Showing posts with label Writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Writing. Show all posts
Howdooit (Part 2)
Feel free to skip this post, if you're not interested in murder mysteries, or my slightly long musings on their puzzles.
There is the obligatory salacious footnote: I came up with all this walking around town for an hour after being stood up for a conjugal appointment. So there.
How many murder mystery puzzles are there? And why can't I think of one that hasn't been done hundreds of times before?
And while we're thinking about it, is there some way I can map out the puzzles in a way that'll let me explore the less-used outer reaches, or come up with one by throwing a few dice?
I reckon the basic structure of the puzzle is: Death X is disguised as Death Y by action Z. For instance:
- Murder of A is disguised as Murder of B by C switching the bodies.
- Murder of A is disguised as suicide by C placing a pistol in the hand.
- Suicide of A is disguised as death by natural causes by C faking the medical history.
Now, I think there are six basic types of death, one for each side of the (appropriately named) die. Here's descriptions and examples.
1) Murder - one person deliberately killing another, or through inaction allowing them to die.
- Shooting someone who's about to shoot you. Justifiable homicide or self defence.
- Not telling someone that a third party has poisoned their food.
- A doctor deliberately injecting so much pain medication that it stops a terminally ill patient breathing. Mercy killing.
2) Manslaughter - one person accidentally killing another.
- Punching someone in the jaw, leading to subddural heamatoma.
- Inducing a heart attack by taking someone on a fairground ride.
- A pharmacist providing the wrong pills.
3) Suicide - someone deliberately killing themselves, or letting themselves die.
- Wristcutting in a hot bath.
- A patient refusing blood transfusions on religious grounds, knowing it'll kill them.
- A prisoner on hunger strike for too long.
4) Suislaughter - someone accidentally killing themselves. I haven't been able to find a single word for this, so I invented a portmanteau for it - if you can think of a better one, please tell me.
- Making two drinks, one poisoned, to drink with the victim, then getting confused and drinking the wrong one. This is attempted murder, gone wrong.
- Overdosing on a recreational drug.
- Falling from a roof.
5) Biology - death from natural causes, inside the victim's own body.
- Death from illness
- Old age
- Heart attack
6) Nature - death from natural causes external to the victim.
- Struck by lightning
- Avalanche
- An out of control plane crashing into your place of work.
This list is not the only alternative, nor does it cover every possibility.
Feeding alcohol to an alcoholic until it kills them could be considered murder, manslaughter through reckless negligence, or even assisted accidental suicide. Eating poisonous wild mushrooms could be Suislaughter, Nature or Biology.
The Biology and Nature categories could be merged, and you might chose to disregard the deliberate/accidental distinction. Russian roulette could justifiably be placed in four of the six categories, killing an unborn child to save the mother would technically be considered murder here, and war crimes are different again.
However, I'm not trying to create a perfect classification of death, just a working method for generating detective mystery puzzles.
In a murder mystery, the manner and/or cause of death is disguised. Some examples:
- Murder disguised as Suislaughter. The tightrope of a daredevil walker is made wet and slippery.
- Suislaughter disguised as Murder or induced Suicide. After someone dies is a housefire caused by their smoking in bed, someone else claims to have found a stack of poison pen letters that drove the victim to kill themselves.
- Biology disguised as Murder. Following a natural heart attack, the victim is injected with belladonna and the syringe "hidden" where it will be found. A convenient death is used to frame a third party for murder.
- One Murder disguised as another. C framing D for a murder committed by E, in the mistaken belief that F is the killer.
- One Suicide disguised as another. Changing a suicide note to suggest a different motive.
- Suicide disguised as Suislaughter. A husband and wife run a swingers club. She comes home to find he's hanged himself. She changes the scene to make it look like auto-erotic asphyxiation, to avoid damaging the business.
The above gives a six-by-six grid of possibilities. But there's a third factor - the act of disguising.
1) The victim, deliberately.
- Someone arranges their own suicide to implicate an enemy.
2) The victim, accidentally.
- The murderee misidentifies their masked killer, and scratches the name on a desk before dying.
3) The killer, deliberately.
- The killer, a nonsmoker, leaves behind a half smoked cigar, implicating a cigar-smoker.
4) The killer, accidentally.
- The killer fakes a suicide note. The fraud is easily detected, but his misspells several words, leading suspicion to fall on a dyslexic person.
6) A third party, accidentally.
- The group of ramblers who discover the body destroy the killer's footprints with their own.
5) A third party, deliberately.
- The ramblers destroy the footprints, but the one who suggested the route did so deliberately to protect the killer.
- False confession from a mentally disturbed resident.
7) Biology
- The victim's hemophilia gives a wrong time of death. This could in principle also apply to the victim accidentally obscuring the facts, if you prefer.
8) Nature
- A corpse has been buried on one kind of soil for thirty years. The killer digs it up a reburies it in different soil, in the garden of the person who's just accused them of the old murder. The differences in soil confuse the forensics.
Obviously in the case of Suicide and Suislaugher, the killer and the victim are the same person - unless the killer has driven the victim to suicide.
The third party isn't just innocent bystanders or someone protecting the killer - it could be the police, the forensics team, or the detective themselves.
Now, I've got these eight categories, some rather esoteric (eg. the victim conspiring to cover up the circumstances of their own murder) and some overlapping (Biology and Nature blur together where corpses are concerned). And what I really want is six categories. Just so they can be selected by rolling dice. Yeah, alright.
So here's the shoehorned version:
1) Victim accidentally.
2) Victim deliberately, or their biology.
3) Killer deliberately
4) Killer accidentally, or a natural event or fact.
5) Third party deliberately
6) Third party accidentally.
If you want inspiration for the basic structure of a murder mystery, roll a die three times, and there it is.
Of course, none of this says anything about clues, motives or processes of detection. That's for another time.
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Writing
Murder Notes 2
A few more ideas for murder mysteries...
A man gives himself a series of alibis, by confessing to a priest that he meeting a woman for an adulterous affair at the time of each crime. He knows the priest has broken confessional secrecy before, and will do so again.
Three murders, all well reported in the press, all with the same MO. One suspect can be tied to the first and third, but has a cast iron alibi for the second. The second murder was by a copycat killer.
A spate of poisonings lands a series of people in hospital, where they die. The people are unconnected apart from two, who are members of the same family. The symptoms of all before reaching hospital are slightly different from each other. There are various toxins found in each bloodstream after death, but one is common to all.
