The Secret Strand: Amateur sleuthing finds a home on the Grand Strand
Time ticks. I race to find keys and puzzle over mind games. It’s a race for my life. My family has one hour to figure out these clues, or the serial killer returns and cut us into pieces. Not really, but the stakes feel elevated when you enter one of the rooms at Breakout Myrtle Beach – an escape room game where you figure out mystery to get out of the room.
Breakout Myrtle Beach has three rooms to choose from. You can search for Blackbeard’s gold in the pirate room or solve the case of the Myrtle Murderer in the CSI room, or in my family’s case, you can try to save your skin before it becomes a killer’s lampshade in the serial killer’s room.
The ideas at Breakout Myrtle Beach aren’t a new trend. Escape rooms are the visceral versions of mystery phone apps and video games, but trace the evolution back further than digital technology, back to board games like Clue. Now, back further and you’ll eventually get to those old dusty things on the shelves known as books. Yeah, they’re not dead yet. They’re alive and full of mystery.
The Grand Strand brims with mystery writing as well. Murrells Inlet’s waterfront section of U.S. 17 Business is even dedicated to Mickey Spillane, a prolific writer of detective novels. And as William Faulkner once wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Mystery swirls around us.
Writers are writing mystery and thrillers up and down the Grand Strand. There are two separate locations operating Murder Mystery Theaters. There are two separate escape room games in the area. The Grand Strand is a mystery machine, churning out products and services for audiences who love to be mystified, but why?
Location, location, location
Any real estate agent will tell you location is everything, but for mystery writer Troy Nooe, he needs his locale peppered with history. Nooe’s “Frankie McKeller Mystery Series – Murder in Myrtle Beach” revolves around the Ocean Forest Hotel, a resort in Myrtle Beach in the 1940s.
The series is up to a trilogy – “The Ocean Forest,” “Damn Yankee” and “Long-Legged Rosie,” and “The Ocean Forest” was a top-five finalist for the Shamus Award, a national award for best detective fiction.
“Coming from Baltimore, I was always struck by the lack of history you see in Myrtle Beach,” Nooe says. “It got me interested in researching Myrtle Beach. That and my love for old time murder mysteries made me realize what a great setting Ocean Forest would be for the genre, as well as a good way to showcase the history of the area that you seldom hear about. Local lore and legend also finds a way to sneak into my stories from time to time.”
Dana Ridenour had vacationed in the Grand Strand area since she was a small child. She always wanted to make a home here, but she was too busy infiltrating criminal organizations as an FBI undercover operative. After a twenty-year career with the bureau, she retired to Murrells Inlet earlier this year.
The main character in her first novel, “Behind the Mask” is a female undercover FBI agent. “It’s fiction but some of the people and situations are based loosely on my personal experiences,” says Ridenour.
Ridenour is originally from Kentucky and lived all over the country and the Caribbean but agrees with Nooe about the richness of the strand’s mythos.
“You can’t live in the Grand Strand area and not be influenced by the folklore and legends. This area is rich in history, mystery and romance,” says Ridenour. “I love the people of the lowcountry. The novel that I’m currently writing is set entirely in South Carolina.”
Su Kopil is a freelance graphic designer who’s published 30 short stories in magazines, ezines and mystery anthologies both in America and overseas. Originally from New Jersey, she’s been living along the Grand Strand for about 20 years.
“I love gothic mysteries. Eccentric characters, creepy old plantations, live oaks, lonely swamps,” Kopil says. “You only have to drive a few miles in any direction to find a great setting, character or story idea. Then, there are the coffee shops and cafes where you can grab a corner chair and write it all down.”
Recently, Kopil attended a meeting for a new group in the area of writers and readers of mystery – The Sisters in Crime. The group meets at Socastee Library on the third Saturday of every month at 10:30 a.m.
The organization wants to advance women crime writers in both nonfiction and fiction, but “We do have misters who are members,” says Terry Friedman, the chapter president.
Friedman is new to the area, but already feels kindred to the coast.
“There’s mystery in the sea,” Friedman says. “Walking the beach is a great place to work out characters and plots, and I swear I’m closer to my muses here. I’ve always been more creative at the beach.”
“Building a Mystery” – What’s that mean?
Why has the mystery genre been so popular for so long?
Let’s go back to Ancient Greece for answers, back to a writer and orator named Cicero who argued two lawsuits in court that involved murder and theft and double crosses. People wrote about the cases, and audiences ate them up. Some also say there are elements of the mystery in the Old Testament.
