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Dear Beth Gutcheon,
I have read DEATH AT BREAKFAST with the purpose of reviewing it online and, as is my firm standard, I have read it twice. I understand from the book's jacket and from your publicist that this is your first foray into the mystery genre after a marvelously successful writing career spanning a number of years.
Your voice, your use of the written English language, and your drawing of characters are refreshingly wonderful. It was a pleasure to dive into your world of words. Mystery is clearly not a genre you are well-versed in and although your plot in its bare bones is good enough, you are unable to carry it off. Sadly, the most mysterious thing you are able to conquer is the dragging of red herrings across the trail.
I do love your protagonists, the widowed and retired private school head Maggie Detweiler and her close friend, the long single and well-off Hope Babbin. I wish that they had, indeed, been allowed to be real protagonists. Their visit to an inn on the Maine coast, devised to discern whether they could join forces in much longer and exotic travels around the world, is a perfect segue into a closed setting that lends itself to a slick murder and subsequent sleuthing. Further, the gradual realization that these two very sharp older women come to conclude that Hope's son, deputy sheriff Buster Babbin, is rightly motivated but terribly overwhelmed in trying to solve the crime -- and that the outside and higher-ranking law agencies that move in are totally satisfied to settle on the first suspect they stumble across -- this is a great start.
But then comes the first real red herring. These women are not going to solve anything. They are not even going to be real main characters; you just use them as a sort of hinge upon which everything else swings.
In fairness to Maggie and Hope, their desire to find the real culprit or culprits is hamstrung from the beginning by the inanely tangled relationships you have set up among the characters. Lacking any sort of back story for most of them, Maggie and Hope are almost helpless in their quest to figure out who had both ample motivation and means to commit the crime. The "almost" is a correct description because their stubbornness in continuing to try no matter what keeps their helplessness from being complete. Great characteristic for mystery protagonists, by the way.
So, they do not give up. In another enormous red herring, you change your mind about them being the investigators and have each of them call on a friend -- this is two thirds of the way through the story -- and these are friends with uniquely specific qualifications for doing the investigating and unraveling for them. How serendipitous. Dear Beth, that's authorial cheating in the mystery genre. You have left your protagonists and your readers clueless all this way and now a pair of strangers with special skills swoop in to make all kinds of things clear.
The very worst red herring of the myriads you lean on is this -- and it is awful. Remember, I read this twice. The second time I resorted to a sort of cheating of my own and began listing characters as they were introduced for the first time by name, chapter by chapter -- not names dropped, but characters who had at least one line of dialogue to offer. Okay, it's not in chapters but in chunks titled days. So what? There are fourteen of them and they are in calendar order.
Day one: fifteen characters in fourteen pages.
Day two: fifteen additional characters in sixteen pages.
Day three: six more. Day four: eight more. Day five: thirteen more. Day six: eight more. Day seven: five more. Day eight: six more. Day nine: two more. Day ten: three more. Day eleven: five more. Day twelve: three more. Day thirteen: two more.
There are new named characters introduced in every "day" through the thirteenth day. Only the fourteenth and final "day" does not involve the entry of yet another named person.
What were you thinking? I counted. Beth, there are eighty seven (give or take) separate speaking characters in a novel with fewer than three hundred pages. Was I supposed to remember them? Was I supposed to recall who was where, when, with whom, why, or how they felt? Really? How could a reader care?
Yet I do care. You are so gifted a writer that I want you to try again and master this form. I want a mystery from you that I can love.
Sincerely, Diana
§ Diana Borse is retired from teaching English at Texas A&M University-Kingsville and savoring the chance to read as much as she always wanted to.
Reviewed by Diana Borse, June 2016
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