Mystery novel lecture set for Wednesday

MOSES LAKE — Mystery novels and the changing emphasis on victims and killers will be the subject of a lecture at 3 p.m. Wednesday at the Moses Lake Civic Center Auditorium. Admission to “A Nicer Kind of Murder: Shifting Roles in Today’s Crime Fiction” is free.

Matthew Sullivan is the speaker. Sullivan is an instructor at Big Bend Community College – and the author of a new mystery novel scheduled for publication in June 2017.

The lecture is sponsored by the Moses Lake Museum & Art Center as part of their Fall Salon Series. It’s in partnership with Humanities Washington.

Murder mysteries have been around for about 170 years, give or take, and in that time the list of victims has been long and varied. Edgar Allan Poe killed off the ladies that ran the morgue in his pioneering “The Murders at the Rue Morgue.” Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes solved murders of good guys (“The Hound of the Baskervilles”) and bad guys (“Abbey Grange”). Ellery Queen (who was actually two men writing under a single pen name) killed off Hollywood stars, and Dashiell Hammett killed off ruthless gangsters. Victims have ranged from innocent bystanders to mobbed-up guys who got whacked before they could whack somebody else.

But for a long time the victim didn’t get a lot of attention, Sullivan said. “There’s a whole category of mysteries being published right now, ‘literary mysteries,’ that are focused as much on character development as they are on the twists and turns of a good mystery plot. (They are also usually focused on style and concept/theme),” he wrote.

“I would like to think that these books are popular because many readers want to read a good mystery, but they also want to have an emotional connection to what they are reading, and that comes in large part from well-written characters,” Sullivan wrote. “We have to know a character well if we are going to care about them, especially if they get killed in the story.”

Studies, he said, have shown that reading literature helps increase empathy. So maybe readers are gravitating toward literary mystery novels because feeling empathy is a rewarding experience.”

Sullivan’s novel, “Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore,” will be published by Scribner. He said writing it changed his view of reading mysteries, too. “It’s a real challenge to dole out bits and pieces of the story in a way that keeps suspense going and keeps readers interested, so I have a whole new level of respect for those writers out there that are doing it well.”

People who want more information can contact the museum, 509-764-3825.