WRITING ABOUT DEATH

Recently I totaled up the many ways I’ve murdered victims in the three books and thirteen finished short stories I’ve written. Bashing on the head was the most common method with seven victims. Two of those were first bashed and then succumbed to eventual death through some other method like drowning or being run over by a sheepsfoot roller. Next was poisoning. I’ve poisoned five victims. Drowning was third.  Short stories for the Guppy anthologies needed something to do with water or fish nets. I wrote three for them, but one was too long so I couldn’t use it, but all three involved drowning. There were two involving strangulation. One murder happened with a garden fork and only one with a gun. Several more murders were caused deliberately, but the murderer couldn’t be prosecuted because one was a wife purposely feeding her obese diabetic husband a diet of rich and sweet fatty foods and another wife withheld important information from her husband.

So what kind of person plots and writes murder? Are we callous and unfeeling people for which death is no big deal? Or is writing about murders some subliminal wish to experience murdering someone through writing about it since we lack the courage to actually do such a deed? I don’t believe that’s true – at least not for me, and I doubt it is for other mystery writers either.

 

I for one have leaky tear ducts. I cry over sad movies or books. Except for slugs and Japanese beetles which I feed to my chickens, or mosquitoes and flies which I swat with no compunction, I can’t kill things. When Moggie, my cat, brings a mouse up from the basement, I leap from my chair to find a jar with a lid to rescue the mouse before she harms it and then I release it outside – where it most likely finds its way back in. I do the same if I see Barney, my barn cat with a chipmunk or a bird. I chase her around the yard until she drops her prey. The PBS News Hour used to show pictures and information of soldiers who had died in Iraq or Afghanistan several times a week at the end of their show. I sat there reading the information with eyes so wet I had a hard time reading. And so it was for me when my daughter called and told me what had happened at the Boston Marathon. She wanted to know if her Uncle Phillip – my youngest brother was there since he went every year. He wasn’t because he’d broken a bone in his foot the month before, but if not for the broken bone, he would have been running. I, who rarely watch TV, turned the set on and watched for over an hour. It wasn’t morbid interest, it was grief over what one or more bombers could callously do with no regard for innocent life.

Is it contradictory that I can write about death but am also saddened by it? Maybe, but I don’t write graphic death scenes and never kill off any characters that are fully developed and become real to me. It’s been said mystery writers want to make sense of a world in which much doesn’t make sense, exploring for example how there can be so much cruelty in the world. Also, I’m haunted by the face of the younger bomber. It’s a gentle face. Those who know him, family, teachers and friends, express shock and disbelief. They describe him as someone who was friendly, helpful, a good student, good at sports, and someone well-liked with many friends. How could he change so radically?  Did his older brother have some kind of control over him?

He certainly does not fit the same profile of other mass murderers we’ve read about.

Some would say would say there is more cruelty in the world today, but from reading about past eras, I don’t believe that. There’s much that has changed for the better. I couldn’t find the bombers and bring them to justice, and I can’t become a vigilante and bring about justice closer to home, either, but I can bring murderers on the page to justice; a microcosm of a real world, true, but at least in my written world justice rules in the end, and isn’t that what we all wish for?

Why do you write or read murder mysteries?