QUICK TIPS FROM A COZY MYSTERY EDITOR: THE VICTIM

by Korina Moss

There are many early choices to make while plotting your cozy mystery. An important one is choosing the murder victim. The victim doesn’t spend too much time on the page. After all, you should have him killed off by chapter three (chapter five at the latest). So, he should be someone who can make a big impression in a short amount of time. If he has an interaction with several characters before he’s murdered, you’ll have the beginnings of your suspect list ready as soon as the body is discovered, keeping the pace brisk. If there’s some kind of relationship between the victim and your protagonist, even better—it may give your main character a reason to investigate or a reason to be suspected! 

However, you want to stay away from making the murder victim and your protagonist’s relationship too close. If the victim is a beloved family member or best friend, it will be difficult for the lighter tone of your cozy mystery to recover, as it needs to do fairly quickly after the murder. It’s good to include some humor to lift the darkness of what’s just been discovered, but it won’t land well if the victim is Uncle Dewey or your protagonist’s best friend. That’s not to say your protagonist shouldn’t be affected; they absolutely should. Write a scene where she’s shocked, upset, or reflective about the victim or death itself. Although cozies have a lighter tone, they still need to feel grounded and real. After that brief but somber time is taken, your protagonist goes into investigative mode as soon as the death has been identified as a murder (if it’s not obvious). The pacing of a cozy mystery should be quick and compact, so you don’t want to spend precious early pages grieving and not getting back to the fun part—trying to solve this mystery!  

Keep in mind that you’re likely going to be revealing a lot about the victim as your protagonist begins to piece together the murder. So, make sure the victim isn’t just a one-note bad guy. Think of a full backstory for him (for you, not necessarily for the page), so that he’ll come across as a fully formed three-dimensional character. If you think about it, the victim is kind of the star of the book. Make sure he deserves that title. 

When you’re deciding who should be your murder victim, consider the following: 

• How will your victim make the greatest impact in a short amount of time? 

• What is your victim’s relationship with your protagonist? 

• Will your protagonist be able to bounce back from their death to keep the tone cozy? 

• Will your victim be able to interact with some of the characters so those characters can become the initial suspects? 

• Is your victim a fully formed character? 

Readers: Do you have any tips or preferences for a cozy mystery author choosing a murder victim?

 

KORINA MOSS is the author of the Cheese Shop Mystery series set in the Sonoma Valley, which includes the winner of the Agatha Award for Best First Novel, Cheddar Off Dead, and two novels short-listed for Best Contemporary Novel. Listed as one of USA Today’s “Best Cozy Mystery Series,” her books have also been featured in PARADE Magazine, Woman’s World, and Writer’s Digest. 

Korina is also a freelance developmental editor specializing in cozy and traditional mysteries. To learn more or subscribe to her free monthly newsletter, visit her website korinamossauthor.com.

First Ask Who, Then Why

 

Immediately after the Boston Marathon bombing, a television reporter asked a detective, not associated with the case, why someone would commit such a terrible act. The detective replied that at this point “why” doesn’t matter because when they find out “who” then they will know why.

I recalled this advice during a recent murder trial in my area.

Last year I wrote a blog about a mysterious and unsolved death of a young woman:  http://writerswhokill.blogspot.com/2012/06/unsolved-murder-mystery.html

On the afternoon of June 27, 2010, nineteen year old Vanessa Pham was found dead behind the wheel of her crashed car just off a busy highway. She had been stabbed to death. Thirty minutes earlier she had stopped by a beauty salon at a shopping center and there was video tape of her driving away. Who did this and why?

The truth was more shocking than anything I could imagine.

About two and a half years after the murder, police arrested a suspect, Julio Miguel Blanco-Garcia, at his construction job not far from where the murder took place. He had a short history of misdemeanor offenses and had recently stolen bottles of Moet & Chandon from a grocery store. When police ran his fingerprints from this latest theft, they made a match to prints taken from Vanessa Pham’s car. 