The spate was partly a statistical fluke. The two family members were poisoned by the same person, who just wanted to hurry up his inheritance. The other poisonings were just a coincidental cluster of food poisonings, and the family killings would have been noticed immidiately if they hadn't been hidden by the cluster.
One of the doctors at the hospital is the real killer, administering the common poison to patients when they arrived in his ward. He chose patients with low life expectancy to hide what he was doing. His motive: he just enjoyed it.
It's been said that there are only four basic motives for murder - love, lust, loathing and lucre. But I think there are many others that don't fit into these categories.
What about shame? A mother kills a journalist who is writing a biography of her pop-star son, to prevent her finding out about the son's shameful secret - that at school he got a girl pregnant and forced her to have an abortion, after which she suicided.
The mother pieced together what had happened from clues about her son's behavior and what she'd heard about the girl. But the mother had worked it out wrong - she was protecting a secret that existed in her own imagination.
What about murder as a trial run for another murder - one that never takes place? Or is botched?
Murder as ceremony? As initiation into a sect? A secret society of super-powerful businessmen, and for someone to join they need to prove their ruthlessness and determination by killing a stranger.
Murder as experiment? Think of Alfred Hitchcock's film "Rope", where the maguffin is the protagonists comitting a murder as an intellectual exercise, just to see if they can do it.
A wants to kill B. B and C are sisters who resemble each other and often visit each other's homes. A writes a series of anonymous hate letters to C, pretending to be an unbalanced stalker, vacillating between love and hate for her.
A shoots B from a distance, making it appear the stalker has attempted to shoot C, but got the wrong sister.
There are plenty of mysteries where the killer covers their tracks by advancing and retarding clocks. How about one where they get caught because their own watch was slow?
"Strangers on a Train" was about two people who met once by chance and swapped murders. How about a group who are all members of a larger association - say 5 members of a sports club of 30 - who draw lots to each perform one murder for one of the others.
The trail of clues for each killing would lead back to the sports club, but the obvious suspect for each would have an alibi (such as being at the club at the time), and there are 29 others possible suspects.
For further obfuscation, one of the murders was of the wrong victim - mistaken identity.
The police will quickly cotten on to the link between a spate of murders and the sports club. But they might be confused by a staged failed murder of one of the group of five.
A man gives himself a series of alibis, by confessing to a priest that he meeting a woman for an adulterous affair at the time of each crime. He knows the priest has broken confessional secrecy before, and will do so again.
Three murders, all well reported in the press, all with the same MO. One suspect can be tied to the first and third, but has a cast iron alibi for the second. The second murder was by a copycat killer.
A spate of poisonings lands a series of people in hospital, where they die. The people are unconnected apart from two, who are members of the same family. The symptoms of all before reaching hospital are slightly different from each other. There are various toxins found in each bloodstream after death, but one is common to all.
The spate was partly a statistical fluke. The two family members were poisoned by the same person, who just wanted to hurry up his inheritance. The other poisonings were just a coincidental cluster of food poisonings, and the family killings would have been noticed immidiately if they hadn't been hidden by the cluster.
One of the doctors at the hospital is the real killer, administering the common poison to patients when they arrived in his ward. He chose patients with low life expectancy to hide what he was doing. His motive: he just enjoyed it.
It's been said that there are only four basic motives for murder - love, lust, loathing and lucre. But I think there are many others that don't fit into these categories.
What about shame? A mother kills a journalist who is writing a biography of her pop-star son, to prevent her finding out about the son's shameful secret - that at school he got a girl pregnant and forced her to have an abortion, after which she suicided.
The mother pieced together what had happened from clues about her son's behavior and what she'd heard about the girl. But the mother had worked it out wrong - she was protecting a secret that existed in her own imagination.
What about murder as a trial run for another murder - one that never takes place? Or is botched?
Murder as ceremony? As initiation into a sect? A secret society of super-powerful businessmen, and for someone to join they need to prove their ruthlessness and determination by killing a stranger.
Murder as experiment? Think of Alfred Hitchcock's film "Rope", where the maguffin is the protagonists comitting a murder as an intellectual exercise, just to see if they can do it.
A wants to kill B. B and C are sisters who resemble each other and often visit each other's homes. A writes a series of anonymous hate letters to C, pretending to be an unbalanced stalker, vacillating between love and hate for her.
A shoots B from a distance, making it appear the stalker has attempted to shoot C, but got the wrong sister.
There are plenty of mysteries where the killer covers their tracks by advancing and retarding clocks. How about one where they get caught because their own watch was slow?
"Strangers on a Train" was about two people who met once by chance and swapped murders. How about a group who are all members of a larger association - say 5 members of a sports club of 30 - who draw lots to each perform one murder for one of the others.
The trail of clues for each killing would lead back to the sports club, but the obvious suspect for each would have an alibi (such as being at the club at the time), and there are 29 others possible suspects.
For further obfuscation, one of the murders was of the wrong victim - mistaken identity.
The police will quickly cotten on to the link between a spate of murders and the sports club. But they might be confused by a staged failed murder of one of the group of five.
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Writing
Murder Notes
A maid working in a hotel recognises one of the guests as a businessman who got her fired from her dream job some years before. The hotel, quite a high class place, provides toothpaste, toothbrushes, towels, soap etc in each suite's bathroom.
She takes the toothbrushes from the businessman's room, soaks the bristles in a poison, and replaces the brushes. The plan is for the businessman and his family to brush their teeth in the morning, and several hours later to be dead. The maid would replace the toothbrushes with ordinary ones in the course of her normal duties, disposing of the poisoned brushes, hopefully leaving no clue as to how the poison got into their bodies.
However, the businessman gets an unexpected urgent call, and jets off with his family the night before they were supposed to use the toothbrushes.
Another family arrive, but due to booking mix-up, their rooms are unavailable. They are given the businessman's room for the night, and use the toothbrushes in the morning. The maid didn't see the businessman leave, and didn't know about the new family or the booking mix-up.
"If you're a detective, sooner or later you'll screw up and get the wrong man convicted. If you think it'll never happen to you, if you think you're too good to let it happen to you, you're in the wrong job. If you can't live with the possibility, don't do the job. If it doesn't bother you, go somewhere else.
You want to know when I got the wrong man? It was a simple case of a young girl who'd drowned in a swimming pool. It looked like a straightforward accidental death - she'd left most of her clothes by the poolside, dived in, got into difficulty and drowned.
But there was no towel with the clothes. Why would someone go swimming and not bring a towel? It had to be murder.
Her father couldn't account for where he was when she died, and he'd been warned about hitting her about before. So we brought him in, pressured him and he confessed.
