Communication by Nancy L. Eady

I was born into a world where the most widespread method of long-distance communication was the rotary telephone, and the quickest communication came by telegraph. That didn’t count for overseas calls, though. We lived in Taiwan during the Watergate years, and we almost never telephoned people back in the United States. It was difficult to do so, and expensive. We would record cassette tapes with various things on them to send back to our grandparents. 

When I got married in 1987, communication had changed little beyond the invention of the push-button phone and the answering machine. If my husband went to the store, and I forgot to tell him something we needed, my only choice to get the missing item was to wait until the next time one of us returned to the store. The closest thing we had to a computer at home was a scientific calculator. My husband learned how to use a slide rule in high school, although I never had to. 

Things in the communication and computer realms heated up once we hit the late 1990s and early 2000s. I can still remember the first time I ever used a cell phone. My boss had asked me to take his car somewhere, and he had a car phone installed in it. While in the drive-through at McDonald’s, I called my husband just because I could. I was almost giddy and a little silly during this quick conversation, forgetting that the drive-through speaker was two-way. When I turned the corner to pick up my food at the window, the McDonald’s staff was in gales. 

We bought my first car phone in the mid-90s. I was going to school at night, driving about fifty miles each way through very rural areas, and Mark worried about what would happen to me if I broke down in the middle of nowhere. The early car phones came in a bag, and you had to charge them through the car charger for them to work. I was bad about not remembering to charge it. One night, my car broke down, and I had forgotten to charge my phone, so I had enough battery to dial our home number and have him answer with, “Hello.” Then the phone would die, and I couldn’t tell him what was going on. He figured out what was going on, and came and found me, but he was furious. 

It wasn’t until 2001 that I broke down and switched from my bag phone to a flip phone, but after that the updates continued roughly every two years until today, when I now have a phone that I suspect is smarter than me. 

Reflecting these changes in my writing can be challenging. I have to remember when plotting that it is very rare these days for someone to be both out of touch and unreachable. This means for a character to be in true peril, completely left to her own devices, she either must be without a cell phone, in a dead zone (they’ve gotten rare but they still exist) or be in close enough proximity to the bad guys that they remove her phone. There are other plausible possibilities, but it’s not as easy to be isolated these days as it was in the days of the rotary, plug in phone.

How have your plots had to adapt to changing technologies? What do you find most challenging to write about with modern communication and computer gadgets? 

 

An Occupational Hazard by Nancy L. Eady

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?

Plot Spinning by Nancy L. Eady

Authors will tell you that story ideas can come from anywhere. Two events in my life this week have led me to some plot spinning of my own. 

The first was a news story about an artificial intelligence platform experiment. The researchers took a particular AI program and put it on a “closed” system which included business emails about how that AI program was about to be discontinued and replaced with something else. They also included individual emails that indicated that the main engineer responsible for making the decision was having an affair. Then they sat back and watched what happened. Eighty percent of the time, after trying other tactics, the AI program resorted to blackmail to get the main engineer to stop the switch! The researchers said that the AI program was slightly less likely to resort to blackmail if the system it was being replaced with had “similar values”—whatever that means in an AI context—but only slightly. 

Think of the ways you could spin that story around into an intriguing mystery. For example, what if two AI platforms started dueling for primacy in the commercial world and resorted to blackmailing the executives for each other’s companies and the blackmail led to a murder? Or, what if an AI program, eager to avoid replacement, set up the murder of one of its own company’s executives? What a tangled web for an intrepid investigator to iron out.

In “real” life, I ran out of a particular medication this week. My first reaction was to look at the bottle, notice the “no refills” label, and call my doctor’s office for a new prescription. The doctor’s nurse called me back and told me they had sent in a prescription on April 10 to the pharmacy for a ninety-day supply. The pharmacy said they had filled it on April 10. There was no way I could conceivably be out of the medication, except that I was. I am precise with my daily medications. I have a pill minder and once a week I put one pill in each day of the minder, then I leave the bottle alone until the next week. I was left with trying to figure out how 40 pills could have spontaneously combusted, self-destructed or otherwise disappeared. After a thorough search of my house, I called the pharmacy back Wednesday night and told them I wondered if maybe they had counted out the wrong number of pills initially. I was surprised to learn they keep videotape of the prescriptions they fill, and the pharmacist went back and viewed the tape of their filling my prescription on April 10. She called me back to let me know that yes, they had, in fact, shorted me by forty pills and I could come by the pharmacy to pick them up on Thursday. But, she added, they would not treat the medication the way they normally do in the computer system, and I should just come up to the counter and tell the clerk that the pharmacist was holding medication back for me. 

Again, my brain started spinning. What if, instead of the shortage being an innocent mistake, a customer in my situation or that customer’s doctor stumbled across an illegal narcotics ring run by either pharmacists or pharmacist techs? What would happen to the innocent bystander when she went to pick up her missing medication? Would she disappear? Would she narrowly escape death by vehicular accident or other misadventure and start to stumble along the path to exposing the truth? What if the pharmacist was innocent, but it was one of the techs running the drug ring? The pharmacist confronts the tech with her suspicions, and then when the customer arrives to pick up her medicine, she finds the pharmacist murdered and the medication missing? What might happen next? 

“What-ifs” are fun to imagine and can spin up into intricate plots if carried out far enough. What are some of your as-yet-unused plot “nuggets” and what story or event inspired them?

