Jackie McMahon

speaker

185 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 9 Jul

Jackie McMahon’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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The Shit No One Tells You About Writing · The First Guest on Books With Hooks is Publishing! & The Protagonist as an Outsider · 9 Jul 2026 podcast

It does give some time to introduce the characters and their relationships and then have the murder occur.

Which also, I personally prefer that because for me, I like to know who the characters are before the crime occurs.

I remember when I was preparing to query, I saw a video from a literary agent where they said, hey, if you're querying me with a mystery or a thriller, somebody better be dead on page one.

which is that person's preference.

I personally need to know who I'm reading about first because I want to understand what is at stake here.

I want to know who that person was.

I want to know what are the ramifications of this person being killed for the other characters.

So I think, yeah, Agatha Christie, usually somewhere around 10 to 25%, though sometimes as late as 50%.

Yes.

So I very much intentionally thought about who were some of the popular authors of the 30s and 40s?

What did they write about?

What are some of the enduring mystery tropes that have lasted through the last 100 years that mystery readers know and love?

So very much intentionally so, when I was thinking about...

who are the kind of people that are going to populate this group?

I thought about the different types of mysteries.

So for example, one is a mystery that follows a professional detective or a police procedural.

That is a very enduring trope.

And so one of the characters is a former detective who now writes a police procedural that is somewhat based on his own experience as a former Scotland Yard detective.

There are also a lot of cozy mysteries.

You can think about the Miss Marple stories and her very quaint English village that has a disproportionately high number of murders.

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