From Mary Anna--But you seem so nice to be a professional murderer...

Any mystery author gets the occasional question from somebody who wants to know why we write about killing people.  A slightly more discerning question comes when someone wants to know if it's possible to write a mystery that doesn't involve murder.  The two questions are related, I think.

To me, murder works as a starting place for a story because it is inherently dramatic.  It demands that the reader care.  If I wrote a mystery about a jewel theft, I would need to presume that you cared whether the victim ever got her jewels back.  How can a human being not care when another human being is deprived of life?

This doesn't mean that there's only one story to be told about a murder.  The murder of a desperately evil person who has spent a lifetime torturing puppies and stealing from old ladies wouldn't be the same story as the murder of an old lady who has devoted the last fifteen years of her life to raising a child who isn't even related to her.  (This second scenario is the plot of my work-in-progress, Plunder, in fact.)  Still, though you may be glad that the evil person has died, you do care.

I think of crime fiction as the literature of justice.  A crime, usually murder, sets the world askew, and the writer has about 300 pages to examine what that means.  Sometimes, as a writer, I find that I'm far more interested in the repercussions for the people left behind than I am in the irredeemable piece of humanity who did the killing.  Then I ask myself if anyone is ever truly irredeemable, and that question drives another plot twist or three.  Sometimes being a mystery writer is philosophically interesting.

And it also gives me a chance to dream up interesting ways to kill people.  (Metaphorically.)   I have thrown them off cell towers, beaten them, shot them, knifed them, and I'm waiting for a chance to kill someone with candy, because I know how.

Now you're afraid to eat in my presence, aren't you?  And maybe you should be...

Mary Anna

Comments

[Camille Minichino]

I agree, Mary Anna, murder gives us the high stakes plot.

[I'll always take my chances with chocolate!]

[Mary Anna Evans]

Oh, I'd never kill anybody with chocolate. Some deeds are just too dastardly.

[Mysti Berry]

Hmm, does that make melodrama, or it's close cousin, film noir, the literature of injustice? I wonder...

Thanks Mary Anna, for getting my brain started on this holiday!

[Priscilla]

Threat of death provides the ultimate tension (think Day of the Jackel) and brings out our strongest desire for retribution so stories that don't include a murder may have a harder time gripping our interest? As for death by candy, dangle chocolate and I'll eat it, arsenic and all!