Truly Devious By Maureen Johnson Analysis

Literary Analysis Essay: External Reading

Truly Devious The music bursting through Stevie’s glowing headphones is suddenly fully flushed out by her thoughts, as she quickly realizes that Ellie had possibly murdered the internet-star heart-throb, otherwise known as Hayes. Ellie,who loved art and went to Paris and got tattoos, who was funny and careless and drank wine as a hobby, who dyed herself pink for fun, could have cold heartedly carried out a murder through carbon dioxide poisoning. Such an odd pattern of mysterious killings can be investigated in New York Times best-selling author Maureen Johnson’s 2018 mystery novel “Truly Devious”. Set in the present day at a prestigious private school in Vermont, the story follows Stevie Bell,

Johnson throughout her novel uses flashbacks to bring past crimes to life and allow the reader to truly understand what goes on behind the glorified history of it. “When the visitor looked away and out the glass, she pushed the pencil down and into her palm, and roughly drew a line under a sentence on the page. It wasn’t much, but it was a way of making a note maybe someone would understand if… No one would understand, and if was too terrifying to think of.” (johnson, 10). In this quote, Dottie, a promising student who attended Ellingham in 1936, encounters a stranger carrying strange items such as rope and handcuffs at a secret part of the school where she likes to read. We follow her point of view of the events happening, and what her thought process was like minutes before her murder. By writing a flashback from the perspective of the victim, and later on in the book referencing the accounts of the murder, Johnson allows the reader to see the crime beyond its ‘statistical’ and accounting perspective like an outsider does, but to see it in a more intimate and human perspective of the events. Through this use of flashback, Johnson is able to give a nearly 100 year old crime a more sentimental value, and allows the reader to feel for the victim and experience the sense of shock a new murder is able to give, despite it being a decades old one. Further, she is able to use the same literary device to give characters, who are perceived as high and mighty, a more humane and relatable face, even if the characters are long dead. “‘You're a good man, Robert,’ Ellingham said. ‘I wish you had the happiness in your life that I’ve had in mine. Remember to play. Remember the game. Always remember the game.’”. In this passage, Ellingham is conversing with his financial adviser and close friend Robert, a day before the accident which caused his death. At this point, it had been a year since his wife’s death and