbs, exclamation points, and especially hoopty doodle.
Speaker: That was the title of the article. And Sue Grafton had rules that she came out with in 2010. in um It was her philosophy and approach to mystery writing in a writer Writer's Digest interview.
Speaker: And examine the dark side. Grafton viewed the mystery novel not just as a puzzle, but as a way to probe the dark side of human nature. They have to have believable foundations.
Speaker: In current crime fiction, you need to be able to, your reader needs to be able to fit in to, they become part of the book. crime Crime readers, mystery readers, just um devour these works. and i And I think it's because they're made to feel more a part of it.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: Michael Connolly said, and there was a ah book put out, um and i didn't I don't have the title of it here, but there was a book put out of a companion of all the writers and what their ideas were on um fiction, so on writing crime fiction. So he noted that great crime fiction isn't solve isn't just about how a detective solves a case, but how the case transforms the character.
Speaker: which I think is brilliant. That's exactly what it should be doing because that's how the character grows. And Sue Grafton didn't like it, now want to make it feel like the story was always the same.
Speaker: So, and that can happen in a series. You don't learn anything about the character. The character doesn't grow. Then we come up to something that's happening more and more lately and is devising its own set of rules And that is in 2013, a woman, a UK writer, Julia Crouch, coined the term domestic noir.
Speaker: These are one-off books that we see so much happening. And it has a main component of this domestic noir.
Speaker: And, um, these psychological thrillers, if you want to call them that, um, the narrator is unreliable.
Speaker: You can't tell if they're telling you the right thing or not. The narrative switches. Um, um, So the contemporary writers who are writing this kind of stuff are now changing the rules yet again.
Speaker: They focus, ah they're beginning to focus on visible, integrated clues, organic character flaws, and pacing rather than that formatted thing we had in the golden age of of everything was step-by-step investigation.
Speaker: So Julia Crouch wrote two books which established the genre. She wrote Cuckoo in 2011 and eleven and in ah Every Value Break in 2012.
Speaker: I mean, even those titles are similar to titles that are being used today. What domestic noir does is it turns the lens inward. It focuses on an unsettling gaze directly into a person's home and home life.
Speaker: It explores crime, betrayal, and danger unfolds within that unfold within families, marriages, and intimate relationships. The conflicts are deeply personal, which I think is why they're often speed reads, because you're so frightened you have to get through it, right? Because this is very psychological. It messes with your mind, and it's supposed to.
Speaker: They examine mothers and daughters locked in psychological power struggles that span generations, reveal neighbors whose friendly facades mask sinister intentions, introduces outsiders who infiltrate domestic spaces, threatens to destroy the fragile balance of a household.
Speaker: The most dangerous places to gather in? The kitchen. where families gather for dinner, the living room, where they hold conversations in, or the marital bed.
Speaker: Then, of course, in 2012, we get Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl, and that really threw things into the forefront. And That narrator was so unreliable, it threw readers off balance, which was the whole intention of it.
Speaker: It made shocking revelations that emerged naturally from the domestic framework.
Speaker: Funnily enough, authors in the UK took off with this type of book So you get um Paula Hawkins, The Girl on the Train in 2015.
Speaker: Lisa Jewell has written a few of these that are very dark. Claire McIntosh, very psychological twist. She's been writing them for 12 years. she's still got She's got a new one out now.
Speaker: And she really likes family drama with genuinely disturbing secrets and setting. Now we get psychological thrillers versus domestic noir. There is a slight difference.
Speaker: They frequently overlap though, and many books are described as both. There are important distinctions. The psychological thriller is any story that places the human mind at the center of its suspense.
Speaker: It might involve serial killers with complex pathologies, stalkers driven by obsession, unreliable narrators whose perceptions we cannot trust. The setting varies widely.
Speaker: From offices to remote hotels, from psychiatric hospitals to wilderness cabins, it might paint across a wide canvas of locations and scenarios.
Speaker: Domestic noir is narrower in focus. The psychology remains narrower. central. The setting, as I said, is always a domestic space, and then we get domestic thrillers.
Speaker: They tend to emphasize pace and external plot mechanics above all else. They often feature missing children, explosive affairs, sudden betrayals, and they spread out a lot further than in domestic noir, where it's mainly just in the home So the unreliable narrator, as I said, the storyteller, is supposed to be the one that you can trust as the reader.
Speaker: But in this thriller, domestic noir, totally different. The grip on reality for the person is compromised. And it forces the reader to check the and question the version of events that they have been told.
Speaker: Usually first person perspective um forces the readers to question everything. They just can't trust the person. And the tension between paranoia and genuine danger is very realistic for the reader and the character.
Speaker: It creates suspense, which is actually happening behind the narrator's skewed lens and delivers plot twists um that have sudden realization that the truth has to be reframed.
Speaker: So it really is it's really meant to throw the reader off and keep them guessing at every turn. And it's not it's not like a it's a longer drawn out criminal behavior.
Speaker: Because it's psychological, it's like gaslighting, right? um You're trying to disturb the character and the reader. The other thing about more more modern crime fiction is that the justice is not guaranteed that we hope for.
Speaker: A lot of things are left unsolved or are questionable about why things happen. for characters, modern characters are much more flawed than they used to be and that helps with their growth.
Speaker: We get a lot more professional police teams, they try and and solve whatever they can. The characters' decisions they make are more complex, which affects the movement of the suspense.
Speaker: There sometimes They have a very disruptive narrative. So that the example that I'd like to use is Turton's The Seven and a Half Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle.
Speaker: and from 2018. I could not believe that book. That was so unusual, where the investigator wakes up every each day in the body of a different guest at an estate. I mean, what?