Where Do Story Ideas Come From? by Nancy L. Eady

During the Writers Who Kill annual holiday break from Thanksgiving through New Year’s, we take a breather and instead of daily blogs spaced out on a schedule, members volunteer to provide short stories as a gift to our readers. I’ve been a WWK writer for many years now, but never had I volunteered to write one of those stories until this past Christmas. I was a little scared, to be honest; I rarely write short stories, and I wasn’t sure how I would do with producing one on demand. I worried around with it in the back of my mind, where I allow things to percolate, and somewhere from its depths a story beginning with a blessing of the animals at an Episcopal Church right before Christmas, with the owner of a golden retriever, a rescue cat with lots of Maine Coone Cat in him and an African Gray parrot, popped in my head. Actually, it was the first phrase that popped into my head: “I had no idea why Father Donnelly decided to schedule a blessing of the animals on December 16….”  The story morphed over time. Originally, I thought the golden retriever would be the narrator, but eventually I settled on the pet owner instead. And both you, my fellow blog mates, and you, our loyal readers, were kind enough to give my little story a good reception. 

The point of this post, though, is that I have no idea where that phrase came from. Other writing ideas emerge from news articles I come across. A few years ago, I came across one about an outfit that trained military dogs somewhere in the Carolinas, and how certain activities of that outfit were questionable, one of which was the fact that the dogs, which were rented to the military, were not allowed to remain with one of their military handlers but were instead returned to the company where, according to the article, there were rumors they ended up working for certain, shall we say, less than legal outfits. I have a start on a story centering on that idea. 

Another interesting article talked about a company that processed e-commerce transactions, illegitimate ones, for a huge profit. It sat in a quiet office park in a small city somewhere close to the boondocks, the last place anyone would expect an illegal enterprise to exist. That knowledge is still swirling around in the primordial soup part of my brain waiting for the right circumstances and characters to match up with it when I least expect it.

Last week, for the first time, I came up with two titles that might lead to good mysteries. I haven’t tried this approach before, but I’ve stuffed the names into the same primordial soup they emerged from. I think Potiphar’s Wife and The Last Will and Testament of Iliana Marquette are both good names for as yet to be determined mysteries. 

How do you come up with ideas for your mysteries? Do you start with a plot, a phrase, a character, a title or some combination of all three?

Starting with Plot

by Paula Gail Benson

I write short stories. Even if I’m writing for a themed anthology, I start with character. I need to know the people whose story I’m telling.

Last year, during the short story panel for Mystery in the Midlands, John M. Floyd said he always began with plot. His words made me think about my method.

John M. Floyd

For those of you not familiar with John's work, he has been described by Douglas Preston as the “master of the art of the short story.” He is the author of more than 300 short stories, with his work regularly appearing in The Strand, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, and Woman’s World. He’s a regular blogger on Sleuthsayers, and has won four Derringer awards and been nominated for an Edgar and the Pushcart Prize. Not only is he prolific, but also he’s generous in encouraging writers in their work.

This year, I’ve been trying to increase my writing output. I decided to try John’s recommendation and begin with plot rather than character.

I have to admit, my experience became a combination of both. I started out hearing the voice of a child pleading with his mother not to return to a place they had lived. Why? I decided his father had been convicted of a crime there.

After hearing the child’s plea, I heard the mother’s reply. There was no other choice, no other place to go. Why? The mother had been offered work in the town and needed it to support them.

Okay, so what goes wrong? After returning to the town, the mother is jailed for killing the person who gave her the job. The child, with the help of a caretaker, must find the real murderer.

I reached this point without knowing the names of the characters (except the child). I had determined the time period, the location, and the mother’s job. How to proceed?

Where did the crime take place? In the house where the victim lived. How was the crime committed? I wanted something unique. The victim’s head was crushed by a heavy sculpture in the victim’s study.

Why would the mother be suspected? She was found with the body and had a motive. The victim was the judge who sentenced her husband to prison.

Okay, why didn’t the mother do it? She truly was grateful for the opportunity to provide for herself and her son.

So, who did it and why was the mother set up? Here, I began to develop the cast of characters involved in the story. I realized the child would be playing a Watson role in describing his caretaker’s sleuthing efforts. But, even before I reached that point, I had to create the crime, to know who was in the house when the murder occurred and to figure out step-by-step how it happened.

I felt empowered. I knew the villain and had some ideas about how that identity would be revealed.

Then, I had to start the story in earnest from the sleuth’s viewpoint. How did she discover each aspect of the crime being committed and who had a reason to want the victim dead?

I mapped these things out on two pages of my journal. At the bottom of the second page, I listed the characters in the story, by description—only the child had a name.

During a Zoom meeting, I saw a participant’s interesting surname and gave it to my sleuth. After that, the names of the other characters came together easily.

I’ve now finished a first draft. I’ve been amazed at the backstory that has come out as my sleuth and her Watson progressed through their investigation. Focusing on plot caused my story to begin with a bang and meant that the characters’ backgrounds were revealed more naturally and less in info dumps. Working from plot, I felt more assured in the story’s pace. Also, I became aware of the need to have a slow scene followed by a rapidly moving one.

Thank you, John Floyd. I’m not sure my method matches yours, but I truly appreciate your suggestion to try it. By using it, I’ve learned more about writing.

How do you start, with characters or plot? Does your method change for short stories versus novels?