Twelve Mysteries for Your Next Rainy Day

Mysteries and rainy days just go together. Like Sherlock and Watson, like London and fog, like coffee and ... a lot more coffee. 

I've learned not to fight it. 

Actually, when I hear thunder breaking overhead, I get my feet tangled in my scramble to grab the nearest Agatha Christie.

I've heard someone say that, at its heart, every novel is actually a mystery.

And I love that definition. I certainly think it's true: at least from a writer's point of view. You're faced with so many mysteries: unraveling the characters, their motivations, the history of the story world, and then of course, how the plot works its way out. 

Even though the book I'm writing would never be classified as a mystery: that's what I feel like I'm writing, most days. When it's going well, I feel like I'm solving the mystery of the story itself.

Writers as sleuths. I like that.

Maybe this is why I read and watch more mysteries than any other genre. 

If you're looking for a good one, here's a list of twelve of my favorites:

1. The Nero Wolfe mysteries, by Rex Stout. (Because I want to marry Archie Goodwin. I do. Fiction or not, I feel sure that we can work this out. ... Book-wise, I'm especially fond of The League of Frightened Gentlemen.)

2. Green for Danger, by Christianna Brand (World War Two, bombs falling over a hospital, patients dying mysteriously during surgery... So. Good.)

3. Mary Stewart wrote mysterious romantic suspense, which reads superbly on damp dark days. Pick up Nine Coaches Waiting, especially if you're a fan of Jane Eyre.

4. Alan Bradley's Flavia de Luce series is ridiculously fun: she's an eleven-year-old chemist, she's hilarious, and she keeps solving mysteries. (The series is for us grown-ups though, not kids.) Of the first four, number one is still my favorite: The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie. 

I wish I could say my heart was stricken, but it wasn't. I wish I could say my instinct was to run away, but that would not be true. Instead, I watched in awe, savoring every detail. ... Then the utter stillness. I wish I could say I was afraid, but I wasn't. -- Alan Bradley / The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

5. Some Danger Involved by Will Thomas. Excellent if you like Sherlock Holmes era mysteries, but are ready for some new characters.

6. Speaking of which... The Complete Sherlock Holmes. Of course. Obviously. Of course.

Peering through the gloom, I saw the vague outline of a man, a shade blacker than the blackness of the open door. He stood for an instant, and then he crept forward, crouching, menacing, into the room. He was within three yards of us, this sinister figure, and I had braced myself to meet his spring. -- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle / "The Adventure of the Empty House"

7, 8, & 9. And as far as obvious choices go: It is impossible to pick a favorite Agatha Christie. Right? I "narrowed it down" to: And Then There Were None (for most goosebumps while reading), Murder on the Orient Express (for sublimeness, for perfect murder, for happening on a train, and for this screen version), and Death on the Nile (because everything... check out the movie too). 

10 &11. If you want sweeping scope, layered narratives, gloomy landscapes, dark secrets, brooding family estates--basically if you want the best sort of thing for a thunderstormy day--then check out Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White (!!!!) and The Moonstone. 

12. Last but not least: Brat Farrar by Josephine Tey. I couldn't stop talking about this one when I finished it. (I just love the set-up: the story of an impostor who begins to unravel a family mystery...)

There have been doubles before. Hitler had several. Lots of famous people have doubles. The papers are forever printing photographs of the humble doubles of great men. They all look like the great men with the character sponged out. -- Josephine Tey / Brat Farrar

There you have it. An easy dozen for the next time you see thunderstorms in the forecast. 

Obviously I've left out only about two hundred excellent recommendations... (I didn't even mention Ellery Queen! How did that happen?! And has anyone else watched The Bletchley Circle?)

Care to fill in the gaps? What are your favorite mysteries to read or watch? I'd love some new titles to check out!

The Case for the Really Long Read

Usually, my game plan for my reading life is simply this: To read more good books. 

Chuck the dull ones. Soak up the good ones. Learn from all of them.

Usually this means that I am trying to cram books into my life: more books, better books, and reading them faster.

But once a year, I slow the pace of my reading plan. Once a year, I block off a month. 

And plunge into a single, long book.