Then we found he was miles away when his daughter died, in bed with his girlfriend. The daughter really had just forgotten to bring a towel.
But we couldn't let the man go. He'd hanged himself in his cell the night before."
The major clue in an investigation is what seems to be a diary kept by the killer. It details his thoughts about killing various people, including possible methods of killing and of avoiding detection.
The author of the diary is in fact the victim, who had been a fantasist, constantly imagining himself as murderer, plotting perfect crimes he was never going to commit. His own death was a coincidence.
Problem: A husband and wife are found dead in their home, Both have been poisoned by the last meal they shared. There is no way the food could have been accidentally poisoned.
There is a marked empty test tube on the floor, and another one, unmarked, in the husband's pocket. Forensics show they contained the poison. They have the husband's fingerprints on them. It looks like the husband put poison into the meal, and they both ate it. A suicide pact?
The couple had an estranged son, a chemist. He had access to the poison, but had no way to get it into the food. He was in another country for a full month before they died.
The son claims (and others verify) that his father had visited him at the lab some months earlier, looking for a reconciliation, but it didn't work out. Could the father have stolen some poison then?
Solution: The husband had approached the son, asking for help in killing his wife. He could hardly cook his wife a meal and then not eat himself, and if she died of poisoning and he was unscathed, he would be the obvious suspect.
But, what if she died of the poison, and he showed symptoms of poisoning but survived, as though someone had tried to kill them both? What if, after making sure his wife was dead, he called an ambulence for both of them, and his bloodstream and stomach contents showed traces of the poison? That would shift suspicion away from him, and he could dispose of the test tubes before the ambulence arrived.
So all he has to do is poison the food, ensure he and his wife both eat it, and make sure she eats more. As a precaution, he should also carry the antidote, in case he accidentally ingests too much.
But, instead of giving the husband one tube of poison and one (marked) of antidote, the son gives him two tubes of poison. So when the husband gets crippling cramp and thinks he's eaten too much, he takes the "antidote", and poisons himself more.
The unmarked tube is still in his pocket, and the last thing he does is drop the marked one.
A police detective investigating the death of a colleague is hampered by all the suspects being other members of CID. The police close ranks to protect their own - even when it's a murderer they're protecting, and even when they don't know which of their number they're protecting.
In the end, the detective finds the killer, but tells no one because he can't prove it. His superior tells him to drop the case - so as not to bring the name of the police into disrepute.
The hero gets the opportunity to kill the murderer undetectably. Would the investigator of that crime be similarly hampered?
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Writing
Oh I Give Up
I've got four unfinished short stories. They range from nearly written to fully planned but barely started, and I'm not happy with any of them. There's a murder mystery that started out heading for 5000 words, then got more and more complex till it would occupy ten times that. There's another about a guardian angel who can't get his human out of an ethical quandary any more than the human himself.
It looks like I'm not good at writing to a self-imposed deadline. Anyway, here's a brief excerpt from the 'angel' story, listing some of the protagonist's previous human changes:
It looks like I'm not good at writing to a self-imposed deadline. Anyway, here's a brief excerpt from the 'angel' story, listing some of the protagonist's previous human changes:
A married man keeps having affairs with women who remind him of his wife, even though she's waiting for him at home. He can only love her when it's not really her...
A young girl runs away from abusive carers and gets picked up by a much older man. When the police find her he wants to stay with him because he makes her feel wanted...
A wife stays with her violent husband because she needs to feel like a powerless victim. If she took control she'd have responsibility, and she can't bear that...
A man enters an arranged marriage to a woman he's never met because he wants to prove his devotion to the traditions of the homeland he's never seen. Then he falls in love with his wife and finds the homeland hasn't practiced the tradition for decades...
A rich widow sells everything and moves back into the house she lived in till she was five. But she's misremembered the number and street. She has to invent her childhood there to relive it...
A young boy feels guilt that he didn't cry at his grandmother's funeral. He starts to read the bible obsessively, hoping it'll make him holy. It convinces him his grandmother was a sinner not worth crying for...
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Writing
Murder Most Flummoxing
I've been constantly tired and listless for the last few days, so today's entry is mostly a cut and paste of someone else's writing.
The "Golden Age" of British (read: English) crime fiction is usually reckoned to be roughly 1920-1950.
The dominant sub-genre was the "locked room mystery" - the seemingly impossible crime. The literal locked room crime involves a corpse being found in a room with no entrances or exits except one door, which is of course locked - from the inside. Often the victim is shot or stabbed, but there's no knife or gun to be found.
There are other impossible crimes in the genre - a man might be shot at point blank range but with no one near him, or found dead in the sand or snow with only his own footprints leading to him, or he might have been lying there for a day before discovery but have witnesses seeing him alive the hour before.
The author from that time most admired and collected is John Dickson Carr, a Brit living in America but setting his mysteries back in England. His most celebrated mystery is The Hollow Man (published in America as The Three Coffins).
Chapter 17 is set aside for a self-referential lecture from the detective, Dr Fell, on the subject of...locked room murders in fiction and their solutions.
He lists 7 types. Here is a precis of what he has to say:
He goes on to list 5 ways the door can tampered with to create the mystery:
The "Golden Age" of British (read: English) crime fiction is usually reckoned to be roughly 1920-1950.
The dominant sub-genre was the "locked room mystery" - the seemingly impossible crime. The literal locked room crime involves a corpse being found in a room with no entrances or exits except one door, which is of course locked - from the inside. Often the victim is shot or stabbed, but there's no knife or gun to be found.
There are other impossible crimes in the genre - a man might be shot at point blank range but with no one near him, or found dead in the sand or snow with only his own footprints leading to him, or he might have been lying there for a day before discovery but have witnesses seeing him alive the hour before.
The author from that time most admired and collected is John Dickson Carr, a Brit living in America but setting his mysteries back in England. His most celebrated mystery is The Hollow Man (published in America as The Three Coffins).
Chapter 17 is set aside for a self-referential lecture from the detective, Dr Fell, on the subject of...locked room murders in fiction and their solutions.
He lists 7 types. Here is a precis of what he has to say:
1. It is not murder, but a series of coincidences ending in an accident which looks like murder. At an earlier time, before the room was locked, there has been a robbery, an attack, a wound, or a breaking of furniture which suggests a murder struggle. Later the victim is either accidentally killed or stunned in a locked room, and all these incidents are assumed to have taken place at the same time.
2. It is murder, but the victim is impelled to kill himself or crash into an accidental death. This may be by the effect of a haunted room, by suggestion, or more usually by a gas introduced from outside the room.