The first clear example of a detective story is Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” in 1841. It’s a locked-room mystery where a murder victim is found in a closed in space and someone has to use clues to figure out the murderer’s motive. From there, the genre spilled out, from Sherlock Holmes to Scooby Doo to cell phone apps to anything goes.
Now, let’s come back to the serial killer’s room that I’m trying to escape from for a second.
There’s a fever about the problem solving, putting the answers together one step at a time. I look at my family. No one has phones in their hands and lost in the screen. We talk and work together to solve problems.
The same process happens on an individual level while reading a mystery book. One page, turns into another chapter as you work out the intricacies of the enigmatic story. Mysteries engage and connect the reader to the writer.
“Our rooms are like all mysteries, they’re interactive,” says Jen Whitehurst, operating manager of Breakout Myrtle Beach. “It’s the unknown that makes it so great.”
“People always want to be the detective, to just live inside the fantasy,” says Todd Laird, the other operating manager of Breakout Myrtle Beach. “People love to think in the end and get more out of something than just mindless entertainment.”
“Mysteries are an exploration of character. Why people do what they do? What makes them tick?” Kopil says. “In the right author’s hands, the most unassuming person can be a fascinating psychological study. Weave that together with a setting that breathes and an intricate puzzle and you’ve got an unstoppable story.”
But Friedman has a more pragmatic take on the genre of mystery. She believes this area has “an amazing number of retired crime experts.” This proximity of writers to sources can add clear advantages to their writing.
“You learn about history and how law enforcement and the courts work,” says Friedman. “You have access to lawyers and private investigators and all kinds of scary people. It’s also fun to see how TV and Hollywood and sometimes writers botch their research, like revolvers with safeties.
Ridenour combines crime expert with writer already.
“The FBI is hardly ever portrayed factually in novels, television, or movies. I wanted to write a realistic FBI undercover novel,” says Ridenour. “My firsthand knowledge of undercover work allowed me to write a novel that not only has a thriller element, but also delves into the psychological impact that undercover work has on the agent.”
When the magnifying glass meets the eye
In 2015, amateur sleuthing took a turn for the real when a missing Myrtle Beach man was identified after almost 20 years missing. At 18 years old, Jason Callahan left his mother, Margaretta Evans, to follow the Grateful Dead. He never returned.
Since June 1995, Evans searched for her son. Last year, she came across a Facebook page devoted to cold cases and saw a picture of him labeled as an unidentified victim of a car accident in Virginia from 20 years ago. The picture was tagged, “Grateful Doe.”
Two decades and mystery solved. Margaretta Evans has closure because of a group of ragtag web sleuths. This type of crowd-sourcing and sharing information online shows the next level of mystery solving right? It allows problem solvers and mystery tactician to get away from fantasies and do some real good.
Slow down, let’s take a closer look.
Web sleuthing has been around since the mid-nineties with mixed results. It went from mild meddling chat rooms to full-blown communities during the JonBenet Ramsey murder case in 1996. True-crime forums raised questions and conspiracies and piqued interests.
The real purposes of web sleuths are to seek out cases, both small and large, work through the details known to the public and come up with theories. Ultimately, they try to bring more attention or tips or new information to the case to share with the police. But like most activities related to the internet, it can be addictive.
“It can be dangerous,” says Friedman.
Yes, not all web sleuthing ends like the case of Grateful Doe.
In 2013, amateur sleuths studied video surveillance and photographs of the Boston Marathon bombings and identified dozens of men they thought looked suspicious at the finish line. The forums escalated. The suspects narrowed to men with dark skin. The threads spread to twitter.
The New York Post printed pictures of two of these suspects and a falsely claimed they were suspects. One of them was 16 years old.
This did no good. Some sleuthing should only be done by professionals.
No escaping the mystery
My family did escape, but not in time. We ran over by seven minutes. I guess that means some of us didn’t make it out, or maybe we’re just slow, but it was our first time and we didn’t really get cut into pieces and there are two more rooms to try.
Laird tells me he and his partner got the idea for Breakout Myrtle Beach and their sister store in Charleston from visiting escape rooms in Europe. “They have all sorts of rooms there,” he says.
“We went broke playing them.”
“They’re so advanced,” says Whitehurst.
Now, they work long hours, seven days a week, trying to bring a little of that magic to this coast, trying to provide a little mystery to the masses.
“We were the busiest escape room in the country last summer,” says Laird. “It’s crazy.”
A birthday party of teenage girls exits the CSI room, the mom points at the girls and says to Whitehurst, “Their brains hurt.”
I know how they feel, but it’s a good hurt.
This story was originally published June 11, 2016 at 5:00 AM with the headline "The Secret Strand: Amateur sleuthing finds a home on the Grand Strand."