I started this habit several years ago, after reading the article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" In it, Nicholas Carr investigates how our Internet habits are affecting the way we think, read, and process information.

He quotes Bruce Friedman (who sounds plenty smart himself), who says: "I can't read War and Peace anymore. ... I've lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it."

Okay. That terrified me. (Although, if you didn't make it past my fourth paragraph, I guess you'll never know that.)

Most of the books I read are between 250 and 400 pages. And since I try to keep books moving through my hands, I never took the time to dive into one that was, say, 900 pages or so.

But that article made me think. There are so many fantastic yet huge books out there. And I wasn't reading them. 

Would I lose the ability to read long books?

(Just thinking that makes me start hyperventilating. Like my brain is disappearing. Ack! Ack!)

I made a decision to start.

I began with the massive (and beautifully translated) Les Miserables. I blocked off a month. I made a little chart of how many pages to read on which days. (Because I cannot resist a little chart.)

And I dove in.

Yes, I did get a little restless. Yes, I was reading a hefty chunk each day.

But I also fell in love with Victor Hugo. I loved how the world of his book wrapped itself around me. I loved how deeply I could fall into the story, how well I could know the characters--so many characters!

After that month, I made a list. I rounded up the names of other long books. The ones that usually got bumped from my reading list, because they were just too dang long.

I've spent a month each year ticking one more title off the list. The Three Musketeers and Moby-Dick, The Pickwick Papers and Anna Karenina. 

Every novel contains a bit of the world inside it.

These long novels have much bigger worlds.

And on the rainy days, the days when you want to crawl into a reading cave and just disappear for a while, consider curling up with a super long book. Let it swallow you up for a while.

Let it pull you toward a deeper writing practice. A deeper love of books. And a bigger appetite for language.

What's your favorite heavy-weight title? What's your most recent long read?

---

Want to keep reading? Check out This Is What Happened to Us When a Story Showed Up and Danger and Daring.

This Is Why You're Going to Paris This Weekend

Okay. So it's going to happen. You're going to have a writing day, week, month, uh, year, that's just going to stink. You'll do your best, but won't pull out of your funk. And your work goes all wobbly.

Either it all fails big, it blows up in your face, it gets dramatic and ugly and there are tears...

Or, it just whimpers in a corner, and your imagination dulls, and the words stale off, and you kind of wonder how you ever got into this.

Here's my best recommendation: Go to Paris.

Like, today. 

An actual plane ticket is the best route, and if you can muster that, then go and God bless you.

For all us normal people, with tiny budgets and not super flexible schedules, here's the other route:

Get your discouraged little hands on this book.

A Writer's Paris, by Eric Maisel. And yes, you are allowed to swoon over the cover. It is a totally normal reaction.

Why this book?

Because Eric Maisel is exactly the writing coach that you need this weekend: He is definitely on your side.

And in this book, he understands what's going on in the mind and heart of a writer who is discouraged. A writer who is afraid and anxious.

Most of all, a writer who needs to commit to her work in a deeper way.

(That's you. That's me. That's all of us.)

So yes, this book is also about going to Paris. For, say, a year. And writing while you're there. Writing your brains out. But more than that, it's about owning your writerness, about choosing to be the writer that you are.

The chapters are short, easy to read, and packed with encouragement. Seriously, it believes in you so hard that it nearly turns inside out. (Or was that just my copy?) 

But you're reading this because you're discouraged, right? So maybe you don't feel like you can stomach talking about writing all the time. Maybe another writing book isn't what you need? 

That's why this book is so perfect: it's part writing encourager, part Paris travelogue.

Really. So you'll be daydreaming about the Seine, about gargoyles and gothic chapels, about flaky croissants and famous museums. You'll be reading little stories about Van Gogh and Hemingway, you'll be thinking about the expats in Paris, you'll be smiling over the wonderful illustrations.

So you soak up the stories about Paris. ... And as you do, you also read about embracing your own imperfection. About how to get out of a writing slump. (I've read Chapter 25, "Not Writing," approximately 200 times.) You read about motivation, about what to do with the wonderful people who support you and the difficult people who do not.

You read about where our ideas come from, about writing in public places, about running away from your work, about how to deal with discouragement. 

