Category: Characters

  • The Character Who is You

    We’ve spent the last few days talking Poirot, and next week I’m gonna talk Jane Marple, but today I wanted to talk about a recurring character in Christie’s work who has been noted to mirror Agatha Christie herself: Ariadne Oliver. Ariadne Oliver is a sixty-ish woman who writes mystery novels about a foreign detective named…

  • Can Series Characters Get in the Way?

    In An Appointment With Death, Hercule Poirot is on vacation in Jordan. He is called into a case involving the death of a woman in the historic city of Petra. This sounds pretty straightforward, doesn’t it? Christie’s sleuth on the case. Unfortunately, in the actual narration of the story, Poirot shows up just in time…

  • Consistency of Physical Description

    I have trouble keeping track of the various eye colors of my characters through one book. In my last completed draft of a book, I caught at least three variations of eye color of my main character’s eyes. Apparently I just couldn’t decide. So, as I read through Christie’s body of work, my main thought…

  • Characters Who Don’t Make It Through The Series

    In both of Christie’s series – Hercule Poirot and Miss Jane Marple – the opening books are narrated by characters who fall away fairly quickly in the series, never to be heard from in the same way again: John Hastings as Poirot’s bumbling sidekick in The Mysterious Affair at Styles, and Vicar Leonard Clement in Murder…

  • Meditating on What Makes Poirot a Good Series Character

    In her career, Agatha Christie came up with, not one, but two iconic characters: Hercule Poirot and Miss Jane Marple. Today we’ll look at Poirot, seeing why he’s a good focal point for a mystery series. “In her Autobiography Christie gives a detailed account of the genesis of the The Mysterious Affair at Styles. By…

  • The Solution to the Pop-Up Character Syndrome in Mysteries

    During a critique session, years ago, one of our group members submitted a first-chapter of a novel she was working on. Members of the group had taken her pages home, read it over for the month, marked it up, and then we all came back to discuss–which is our M.O. Rarely is it the case…

  • Wodehouse’s Traps: How he hints at the complications to come

    On Monday I chatted about complications and, because Wodehouse is such a complication-y dude, there’s more to talk about. As I read more Wodehouse, I find it’s pretty easy to spot what’s going to be a trap for the characters. (Sure, there’re one or two surprises that you can’t see coming–like Monty’s tattoo in The Luck of…

  • Trouble on Your Hands: Complications

    You know how they tell you creating complications is a good thing in writing a story? Challenge your characters? Well, Wodehouse is The Master. I remember thinking this way back when I read The Code of the Woosters. Now I’m reminded of his skill in The Luck of the Bodkins. In this funky love larger-than-triangular-geometric-pattern,…

  • Novelists in Novels

    Stephen King does it often. Apparently, Wodehouse does it too: “He envied fellows like Gertrude’s cousin, Ambrose Tennyson. Ambrose was a novelist, and a letter like this would probably have been pie to him.” ~P.G.W. The Luck of the Bodkins Novelists as characters. I’ve never done written a novelist character myself, partly because I think that other fantabulous…

  • Curses! Foiled Again!: Another Note on Foils

    Another thing to think about when developing good foils is creating a goal that is compatible for both parties. This is harder than it looks. How do you create two characters with different backgrounds who want the same thing, but don’t want to beat each other up in order to attain the same thing? Jeeves…