3. It is murder, by a mechanical device already planted in the room, and hidden undetectably in some innocent-looking piece of furniture. It may be a trap set by somebody long dead, and work either automatically or be set anew by the modern killer.
4. It is suicide, which is intended to look like murder. A man stabs himself with an icicle; the icicle melts; and, no weapon being found in the locked room, murder is presumed.
5. It is a murder which derives its problem from illusion and impersonation. Thus: the victim, still thought to be alive, is already lying murdered inside a room, of which the door is under observation. The murderer, either dressed as his victim or mistaken from behind for the victim, hurries in at the door. He whirls round, gets rid of his disguise, and instantly comes out of the room as himself.
6. It is a murder which, although committed by somebody outside the room at the time, nevertheless seems to have been committed by somebody who must have been inside.
The door is locked, the window too small to admit a murderer; yet the victim has apparently been stabbed from inside the room and the weapon is missing. Well, the icicle has been fired as a bullet from outside – we will not discuss whether this is practical...
The victim may be stabbed by a thin swordstick blade, passed between the twinings of a summer-house and withdrawn; or he may be stabbed with a blade so thin that he does not know he is hurt at all, and walks into another room before he suddenly collapses in death. Or he is lured into looking out of a window inaccessible from below; yet from above our old friend ice smashes down on his head, leaving him with a smashed skull but no weapon because the weapon has melted.
7. This is a murder depending on an effect exactly the reverse of number 5. That is, the victim is presumed to be dead long before he actually is. The victim lies asleep (drugged but unharmed) in a locked room. Knockings on the door fail to rouse him. The murderer starts a foul-play scare; forces the door; gets in ahead and kills by stabbing or throat-cutting, while suggesting to other watchers that they have seen something they have not seen.
He goes on to list 5 ways the door can tampered with to create the mystery:
1. Tampering with the key which is still in the lock. This was the favourite old-fashioned method, but its variations are too well known nowadays for anybody to use it seriously. The stem of the key can be gripped and turned with pliers from outside...
2. Simply removing the hinges of the door without disturbing lock or bolt.
3. Tampering with the bolt. String again: this time with a mechanism of pins and darning-needles, by which the bolt is shot from the outside by leverage of a pin stuck on the inside of the door, and the string is worked through the keyhole.
4. Tampering with a falling bar or latch. This usually consists in propping something under the latch, which can be pulled away after the door is closed from the outside, and let the bar drop.
5. ...The murderer, after committing his crime, has locked the door from the outside and kept the key. It is assumed, however, that the key is still in the lock on the inside. The murderer, who is first to raise a scare and find the body, smashes the upper glass panel of the door, puts his hand through with the key concealed in it, and "finds" the key in the lock inside, by which he opens the door.
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Writing
My Bloody Valentine
My valentine story is a murder mystery. That was decided within a minute of deciding to write it. Then in an hour I had most of the crime, most of the characters, and the settings.
It's taken me three days to work out the clues that lead the detective to the killer. Or rather, it's taken me three days of trying out permutations of the killer's method, the movements of witnesses, hiding place of the weapon, and clues left behind to come up with a pattern that:
(a) the detective can actually follow
(b) lead to the killer, and
(c) couldn't plausibly lead to any of the wrong suspects.
Is that the way proper mystery writers operate? Detailing the crime and characters, then making up clues to shoehorn into the margins of the plot?
Anyway, this is just a note to say: I'm still here, I'm trying to write, and I haven't reinstalled Windows or had sex since the last post.
It's taken me three days to work out the clues that lead the detective to the killer. Or rather, it's taken me three days of trying out permutations of the killer's method, the movements of witnesses, hiding place of the weapon, and clues left behind to come up with a pattern that:
(a) the detective can actually follow
(b) lead to the killer, and
(c) couldn't plausibly lead to any of the wrong suspects.
Is that the way proper mystery writers operate? Detailing the crime and characters, then making up clues to shoehorn into the margins of the plot?
Anyway, this is just a note to say: I'm still here, I'm trying to write, and I haven't reinstalled Windows or had sex since the last post.
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Writing
Doingit
C is spending a week in Prague.
Several weeks ago, things were not going well for him. He was off work and in a lot of physical pain from a mysterious and persistant intestinal disorder. A brief, intense and chaotic relationship (with me) had just ended badly. He'd been mugged at knife point with GBP200 stolen, and his prescription of prozac had been doubled.
He dealt with all this by getting enormously drunk. Unfortunately alcohol don't mix too well with prozac. He has no recollection of doing it, but it seems he made a series of phone calls to his boss, telling her exactly what he thought of her and what she deserved.
She proved him right by pressing criminal charges, and pushing for a jail sentence. The police were their usual sensitive and diplomatic selves when they turned over his room, which didn't help his depression one bit.
He's the kind of person who, once he's decided to do something, will do all that's humanly possible to achieve it. That's how he managed to spend 2 weeks on a frantic tour of Peru, sampling everything it had to offer from hang-gliding to paddling down a pirhana infested river in a thin little boat - with the bowel infection but without any medication.
So, when he decided he'd kill himself if sent down, there's no doubt he'd do it. It's his right, and there's nothing I could do to stop him, but I'd still rather he didn't - I like him.
A prison term for a trivial first offence seemed unlikely. But then, I spent five months in a stone box for no intelligent reason a decade ago, and since then the courts have been seized by a mania to overfill prisons even more.
He went to court on the 4th.
Now he's touring the great architectural sites of Prague, taking endless photos and trying every bit of local cuisine and culture available.
When he gets back on the 14th, there's 60 hours "community service" to do, apparantly working in a charity shop - the kind of work he likes to do. He's on a new antidepressant - one that actually works - and I'll see him in about a week.
So, he won't get to see me do my drunken karaoke (kapitoke?) on the 13th. 50 others will though, so I'm practicing my cadaverous baritone and gutteral hiphop
Although I can't get Gloomy Sunday to work, Strict Machines want to have a go. A punk-funk-blues version of the Hungarian suicide song should be interesting.
I've got my murder mystery planned out, now it's just a matter of writing it. Just the little matter of a few thousand words that get read beyond the first hundred. How's this for page one?
Several weeks ago, things were not going well for him. He was off work and in a lot of physical pain from a mysterious and persistant intestinal disorder. A brief, intense and chaotic relationship (with me) had just ended badly. He'd been mugged at knife point with GBP200 stolen, and his prescription of prozac had been doubled.
He dealt with all this by getting enormously drunk. Unfortunately alcohol don't mix too well with prozac. He has no recollection of doing it, but it seems he made a series of phone calls to his boss, telling her exactly what he thought of her and what she deserved.