... I am resisting the urge to type out whole pages (21, 128, 190...) and instead will share this one quote:

There are always reasons not to write. They appear as wantonly as toadstools after the rain. Entertaining those reasons even for a split second is the path to uncreativity. Write, even if you have a twinge, a doubt, a fear, a block, a noisy neighbor, a sick cat, thirteen unpublished stories, and a painful boil. Write, even if you aren't sure. 
-- Eric Maisel

Breathe that quote in for a second. So good, right? 

If you have varsity-level discouragement, then I'd say go big. Get this book, and dive in. But don't stop there. 

Get yourself a baguette, a pack of croissants, or at the very least an éclair or some kind of pastry. (Because discouragement and calories are best friends.) Get some French-style café music playing. Grab your coffee (strong! dark! with chocolate!).

See where we're going with this? Make yourself Paris. Right where you are.

Whip up an omelette Saturday morning and keep on reading.

Invite courage in. Wrap it around you, like a warm blanket on a rainy day.

Close out your Parisian weekend by watching Midnight in Paris. (What, you thought I wasn't going to go there? I was totally going to go there! I can't get over Ernest Hemingway in that movie. CANNOT get over him. I just want listen to him talk about writing all day.) 

Have yourself a Parisian writing weekend. And dive into your next writing week refreshed--and still nibbling croissants and humming along to Edith Piaf--and ready to work.

---

Wanna read more about Eric Maisel? Check out these two posts, inspired by quotes from A Writer's Paris: Write Where You Are and Today Is Another Chance. 

Have a first line festival.

WARNING: If unapologetic word geekery alarms you, skip this post. It's okay. I won't tell anyone.

Sometimes, my favorite way to grab inspiration is by bingeing on other people's good work. 

Anyone with me? Just devote a day to plunging through an entire novel. Have an afternoon of compulsively watching movie trailers. Or this:

A first line festival.

Sometimes, reading the first sentences of a stack of books--well, it energizes my approach to my own book. 

Beginnings. They just grab me.

So here, for our browsing, bingeing pleasure, are 30 first lines.

They aren't especially famous ones--so, don't look for anyone called Ishmael, any happy and unhappy families, any universally acknowledged truths.

But they still make my fingers tingle. And give a boost to the sentence-churnery in my own head.

Use them to stir up your own writing, to help brew a hook for your own project, or just wade through and geek out along with me.

---

Beware thoughts that come in the night.
- William Least Heat-Moon / Blue Highways

I told you last night that I might be gone sometime, and you said, Where, and I said, To be with the Good Lord, and you said, Why, and I said, Because I'm old, and you said, I don't think you're old.
- Marilynne Robinson / Gilead

There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.
- C. S. Lewis / The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

The year began with lunch.
-Peter Mayle / A Year in Provence

It was one of those wet-hot nights in July when living in New York is like living in a teapot.
- Linda Stewart / Sam the Cat Detective

Imagine a ruin so strange it must never have happened.
- Barbara Kingsolver / The Poisonwood Bible

I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time.
- Carlos Ruiz Zafon / The Shadow of the Wind

There is no lake at Camp Green Lake.
- Louis Sachar / Holes

On the late afternoon of Friday, 30 June 1559 a long splinter of wood from a jousting lance pierced the eye and brain of King Henry II of France.
- Leonie Frieda / Catherine de Medici

This book was born as I was hungry.
- Yann Martel / Life of Pi

How do you introduce the untranslatable?
- Ella Frances Sanders / Lost in Translation

The strange thing was, he said, how they screamed every night at midnight.
- Ernest Hemingway / "On the Quai at Smyrna"

I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.
- Dodie Smith / I Capture the Castle

Like many of us, I think, my father spent the measure of his life piecing together a story he would never understand.
- Ian Caldwell & Dustin Thomason / The Rule of Four

Underground is where you expect to find revolutionaries.
- Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn / The Oak and the Calf

Oh, anywhere, driver, anywhere--it doesn't matter. 
- Dorothy Parker / "Sentiment"

When she sang, it was hard to imagine death was so near. 
- Matt Rees / Mozart's Last Aria

