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A blog for readers and writers of crime fiction
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We're so proud of Ann Parker and her fabulous Inez--they've won the 2012 Bruce Alexander Memorial Historical Mystery award at Left Coast Crime.
Well deserved, Ann!
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...
I had planned to write something richly detailed about guns, since I come from a long line of gun nuts, and my nephew is the world champion cowboy shooter in his class:
After the intro, you can skip to 1:15 and 4:44 for the shooting action.
I was going to wax eloquent about the flawless marriage of form and function--the beauty of a sight that's true, the perfect science in a controlled explosion that shoots the projectile out the front of the gun instead of blowing it up in your hand. Guns are machines that do one thing, and do it incredibly well. They seem perfect to me, like the magic of the internal combustion engine or a film projector's intermittent sprocket. I honestly feel that true joy is expressed in the complete marriage of form and function represented by a well-designed gun. I was going to tell you all about it.
But then I remebered burking.
ALERT: If you have a vivid imagination and a weak stomach, I'd stop reading right here.
There is nothing nice or beautiful about using your knees as a deadly weapon. Burking is named after Burke and Hare, two Irish canal workers who killed people in Edinburgh and sold the corpses to Dr. Knox for his use in a medical school. They killed more than a dozen people between 1827 and 1828.
With their knees. Mostly.
This was back in the age of debtor's prison and public executions/picnics, and at a time when it still was very hard to get cadavers to dissect. Ugh, I'm feeling ill...
Anyhoo, how it works:
1. Find someone drunk out of their minds, which I'm gathering from my reading about 19th century London wasn't hard to do. Burke and Hare also killed the old, mentally, ill, lame, blind, and very young. Double ugh.
2. Take them somewhere private, and give them more booze until they are passed out as needed.
3. Kneel on the victim's chest to provide compression, and clamp the mouth and nose shut. In 4-7 minutes you've turned a person with poor judgment, and preferably no family to miss them, into a corpse for sale. And there's no evidence of foul play, at least not at that time in the history of forensic science. If anyone knows if or when the relationship of suffocation and petechiae was discovered, please let me know.
Burke and Hare murdered people in their immediate neighborhood before getting caught with a corpse in the bed where they roomed. Not criminal geniuses. But fascinating as the barber of Fleet Street, apparently, as film and televsion and book projects continue to be produced about the pair--one movie as recently as last year.
Less than four years after the crimes were prosecuted, England passed the Anatomy Act, which made it easier for medical schools to obtain cadavers from sources other than murderers. Burking disappeared from the annals of murder history until Ted Binion's death in Las Vegas in 1999.
During the second trial for his murder, one forensic pathologist testified that Binion had been burked, but more than half a dozen other experts testified that he died due to overdose, which is a much smarter way to kill a drug addict like poor Mr. Binion. I prefer to think that burking never was revived, pardon the expression. It went the way of the asp.
They've made quite a few film, book, and television projects about poor old Ted as well. In his case, it was probably the millions of dollars of buried silver more than the burking that attracted peoples' attention. Yes, he buried a bunch of silver in a vault just before he died. Again, we are not talking about criminal geniuses here.
I thought about using burking in my current work-in-progress, which is set in Las Vegas and involves missing casino millions. But I really didn't want to remind anyone of this dreadful way of murder. Don't want to be responsible for reviving it, if you'll pardon the pun.
Is there any lesson to learn from this long rambling tale of deadly knees and murder? Only, perhaps, that everything is subject to the whims of fashion, even murder.
Hello again! I know I’ve been away a long time. I must first thank the other members of the Ladykillers for filling in for me in these past few months since me mother died. I won’t say I’m fine now, but I’m beginning to function again.
Now, I prefer to write historical mysteries because I don’t want to fuss with guns and high tech weapons. However, that leaves the problem of getting rid of people without always using the same thing. It may surprise some people but there were a lot of ways to commit murder in the Middle Ages. The most popular for those unconcerned with capture was the knife.
Everyone over the age of about eight had a knife. They also usually had a spoon, but you can’t do as much damage with that. Knives were useful for a multitude of things, including cutting bread, skinning small animals and stirring soup. So, if someone was killed by a knife, the field was wide open for suspects.
