Bernadette Calonego's Blog: Eventful - Posts Tagged "true-crime"

It is an eery feeling when an author publishes a murder mystery and soon after that, a crime takes place that is strangely similar to the one in her book. I know the feeling because it has happened to me. Not long after my murder mystery "Stormy Cove" was published, a young woman disappeared on the Northern tip of the Canadian island of Newfoundland, exactly where my murder mystery is set. In "Stormy Cove", a young woman disappears without a trace, too.
When I came to Northern Newfoundland, I instantly thought that this is a region where somebody could make a body disappear very easily. There are swamps, hundreds of small lakes, there is wilderness, the tundra - and there is the North Atlantic. When you dump a body in the North Atlantic, it won`t wash up on one of the beaches. It just vanishes.
The woman who disappeared in November 2016, a mother of two, hasn´t been found yet. The police treat her disappearance as suspicious and as a possible homicide. The locals talk about who they think is the murderer. But the police has a hard time finding the perpetrator. There is no body, no crime scene, no witnesses.
This is the dirty little secret in criminal investigations (and in crime fiction): So many cases are never solved. Thousands of murderers commit the perfect crime and get away with it. Only in crime fiction, we have the answer at the end of the book. Still, I haven`t given up hope that the woman - her name is Jennifer - will be found one day and that there will be justice for her.

When I read mystery thrillers, I tend to gravitate towards stories in which long buried family secrets are revealed. I suspect that you have read many of these books, too.
It isn't rare that I find myself in a situation where people disclose their own dark family secrets to me. Maybe because I'm a mystery writer or because I'm a good listener. Sometimes a person says: "You could write a book about it."
But I am reluctant to use such a family secret in my crime novels after somebody has confided in me. These are usually very painful personal tragedies and if feels wrong to exploit them for a book. They might not even be credible in a novel. Reality is sometimes stranger than fiction. It really is. Recently, an acquaintance told me of an episode in her life that impacted her marriage and her family and of course herself in a terrible way. I would never have thought that such an ordeal could have happened to this very nice person.
The mystery writer in me, however, was intrigued by these very unusual events. There was passion involved, betrayal, murder (the murderer was eventually prosecuted), revenge, dispair - and the question how people get over such an experience. It seemed to me that in this case, they were not able to move on.
I'm sure that you have heard of one or more family secrets, too, maybe just hints, maybe an entire revelation. It can be oddly fascinating, but at the same time you want to protect the people involved and you keep the secret forever.
For me, these real life dark secrets are confirmation that mystery thrillers don't always exaggerate and even my vivid imagination is sometimes surpassed by true stories. I think I better leave them untouched. At least for a long while.