April Meeting Recap

We met on April 21 at the Wall Branch of the Monmouth County Library System for a talk with author Jane Cleland. Jane gave a talk on the use of red hearings in mystery writing and then did some Q&A.

Jane Cleland is the author of the Josie Prescott Antiques Mystery novels, these are considered Cozy Mysteries. As Jane described these mysteries take place in a sweet and decent world and there are some things that just don’t happen. For example the killer and victim know each other, the sleuth figures out the mystery not really forensics, there is no sex, no violence or really bad language. For a more detailed description you can read about cosy mysteries here.

As I said Jane discussed the red herring fallacy. A red herring is a clue that is intended to be misleading, or distracting from the actual issue, and this makes good mystery writing! She described a bunch of examples and works related to these examples.

Books/works mentioned by Jane: Night Work by Irwin Shaw
The Gun with Wings by Rex Stout
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
The Spellman Files by Lisa Lutz
The Reluctant Widow by Georgette Heyer
She likes anything by Lee Child
Her short story The Killing Time is free on her website. She’s working on turning it into a Noir play
You can sign up for Jane’s newsletter here, or you can read the current newsletter here. (I think you should do both!)

-Amelia