Adding Magic to Your Mystery—A.T. Bennett
I’ve got a helluva story I want to write. A proper razzle-dazzle.
This mystery has got everything: a pharaoh’s curse, spirit messages, magic, the Free Masons. Naturally there has to be at least one stone cold corpse in the pages, somewhere, otherwise it wouldn’t be a proper whodunit. I’m planning on placing my dearly departed on top of a Scottish fairy mound.
Think the above is a tad too outlandish? Well, my gentle readers, this proposed “story” is entirely based on a real life event—the bizarre case of Netta Fornario. In point of fact the only falsehood I presented was the illusion that my literary musings were fiction.
There is a tendency in mystery writing to exclude the fantastical in order to keep the plot streamlined to a logical conclusion. A gun, a bad guy, a shot in the dark (insert a dog forlornly howling in the background here). There are the expected red herrings and peppered clues. Bing-Bang-Boom. But fantasy? Magic? Beh! Other than the overused trope of the “Devil worshipping killer cult” when does magic ever happen in real life cases?
Honestly all the darn time, especially in the historical record. You just need to look for it.
Bridget Cleary was murdered because her family believed she was a fairy changeling. A psychic horse named Lady Wonder found the bodies of not one but three missing children in the 1950s. Dr. Arthur Waite used possession by a wicked and unseen “man from Egypt” as a legal defence against poisoning his in-laws. And (just to add a ghost to the mix) in 1897 the spirit of Elva Zone Heaster Shue made enough of a fuss to her poor mother that the circumstances of her death were investigated. Erasmus, Elva’s husband, was eventually found guilty of her murder.
Sherlock Holmes certainly did not believe in the existence of a hell-hound in the Baskerville Curse, but a good many supporting characters did, and the murderer took full advantage of that fact.
Just as victims do.
I have no doubt that Elva Shue’s mother suspected that her daughter had been murdered, and used the woeful tale of Elva’s supposed restless spirit to gain sympathy from the local prosecutor. A god-fearing community might not be supportive of a grieving mother, but they sure as sugar rallied behind the story of a ghost crying “Murder!”. When the autopsy proved that Elva had in fact been killed, their faith in the Otherworld was confirmed. It was a win win for (mostly) everyone involved. The dead could now rest in peace, Erasmus was carted off to prison—after nearly being lynched—and the mother got her revenge.
It’s a heck of a strange case, isn’t it? And that’s the point.
Elva Shue’s murder was tragic, marvellous, simply ridiculous, and quite frankly utterly unbelievable but it did happen—ghost story and all. And when you break it all down, doesn’t it have the bones of a rather riveting mystery?
So maybe consider adding a touch of the fantastical to your own writing. Make people afraid of the monster prowling out on the moors, the mournful sobs within the attic walls…then take off the blinders and reveal to the reader the cold, hard, scientific truth.
Or not.
When you add a touch of magic to your murder and mayhem, any number of exciting consequences can happen.
Play superstition against human nature and see what happens.