How Am I Going to Kill You?
Hello there! I interrupt this blog break to bring you the wonderful writer Elizabeth Bailey, talking about killing characters!
I will be back next Wednesday. Until then, have a great Easter/ Passover/ Chocolate Bunny Eating holiday!
Now over to Elizabeth...
How am I going to kill you?
This is the first question for the crimewriter, I've discovered. A tad macabre, but that's the genre.
Hellothere, victim, how would you like to die? I can strangle, bludgeon, knife orpoison you, just for starters. But if that ain't good enough, let's beinventive. The sky's the limit. The other day someone got mirrored to death inMidsomer Murders!
Problem is, the moment you decide how tokill someone, you've immediately got to find out what that's going to do totheir body. Enter medical research. That leads backwards to what your sleuthcan and can't notice and what it will tell her. She has to work out how it wasdone before she can figure out whodunnit.
Just to complicate matters, when you setyour crime in a historical context, you've got to find out what your medicalman would have known at that time. Which isn't what he knows now by a longchalk. At which point, thank heavens for the internet!
I turned up the most marvellouscontemporary treatise on poisons on Google books, which tells me exactly whatwas known or thought about it, as well as how to recognise it, for everypossible poison you could think of, and some you couldn't. This is for the bookI'm currently writing. You can also dig up lots of accounts of horrific 18thcentury murders, which is extremely helpful, thank you, generating plenty ofideas.
There's a strange satisfaction aboutkilling victims off, I find. Does this mean I'm a closet murderer? Let's becharitable, and say that it's pure imagination and the writer's mind. Afterall, I may kill them, but I'm also revenging their deaths and seeing thatjustice is done.
The other thing I've found is that youcan't avoid the inevitable exposition where your sleuth says how it was done.I've managed to steer clear of the cliché of gathering suspects together forthe purpose, though, and tried to make it a natural part of the investigationprocess. But as a reader I wouldn't be satisfied if the puzzle wasn't somehowexplained.
I don't honestly think I'm going to spendtoo long worrying over the how-am-I-going-to-kill-you question. Ideas forfuture books seem to leap out at me with images of full-blown murders readymade. I've got a humdinger for book four, but I haven't a clue who dunnit orwhy! But that, for me as writer, is the fun of the genre.
Elizabeth Bailey's second novel in her Lady FanMystery Series, THE DEATHLY PORTENT, comes out in April in the US and June inthe UK.
Theblacksmith has been bludgeoned to death and the village blame the local witch,a girl with second sight. The Fanshawes have broken down on the road and whenOttilia hears the news, she cajoles Francis into going to Witherley, where afull-blown investigation leads her intopersonal danger before she can find out the perpetrator.
More details atwww.elizabethbailey.co.uk.
I will be back next Wednesday. Until then, have a great Easter/ Passover/ Chocolate Bunny Eating holiday!
Now over to Elizabeth...
How am I going to kill you?
This is the first question for the crimewriter, I've discovered. A tad macabre, but that's the genre.
Hellothere, victim, how would you like to die? I can strangle, bludgeon, knife orpoison you, just for starters. But if that ain't good enough, let's beinventive. The sky's the limit. The other day someone got mirrored to death inMidsomer Murders!
Problem is, the moment you decide how tokill someone, you've immediately got to find out what that's going to do totheir body. Enter medical research. That leads backwards to what your sleuthcan and can't notice and what it will tell her. She has to work out how it wasdone before she can figure out whodunnit.
Just to complicate matters, when you setyour crime in a historical context, you've got to find out what your medicalman would have known at that time. Which isn't what he knows now by a longchalk. At which point, thank heavens for the internet!
I turned up the most marvellouscontemporary treatise on poisons on Google books, which tells me exactly whatwas known or thought about it, as well as how to recognise it, for everypossible poison you could think of, and some you couldn't. This is for the bookI'm currently writing. You can also dig up lots of accounts of horrific 18thcentury murders, which is extremely helpful, thank you, generating plenty ofideas.
There's a strange satisfaction aboutkilling victims off, I find. Does this mean I'm a closet murderer? Let's becharitable, and say that it's pure imagination and the writer's mind. Afterall, I may kill them, but I'm also revenging their deaths and seeing thatjustice is done.
The other thing I've found is that youcan't avoid the inevitable exposition where your sleuth says how it was done.I've managed to steer clear of the cliché of gathering suspects together forthe purpose, though, and tried to make it a natural part of the investigationprocess. But as a reader I wouldn't be satisfied if the puzzle wasn't somehowexplained.
I don't honestly think I'm going to spendtoo long worrying over the how-am-I-going-to-kill-you question. Ideas forfuture books seem to leap out at me with images of full-blown murders readymade. I've got a humdinger for book four, but I haven't a clue who dunnit orwhy! But that, for me as writer, is the fun of the genre.
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Elizabeth Bailey's second novel in her Lady FanMystery Series, THE DEATHLY PORTENT, comes out in April in the US and June inthe UK.Theblacksmith has been bludgeoned to death and the village blame the local witch,a girl with second sight. The Fanshawes have broken down on the road and whenOttilia hears the news, she cajoles Francis into going to Witherley, where afull-blown investigation leads her intopersonal danger before she can find out the perpetrator.
More details atwww.elizabethbailey.co.uk.
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