This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.
- William Goldman / The Princess Bride

My father had a face that could stop a clock.
- Jasper Fforde / The Eyre Affair

When at last I was taken out of the plaster, and the doctors had pulled me about to their hearts' content, and nurses had wheedled me into cautiously using my limbs, and I had been nauseated by their practically using baby talk to me, Marcus Kent told me I was to go and live in the country. 
- Agatha Christie / The Moving Finger

I have had not so good of a week.
- Sara Pennypacker / Clementine

There are devotees of Goethe, of the Eddas, of the late song of the Niebelungen; my fate has been Shakespeare.
- Jorges Luis Borges / "Shakespeare's Memory"

It was Charles who called us the parasites.
- Daphne du Maurier / The Parasites

Taran wanted to make a sword; but Coll, charged with the practical side of his education, decided on horseshoes.
- Lloyd Alexander / The Book of Three

The windows of a spaceship casually frame miracles.
- Col. Chris Hadfield / An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth

In the beginning was the land.
- Eugen Weber  / A Modern History of Europe

When Mrs. Frederick C. Little's second son arrived, everybody noticed that he was not much bigger than a mouse.
- E. B. White / Stuart Little

I am old now and have not much to fear from the anger of gods.
- C. S. Lewis / Til We Have Faces

It was nine o'clock at night upon the second of August--the most terrible August in the history of the world. 
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle / "His Last Bow - An Epilogue of Sherlock Holmes"

On my forty-ninth birthday, I decided that all of life was hopeless, and I would eat myself to death. 
- Anne Lamott / Plan B

Yep, more awesome first lines coming in. Good to know I'm not the only one who loves this kind of stuff! Here are a couple more opening lines, from Twitter friends and from the comments:

Mr. and Mrs. Dursley of Number Four Privet Drive were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.
- J. K. Rowling / Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

The small boys came early to the hanging.
- Ken Follett / The Pillars of the Earth 

---

Which opening is your favorite? And what lovely or chilling or just-right first lines should we add to the list? Let me know in the comments.

How to Keep Your Reading Life Fresh

When writing became my full-time job, my reading life got all professional too.

Kinda makes sense, right? The best writers are super well-read people. I mean, they know everything. They make all these literary allusions, they quote passages from beloved books, you can't stump them with an author reference...

Basically, when it came to my reading life, I kind of panicked.

In spite of graduating with an English major, I still had some holes to fill. I'd never read The Great Gatsby--how had that happened? And Moby-Dick and The Tale of Two Cities. A lot of classics to catch up on, and oh, in the meantime, amazing writers are still actively writing...

Really, it was a paralyzing scenario. And in true Lucy Flint fashion, I came up with a plan:

READ EVERYTHING AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.

... It didn't exactly work.

I made lists. A lot of lists. I read to balance out deficiencies in my book knowledge. I finished every book I started, with total seriousness. I took very detailed, I-could-give-a-presentation-on-this kind of notes on what I read.

Heck, if the quality of my own writing depended on what I read, I didn't see how I could do it any differently.

Funny thing happened. My reading energy dried up. And I got really into reading magazines instead.

Eventually I realized I needed to lighten up. I redesigned my reading life to blend structure with a bit of quirk. And now? I'm always energized by what--and how--I'm reading.

Here are my new guidelines:

I keep a huge list of books to read. And I do mean huge. At last count, I have over 1300 books on my reading list, and I'm adding to it all the time.

This used to be a bit crippling--until I changed my perspective.

Here's the thing: I'll never get all the books read. Never. There will always be worthwhile books out there that I won't get to.

Why is this good news? Because it gives me the permission I need to quit reading books I don't like. I want to find the ones I love! So if a book doesn't win my heart over pretty quickly, I toss it. 

I build a monthly reading list. Because 1300 books is still a bit daunting, I break it down and focus on a select number of titles each month. I pick out fifteen, a dozen of which are novels.

Buckle up, because this is where structure meets quirk: Each month has a theme.

Yes, really.

I know, I know, it's a little goofy. But I can't even tell you how much it delights me to do this. One month, it's books with an animal in the title. The next month features titles that start with the letter M. The month after that, it's books with a color in the title, or one-word titles, or every thirtieth book on the list.

