Mysteries

After two decades of making our living as mystery authors, we thought, hey, we must have done something right. If you think so, too (or you're simply curious), read on. Just to be clear. This is not a list of mechanical techniques. Much has been written on genre tropes and tricks. This is a list of how we survived them.

There is little doubt that in recent years the reading public's taste in crime writing has shifted. Cosy crime, it seems, is king. The hyper-realistic, blood and guts style of novels about hard-bitten detectives with drink problems, broken marriages and potty mouths is giving way to something different. A hark back to happier times, maybe.

What lies behind this trend?

When I think about the classic period of crime fiction known as the Golden Age, there are a few things that spring to mind. A certain type of detective, often with some quirk to set him or her (but generally him) apart. Upper class white people. Often large houses with staff who knew their place, except for when they had a deadly secret to keep.  Read more

I live in Bern, the capital of Switzerland, which has a magnificent medieval core, and I'm currently working on the fourth mystery in my Polizei Bern series, which is set in and around the city's Gothic church, the Berner Münster.

In a sense, every detective novel is about the inside of someone's head. What immediately captures the reader at the beginning of a Sherlock Holmes story is the tick-tock of Holmes mind: what brilliance will he conjure next, what detail will he pull out of an ordinary scene, who is this guy?