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setting except insofar as it furthered the puzzle itself. The grand country house could be in any part of England, the sinister university or the bedeviled
    theater could be anywhere in Britain, the U.S., or New Zealand—we weren't reading for a travelogue or for insight into local culture.
    Tony Hillerman helped to change all that. His mysteries took place on Navajo lands, and the land itself was a major factor in creating the circumstances and the means for murder. The people and their culture were important to the solution of the mystery, which could not have been solved by an outsider without knowledge of Navajo myth and mindset. Even though Hillerman's detectives were police officers, the experience of reading about an exotic place and seeing it through the eyes of someone with deep understanding of the place and its people whetted mystery readers' appetites for more of the same, only different.
    When Margaret Maron wrote The Bootlegger's Daughter , her first Deborah Knott mystery, she changed her setting from the New York City of her Sigrid Harald police procedurals to the rich soil of North Carolina, sweeping that year's awards in the process. Soon mysteries were set in Alaska (Dana Stabenow, Sue Henry, John Straley), in national parks (Nevada Barr), and in the formerly hidden world of Orthodox Jewry in New York and Los Angeles (Faye Kellerman, Rochelle Krich). More and more writers found Native American connections and set their books among the Cherokee (Jean Hager), the Arapaho (Margaret Coel), the Ute (James Doss), and the Pima (J.A. Jance).
    The keys to writing a successful regional mystery are choosing a region interesting enough to engage the reader and making sure the mystery itself isn't swamped by description and portraits of local eccentrics. Those of us unlucky enough not to have grown up in the Alaska bush or the Louisiana bayou have another option: turn back the clock.
    The Historical Mystery "The past is a foreign country," L.P. Hartley wrote in The Go-Between. "They do things differently there." Using an exotic setting for your traditional mystery may involve choosing a location you can't get to by train or plane. Through mysteries, you can visit ancient Egypt (Lynda Robinson), ancient Rome (Steven Saylor, Lindsey Davis), Victorian England (Anne Perry), the 1920s (Annette Meyers, Carola Dunn), medieval Europe (Sharan Newman, Ellis Peters). You can meet historic figures such as Houdini (Barbara Michaels, Daniel Stashower, Walter Satterthwaite), the Prince of Wales (not the current one; Queen Victoria's oldest son) (Peter Lovescy), or Jane Austen (Stephanie Barron).
    Some authors choose history because they love a certain period and want to share their deep understanding of it with readers. Others frankly admit that one of the charms of history is that it lacks DNA testing. In a world without modern forensics, the amateur, be he monk or prince, has as good a chance of success as the official investigating body. By removing today's scientifically inclined police from the scene, they essentially recreate the conditions under which Dupin and Holmes first flourished.
    Comic Relief
    Playing it for laughs has been part of the mystery tradition even before Craig Rice, the screwball comedy queen of the forties, and humor spans all three of the major subgenres. Joan Hess combines humor and regionalism in her Maggody series, while Parnell Hall injects hearty doses of laughter into his Stanley Hastings P.I. series. For a wonderful sendup of the old country house mystery, James Anderson's Affair of the Bloodstained Egg Cosy is a must, while Lawrence Blocks more recent Bernie Rhodenbarr books give us sly variations on some of the oldest tricks in the traditional mystery book.
    The only caveat about using humor: to paraphrase the old actor's saying, "Killing people is easy; comedy is hard."
    You Gotta Have a Gimmick Take a stroll through your local bookstore to check out the mystery shelves and you'll see what I mean by