After his arrest, Blanco-Garcia confessed and told his version of what happened. He had smoked PCP the morning of the murder and stopped Pham in the Fairfax Plaza shopping center. He was holding his infant daughter and said he wasn’t feeling well. He asked Pham to drive them to a nearby hospital. She agreed and they all got into her car. She began driving to the hospital, but made a wrong turn. Scared she would call the police or harm the baby, (I read two different accounts) he stabbed her repeatedly. Her car ran into a ditch and crashed. Garcia exited the car via the sunroof then reached down for his baby and ran off.

I never would have guessed correctly how or why this murder was committed or that a baby was at the scene. Outside experts who theorized she was killed by a female friend, were clearly wrong too.

On August 22, 2013 a jury found Julio Miguel Blanco-Garcia guilty of first degree murder and sentenced him to 30 years of jail time. They added 19 additional years—one year for each year of Vanessa Pham’s life.  In November, a judge will formally sentence him. The judge can’t reduce the sentence the jury recommended, but can add years to it.

What fictional or real crime has surprised you?

Unsolved Murder Mystery

Who killed Vanessa Pham? It’s been two years since her death. I still ask myself that question every time I drive by the shopping center where she was last seen alive and when I pass the area where she was found stabbed to death in her overturned car.

It was heartbreaking since this talented, beautiful nineteen year old girl had her whole life ahead of her. She was going to be a sophomore at Savannah College of Art & Design in Georgia, just hired as a nanny and staying with family at her home located in the Northern Virginia area. When I first heard about this tragic murder I was shocked not only because it was brutal but that it took place in the middle of the day in a busy area a few miles from my home. It’s a baffling mystery.

On Sunday, June 27, 2010 about 3:00 pm Vanessa drove her two–door Toyota to a shopping center and briefly stopped at a nail salon. Video surveillance shows her car leaving the parking lot about twenty five minutes after her salon visit. Ten minutes later and one half mile away, she is dead with multiple stab wounds to her chest.

What happened in the ten minutes leading to her death? Reports indicate that she was alone in the nail salon and didn’t seem in distress. Did she meet up with a friend outside? Or, did a stranger grab her and force her to get in the car with him? In the parking lot, near the stores, there are rows of 30 minute only parking spaces. That would be an opportune spot for an unknown person (car-jacker, mugger etc.) to wait for a victim. I don’t know if she parked in one of those spaces or not. People watching the surveillance video point out that it looks like she hesitates a few times before finally pulling out of the parking lot onto the street.

If she was alone in the car when exiting the parking lot did someone accost her while she was stopped at a traffic light? It’s not unheard of for a stranger to jump in a stopped car. Or, perhaps she was in a fender bender and became the victim of road rage? However, this is a busy area of strip malls, restaurants and a school. If someone did jump in her car or she rolled down the window to respond to someone and was stabbed, I have to believe that another motorist saw something.

As I drive down the same street where Vanessa drove I see two drive-through car washes and a gas station. Did she stop to get gas, a car wash or vacuum her car? If so, it’s possible that someone approached her there. Hopefully, police looked at surveillance video from the stores surrounding the route they believe she drove.

One motive that I considered but haven’t heard mentioned is gang initiation killing. When I lived in Los Angeles the initiation to become a member of a gang was to kill a woman. The young initiates dressed to blend in, hunted in twos and stalked victims in shopping area parking lots. This happened to one of my acquaintances. Two guys with knives approached her as she was getting into the driver’s side of her car in a mall lot. They told her to move to the passenger seat and she said she couldn’t because the stick shift was in the way so they let her out of the car to walk around to the other side. Thinking quickly, she threw her keys away, screamed and ran to safety. I’ve read there is a large gang presence in the D.C. metro area and there have been gang initiation killings of people unrelated to gangs. Perhaps police considered this possibility but discarded it.

After ruling out close friends and family, the Fairfax County police now believe it was a random act of an unknown killer. However, one outside retired police officer turned private detective has a feeling the killer was a woman and someone Vanessa knew. He believes that a man would be more apt to slit a victim’s throat or choke her rather than repeatedly stab. He also believes that the quick time frame suggests that someone was angry with her and hiding in her car.

There are many theories but still no answers. All we know for sure is that there is an unsolved murder, a killer on the loose and a grieving family. Although we often write about murders and include realistic details it’s important to remember it shatters lives and to treat the subject carefully and with compassion. I will continue to honor this young woman’s memory every time I drive in that area.

