Your Secret Library Magazine - Halloween edition!

I Ain’t Afraid of No Ghosts

by Mike Martin Well, that’s not really true. Some ghosts scare the dickens out of me. But in many mysteries, like my Sgt. Windflower Mystery series, ghosts and spirits pop up quite often, and always unexpectedly. They serve to help tell the story, particularly about the history of a place and even allow for a little light humour in sometimes dark places in the story line. Ghosts and mysteries have been called the perfect combination. Both ask the reader to delve a little bit into the unknown and then back again across the line into reality.

You have to pretend to accept a ghost as part of a story, even in mysteries.

But then, all fiction requires the reader to suspend belief in order to follow the story. You have to pretend that you are in a different location with people that you don’t know in order to experience the full effect. Those who can’t do that often claim that they don’t like fiction books or stories, but I think it may be that they just don’t know how to let themselves go and be captured by the story or the characters. I also think they are missing out on a great deal of fun!!

What most people don’t realize is that writers have to do the same thing. Suspend our belief in the ordinary and escape to another reality, 11