Speaker: And that, boy, the the perceptions are so skewed in that thing. I started reading it and I thought, what the heck is going on here? And then you get into it and you can't stop reading it. It was quite quite an interesting book.
Speaker: The whole point is that crime fiction is a ah genre that continually evolves.
Speaker: So the rules are constantly changing. And a lot of writers say, break the rules, because it's okay.
Speaker: Well, and... With what you've shown us, um a lot of authors have broken those rules that Sarah and I talked about you know last time. um but Maybe all of them have been broken out.
Speaker: Or tweaked. Yeah. But I hadn't thought about it in the context that you're saying is it's because of changes yeah the world and changes in our lives. So it's not just to be like avant garde and do something crazy. It's because the world has changed. And so the and rules are going to change.
Speaker: Add the internet. right That has changed everything. That has changed a lot of sleuthing that can be done. Look at the research you can do as a writer.
Speaker: For sure. yeah the The point you made about needing to know the facts about the the topic, it's much easier now. You don't necessarily even have to befriend a police officer. You can you can do a lot of online research. You can into the FBI online and Or the you know the National Archives have thousands of things that you can look at, read about, learn about.
Speaker: All of the newspaper archives is quite something. Yeah.
Speaker: And so in thinking about kind of how the genre has evolved and how rules have evolved with it, do you think there are any rules, Frances, that have evolved?
Speaker: remained remained in place? I think it's more tweaking of rules. Rules are being broken all the time.
Speaker: For a writer to break a rule, I think they put a lot of um thought into it. And the other thing is, I'm not sure how many crime writers know there are mystery rules.
Speaker: Right? you True. Yeah. Yeah, fair enough. If you include in your reading books about writing and about writing crime fiction or the biographies of or autobiographies of crime writers, you learn a lot about the process, whether you know there are factual, there are set rules or not.
Speaker: Yeah. I think that some of these come back to um people who do want to write, who, um and you know I'll put myself in this category, when you're just getting started, you're thinking, I just need to know how to do it. And so you think like, okay, what what's the structure? what What are the rules I can follow to accomplish this? Yeah.
Speaker: I guess just kind of like as a life preserver to hold on to when you're trying to write mystery. Or you may not out about them until you've done two books already and you think, why ah why isn't this working for me? And then you go and look up and see what you can find about how to how to tweak it to fix it.
Speaker: See, I keep using that word, tweaking, because that's what I think it is. It's all adjustments. Yeah. Yeah. And I kind of think that the rules are kind like a recipe.
Speaker: If you're cooking for the first time, you find a recipe and you're going to follow it very, very closely because you don't really know what you're doing, right? make sure that you put in, if it says one teaspoon of salt, you put in one teaspoon of salt. And as you become more comfortable with cooking, you realize that oh, you know what, you can add a bit more salt or a bit less and and kind of play around with the flavors. And, you know, carrots aren't listed in the recipe, but they're going to add a little bit of sweetness to this sauce. So I'm going to put in a couple. And so I think that's maybe what we see what we see with authors, right? I think it's good to have guidelines that you can refer to if you want to get out of a sticky situation with your characters. see what others have done.
Speaker: But it's all going to be your own comfort level. if I mean, i can't imagine following the Knox's rules. And consider when they were written and what the people's thoughts were at the time.
Speaker: Because some of them are derogatory.
Speaker: Yeah. and And I think written because of the kinds of stories that were being... that were being written at the time, right? So the one about secret passageways. Well, we don't see a lot of secret passageways in the books that are being published now. um And, you know, maybe it's because he articulated like, guys, don't put so many yeah secret passageways in your books. And he probably came up with them too, because he read a lot.
Speaker: If you read a lot of your genre, then you know what is acceptable and not acceptable. And you could we could we could all probably a really good point ten if we so we so sat here we could come up with 10 different rules that don't touch on any of the stuff that's there.
Speaker: It might have components of it, but not all of it Yeah, when you were speaking of the um trend to have the unreliable narrators in psychological thrillers, I was thinking of the rule that we talked about before, Sarah, which is the detective has to give up all their knowledge to the reader, right? They have anything the detective knows, the reader has to know. And of course, we don't have an actual detective in a psychological thriller, but that main character, um it
Speaker: that It doesn't happen at all. And most of the time you're wondering what you learn, if what you learn from them is true or not. So it's just like really turning that rule ah completely on its head. Exactly. that's how you get the twist, right? is Is that the, as the reader, you don't know everything that's going on and then you get the reveal and you're like, I didn't see that coming. how And, and you're not mad that you didn't see it coming.
Speaker: Not at all. Yeah. If you go back through book, you'll you still won't see how how it would work.
Speaker: Readers tend to read them very quickly because the suspense is so built up in them. Yeah. yeah Yeah. Yeah. You don't want to linger because it, it gets. Yeah. Sometimes it's too close to home. yeah Yeah. This needs resolution or I'm not going to be able to sleep.
Speaker: i Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: Well, Frances, thank you again. This has been fantastic. I, as usual, whenever you visit, learned so much. I have a page of notes and and reading recommendations that I want to go look into. So thank you so much for coming to talk to us about this topic. I had a fun time.
Speaker: Learned stuff on my own. Like I didn't know about the rules that Garfield wrote. so ah That's awesome. That's great.
Speaker: And thank you listeners for joining us today on Clued in Mystery. Until next time, I'm Brooke. And I'm Sarah. And we both love mystery. Clued in Mystery is written and produced by Brooke Peterson and Sarah M. Stephen.
Speaker: Music is by Shane Ivers. If you liked what you heard, please consider telling a friend, leaving a review, or subscribing with your favorite podcast listening app. Visit our website to sign up for our newsletter, The Clued-In Chronicle, and get mystery news, podcast updates, and bonus episodes.
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