Good examples of literary twists

[Snarky]

Well, I'd certainly advise against paying 100 dollars for this. Or even 1 dollar, for that matter.
Read it all now, btw. The ending somehow managed to be the worst part of this silly book. Laughable farce doesn't begin to describe it.

Well, I suppose it's progress that for once you've actually read the book you "critique."

I probably wouldn't recommend paying $100 for it either, but I do definitely recommend reading it. It is spooky and extremely ingenious. Silly? Sure, but then any book about ghosts and witchcraft is fundamentally silly.

Spoiler

A newly married man comes across a photo of a painting of his wife. Only, it's not his wife, but a notorious poisoner and reputed witch who was beheaded centuries ago. Right afterwards he gets involved in the investigation of a possible murder by poison, aspects of which seem to defy any rational explanation other than witchcraft. As the evidence starts to point towards his wife, he seeks to shield her from suspicion while himself growing all the more frightened of who and what she might really be.

Some of the scenes are as memorably iconic as anything in Dracula or The Hound of the Baskervilles, and the mundane solutions provided for the several locked room mysteries involved are a tour-de-force demonstration of Carr's ability to explain the impossible.

It also has some nice authentic local and period color from Carr's original home turf, the wealthy towns and boroughs along the Philadelphia Main Line (very unusually for him, as he otherwise preferred to set his stories in England or France).

[close]

[Snarky]

When we read Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier everyone in my book club expressed quite shocked delight at the twist. Completely recontextualises the story and characters in a wonderful way.

The twist is great, but I also love the ambiguously unhappy ending (of the book, not movie).

I'd recommend, in addition to Rebecca:

I just read Verity by Colleen Hoover, which was recommended in one of those listicles that authors are forced to produce in order to promote their books (you know: "Here's a list of ten of the best psychological thrillers, and BTW, I just happen to have a psychological thriller coming out this month"). It is very much a riff on Rebecca, down to the title, but turns it around by having the new woman be the one to discover the truth about the wife, and deciding whether to hide it from the husband.

I liked that it had the guts to be really nasty (graphic descriptions of violence to a baby, primarily), but the plot was were pretty flimsy, leaving too few possibilities for where the story could go and therefore not generating a lot of suspense. The sex scenes were also rather gratuitous—Hoover is primarily a romance author, and brings some bad habits with her.

[Snarky]

I love mystery stories, and I love stories-with-a-sting-in-the-tail.

This might be a good opportunity to mention that I recently read (well, listened to, in the dulcet voice of the author) Montgomery Bonbon: Murder at the Museum.

It's clearly for kids, but even though I'm not in the target audience, I enjoyed it because of the humor, and because the love for the genre comes through so clearly. My favorite gags were the anonymous stakeout vehicle (former ice cream van, painted a discreet gray—including the big gray ice cream cone on the roof) and "St Hilaria's Church of the Unfounded Assumption," while my favorite part of the investigation was the relatively subtle way you hinted at the owner of the hairpin. And I really appreciated that it was a properly constructed mystery story, not the crude simulations often found in children's fiction (where there is no real riddle or any proper investigation, and where plot events are just arbitrary "business" before the solution conveniently falls into the detectives' lap), even if the gimmicks were lifted from various classic stories.

As for literary twists, the final twist/cliffhanger was OK, though to this adult reader it felt a bit low-stakes. But perhaps that was intentional.

From flipping through the book, the illustrations are really fun, too.

So congratulations on the publication! I hope the book and the whole series are a success. There's a Norwegian edition coming out next month, which I take to be a good sign.

[KyriakosCH]

Hm, is there any story (preferably short, not a novel) that can be reasonably presented as the one with the best use of a locked room plot?
It's a bonus if the author has literary value (eg Chesterton), but even just the plot will be enough for me to look into it

[cat]

I probably wouldn't recommend paying $100 for it either, but I do definitely recommend reading it. It is spooky and extremely ingenious. Silly? Sure, but then any book about ghosts and witchcraft is fundamentally silly.

Oh, then this book isn't for me after all. I'm not into supernatural stories. Considering this, would reading Rebecca be a good idea? This book I can order easily.

Regarding Chesterton, many years ago I read a collection of Father Brown stories and the only thing I remember is that I found it meh.

