If you were a 19th century archaeologist with an unholy Egyptian artifact in your possession, and you wanted to both keep it out of the hands of bad guys and protect your family, where would you put it? Why, a secret room in your mansion, of course.
At least, that was the solution of Ransford Monk, the adventuring great-grandfather of Standish Monk, a friend of my heroine’s late husband. Inside Reafen Hall, in West Sussex, England, there was a hidden room just large enough to house the acquisitions that Ransford didn’t want the public to know about, including a statuette of a black Jackal with rather unusual markings on it.
Despite the statuette’s confinement, the ghostly figure of a full-sized ancient Egyptian Jackal regularly haunted the mansion’s hallways over the ensuing decades. Ransford’s choice turned out not to have been the best idea, as Romy and the Monk family horrifyingly found out.
Houses with mysteries – concealed rooms or passageways, owners who don’t want to be seen, weird things in the attic, hauntings – make fertile settings for thriller or horror novels. All kinds of things can be hiding inside, waiting to be discovered at the worst possible moment.
Settings are the backbone of novels, whether a run-down tenement filled with poor people struggling to survive any way they can or an opulent villa where the residents all have their own skeletons in the closet. The settings become a character of their own, the stage for all the drama that’s going to unfold. Think of Psycho House in the famous Alfred Hitchcock film – so iconic that Universal Studios Hollywood featured it on their studio tour.
Numerous novelists have used them to their advantage, myself included. I was greatly entertained by an article I read in the Crime Reads newsletter I subscribe to, Architectural Misdirection: Seeking Out Secret Staircases and Hidden Rooms, by mystery novelist Gigi Pandian. Tonight, since I’m feeling a little under-the-weather, I’m going to share her insights with you and give you some ideas for books for your reading list.
Hope you enjoy, and if you want to find out what happened with the damned (literally) jackal statuette that Ransford Monk brought home from his forays into Egypt, read the first novel of my trilogy, Through the Monster-glass. If you start now, you can get caught up on the first two novels just in time to read the thrilling finale coming out this June!
