I am a gentle soul. Acting out in violence is foreign to me. My demeanor is such that in a store or park where someone is searching for directions, I am the person they ask. (Bad choice by the way; I am terrible at giving directions. I once sent an attorney trying to find our office thirty miles in the wrong direction by trying to “help” them with directions over the phone.) But I am also a mystery writer. An occupational hazard of which is the musing that leads to the question “Would this work as a murder?”
For example, the other day, I was alone in the house and taking a shower. That doesn’t happen often. Usually, either my husband or my daughter is within shouting distance. But since I was alone, I used more care than normal. I have reached the age where a broken hip from a fall is less than desirable. But it’s difficult to keep my mind in one place, so the next instant my mind flipped over to, “I wonder if you could commit murder by making a shower floor extra slippery and how you could get away with it.”
My law firm has two offices in two cities. Both offices have break rooms with refrigerators. The unwritten rule is that something in the refrigerator is off limits—inside the refrigerator is where people put their lunches for their exclusive use. However, food left out on the table is free to all comers. Treats like cookies, brownies, leftover birthday cake and cupcakes regularly find their way to the table anonymously. I have long thought that one way to commit murder in a law office would be to slip a few poisoned goodies among the tempting treats. No one would know how they got there or who put them there, and no one would think to question how they ended up on the table before eating them.
Another time, a case was being mediated. (A mediation is a formal, but non-binding settlement conference between two or more sides with a person trained to be a go-between.) The person mediating told me about the case, a terrible civil lawsuit involving the death of an infant. The mediator, who was borrowing our office, had put the two sides as far away from each other in our office as she could to minimize the chances of either side running into the other. My mind started spinning again—how could someone murder either the defendant or the plaintiff at the mediation, who would be the least obvious perpetrator out of all the people present in the office that day, and could you craft a believable story out of it.
What unusual murder methods have you contemplated while planning your mysteries?
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