I once explained this system to another writer, and she had such undisguised pity on her face. Apparently this way of reading is lunacy. But whatever. It's my lunacy! My reading list! ... Ahem.

I order more books than I can read. So, I order those fifteen themed books through the library, even though I know I won't get through them all.

Because I'm not that quick of a reader. In all honesty, I read about three to six full books in a month. So why order so many? So I'm free to discard the ones I don't like! It keeps me from feeling trapped with a few selections. 

(Plus, it really does feel cathartic to chuck a book. Pffft, I'm not reading this! It's a weirdly great feeling.)

I give a book twenty pages. In spite of my delight in tossing a book, I really do commit to read the first twenty pages. At that point, I know if I'm interested in continuing or not.

Twenty pages is long enough to give you a good feel for the style, the characters, and what you're in for. 

And I've found--after suffering through all too many--that if I'm snarling or rolling my eyes during the first twenty pages, I'm going to feel that way all through the rest of the book. So I chuck it. No guilt necessary.

I know, I know. This totally horrifies some people.

My only requirement in tossing a book: I try to pin down what exactly made me drop it. 

Was the style obnoxious? How? Was the main character totally unsympathetic? Where did I lose interest? Why wasn't it working for me? This little step lets me extract a bit of learning... without enduring the next 350 pages.

Obviously, then, I still do take notes. Yep. It's still my job, after all. But my note-taking is a lot more casual.

I'll write down what worked the best in the book, what kept me reading. I'll try to capture what exactly was disappointing or what was so moving. How did they make that setting come alive, why was that dialogue exchange so spot-on, or how did they pace the climax? 

I'll copy out paragraphs that I loved, or ones that were confusing so I can avoid those mistakes.

So yeah. There's still note-taking. But I try to keep a light hand.

I wipe the slate clean. At the end of each month, I return all the unread books along with the rest.

It gives me a light heart to chuck out the books I didn't get to, instead of making myself complete the list. It's freeing.

Sometimes you just have to be in the right mood for a certain book. So if it fell through the cracks this month, no worries. I'll probably reorder it again, some other month.

... So there it is. That's my reading life. Somehow, that blend of structure and freedom works just right for me. I don't feel so pinned down, but there's enough of a challenge that I get excited to dive in, month after month.

What about you? Do you toss books freely, or have you found it's worth it to persevere? Do you keep a reading list? Or do you like to browse and pick up what sounds good to you?

What works well for your reading life: Let's continue the discussion in the comments.

Wanna keep reading? Check out: Frivolity + Wisdom and The Power of an Explosively Good Book.

This is what happened to us when a story showed up.

It doesn't happen as much as it used to, but I still get that voice in my head at 1 a.m.

You know the voice?

It shows up with a list of things that I can't do anything about. And it rattles them off, accompanied by a dangerous amount of emotional pull and flawed reasoning. 

This voice is always convinced that it is right, it never lets me argue back, and it's sporting a t-shirt with the slogan "IT IS ALL DOWNHILL FROM HERE."

I haven't heard from this voice in a few months, but as of last Wednesday night, it's camping next to my pillow, knitting long unhappy scarves and crowing over my frustrations. 

It's really fun. Definitely has put me in the Christmas spirit.

It's been a long time since I've felt like my job is useless, but that's one of those happy little thoughts that show up at 1 a.m.

My family and I have been immersed in the medical world lately. I've learned to be so grateful for skilled nurses and doctors and surgeons: If you can wield an I.V. without traumatizing your patient, if you don't flinch at the word "catheter," and if you are compassionate on top of all that...

Well. You're a superhero. 

I have a long gratitude list right now. So many people, in so many different roles, have held my family together, given us the information and courage and support we needed. 

But it gets easy to think that everyone else is doing important work, while I somehow lost myself in a silly dream of putting words on pages.

The books that I'm writing--well, I love them. No matter what the 1 a.m. voice says, I still do love these stories. But they aren't important. You can't confuse my work with, say, a doctoral thesis. I'm writing about themes I love, absolutely, and this trilogy is for an age group (eleven-year-olds!) that I care deeply about, but the books are also very ...