[KyriakosCH]

It wasn't presented in this thread as a supernatural story, otherwise I'd not have wasted my time with it either. It's just that Carr is too low value to pull off this type of twist

Spoiler

so up to the end he tried to play down the supernatural angle but then thought it would be great if he subverted expectations.

[close]

Of course it wasn't. One of the worst junk I've read ^^ (ok, I should also state the obvious, that just because it wasn't for me, it doesn't mean no one could enjoy it for positive reasons of their own).

Chesterton isn't the best writer, but he rightly is regarded as being a capable one - which is rare (not impossible) for those delving into detective stories. Some of his detective stories don't feature father Brown (I mentioned the White Pillars one which is freely available online).

[Snarky]

Oh, then this book isn't for me after all. I'm not into supernatural stories. Considering this, would reading Rebecca be a good idea? This book I can order easily.

Well, The Burning Court is primarily a murder mystery, but a spooky murder mystery, like The Hound of the Baskervilles or Les Diaboliques (or, for Norwegians, De dødes tjern).

Spoiler

It ultimately offers both a rational and a supernatural solution.

[close]

There is no supernatural element to Rebecca, but it's a gothic psychological suspense novel that appeals to a lot of the same emotions.

It wasn't presented in this thread as a supernatural story, otherwise I'd not have wasted my time with it either.

I did in fact mention "a spooky and terrifying atmosphere, so that some of his mysteries almost cross over into horror" with The Burning Court as the finest achievement of that. There's always been a close link between mysteries and the supernatural, given the common gothic heritage (Poe, Collins, Conan Doyle, ... ), and locked room mysteries/impossible crimes in particular often flirt with the supernatural as a possible explanation. As you were already reading The Three Coffins, this could hardly be news to you.

It's just that Carr is too low value to pull off this type of twist

That's such a vacuous statement. What does "too low value" even mean?

[Snarky]

Chesterton isn't the best writer, but he rightly is regarded as being a capable one - which is rare (not impossible) for those delving into detective stories. Some of his detective stories don't feature father Brown (I mentioned the White Pillars one which is freely available online).

Chesterton is a perfectly decent writer, but I'm with @cat (and against Carr, who was a big fan) that his stories are pretty meh. There is rarely anything interesting or memorable about them—admittedly this could in part be because whatever was novel and unique about his stories when he wrote them has been copied so often that the freshness has been lost—and he too often falls into didacticism and proselytizing. He's smug, and I find that a particularly irritating trait in an author.

Hm, is there any story (preferably short, not a novel) that can be reasonably presented as the one with the best use of a locked room plot?

I think the second murder in The Three Coffins/The Hollow Man (a man is shot in the back, up close, in the middle of an empty street with witnesses at either end; the street is covered in snow, and there are no tracks other than the dead man's) has a reasonable claim to being the greatest "locked room" mystery devised, because of its simplicity, apparent impossibility and the elegance of its solution. (The solution to the other murder, and the combination of both, is a bit too baroque and contrived for my tastes.)

Gaston Leroux's The Mystery of the Yellow Room is also a strong contender due to overall excellence. And Then There Were None is not always considered a locked-room mystery, but I would argue that it qualifies and is one of the best. I also have a weak spot for The Big Bow Mystery by Israel Zangwill, which although indifferently written and badly dated, introduced two of the classic locked-room gimmicks. Oh, and Hake Talbot's The Rim of the Pit is tremendously good fun and absolutely preposterous. You'd hate it.

I tend to think locked room shorts are less interesting than novel-length mysteries, as a rule, since the length usually constrains them to pretty trivial tricks. Edward D. Hoch is usually considered the master of the form, but I haven't read a lot of his work. Some would cite Chesterton's "The Invisible Man," but I never found the solution credible. One I personally have fond memories of is the Sherlock Holmes-pastiche "The Adventure of the Highgate Miracle" by Carr and Adrian Doyle, but while neatly done, it's not very original.

There are good lists here (novels), here (novels and short stories) and here (short stories).

[KyriakosCH]

Afaik the Invisible Man is widely regarded as one of Chesterton's most memorable stories. I have read it, of course, and while the reveal is a bit trivial and artificial, the story has some other merits. In a lecture by Borges, it was correctly mentioned that the more striking part is about how a character there dies (and suggestion of other means), not the reveal.

