Mystery Adventures: A Writers Guide

Charles Dodgson with Pen in Hand Charles Lutwidge Dodgson never wrote a detective adventure story, but I thought he might be of help for me in creating the fourth novel in the Jonas Watcher Detective Adventure Series. I chose Through The Looking-Glass for the template for my novel because it was the lesser known of the two Alice in Wonderland stories. Additionally, it contained characters that could act as blueprints and it had " a most marvelous " villain in the form of  the Jabberwocky. My only obstacle was to be sure that I committed no plagiarism. This was actually quite easy because Through The Looking-Glass is to be used as a template not to be copied but a reference. Gene Poscham and Company I already had my title, and oddly enough I hadn't gotten it from The novel by Lewis Carroll, but from another author; Agatha Christie. The title came from her novel, The Mirror Cracked . I must confess the original title for the fourth book started out as The ...

Tales from the Bayou After I finished The Case of the Bourbon Street Hustler I had already decided the next story would be based upon a scene from the television series Have Gun Will Travel . While Jonas has some characteristics of Paladin, he is by no means the same character. Both men are for hire, and both live in San Francisco, and they both travel about the United States on assignments. There could be more similarities, but there are a dozen other characters that share similar storylines. Jonas is younger and from a different era. China Town For this specific story, the genesis comes from a story where Paladin helps out an elder Chinese gentleman and his daughter at the beginning of an episode. There the similarity ends. This is another case of my The Case of the Jade Dragon was born. I spent a fair amount of time researching Trains in the 1930s, where they went, what thy were called and the passenger accommodations. I also returned to San Francisco, which I w...

A  I was still writing The Case of the Running Bag  when I realized that Jonas Watcher was going to be more than a single novel character. I had a number of stories floating in the ether of my mind when I recognized that Jonas would be the character to bring all the stories together. It was happenstance that I chose the era of the 1930s to tell the story of the Running Bag in. I had always been a fan of films of detective stories from that era and while I had a Hollywood idea of the period I had no first-hand information. It was then that I remembered reading somewhere that if one wanted to get a better look into a period, that detective mysteries and adventures provided the best window into a time period. Where's the Bridge? I started reading more writers that wrote in the period and I started doing more research into the thirties and forties. I realized that I would have to take my research back into the roaring twenties and take a more definitive view of World Wa...