She proved him right by pressing criminal charges, and pushing for a jail sentence. The police were their usual sensitive and diplomatic selves when they turned over his room, which didn't help his depression one bit.
He's the kind of person who, once he's decided to do something, will do all that's humanly possible to achieve it. That's how he managed to spend 2 weeks on a frantic tour of Peru, sampling everything it had to offer from hang-gliding to paddling down a pirhana infested river in a thin little boat - with the bowel infection but without any medication.
So, when he decided he'd kill himself if sent down, there's no doubt he'd do it. It's his right, and there's nothing I could do to stop him, but I'd still rather he didn't - I like him.
A prison term for a trivial first offence seemed unlikely. But then, I spent five months in a stone box for no intelligent reason a decade ago, and since then the courts have been seized by a mania to overfill prisons even more.
He went to court on the 4th.
Now he's touring the great architectural sites of Prague, taking endless photos and trying every bit of local cuisine and culture available.
When he gets back on the 14th, there's 60 hours "community service" to do, apparantly working in a charity shop - the kind of work he likes to do. He's on a new antidepressant - one that actually works - and I'll see him in about a week.
So, he won't get to see me do my drunken karaoke (kapitoke?) on the 13th. 50 others will though, so I'm practicing my cadaverous baritone and gutteral hiphop
Although I can't get Gloomy Sunday to work, Strict Machines want to have a go. A punk-funk-blues version of the Hungarian suicide song should be interesting.
I've got my murder mystery planned out, now it's just a matter of writing it. Just the little matter of a few thousand words that get read beyond the first hundred. How's this for page one?
Detective Inspector Brandt snored as the telephone rang. For a full minute the two sounds competed, until the shape next to him in the bed nudged him awake. With a long suffering grunt, he awkwardly sat up, swiped on the bedside light, and grabbed the receiver.
“And a merry fucking Christmas to you too, whoever you are”, he growled down the phone without giving the caller time to speak, “and if this isn’t important, you can shove the tree…”
He was interrupted by a middle-aged male voice on the other end. It spoke rapidly for 10 seconds, and Brandt listened intently, not interrupting. When the voice stopped, Brandt spoke much more quietly.
He said, “I’ll be there in half an hour” and hung up.
“Or maybe 45 minutes”, he added, heaving his bulk out of the bed and starting to get dressed.
“Sorry love”, he said to the other form in the bed, “It’s a murder.”
The car park of Mallich police station one hour later, coated with drizzling rain at six ‘o’ clock on boxing day morning. Someone had optimistically strung multicoloured lights over the station’s front entrance – they worked but the illuminated blue police sign over the door didn’t. A dented brown skoda, dragged by it’s headlights in the gloom, pulled arthritically into a random parking space, and out stepped Brandt.
DI Brandt, 48, 6’1’’, 250lbs, wearing his version of smart casual grey trousers and white shirt under a black trenchcoat and broad brimmed fedora. He stood for a moment, tired eyes looking at nothing, droplets collecting on his dark brown beard somewhere between stubble and proper growth. Then he gave a grunt and marched purposefully through the front doors.
Labels:
Writing
Keep Killing TV
There's been no word back on the review I wrote for Torchwood episode 8 "They Keep Killing Suzie", so presumably they won't be using it - probably because it's too negative. Well, if they don't want it, here it is. This is the full length version of around 1500 words - the version I submitted was cut down to 1200.
I really don't know what to make of Torchwood. After an incredibly shakey first three episodes, it's blossomed into some of the most watchable and engaging television around. On the other hand, the plots don't make sense, the humour is juvenile, the sexual themes serve no purpose, and the science is junk. But I'm still tuning in each week, watching repeats and lovingly dissecting it on the Outpost Gallifrey website.
Episode 8, "They Keep Killing Suzie", opens with a racap from episode one. In it, Torchwood team member Suzie Costello became addicted to an alien gauntlet with the power to bring people back from the dead - but once only, and for a few minutes. She'd murdered three innocent strangers, just to bring them back in the name of "research".
Policewoman Gwen Cooper and the team discover what Suzie's doing and, rather than be sacked and memory wiped, she shoots herself through the head - this is her first death. Gwen joins the team.
Now, three months later, Suzie's corpse is in the Torchwood mortuary freezer and all her belongings are in storage - the fate of all the implied hundreds who died working for the organisation. And someone has killed three innocent strangers, writing the word "Torchwood" on the walls with their blood.
Gwen persuades Captain Jack to use the gauntlet to resurrect the victims and question them about their murders. Gwen is the only one who can make the gauntlet (or "Risen Mitten") work. The victims provide is two names - Max, who killed them, and Suzie. The victims were members of a philosophical debating society called "Pilgrim", and as the team discover, so was their former college Suzie.
So, Gwen resurrects Suzie for questioning. But it only works when Jack "kills" the corpse with the knife (the "Life Knife") that is somehow partnered with the glove - this is her second death.
Then there's a surprise, and a problem - Suzie stays resurrected, and as she lives, Gwen's health slowly starts to deteriorate. Creeped out but helped by Suzie, the team locate Max, bringing him to the Torchwood cells. He is blankly unresponsive, except for exactly ten seconds of violent rage every time he hears the word "Torchwood".
Suzie, forbidden to talk to anyone about her work with Torchwood, but desperately needing to, had used Max as her confidant for two years. After each weekly conversation, she fed him the memory-wipe drug "Retcon", maintaining security and keeping him available. So, excessive retcon exposure presumably drove Max insane. Given that retcon is fan slang for “retroactive continuity” - fixing plot holes of earlier episodes in later ones, familiar to fans of Dr Who and sci-fi in general - this is presumably a joke.
But it's not over. Suzie befriends Gwen, persuading her to break security and take her to see her dying father in hospital. Gwen suspects Suzie's fascination with the metal glove began with the desire to save her father. She takes Suzie out of the bunker, and drives her to the hospital. The team are about to follow, but the entire base shuts down, locking them in.
Suzie had planned the whole thing while still alive - programming Max to kill Pilgrim members if he didn't see her for three months, leading them to bring in Max and resurrect her, and installing a shutdown mechanism activated by Max automatically intoning a particular poem by Emily Dickenson. Now she's alive and free.
In the car, Suzie tells Gwen there is no life after death, but there is a "darkness". At the hospital, Gwen collapses and starts to die, Suzie's headwound and death migrating into her, leaving Suzie with Gwen's health and vigour. Suzie's father is terrified at seeing her, and instead of helping or comforting him, she pulls the plug on his life support machine. It seems it was hate that brought her, not love.