Wacky.

(I'm secretly terrified that my friends will read them and then take five quick steps away from me. You can know me pretty well and never guess the kinds of things I'm writing about. Because... how do I put this... there are telepathic lizards in these books. I'm still surprised that they're in there, but, yup, that's what they are.

And there's a family of aristocratic assassins with funny names, and a whole town devoted to jam-making, and these spiders that became really important to the plot somehow, and a whole troop of monocle-wearing superpowered who-knows-whats. 

It's goofy, is what I'm saying.)

Right. So I've had a few interactions with an insanely gifted surgeon, and then I go back to my desk and write about lizards. And then I stare at the ceiling past 1 a.m. wondering what on earth I'm doing with my life.

Do you have these kinds of nights?

But then I remembered one very important moment, and it shut the voice right up.

See, we were in my mom's hospital room. Waiting with her as they tweaked her pain medication, waiting for her to recover just enough from the surgery to go home. We were looking out at the amazing view from the seventeenth floor. Letting her rest, grabbing coffee from the lobby, keeping each other company.

And then: we were reading out loud. 

My family has always read out loud to one another: something my parents were doing for us when we were kids, and none of us got around to outgrowing it. So my mom packed a lighthearted novel for her hospital stay, and Dad and I read it out loud.

And something funny happened. Instead of being overwhelmingly conscious of I.V. cords and hospital gowns, the smells of antiseptic, the sounds of the equipment in the room (I never knew hospital beds were so loud)... instead of all our worries about the surgery itself, and the outcome, and what the rest of recovery would be like, and if any other treatment was needed--

We all teleported. 

To 1930s England. To chauffeurs in uniform, to having tea and lemonade on the lawn, to entertaining the vicar. To frivolous women and pompous young men and imperious great-aunts. To thwarted love and silly mix-ups and endangered inheritances. It was one of those comedy-of-manners kinds of books, trivial and subtle and funny. 

The only thing I had to focus on was reading the very next sentence. Everything else faded away. Mom listened and rested. Dad and I wrapped ourselves up in the story. 

And at one point I looked up to see my mom's roommate standing there, listening to me read. She was holding onto her I.V. pole, with a feeding tube snaking into her nose, but she was with us in the 1930s, standing there in England, just for a little while. 

(She told us--in a beautiful accent that none of us could quite place--that she and her husband had been listening to us for a while, that it was lovely to overhear someone reading, instead of the noise of the TV. "There's a TV in here?" I said later, surprised. We had never even noticed.)

In other words--I tell this emphatically to the doubting voice in my head--in other words, books are still important.

Even when your family gets all shaken around and can't figure out what normal is for a while.

Even in a land of diagnoses and tests and results and lab reports and waiting, waiting, waiting.

After all, anything that can make two women forget--even for an instant--that they are in a lot of pain; anything that can move a group of people over a continent and back about eight decades; heck, anything that can keep me from realizing I'm in a hospital--

Well. That's a very powerful force. Whether the story reminds you of green lawns and sparkling lemonade, or whether it's populated with aristocratic assassins and monocled crime fighters: Stories are important.

And maybe there is no such thing as too silly, when even the silly stories can remind us who we are.

Side effects.

I stare like a lemur at anyone who asks me a question. Confronted by a grocery list, I try to remember the name of something--anything--that I eat. I decide never to leave the house for anything, ever again. I'll just learn to photosynthesize. If I can remember what that means.

... In other words, it's Day Three of the first draft. Of trying to live more in the story than out of it. And it's bringing on all the usual symptoms.

I get a bit dizzy. I put things in the wrong places. I try to make sense when I'm around other people, but what I'm actually thinking about is how the protagonist's aunt manages to bring up three very important bits of information without sounding like blah, blah, blabbity-blah.

Basically I'm trying to get myself to breathe the air of an alternate reality. 

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I love this quote so. 

I'm no opium fiend, I hate injections, and I've never had the slightest desire to inhale smoke of any sort. But I have been deeply and persistently and unshakably bookdrunk, for days on end. 

And right now, I'm pretty much tumbling back down that rabbit hole. 

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind. -- Rudyard Kipling