Category Archives: Mysteries

Where Evil Lurks Beneath the Sun or Picnic at Hanging Rock

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By Clare Langley-Hawthorne
www.clarelangleyhawthorne.com

As I’m in Australia at the moment, visiting relatives and friends, I thought it was about time I discussed some home-grown Aussie mystery. If you’re thinking I’m sunning myself on the beach somewhere you’d be wrong – Melbourne is in the depths of winter so think rain and lots of it! Since I’m in the cultural capital of Australia (sucks to Sydney – you can see where my allegiances lie!) I have to talk about one of my all time favorite mysteries – Picnic at Hanging Rock.

I read the book by Joan Lindsay when I was about twelve and I was convinced it was based on a true story – the eerie mystery surrounding the fate of a party of schoolgirls who visit Hanging Rock was deliciously fraught. Then along came Peter Weir’s film and the whole ambience and sexually charged atmosphere came to the fore. There are even hints that the events in the book may have been based on events in Joan Lindsay’s own life but there has never been any record found of anything similar happening. Yet the mystery endures today, probably because it remains unsolved (although there is a missing final chapter which Lindsay wrote that apparently solves the mystery. It was excluded in the original book and, to be honest, I don’t want to even know what it says).

I’ve visited hanging rock (Mt. Diogenes) and each time I was struck by the strange energy of the place. It is located just outside Melbourne, where I grew up, and is now forever associated with those haunting few words :
“On St. Valentine’s Day in 1900 a party of schoolgirls went on a picnic to Hanging Rock. Some were never to return…”

Hanging rock is a place where anything is possible and there is a distinct evil vibe that is hard to ignore. When you climb the rock, your sense of perspective and time becomes confused. I think that’s what makes Peter Weir’s film so incredible. He captures the essence of a summer day at the turn of the last century, its drowsy, erotic overtones as well as the heady sense of foreboding – that evil of an unknown nature might have taken the girls forever.

The place itself was the most important character in the book as well as the movie. What places have inspired the same fear within you?

The Ideal (Fictitious) Villain

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By Clare Langley-Hawthorne
www.clarelangleyhawthorne.com

John Mortimer, creator of Rumpole, wrote that “most of the interest and part of the terror of great crime are not due to what is abnormal, but to what is normal in it; what we have in common with the criminal rather than the subtle insanity which differentiates him from us.” I couldn’t agree more – for me, it is the commonality rather than the abnormality that makes a villain truly villainous.

Take Doctor Crippen – an unremarkable man in real life, the least likely man perhaps to have poisoned and dismembered his wife or to have been pursued across the Atlantic with a young mistress in tow disguised as a boy. Part of the fascination with this case is the sheer ordinariness of the supposed murderer – and now, with DNA evidence casting doubt on whether the woman whose body was found was that of Doctor Crippen’s wife, Cora, the mystery of what actually happened may never be solved.

In fiction of course, some of the most fantastical crimes that occur in real life can never be used simply because readers would never believe them. Take for example the man who murdered his wife over an affair that happened 40 years before and then left her body as a gift beneath the Christmas tree. Writers have to walk a fine line with villains too, making them both believable as well as intriguing. Are they merely the flip side of the protagonist? Are they an ordinary person pushed to the brink? Or does some deep psychological wound create the monster within?

As a historical mystery writer and fan, I have a preference for the enigmatic ‘villain or not’ character. I still recall the terror I felt as a twelve year old reading Daphne DuMaurier’s Rebecca late one night when I realized Maxim de Winter may have murdered his wife.
Part of the pleasure of reading Dickens, for me, is his rendition of such memorably odious characters as Mr. Murdstone, Uriah Heep and Steerforth (and that’s just in David Copperfield!)

As for female villains, I love Annie Wilson in Dorothy Sayers’ Gaudy Night. Even though no murder is committed her vitriolic outburst and her ability to mask her hatred beneath sheer ordinariness and subservience made her a perfect villainess in my book. Then of course there’s Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca and that other Annie in Stephen King’s Misery…now they’re just downright bloody terrifying.

So what makes the ideal ‘fictitious’ villain for you?
Please also join me as I guest blog at Good Girls Kill for Money where I discuss what makes the ideal ‘fictitious’ husband…which is in no way inspired by my musings on villainy…