Meanwhile, Max's trancelike poem recitation gives the team the clue that another poem from the same collection might deactivate the shutdown. Managing to contact the Cardiff police station by phone, they persuade the inspector to relay Dickenson's poems to them, line by line - but with no effect. Then Tosh has a brainwave - maybe typing the ISBN number of the collected works into her keypad would work. The computers have no power, but the keyboard membrane just might. Presto! The lockdown is reversed.
With Gwen almost dead, the team catch up with her and Suzie on a marina. Jack kills Suzie - her third death - but she does not die. He shoots her several more times, but though bloodied and presumably in pain, she just laughs. On a desperate hunch, Jack instructs Tosh back at base to destroy the gauntlet. When it is vapourised, Suzie spasms and dies - and Gwen's life energy rushes back where it belongs.
Just before she dies, Suzie tells Jack that there's "something moving in the dark" and it's coming for him. The team are left to their tangled emotions about Suzie, their job, and each other.
You see what I mean about Torchwood? It's a rollicking ride that makes no sense at all.
The glove responds only to Gwen and Suzie - why? Is it because it only works for women? When the second victim mentioned Suzie, the team leapt to the conclusion - only later verified - that it was their Suzie. In Suzie's belongings, Jack immidiately and very conveniently found just one book - the collected poems of Emily Dickenson - and no others. The relationship between the knife and the glove is entirely mysterious. Suzie "programmed" Max - how? Suzie keeps Gwen close till the end - is this because the transfer of energy is weakened by distance? There isn't even a hint of an explanation.
Suzie's whole plan hinged on several big gambles. That she could persuade someone to let her out. That the team would bring Max back to the base at the right time. That he would activate the shutdown at the right time. If she expected to be resurrected, why couldn't she activate the shutdown herself, with a delay to give her time to get away? If that's what she actually did, why was Max reciting the poem? And why did he continue to recite it long enough for the team to hear it? This is just lazy plotting.
Suzie's biggest gamble of all was that the one who used the glove on her would have enough life energy for her to recover, and would "want it enough" to bring her back "all the way". There's no way she could have known that glove user would feel that guilty about Suzie's first death. Indeed, we didn't Gwen felt such guilt and the need for recompense that until the plot suddenly demanded it. Did Suzie plan all this just so she could kill her father? If so, it's absurdly overelaborate. If not, what relevance does the father have at all?
Where did Tosh get the frankly bizarre idea that, if the sound of a Dickenson poem triggered the shutdown, the typed ISBN of Dickenson's collected works would reverse it? What if the team only had access to a different edition?
If the keyboard had no power, that meant the membrane didn't either, and even if it somehow did, the computer it's connected to has no power either, as shown by the blank screens. This scene is absolute blithering nonsense. It seems technology only makes sense in Torchwood when it's magic, like the glove and knife.
The final scene shows Ianto and Jack pondering on the idea that "gloves come in pairs", so there may be another one around. This is an effective coda, marred by some pointless and unprefigured apparant flirting between Ianto and Jack. There is also the suggestion that Jack and Gwen are slowly falling in love - while Gwen is two-timing her boyfriend with Owen.
Torchwood is no longer the little child spinoff from Dr Who - it's a cousin. Torchwood is it's own show, with it's own flavour, plots, world and probably fanbase. Both shows have given us some of the best, and worst, television of recent years. . Torchwood is largely independent of Dr Who, but they share a definite family resemblence. There's the mixture of soapy romance with dark science fiction, the fake science, the crude humour shoehorned in where it doesn't fit, and the ethos of joie de vivre in a world where life and happiness are delicate and fleeting.
I will continue to be perplexed, irritated, and greatly entertained by Torchwood for as long as it runs.
The two part finale to season 1 is coming up on New Year's Eve. I expect it to follow the formula, i.e to make no sense at all and keep me glued to the screen.
Labels:
Writing
Howdooit
I wrote this to clarify my own thoughts on writing murder mysteries, but it grew somewhat.
Crime, setting, clues, plot. Four factors that influence each other when creating the outline of a mystery story.
"Crime" is, of course, the criminal event, which is usually a murder. There's no great significance in the crime being a murder - it's just part of the genre. It could just as easily be theft, rape or fraud. Indeed, it could be an event which is not technically illegal but is noteworthy, such as the bride absconding from a wedding, or someone taking a surprising job. However, I'm going to assume the crime is a murder.
The murder has a Setting. I don't just mean the place where it happens; I mean all the aspects of a location, building, era, culture etc. which limit what the killer, victim, witnesses, suspects and detective can do.
If the murder takes place in the present day, in the attic of a guest house, then this places limits on how the killing could be achieved, what the witnesses could have seen, what clues could be left, and how the detective could find them.
The killer can't use antigravity boots to get into the attic, can't persuade the victim to smother themselves with a pillow, and can't disguise themselves as the victim well enough to fool all the other residents for a week.
The Clues are a collection of individually incomplete indicators of how the crime really occurred. Together, they have to logically show both that the perpetrator committed the crime in a certain way, and that it could not have been committed by anyone else in the same way, and that it could not have been committed by anyone in some other way.
Sometimes clues indicate motive, but thankfully this is currently out of fashion. Any mystery that is solved simply by showing which one of the suspects had a motive is just plain rubbish. Dorothy L Sayers wrote that once you know the only possible way a crime could have been committed, that will tell you who is the only person who could have committed it. And once you know that, motive is either obvious or trivial.
Maybe she was overstating the case, but in my opinion, motives are very easy to construct, and can be just tagged onto the rest of the story as an afterthought, if you are so inclined.
Some clues are red herrings - they point to some perpetrator or method other than the "real" one. Red herrings are tricky to write well, because there need to be extra clues which constitute incontrovertible proof that they're the false clues and the others are the "real" ones. If you don't find a way in the story to convincingly discount red herrings, there is more than one possible solution at the end of the book and - shock horror - the detective might be wrong.
The good mystery writer hides real clues in a mass of irrelevant detail and a few red herrings, but doesn't withhold them from the reader.
The fourth factor, Plot, is the way the clues are laid out in front of the detective, and is also constrained by Setting. If the detective is a Miss Marple-like character, they have to go around each of the characters, interviewing them informally, hoping that some clues will slip out in their testimony. Miss Marple can blag her way into the hotel room where the murder occurred and nose around for a few minutes, but she can't get a search warrant or batter down the door. Also, she can't aggressively interrogate anyone, unlike DCIs Taggart or Tennyson.