[Ali]

Oh, then this book isn't for me after all. I'm not into supernatural stories. Considering this, would reading Rebecca be a good idea? This book I can order easily.

I've enjoyed every Daphne du Maurier thing I've read. Rebecca is great, but may not be the twistiest of her tales. I still recommend it, along with the ones I mentioned above, there's also My Cousin Rachel, and the short stories The Blue Lenses and Not After Midnight - which adventure game fans will surely enjoy. Having said that, there are elements of the supernatural in the shorts, and in Don't Look Now.

So congratulations on the publication! I hope the book and the whole series are a success. There's a Norwegian edition coming out next month, which I take to be a good sign.

Thank you for the review, Snarky!

In a lecture by Borges, it was correctly mentioned that the more striking part is about how a character there dies (and suggestion of other means), not the reveal.

I also found the solution, while clearly important in the history of the genre, annoying. Do you have a link to that Borges lecture?

[KyriakosCH]

I am not sure if it is available outside book form - quite possibly it's not yet in the public domain (if that applies to his lectures, anyway). I read it in an edition of all his articles and lectures

[Snarky]

On the subject of impossible crimes (and particularly inspired by "The Problem of Cell 13" by Jacques Futrelle, a classic short story about an impossible escape from a locked prison cell), I'm reminded of the real-life stories of the escape attempts from Colditz, the WWII POW camp located in an ancient German castle. Escape ought to have been impossible, but the allied prisoners employed a lot of the methods detective fiction writers rely on to create the illusion of impossible events, and managed to get out again and again (though they were almost always caught before they could reach friendly territory). For example, they had various ways to manipulate the periodic headcount, including an actual dummy, so that the guards wouldn't realize that a prisoner had gone missing.

The classic account is in two books by British Escape Officer P.R. Reid, The Colditz Story and The Latter Days at Colditz (sometimes collected together in one volume); more recently there is Colditz: Prisoners of the Castle by Ben MacIntyre, which fills in some of Reid's blind spots and omissions. There was also an excellent, lightly fictionalized TV show based on Reid's books in the 1970s.

[Snarky]

I am not sure if it is available outside book form - quite possibly it's not yet in the public domain (if that applies to his lectures, anyway). I read it in an edition of all his articles and lectures

It's presumably a version of the argument he makes in "On Chesterton" in Other Inquisitions, where he briefly alludes to the story.

Spoiler

As a reminder, the victim in "The Invisible Man" is a millionaire who made his fortune selling household robots, and the narrator observes:

Angus had suddenly the horrid fancy that poor Smythe's own iron child had struck him down. Matter had rebelled, and these machines had killed their master. But even so, what had they done with him?

"Eaten him?" said the nightmare at his ear; and he sickened for an instant at the idea of rent, human remains absorbed and crushed into all that acephalous clockwork.

In my opinion, Chesterton would not have tolerated the imputation of being a contriver of nightmares, a monstrorum artifex (Pliny, XXVIII, 2), but he tends inevitably to revert to atrocious observations. He asks if perchance a man has three eyes, or a bird three wings; in opposition to the pantheists, he speaks of a man who dies and discovers in paradise that the spirits of the angelic choirs have, every one of them, the same face he has; he speaks of a jail of mirrors; of a labyrinth without a center; of a man devoured by metal automatons [...]

These examples, which could easily be multiplied, prove that Chesterton restrained himself from being Edgar Allan Poe or Franz Kafka, but something in the makeup of his personality leaned toward the nightmarish, something secret, and blind, and central.

[close]

[KyriakosCH]

Yes, it wasn't the article, but some similar flourish in a lecture. More than likely one of the detective story speeches to universities.

Maybe you should have put that in spoiler tags, btw.

[KyriakosCH]

Read Chesterton's "Secret Garden". Mmmh, can't say I liked it 

[cat]

When we read Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier everyone in my book club expressed quite shocked delight at the twist. Completely recontextualises the story and characters in a wonderful way.

Now that I finished reading Rebecca, I wonder which of several events you mean.

