THE UNMASKING and the Locked-Room Mystery

LYNN C. MILLER:

The Unmasking and the Locked-Room Mystery 

Characters, all with motives––a secret affair, a lust for revenge of an old slight, a desire to inherit large sums––are confined together in a remote setting. One by one each person is mysteriously killed. How was someone able to enter the space where the crime occurred, murder his or her victim, and exit without seemingly leaving a clue? From popular examples such as Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None to the recent movie Knives Out, the formula of the locked-room mystery has had staying power for decades. 

I play with the conventions of the locked-room mystery in my new novel The Unmasking. Three close friends, Bettina, Miriam, and Fiona, journey from Austin, Texas to Silver City, New Mexico to attend a women’s festival where they and others perform famous women from history. Each of the characters’ presentations reveals aspects of her era that resonate in our own today: Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for US president in 1872, raised issues of class and misogyny that pervaded the election of 2016. In her writing, Gertrude Stein explored lesbian sexuality and her long union with Alice B. Toklas. Edith Wharton and Virginia Woolf wrote brilliantly about the constraints of women’s lives. The three stay in a secluded lodge, Oso Grande, in the Gila Wilderness of southwest New Mexico along with the lodge’s staff and four other participants of the event. Their university dean, Alec Martin, has just died in a one-car crash after it comes to light that he’s been embezzling funds. 

The three women suspect murder, particularly when it is revealed that his widow, Barbara, has inherited millions of dollars upon his death. But how might the crash have been orchestrated? 

The reader knows early on who will die––the novel is less of a “whodunnit” than a “how-and-why-dunnit.” In the process of discovery, the form of the mystery novel itself is unraveled and put back together: random clues, the increasing isolation in the country, the friction between the faces the characters show in the novel’s present vs. the lives they play in history, the ongoing excavation of assignations and loyalties all add to the layers of action. The actual locked room inside the lodge, a small storage room with no windows, holds something utterly unexpected when it is opened. 

Over the course of the novel, the lodge itself becomes an extension of the locked room. It serves as an incubator for motives and desires, including love and revenge. For example, Barbara becomes lovers with Jane, the festival’s Gertrude Stein whose career was negatively impacted by Alec Martin. In history, Gertrude Stein and the arts patron Mabel Dodge Luhan (whom Barbara portrays) were attracted to each other but kept apart by Stein’s lover Alice B. Toklas. Accidents begin to happen around the performances and one of the performers disappears. The police arrive to investigate the disappearance making the festival itself a psychological locked room, keeping the participants together until answers are found. A small shed on the grounds, another locked room, holds clues that are key to the final crisis of the novel. 

Miriam, in her keynote on the locked-room mystery, puzzles through the murder of Alec Martin that on the surface seemed like an accident yet which was carefully orchestrated: “I ask you to contemplate a mind facile and arrogant enough to predict that an act of premeditated violence would appear, one hundred times out of one hundred, as just a bad break. Casual, unfortunate, just one of life’s little surprises. Like a slip on a slick staircase, or a skid in the shower, or a burst vessel in the brain, it was something that could happen to anyone. At any time. But Alec’s death would not have happened at any time. Just at one: on a Friday morning, at rush hour, in the one mile drive from the victim’s home to his neighborhood grocery. Call it designer’s delight. Call it devil’s play. Call it the perfect crime.” 

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Lynn C. Miller is the author and coauthor of several books, including The Unmasking: A Novel and The Day after Death: A Novel. She has performed a number of solo performance pieces and plays about Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, Katherine Anne Porter, and Victoria Woodhull.

The Haunted Country of Our Past: Guest post by Lynn C. Miller

Lynn C. Miller’s third novel, The Day After Death, came out in March from the University of New Mexico Press. Miller’s prior novels are The Fool’s Journey and Death of a Department Chair. She is the Editor of the literary journal Bosque.

Lynn C. Miller:
The Haunted Country of Our Past

A psychologist friend and I were talking one day about how trauma in families affects each member of the family differently, and she remarked that sometimes the family system makes it impossible for the most vulnerable member to survive. That led me to the central “haunting” in my new novel, The Day After Death: The protagonist, Amanda, has a fraternal twin, Duncan, who dies in an ice skating accident when they are twelve. With him that day was their older brother, Adrian, whom Amanda blames for her twin’s death.

When Amanda wakes up one day in her early forties with the memory of Adrian’s bullying her as a young girl, all her childhood fractures surface, including Duncan’s mysterious death. She must, at this mid-point in her life, come to terms with her past and try to understand the family dynamic, and secrets, that haunt her.

Amanda excavates the past through her work in the theater and through therapy. Both in college and later, she is involved with productions of Harold Pinter’s play, Betrayal, which tells the story of a love triangle in reverse chronology. Her participation in the play upends her life and leads to an involvement with the director, Sarah Moore, who becomes her lover. Later in the novel Sarah dies, and Adrian is present on the day she dies, and––once again––Amanda holds him responsible for the death.

You always hope that when you reference another work of art, in this case a play, that the work provides layering to your story and deepens its resonance. In my novel, Pinter’s probing of love and loyalty and the back and forth movement of time in the drama underscore Amanda’s journey to understand her memories of the past while beginning a new relationship in the present where she must learn to trust again. The theater, where art imitates life and life imitates art, is a laboratory for psychological action. Pinter’s play shows how secrets can transform and ultimately poison relationships. The play also shows the power of the triangle, as the three characters align and realign in various scenes, with the power of two pressuring the third. The secret that Adrian and their mother share about how Duncan died is one of the things that pit Amanda and Adrian against each other throughout their lives.

As I said earlier, Amanda also pursues the truth through therapy with Helen, a Jungian psychologist. Theater and therapy are related, I think, in that each examines closely human motivations and the reverberation of an action on other actions. Both involve risk. In a play, what each character says about another or does to another, causes a further action. Therapy is like that too: as you talk about a situation, one question breaks through a barrier to a larger question. In The Day After Death, as Amanda learns more about herself, she goes deeper; she develops a thicker skin and sees herself more clearly. In the theater, the audience becomes the mirror for the action; in therapy, the therapist is the mirror for the client.

I think our lives are full of hauntings; we all search for healing from difficult experiences during the course of our lives. Adrian is a difficult character but not an unsympathetic one. He, too, was damaged by family secrets. Amanda’s healing depends upon her being able to see past Adrian as the villain in her life and on her realizing that she––and no one else––is responsible for her joy and sorrow.

I wanted to explore the rippling effects of family secrets in this novel, as well as the ways in which we can find meaning and forgive others for their limitations even while we transcend our own. The human being is flawed but the human spirit is unstoppable. How do we live with the past? How do we shape our lives? Who are we responsible for? These are questions that I hope resonate for readers in these pages.