There is a fifth factor - character. The personalities and quirks of the characters, including the detective and victim. Some character traits, such as a habit or a way of walking, can be clues. However, most characterisation is there to turn the puzzle into a story. It makes the story more readable - and bulkier - but doesn't add much to the mystery.
Having said that, some murder mysteries are highly novelistic, with extensive characterisation - even including subplots that have nothing to do with the mystery. The fashion for novelistic mysteries - or even novels where the mystery is just an excuse for the other plots - is quite strong as the moment, perhaps because all the straightforward puzzles have already been done.
So, we have Crime, Setting, Clues and Plot. Plus the parenthetical issues of Character and Motive. When constructing a mystery story, you can start with any one of the four main factors, seeing what it suggests about the others, and letting the implications bounce back and forth, sometimes changing the initial premise.
For example, let's say I want begin with the Crime and work outwards. I begin with the premise that an elderly woman, a patient in a care home, is found dead one morning. She's been poisoned, but has no obvious enemies, was not wealthy, and had not visitors for the last six months.
Already this gives me some elements of the setting - a care home for the elderly, containing a varied community of old people (mostly women), plus carers, administrators and visitors. Let's say the victim was maintained there by her family, who would have the cash to do so, but, as she's not rich, neither are they.
This gives me a plausible motive - the family, running out of money because the old woman is living longer than expected, kill her to stop themselves going bankrupt. That's the "why" sorted out, but what about the "how"?
Let's say the old woman, who I've decided on a whim to call Mary, was sent a box of chocolates, one of which was poisoned. it might take her a week of occasionally eating random chocolates from the box to find the poisoned one, but eventually she did. So the killer wanted her dead, but wasn't on a strict timetable.
If Mary's family just visited out of the blue after six months and gave her a box of chocolates, soon after which she died, that would throw suspicion instantly onto the family. So they need to find another way to get the chocolates to her.
How about: Mary had been receiving romantic letters for months from what she thought was a male admirer? He could ask her to burn all his letters - to eliminate evidence - and she wouldn't be suspicious if he sent her a little gift in the post.
But if Mary is 80, is this likely? It's possible, but not probable. So let's make Mary 60, attractive and mentally active, but forced into the home by her parents because she couldn't walk easily and had a heart condition?
And what if she'd had a fling with a married man when she was 40? A man who appeared to be writing her romantic letters 20 years later, now that his wife had died. The killer, knowing about the fling, could easily make Mary think he was writing to her again.
This suggests a clue for the detective to find. Mary keeps the letters from her old flame, and the police track him down - to find he's living with his domineering wife, and still having affairs with women his own age at the bowls club. But handwriting analysis shows that whoever sent Mary the letters, it wasn't him.
This tells the detective that someone who knew about Mary's past had killed her. Which excludes the carers and most of her friends at the home, because she never discussed the affair with them.
The handwritten letters show nothing interesting forensically, and the handwriting is too idiosyncratic and inconsistent for analysis, and doesn't match any of the suspects. The variability of the handwriting is a clue, which I've just retrofitted into the story.
So now I have a crime, a setting, some clues, and the barest outlines of plot, the development of which have modified the original crime.
But what about non-family members who knew about Mary's past, and might want her dead for their own bizarre reasons? Mary had a confidant at the home, a fellow inmate (call her Sarah) she trusted with knowledge of her past exploits. Could Sarah have written the letters? No, because she has Parkinson's disease, which makes her hands too unsteady.
Could she have dictated the letters to a nurse, on the pretext that they were just conspiring to cheer up poor old Mary who's family never visited her? I'm sure there could be a red herring where the nurse does write Sarah's letters for her, but they're to her solicitor, and concern her will.
Now how can I tie all this up into a plot? Well, it gives my detective (a police inspector, not an amateur) a set of people to interview, all of who can drop clues. Specifically:
* The resident who found the body
* Some administrators of the home
* Some carers, including the one Sarah used
* Sarah
* Sarah's solicitor
* Mary's family - let's say her daughter and the daughter's husband.
* Mary's old flame
Interviews with these gives a plot outline something like this:
* The administrators know nothing. Neither do most of the carers, or the resident who found the body.
* One of the carers tells the detective that Mary had been receiving letters, and she was always cheerful afterwards, writing back immediately.
* Sarah confirms that the old flame was back in Mary's life. On a second interview she says that the letters she dictated were to her solicitor. The solicitor confirms this, as does the carer who helped write the legal letters.
* The old flame maintains he hasn't heard from Mary in 20 years. A handwriting expert shows that neither he nor his wife wrote the letters.
* Mary's daughter maintains (truthfully) that neither she nor her husband had visited Mary for six months, but admit that they had pushed her into the care home to be rid of her. The husband lets slip that he's in debt - which suggests they can no longer afford to keep Mary in the home.
* The postmark on the letters to Mary are from a town nowhere near where any of the characters live. However, the husband does drive through there every week as part of his job.
* The handwriting on the letters is highly variable and doesn't match any of the suspects, but if some words or phrases were written by the daughter and some by her husband, a match is possible.
* Between them, they did it.
Okay, it's not great, but I think it's passable as a whodunnit puzzle. There's undoubtedly some holes that can be picked, but I only came up with this one as an exercise. The real one will need more time to work out.
Crime, setting, clues, plot. Four factors that influence each other when creating the outline of a mystery story.
"Crime" is, of course, the criminal event, which is usually a murder. There's no great significance in the crime being a murder - it's just part of the genre. It could just as easily be theft, rape or fraud. Indeed, it could be an event which is not technically illegal but is noteworthy, such as the bride absconding from a wedding, or someone taking a surprising job. However, I'm going to assume the crime is a murder.
The murder has a Setting. I don't just mean the place where it happens; I mean all the aspects of a location, building, era, culture etc. which limit what the killer, victim, witnesses, suspects and detective can do.
If the murder takes place in the present day, in the attic of a guest house, then this places limits on how the killing could be achieved, what the witnesses could have seen, what clues could be left, and how the detective could find them.
The killer can't use antigravity boots to get into the attic, can't persuade the victim to smother themselves with a pillow, and can't disguise themselves as the victim well enough to fool all the other residents for a week.
The Clues are a collection of individually incomplete indicators of how the crime really occurred. Together, they have to logically show both that the perpetrator committed the crime in a certain way, and that it could not have been committed by anyone else in the same way, and that it could not have been committed by anyone in some other way.
