They say truth is stranger than fiction.
Which is both annoying and wonderful when your job is to
come up with fake crimes.
Writing mysteries is pretty much like hoping to show up to
the world’s largest prom without the same dress/hair/shoes/makeup as any other
girl there. There’s plenty of personalization involved, but even if you create
everything from scratch, chances are that someone next door or three states
over has come up with some aspect, large or small, that’s similar if not
totally the same to your brilliant idea.
So, even though you’ve got all sorts of moving parts:
murder, motivation, victim, criminal, setting, plot, secondary plot and
characters, etc., it’s still hard to do something that’s totally not been done
before.
Which is why I’m going to tell you to find inspiration in
something that has been done before.
Something in real life.
For a long time, I’ve kept a file of true-life horrible
things that happen. And bits and pieces of those crimes might show up in my
stories someday, whether I plan for them to be there or not. I figure, even if
these ideas just stay in my file for years, at least reading about those crimes
has taught me something about how murders are committed or investigated or both.
And those are two things that we all need to not only get our fictional murders correct,
but also understand how to create a satisfying conclusion to them.
This week, I added the following story to my file. It’s the tale of a husband and wife, each of
whom shot and killed their families out west before marrying and moving to the
Missouri Ozarks. For more than 30 years, both got away with the crimes. Until
the present day, when their murderous pasts finally caught up with them — shocking
family, friends, and neighbors. (It also shocked fellow blogger Warren Bull, who also mentioned this same story this week.)
It’s real life, but can’t you just see the whole thing
unfolding beautifully in a mystery or thriller? The
Horrible Secrets of Alice and Gerald: Book 1.
So, though you can think of something totally fresh and new,
it doesn’t hurt to keep tabs on those real-life stories that are just so
strange they might make for great fiction. And hey, shows like Law & Order use real-life crimes as
the basis for their episodes all the time, so why can’t you?
What’s the best true-life story you’ve heard that might make
a great mystery?
One year, I read a Darwin Award. The event happened where I based my WIP. Newly weds were honeymooning in Buxton, NC, on Hatteras Island. As usual, it was windy. The man decided to dig a hole to sit in so as to be out of the wind. The sand collapsed around him. No one could dig him out. They called in a backhoe, but of course by that time, the man had died. It set up a premise for me, upon which I based a short, and then a novel.
ReplyDeleteAs you mentioned, in my blog on Friday I talked about several real events that became the basis for my writing.
ReplyDeleteI generally write about financial crimes. I have a Google alert on “financial crimes,” which has provided interesting background reading. So far, the unusual crimes I have invented haven’t appeared in the papers; shooting someone because you hate them or because there is a drug war don’t count. Probably I’m safe because my crimes often involve the murder of large groups of people – and other than the all-too-often-story of shooters killing many people at a school or work place, which happens way too often, other kinds of mass killings do not occur as often.
ReplyDeleteI hope reality doesn't catch up to my fiction.
~ Jim
EB - I remember your story. Delightful that your inspiration came about from a Darwin award. Very clever!
ReplyDelete~ Jim
My guess is that the story of Alice and Gerald will become a movie or at least the inspiration for several TV crime/drama episodes.
ReplyDeleteWhen I read about unusual real-life murders that happened in the past, like the murders during the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, I try to imagine them set in the present. Or, I might use a current murder and set it in the past.
I like Kara's idea of setting a current crime in the past or a historical crime in the present. I have been inspired for many crimes in my books by events that happened in real life at universities in the Midwest in the past fifty years, but I change them to be unrecognizable.
ReplyDeleteWow. I guess fences don't make good neighbors.
ReplyDeleteOoh, all of these examples are so good! Side note: Kara, have you read "Devil in the White City"??? It's all about those murders and it's fantastic.
ReplyDeleteI love your definition of mystery writing - your job is to come up with fake crimes!
ReplyDeleteI have to admit I've been thinking about a man in Virginia who has robbed the same bank branch SIX times. And he doesn't wear a disguise! How on earth does he do it? I am hoping he is captured so we can learn his secret....
Shari, I think I read about that bank robber, or another like him once upon a time. I think he was rather nondescript with nothing that made him stand out.
ReplyDeleteI get a lot of my ideas just from reading the newspaper. If I think it's a crime I can use, I clip it out and save it. Anything that involves mass murders or a serial murderer, I won't use.
Sarah, I did read Devil in the White City. I thought it was scary, creepy, and fascinating. I heard a theory that the murderer, H.H. Holmes, was also Jack the Ripper because he was traveling outside of the U.S. at the time of those murders. Who knows?
ReplyDelete