The good old blunt instrument was also ready to hand; pushing people off ramparts worked well if they could be lured up. Slings and arrows were used but they weren’t always accurate. Poison was extremely popular, especially because, without forensics, it was hard to tell if the death was murder or just rotten meat. Of course, a problem with poison was that one could be accused of murder when the death was from natural causes. The problem isn’t finding a way to kill some one; it’s finding a way for the detective to prove who did it.
One last note: believe it or not, I haven’t found any cases of someone accused of killing a person through witchcraft from the end of the Roman Empire until the Renaissance and Reformation. There may have been some, but it wasn’t common until the sixteenth century. So, if you want to write a medieval mystery, you’ll have to stick to the tried and true methods for doing away with the victim.
What a fantastic list of deadly weapons Penny put out yesterday: corkscrew, nail gun, pickle jar, bowling ball! As I read through it, though, one weapon that wasn’t on the list came to mind (so to speak)…
My seven year old daughter recently asked me what was stronger - a person or a sword. The answer, of course, is a person – because obviously a sword doesn’t function on its own.
So, what I consider the most deadly weapon is the human mind. The twist and turns of the mind are fascinating to me. How one idea can turn into the next and then suddenly cause destruction. That’s probably why I enjoying reading psychological thrillers (some all time favorite authors – Patricia Highsmith and Sophie Hannah).
A seemingly innocent comment or event can send the human mind on a tailspin.
No one is immune – one neural net sets off another one and suddenly you catch yourself thinking, why am I thinking about that? For example - one look at the pile of laundry causes you to think of the blouse that got splattered with red sauce, which makes you think of the disastrous date you were on, which makes you think of your dating life in general, which causes you to think…(and so on – all that just from laundry?).
Hopefully the thoughts in our real life don’t turn into murderous fantasies, but in fiction – especially crime fiction, they usually do.
Ever been attacked by a katana? Frankly, I didn’t even know what a katana was until I stumbled on a website that listed the top most unusual weapons. Since I’m always searching for a creative way to kill my victims, I found the perfect weapon for the book I’m currently writing, HOW TO DINE WITH KILLER WINE—a corkscrew! Below you’ll find a brief list of the nine weapons, with a link to the website at the bottom. Keep in mind that a corkscrew has now been taken, but there are plenty of weapons left for you to use…
1. Katana – In 2004, a guy hacked up his buddy in Queens with a katana, a Japanese backsword after a cocaine-induced argument over a pillow. Talk about a pillow fight.
2. Chainsaw – A disgruntled husband in Texas used two chainsaws to dismember his wife and left her pieces in on the front lawn. Seriously. Why not the backyard?
3. Crossbow – A serial killer working on a degree in criminology murdered prostitutes in England with a crossbow. For research?
4. Corkscrew – It only took a blow to the side of his head with a corkscrew to kill a man in his apartment. An unknown assailant had jabbed the corkscrew into the man's temple and vanished. It apparently wasn’t a good year for the victim.
5. Toilet tank lid – A man who was trying to fix a toilet became enraged at his girlfriend and killed her with a toilet tank lid. Whatever you have handy…
6. Nail gun – It was used in "Lethal Weapon 2"—and in real life—when a man in Australia died as a result of 35 nails in the head. Hate to say it, but it nailed him.
7. Pickle jar – A young man used a ten pound jar of pickles to bash in the skull of another man who’d been molesting him for years. He also stabbed him to make sure he was dead. You can never be absolutely sure about a pickle jar.
8. Chess board – Back in the day, say around the 14th century, a couple of knights were playing chess, when one knight dissed the other's mother, so he cracked the rude guy across the head with a stone chessboard. No one calls his mother a whore.
9. Bowling Ball – While a Japanese man slept, his wife hit in him the head with a 15-pound bowling ball because they were deep in dept. The man lived to tell the story. Maybe the wife should have used a pickle jar.
What is it about men and guns? Or should I say “deadly weapons?”
I’ve spent quite a bit of my life around all sorts of things that could be considered deadly weapons. One thing I’ve learned it you have to show them the proper respect. When my father came back from World War II he brought some war souvenirs, one of which was a Japanese rifle. It was a bolt-action gun and my dad wisely did not keep any ammunition with it. As a small child I was fascinated by it. When I got strong enough to lift it, I used to scale his basement work desk and remove the rifle from its rack. My friends were complicit in this activity, standing below to receive the weapon as I lowered it to them. Then we’d play soldier. My dad put an immediate stop to this once he found out and told us the rifle was not a toy. “It’s a deadly weapon,” he told us.
