Murder Methods, Revisited by Edith Maxwell

I'm pleased to welcome Edith Maxwell as today's guest blogger! 

Thanks for inviting me back to Writers Who Kill, Annette! I’m delighted to hang out here for a pre-celebration of A Poisonous Pour, the third Cece Barton mystery, which releases on Tuesday.

Seven years ago, when I was a guest here, I took close notice of the name of the blog and wrote about all the ways I had fictionally killed people in my books. Since it’s been a minute, and I’ve had about two dozen more books published in those seven years, I hope you’ll forgive me for revisiting the topic.

In the 2019 post, I offered the following list: 

·         Gun – 3

·         Some form of poison – 7

·         Knife or very sharp object – 7

·         Garrote – 2

·         Strangle – 2

·         Pitchfork – 1

·         Push resulting in fatal injury – 3

Those didn’t include the murder methods in my more than a dozen published short stories at the time (I now have three dozen short crime stories in print, with one that might or might not have won an Agatha Award last night!). 

So how’s my list looking today, with my 38^th book about to release?

·              Gun – 4

·              Some form of poison – 10

·              Biological toxin - 4

·              Knife or very sharp object – 9

·              Garrote – 2

·              Strangle – 3

·              Pitchfork – 1

·              Push resulting in fatal injury – 3

·              Heavy object – 6

·              Allergen – 2

·              Starvation – 1

·              Botched surgery – 1

·              Smothering - 1

Note: Some of my books include more than one murder, and the list includes two written but not yet published Cozy Capers Book Group Mysteries, thus the numbers in the list add up to more than 38. 

I’m clearly fond of killing people with poisons and biological toxins. I closely follow any workshop or conference session presented by Luci Zahray, the pharmacologist who goes by The Poison Lady. She’s great at suggesting commonly available drugs and plants that are lethal.

I also like to use heavy objects (including bocce balls), but I was surprised, when I tracked down all the murder weapons in my books, that I used guns four times. One of those was in my first mystery, Speaking of Murder. Another time was in the first Country Store mystery, and two were in my historical Quaker Midwife Mysteries. I don’t know anything about guns – neither do my protagonists – and I’m not really interested in learning. It’s no surprise that having a gun as the murder weapon came early in my career as an author. Now it just seems too easy.

Sometimes the title gives away the murder weapon. In Strangled Eggs and Ham, I kind of had to use strangulation to kill the victim. Four Leaf Cleaver? You got it. Also for Deadly Crush, Cece Barton #2, where the victim is found crushed under an auto shop lift. These books are centered in the wine industry in northern California, and the crush is also when they extract the juice from the grapes. Double meanings are always good in a title. 

That brings us to A Poisonous Pour, the new book. Want to guess the murder weapon? You’ll have to read the book to learn which poison. 

Readers: What’s your favorite fictional way to knock someone off? I’ll send one commenter a copy of the new book. 

At the Memorial Day weekend classic car show and wine tasting, northern California wine bar owner Cece Barton witnesses heated discussions with local vintage car owners and overbearing association director Regan Greene. After Regan is later murdered, Cece once again enlists her twin, Allie, as her partner-in-sleuthing to clear the name of Cece’s elderly but muckraking neighbor. But they’ll have to act quickly to investigate various suspects in the case before the trail goes sour. 

Maddie Day writes the Cece Barton Mysteries and other gentle and historical mysteries; as Edith Maxwell, she writes Agatha-Award nominated short crime fiction. She’s a member of Mystery Writers of America and a proud lifetime member of Sisters in Crime. Maxwell/Day lives north of Boston with her beau and their cat Martin, where she writes, cooks, gardens, and wastes time on Facebook. Find her at edithmaxwell.com and at Mystery Lovers’ Kitchen.