The Thursday Murder Club and Deus Ex Machina

Update 08Oct2025 While reading chapters 5-7 in Natasha C Sass's How to Write A Cozy Mystery, she confirms: don't introduce new characters or places in what she call Acts 3 and 4 of a cozy, making my point.  

Although deus ex machina didn't show up in Elliott Ackerman's novel, it probably does show up in the next mystery, recommended by a friend, that I read: The NYT best seller The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman. 

In the last 75 pages, the protagonists travel outside of England to Nicosia to meet with a patriarch Demir Gundoz (interesting last name). His son Johnny is introduced late in the mystery, a form of deus ex machina. Most cozy mysteries have characters travel from the British countryside to London, in comparison. Break the rules! seems to reign supreme in mysteries. 

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Osman ends the mystery with more than one demise.  

Poetry and Language Exercise Based on Mary Oliver's A Poetry Handbook

 Sound and silence are important. On page 24, Mary Oliver makes a great comparison of 2 nouns, synonyms, with different sounds: stone and rock. She can see the smooth roundness of "stone." She can see the jagged edges of "rock." 

Poets of every level: Can you think of other examples of nouns that have similar meaning but contain different sounds?  

2054: a Novel. By Elliott Ackerman and Adm James Stavridis

 During a Triangle Sisters in Crime Zoom call, I asked a question about Thriller/Mystery/Horror novels using deus ex machina, god out of the machine: an ending that isn't prepared for by the author(s). 

2054, a thriller I read over the past few days, seems to demonstrate my point. The novel begins with the President of the United States dying from remote manipulation of his DNA. During the autopsy, the surgeon finds the President's heart has been altered remotely. 

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Raymond Kurzweil and his Singularity, the combination of biology and technology are referenced. 

Update: p 253 Sarah Hunt achieved Kurzweil's Singularity. She put obstacles in the way to prevent any scientist achieving a second advent of the Singularity. Explains the alteration of the previous president's heart. [However, at the end of the novel, it seems that . . . well, the Kurzweil premise doesn't exist! Seems like deus ex machina!. I looked at the Amazon reviews: no reader seemed to pick up on it. I need to look at Goodreads reviews next.]

Ghosts by Mary Oliver

 Stanza 2 

The golden eagle, for instance,

has a heaviness in him 

moreover the huge barns

seem ready, sometimes, to ramble off

toward the deeper grass. 

 

What does the poet gain from using "for instance" and "moreover?"

 1. the 2 are more appropriate in prose. In many ways, Ghosts is a prose poem. In addition, the 2 are denotative language, which ground the reader in prose. The 2 prepare the reader for the later beautiful metaphors.

2. the two set off the assonance of the "seem ready, sometimes, to ramble off." 

 

Stanza 4

What does the pronoun "they" refer to? How do you know? 

"In the book of the Sioux it is written

they have gone into the earth to hide" 

 

Stanza 7

What does the poet achieve by using "of, in, to"? 

Throughout the poem the poet's achievement is settled in the brilliant use of language and image. She writes of the extinction of buffalo, bawling beasts, yellow-eyed wolves. A lesser poet would have started by naming the animals. Oliver refrains, in several sense of the word. The front rhyme of "of, in, to," is abc, bbc, ba.