Properly admonished, we switched to our plastic play guns, but my fascination with the Japanese rifle continued. When I grew older I asked my father about it. He didn’t talk much about his war experiences, but did tell me that he’d recovered the rifle from a remote island in the Pacific. It was during the aftermath of the Battle of Guadalcanal. After taking supplies ashore some marines told him about an enemy position that had been hit by the navy’s big guns. My dad and a couple of his friends went into the jungle to inspect the site and found the rifle. They also recovered a bugle, helmet, and gas mask, all of which sat next to the rifle on the rack.
I pressed my father about the Guadalcanal, and he reluctantly told to me that he’d shot down some enemy planes during the battle, but downplayed any heroics. “The real heroes were the guys that didn’t come back,” he said. The savagery of the campaign was lost on my still innocent youth, relegating it to the realm of old John Wayne war movies that routinely played on TV. I found out many years later that one of the ships right next to my dad’s was hit by a Japanese Zero and sunk, causing a great loss of American lives.
A few years after that I asked my dad to teach me how to shoot. He remained an excellent shot for many years after his discharge. He was never a hunter, but did enjoy target shooting. He taught me how to line up the sights, with the top of the front sight just touching the bottom of the bull’s eye. Thus I became familiar with guns and this served me well upon my own experience in the military and my police career that followed.
I’m looking back now on those early days and thinking of my father. As I write this, it’s almost a year to the day that he passed away. I was reminded by Ann when given the topic of this week’s blog that one of the deadliest of weapons can be love. Certainly sorrow and regret can be included on that list. But time moves on . . .
I’m also just back from the Love is Murder conference here in Chicago last weekend. I’m very proud to say that my novel, Hostile Takeovers, won the Lovie award for Best Police Procedural. I was up against some pretty stiff competition, so this win is especially sweet and humbling as well. It’s the best type of award, in my opinion. One voted on by the fans as a readers’ choice award. Some would say it’s a popularity contest, but I take the opposite view. It’s a vindication of your work by those who have read and liked it.
When I was presented the award, which is pictured here with my novel, I was surprised at its heft. It’s solid marble. “Don’t use it as a deadly weapon,” the presenter whispered to me on the stage.
Before illness overtook him, my dad donated the rifle and other war souvenirs to a World War II museum up in Kalamazoo, Michigan. I felt bad when he told me this after he’d done it, but they were his to do with what he felt best. I would have liked to have kept the rifle, since it had so many fond memories associated with it, but perhaps that’s why my father wanted to see it placed in the museum.
Michael A. Black's Hostile Takeover won the Lovie Award for Best Police Procedural at the recent Love is Murder conference in Chicago.
Camille Minichino will be teaching a Writing Workshop for the Sacramento Chapter of Sisters in Crime on Saturday, February 19, 9-12, Rancho Cordova City Hall, Rancho Cordova, California. Details at www.capitolcrimes.org.
Penny Warner, Susan Shea, Priscilla Royal, and Cindy Sample will be speaking at Benicia Public Library, Benecia, California, for an AAUW event on Thursday, February 17, at 7:00 pm.
Priscilla Royal will be speaking at an AAUW event at Christ Lutheran Church in El Cerrito (780 Ashbury), California, on Saturday, Feb. 19, at 10 a.m., with authors Pat Morin and Simon Wood.
Penny Warner will be leading a workshop on character development at the San Francisco Writers Conference in San Francisco, California, February 19-20.
The Deadliest Weapon of them all...
Deadly weapons are the next topic up for The LadyKillers. So, what is the deadliest weapon of them all? Gun? Butcher knife? Poison? Or maybe, it's...
...love??
Happy Valentine's Day to all our lovely readers! Wishing you much happiness and chocolate, and no broken hearts.
Mercury's Rise Wins Prize
We're so proud of Ann Parker and her fabulous Inez--they've won the 2012 Bruce Alexander Memorial Historical Mystery award at Left Coast Crime.
Well deserved, Ann!