Warning - full spoilers ahead:

Spoiler

What I liked about the book, is that most of the major events/revelations are hinted at. It's a bit like solving a jigsaw puzzle. You find bits and pieces of all aspects throughout the story and with each additional information, you get a better picture of the persons and events.
What I didn't expect:
- the proposal at the beginning
- the discovery of the boat
- her illness
- the house burning down. It was clear that there will not be a happy ending. I didn't get that the house was burned down in the beginning. I thought they would escape England fleeing his conviction and end up hiding in exile somewhere in Europe, with the house just decaying due to lack of maintenance.

To me it was clear about halfway through the book that the marriage was not happy and she did not die in an accident. I thought of suicide first, though. I was also quite sure that the found body he identified was not Rebecca (I even considered her being still alive). It also did not surprise me when they found her body on the boat and that he killed her.

I think it is an extremely well crafted book. The pacing, especially during the last quarter, is excellent. Also one scene with the unnamed protagonist and Mrs Danvers was extremly powerful.

[close]

Thanks for the recommendation, I fully agree it is worth reading.

[Snarky]

Glad you liked Rebecca, @cat. It's a good one! I guess ThreeOhFour will answer when he sees your post, but the big twist is usually considered to be:

(Again, huge spoilers)

Spoiler

The fact that Rebecca was a very unpleasant person, that her marriage to Mr. de Winter was unhappy, and that his passionate feeling for her was hate, not love. (And that the second Mrs. de Winter has therefore misinterpreted her husband's reactions any time her name was brought up.)

Personally I knew the twist before I read it, and even if I hadn't, the foreword—which IIRC tried to offer a revisionist take on Rebecca as a positive female character, a feminist rebel against a suffocating patriarchal society—gave it away.

[close]

So when not otherwise specified, that's most likely what they are talking about. I would consider the secondary (more conventional) twist to be:

Spoiler

The reveal that she deliberately goaded her husband into killing her because she had discovered that she had terminal cancer.

[close]

... But I don't think that's as well known/remembered, perhaps in part because the Hitchcock movie, produced under the Hollywood "Hays Code" censorship rules, changed the details:

Spoiler

Because Mr. De Winter goes free in the end, he could not be revealed as a wife-murderer. Instead, Rebecca's death is portrayed as an accident (although IIRC we only have De Winter's word for this), and so her non-pregnancy and connivance in her own death makes less difference.

[close]

[ThreeOhFour]

Glad to know you enjoyed it @cat!

For me:

Spoiler

Yes, both the fact that Mr. de Winter's emotions over Rebecca's name being mentioned were actually much more complex than simple grief at her passing, and also that Rebecca deliberately infuriated Maxim with her lies in order to escape the slow death of cancer (and, in my imagination, set her memory up to haunt the rest of his life with her presence/means of death)

[close]

Very much agree that it's a great book. 

[cat]

This might be a good opportunity to mention that I recently read (well, listened to, in the dulcet voice of the author) Montgomery Bonbon: Murder at the Museum.

Thanks for the recommendation, it was a fun read and I loved the illustrations (it's a pity novels for adults don't have such nice illustrations). @Ali did you choose the illustrator or was she decided on by the publisher? In any case, good choice.

The book includes so many mystery novel tropes and puts a twist on them, my favourite probably being

Spoiler

the room behind the book shelf that turns out to be a dusty store room

[close]

I was a bit surprised to see a real murder case. When I was a kid, no one ever died in children's mystery novels, I think the worst thing was a broken arm or something.

I'm looking forward to the next book!

[Snarky]

Me too. I just watched this trailer (if that's the word) yesterday:

Those drawings really are wonderful.

Since this thread is about twists, I suppose I will stick my neck out and with confident trepidation guess at the cliffhanger twist in Murder at the Museum:

Spoiler

The person who knows Bonnie's secret is Dana Hornville, right? I feel like it's foreshadowed that they will become friends and partners-in-crimesolving.

[close]

If I got it wrong, I suppose that's proof I'm in the target audience of 8–12-year-olds or adults who are a bit thick.

I also recently read Mr Bowling Buys a Newspaper by Donald Henderson, a really remarkable crime novel from 1944 that tells the story of a depressed serial killer who can't seem to get caught even though he wants to. It's not really a mystery, but still features a twist ending that caught me by surprise. And it doubles as an interesting depiction of life in London during WWII. I would recommend it.