Has a real life murder touched you?

***

Link to surveillance video pieced together of her car entering and exiting the parking lot:: http://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/police/news-releases/2010/070710vanessaphamvideoreleased.htm

Article with timeline of murder and map:

http://www.fcnp.com/news/7007-police-vanessa-phams-unknown-killer-a-threat-to-public-safety.html

How Do You Decide Who To Kill?

In the middle of a crazy schedule where I’m still doing promotion for Every Last Secret, I’ve received edits and deadline for the sequel, Every Broken Trust, and I’m writing the first draft of a third novel, because that’s the way this writing-career thing works, it turns out. Right now, I’m working out who’s going to die and why in this new book. I’ve written enough to have several different options to choose from.

One of the questions I’ve encountered during events to promote Every Last Secret is, “How do you decide who to kill in your books?” I’m afraid I’ve been guilty of giving a less than serious answer to this one when it pops up.

This question is made for jokes and humor—“Whoever’s pissed me off lately” and “You know that guy who hops lanes without signaling and cuts you off in traffic?”—and I’ve too often settled for what will please the audience and make them laugh. But it’s a serious question and deserves better than that.

How do you decide who to kill off in your books? I would like to say I have a rule to live by in this circumstance, only pedophiles or crooked politicians, but I don’t. Some of the people who die in my books are perfectly nice, ordinary people, some are crooks, and some are truly evil (they usually only die at the very end while trying to kill my protagonist). Isn’t that the way it happens in real life?

We’d always like to think that a murder victim must have done something to bring it on himself or herself, and the media will dig to try to find connections or past bad behavior to explain it. This happens because none of us reading or hearing about a real murder wants to think that it happened to someone just like us. We want to think that, if we’re living a good, law-abiding life, nothing bad—certainly not as bad as murder!—will happen to us.

 

Of course, murder happens all the time to criminals and those who run around with criminals. We’d like to think it happens to the truly evil also. Though that’s something we’re less sure of. A lot of really evil people doing really evil deeds seem to continue and prosper for a long time. They usually get caught only by accident—which makes us wonder how many other truly evil people are out there getting away with their foul actions. That’s a little creepy, but we can live with that. It’s why we have mysteries and thrillers, so we can see the Big Bads getting caught and justice being done.

Murder of the ordinary, murder of the good, is something that shakes us up a bit more. When we read or hear of it in the news, we shudder a little inside. If such a terrible thing can happen to them, it could happen to us! Following the rules and laws, trying to be a good person won’t keep it at bay. We see bleakly that it’s purely the luck of the draw whether we stay safe or not.

I had this brought home to me when I was a very young mother with one baby and another on the way. Our little house was squashed in among old apartment houses in a not-great part of town where lots of young people lived because we couldn’t afford better. I’d sit out in my front yard with the baby in her playpen, so we could both bask in the sun and the fresh air (and I could read). In one of the apartments right behind my house lived a nice woman about my age. We’d met several times. Her boyfriend used to walk down from the bus stop and cut across my yard to get to her apartment. She had told me a week or so earlier that they’d broken up, but on this day, he crossed on his way to her, and I smiled and waved lazily, thinking they must have made up. About half an hour later, he came back through my yard as I was packing up the baby and her things to take back inside. I wouldn’t even have been aware of him behind me, except a stray dog that I’d been feeding for a couple of days started to growl from the sidewalk.

I turned to find this guy right behind me, looking wide-eyed and wild. By the time I really processed the fact that he didn’t seem to be his usual self, the dog had come into my yard, and the guy dashed off up toward the bus stop. I decided he was high—this was in the very early 70s—and thought no more about it.

That night on the TV news, we learned that he had raped and brutally beaten to death his former girlfriend. He was coming straight from the scene of that crime when he stopped in my yard and came up behind me. Possibly worried that I’d seen him go to her apartment. Maybe thinking this was one more detail to clean up. I don’t know to this day. But that dog had a home with me until he died of old age.

Sometimes even the good, or at least nice, get murdered, and I’m wondering right now if that should happen in this new book. If you write mysteries or thrillers, how do you decide who to kill? And if you read them, which victims make you the most interested in seeing their murderers brought to justice?