Crafting a compelling mystery is at the core of any good suspense story. It’s the ability to keep readers engaged from the moment the first clue drops in chapter one, through the twists and turns as suspects are introduced and friends become foes, and all the way to the heart-stopping reveal. It’s something that crime, mystery, and thriller authors have been mastering for hundreds of years, using all the classic tropes that crime readers know and love – red herrings, coded messages, smiling assassins, and protagonists who suddenly find themselves cut off from help.
It’s this final point that has perhaps evolved the most throughout the history of these genres, due in large part to the invention of cell phones, radio, and wi-fi. Once upon a time, you could isolate characters by virtue of them not being able to communicate easily and instantly; think Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, published in 1939, where eight strangers receive an invitation to an isolated English island. That story might have ended very differently had Vera Claythorne been able to call the mainland police, look up ‘Una Nancy Owen’ on Facebook, or Google “Penguin+Island+owner”).
Thus, a problem is presented for modern writers – how can we achieve the same results (characters unable to call for help, no fact finding via Google or social media) when technology is almost constantly at our fingertips? This was a challenge I faced when writing my debut crime novel, The Wolf Tree; like And Then There Were None, my book is set on a remote island (Scottish, rather than English). However, it’s set in the present day, and even remote islands have modern methods of communication – so how could I create an environment where my protagonist, Detective Inspector Georgina Lennox, felt terrifyingly alone?
Luckily, writers have figured out some handy ways to circumvent these issues. Using creative techniques, justifiable complications, and by reimagining the meaning of ‘isolation’, writers can still place their characters in scenarios where they’re forced to survive without a technological safety net.
Cutting Off Access to Technology
The most straightforward answer is, of course, removing your character’s access to technology. It’s also, in my opinion, the most difficult to execute. If we can have Zoom calls with astronauts orbiting Earth aboard the ISS, how are we supposed to convince readers that there’s a place on Earth where someone can’t use their phone?
It helps that modern-day writers are writing for modern-day readers – and we’ve all experienced the baffling scenario of walking down a busy city street and somehow hitting a cell tower blind spot. So it really isn’t that hard to believe that characters can arrive in a place where connection to the mainland is minimal, reception is sketchy at best, and wi-fi is a foreign concept.
However, it would still be hard to swallow the idea that any location set in the present say wouldn’t have some way of contacting the outside world – so to get around this, perhaps you could have the communication device be closely guarded, kept under lock and key, or have all conversations monitored. Or perhaps a vis major occurs by way of a storm taking out cell towers – as in No Exit by Taylor Adams – phone or computer batteries dying, or a pesky family of rats takes a bite out of the wi-fi cables.
A fun way to tackle this challenge – and to punish your protagonist with the irony – is to make the tech-free reality their choice: a workaholic heads to a wellness retreat up in the mountains where laptops are forbidden; an influencer wants to reconnect with real life by taking a phoneless hiking trip. In Killing Floor by Lee Child, former military officer Jack Reacher makes a point of not carrying a phone as he prefers to remain off the grid. In short, making the character responsible for their own isolation is a particularly cruel (and delicious) way to make sure they can’t access help or information.
Consider Unique Isolating Settings
Another interesting way to isolate characters is to place them not in a location, but as they’re travelling between two places. They could be locked in a vehicle they can’t escape from, such as submarines, cruise ships, planes, spaceships. Sure, you may be able to call for help, but it’s not likely that help will arrive in time to make a difference to whatever predicament you’re in. Examples of this include Bullet Train by Kotaro Isaka, and The Woman in Cabin 10 by Ruth Ware.
The idea of being locked also applies small spaces. In Room by Emma Donoghue, Ma was kidnapped and locked in a room for seven years; her son Jack was born in captivity and remained there until the age of five. Similarly, Paul in Stephen King’s Misery is ‘rescued’, then held against his will by the fanatical nurse Annie, unable to call for help due to his debilitating injuries keeping him bedridden, then confined to a wheelchair.
Psychological and Social Isolation
My favorite method of isolation is perhaps one of the hardest to justify, and it’s one I worked hard to achieve for my book, The Wolf Tree. My protagonist, George, has returned to work after a serious workplace incident benched her from active duty for months – and is now carrying a very heavy secret that she’s desperate to hide from her family and colleagues.
Psychological and social isolation can be just as effective as a locked door. Creating a scenario where your character is riddled with paranoia or trust issues – they’re afraid that speaking up will have dire consequences, believe that the people around them are double agents, or they’re convinced their phone or computer is bugged – is a clever way to justify why your characters don’t want to pick up a phone or send an email. The key is making your character believe that they don’t have anybody to call.
An example of this is in A.J. Finn’s The Woman in the Window, where the agoraphobic protagonist Anna believes she witnesses a murder while spying on her neighbors. She calls the police to make a report, but her condition makes her testimony highly doubtful – especially when it becomes known that her medication can cause hallucinations. Even when she does call for help, nobody takes her seriously.
In a slightly creepier example, the protagonist of Matt Dymerski’s short Psychosis opens the story by saying they’re writing on paper because they don’t trust their computer, believing that somehow someone could change or delete their words; they are also rattled early on in the piece by two strange phone calls. And things just get progressively weirder as time passes, until they end up locking themselves in their apartment and smashing all their electronics.
As you’ve probably noticed – and perhaps is a necessity for isolating characters in the 21st century – writers often layer up the methods mentioned above in order to justify the circumstances. A huge storm and a dead battery; a locked door and a heavy secret. Perhaps the biggest tip I have for writers is that, whatever reason you go with, just make it make sense. Readers will accept the isolating circumstances if you justify them, even if the explanation is as simple as ‘my character doesn’t like phones’ … though, come to think of it, since 21st century readers are pretty much born with a phone in their hands, this one might be the hardest one to accept.
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