Sometimes clues indicate motive, but thankfully this is currently out of fashion. Any mystery that is solved simply by showing which one of the suspects had a motive is just plain rubbish. Dorothy L Sayers wrote that once you know the only possible way a crime could have been committed, that will tell you who is the only person who could have committed it. And once you know that, motive is either obvious or trivial.
Maybe she was overstating the case, but in my opinion, motives are very easy to construct, and can be just tagged onto the rest of the story as an afterthought, if you are so inclined.
Some clues are red herrings - they point to some perpetrator or method other than the "real" one. Red herrings are tricky to write well, because there need to be extra clues which constitute incontrovertible proof that they're the false clues and the others are the "real" ones. If you don't find a way in the story to convincingly discount red herrings, there is more than one possible solution at the end of the book and - shock horror - the detective might be wrong.
The good mystery writer hides real clues in a mass of irrelevant detail and a few red herrings, but doesn't withhold them from the reader.
The fourth factor, Plot, is the way the clues are laid out in front of the detective, and is also constrained by Setting. If the detective is a Miss Marple-like character, they have to go around each of the characters, interviewing them informally, hoping that some clues will slip out in their testimony. Miss Marple can blag her way into the hotel room where the murder occurred and nose around for a few minutes, but she can't get a search warrant or batter down the door. Also, she can't aggressively interrogate anyone, unlike DCIs Taggart or Tennyson.
There is a fifth factor - character. The personalities and quirks of the characters, including the detective and victim. Some character traits, such as a habit or a way of walking, can be clues. However, most characterisation is there to turn the puzzle into a story. It makes the story more readable - and bulkier - but doesn't add much to the mystery.
Having said that, some murder mysteries are highly novelistic, with extensive characterisation - even including subplots that have nothing to do with the mystery. The fashion for novelistic mysteries - or even novels where the mystery is just an excuse for the other plots - is quite strong as the moment, perhaps because all the straightforward puzzles have already been done.
So, we have Crime, Setting, Clues and Plot. Plus the parenthetical issues of Character and Motive. When constructing a mystery story, you can start with any one of the four main factors, seeing what it suggests about the others, and letting the implications bounce back and forth, sometimes changing the initial premise.
For example, let's say I want begin with the Crime and work outwards. I begin with the premise that an elderly woman, a patient in a care home, is found dead one morning. She's been poisoned, but has no obvious enemies, was not wealthy, and had not visitors for the last six months.
Already this gives me some elements of the setting - a care home for the elderly, containing a varied community of old people (mostly women), plus carers, administrators and visitors. Let's say the victim was maintained there by her family, who would have the cash to do so, but, as she's not rich, neither are they.
This gives me a plausible motive - the family, running out of money because the old woman is living longer than expected, kill her to stop themselves going bankrupt. That's the "why" sorted out, but what about the "how"?
Let's say the old woman, who I've decided on a whim to call Mary, was sent a box of chocolates, one of which was poisoned. it might take her a week of occasionally eating random chocolates from the box to find the poisoned one, but eventually she did. So the killer wanted her dead, but wasn't on a strict timetable.
If Mary's family just visited out of the blue after six months and gave her a box of chocolates, soon after which she died, that would throw suspicion instantly onto the family. So they need to find another way to get the chocolates to her.
How about: Mary had been receiving romantic letters for months from what she thought was a male admirer? He could ask her to burn all his letters - to eliminate evidence - and she wouldn't be suspicious if he sent her a little gift in the post.
But if Mary is 80, is this likely? It's possible, but not probable. So let's make Mary 60, attractive and mentally active, but forced into the home by her parents because she couldn't walk easily and had a heart condition?
And what if she'd had a fling with a married man when she was 40? A man who appeared to be writing her romantic letters 20 years later, now that his wife had died. The killer, knowing about the fling, could easily make Mary think he was writing to her again.
This suggests a clue for the detective to find. Mary keeps the letters from her old flame, and the police track him down - to find he's living with his domineering wife, and still having affairs with women his own age at the bowls club. But handwriting analysis shows that whoever sent Mary the letters, it wasn't him.
This tells the detective that someone who knew about Mary's past had killed her. Which excludes the carers and most of her friends at the home, because she never discussed the affair with them.
The handwritten letters show nothing interesting forensically, and the handwriting is too idiosyncratic and inconsistent for analysis, and doesn't match any of the suspects. The variability of the handwriting is a clue, which I've just retrofitted into the story.
So now I have a crime, a setting, some clues, and the barest outlines of plot, the development of which have modified the original crime.
But what about non-family members who knew about Mary's past, and might want her dead for their own bizarre reasons? Mary had a confidant at the home, a fellow inmate (call her Sarah) she trusted with knowledge of her past exploits. Could Sarah have written the letters? No, because she has Parkinson's disease, which makes her hands too unsteady.
Could she have dictated the letters to a nurse, on the pretext that they were just conspiring to cheer up poor old Mary who's family never visited her? I'm sure there could be a red herring where the nurse does write Sarah's letters for her, but they're to her solicitor, and concern her will.
Now how can I tie all this up into a plot? Well, it gives my detective (a police inspector, not an amateur) a set of people to interview, all of who can drop clues. Specifically:
* The resident who found the body
* Some administrators of the home
* Some carers, including the one Sarah used
* Sarah
* Sarah's solicitor
* Mary's family - let's say her daughter and the daughter's husband.
* Mary's old flame
Interviews with these gives a plot outline something like this:
* The administrators know nothing. Neither do most of the carers, or the resident who found the body.
* One of the carers tells the detective that Mary had been receiving letters, and she was always cheerful afterwards, writing back immediately.
* Sarah confirms that the old flame was back in Mary's life. On a second interview she says that the letters she dictated were to her solicitor. The solicitor confirms this, as does the carer who helped write the legal letters.
* The old flame maintains he hasn't heard from Mary in 20 years. A handwriting expert shows that neither he nor his wife wrote the letters.
* Mary's daughter maintains (truthfully) that neither she nor her husband had visited Mary for six months, but admit that they had pushed her into the care home to be rid of her. The husband lets slip that he's in debt - which suggests they can no longer afford to keep Mary in the home.
* The postmark on the letters to Mary are from a town nowhere near where any of the characters live. However, the husband does drive through there every week as part of his job.
* The handwriting on the letters is highly variable and doesn't match any of the suspects, but if some words or phrases were written by the daughter and some by her husband, a match is possible.
* Between them, they did it.
Okay, it's not great, but I think it's passable as a whodunnit puzzle. There's undoubtedly some holes that can be picked, but I only came up with this one as an exercise. The real one will need more time to work out.
Labels:
Writing
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