Let’s Commit Murder!

You’re a writer. There are a gazillion ways to arrange letters and words to make murder happen inside the pages of your fiction. You’ve got a character who is doomed, and now it’s time to bring your best words together to commit your special kind of crime.

You’re creative, which means you’re observant and have a vivid imagination. The world intrigues you. When it comes to death and the reasons people die, you can draw on your wealth of personal experiences for ideas. Knowing some real-life assholes helps — and a desire for justice fixes the rest. In writing, you get your opportunity to bring those worlds together in any way you like. Justice and assholes. Suddenly, someone familiar to you falls down a flight of stairs, and you feel a deep grin develop on your face. But you’re an author, not a killer. There isn’t a body. Everyone is safe.

Justice is a sweet muse, isn’t it?

Fiction is a great way to right wrongs. Creating murder text is truly cathartic. It’s heaven deciding how and when someone will die. Think about it. That guy who cut you off in traffic; the bitch who slept with your man; a domineering mother-in-law who won’t leave your family the hell alone — think of the power you have to fix people your way! It’s utopia for the dark fiction author.

Revenge writing might be the path to literary inspiration, but does it lead to creating a bestseller?

As comforting as it might be for authors to kill those who threaten their very existence, it may be of no interest to readers to read it. Authors must still tread carefully. Revenge isn’t enough. Rides don’t come free.

The stories must be highly entertaining, too. And those stories have got to feel plausible. No reader likes to be taken for granted. Senseless killing is cheap. Readers need to know more — who, how, when, where and why a murder happened, and the story must sound sensible. Mindless kills waste my time, too.

Psychological thrillers often gravitate towards the shadowy worlds of psychopaths. They are a perfect match. With the right type of reader, the union allows those who know little of psychopaths to take a peek inside their minds. Convinced that the story feels plausible, a loyal reader will tag along to see where a psychopath’s journey goes.

Who commits a murder?

Anyone. No, just psychopaths.

Me. You. Him. That guy.

A tattooed, troubled gent in a torn leather jacket is an obvious candidate. “That’s the killer you’re looking for, officer! Cuff ‘im! He owns a goddam baseball bat! Go check his car!”

That’s called a cliché. They are nasty things. It’s a stereotype that gives off a putrid stench. We must avoid them.

Here’s Granny Maye. She was also present at the time of the killing. Oh, but she couldn’t have done it. She bakes cookies for the homeless. There’s no way this God-fearing senior could’ve sent someone packing with the swinging of a baseball bat. Go back to that tattooed guy. Yes, he’s the one officer. Arrest that animal!

Let me tell you, Christian grannies are great villains. No one expects them. Granny could’ve walked in, slit everyone’s throat, and left with an armful of blood-soaked knives, and no one would’ve batted an eyelid. As long as the tattooed guy remains nearby, Granny gets off scot-free.

I want to see Granny Maye, the secret cookie-baking psycho, brought to life. I want to know why we didn’t see that monster coming. I want to find out what happened to her that caused her to become a killer. How did she rationalise God and murder at the same time?

Tilting fiction away from the predictable is my style. Clichés are nice if an author wants to accelerate a storyline and make it easy for readers — but where’s the challenge in that? Where’s the challenge for the reader? Outwardly good people can be inwardly bad. It’s true. Some readers may want to know more about that process. They’ll want to understand it better. They’ll want to know why everyone chooses to look the other way.

Back to the guy and his dead ex-girlfriend.

What? Huh? Did we change channels? No. There was a murder. Remember? It included a baseball bat and a suspicious-looking guy in a torn leather jacket. Her head was smashed into bits by a stick of willow. Blood and bone fragments went everywhere. The news reports used words like ‘vicious’ and ‘cold-blooded’ in their headlines. Every wall and floor in her home was covered in fluids. Smears of red created a timeline along the hallway that started in the living room and ended in the bedroom. It appears she got up from the initial clubbing and then ran from her attacker.

It was a bloody mess.

The details of his arrest were cut and dry. He said he’d never been inside her house and that wasn’t true. The fingerprint on her dining room’s light switch was a clear match to his. He lied. Our leather-clad ex-boyfriend soon had a label attached to him. It was called ‘lying bastard’. Jail is the happy-ever-after for ‘lying bastards‘ like him, right?

Isn’t that edging another cliché?

Stay with me.

The police arrested that ‘lying bastard’ without hesitation, and the people rejoiced. That gave the public their happy ending, and the police became heroes for what they did. The city slept at night, but something wasn’t quite right. He didn’t do it. He couldn’t have. He was somewhere else when the murder was being committed. It turned out that the police moved too fast and invented a story to fit a crime. A murderer remained on the loose while an innocent young man was held by the judicial system for eighteen months. Eventually, he was acquitted and released.

The prosecution proved that he had left a fingerprint on a light switch, but not when it was deposited there. The remaining evidence wasn’t compelling enough to convict. Police couldn’t prove how he got to her place to commit the brutal murder and then back home without his jealous girlfriend knowing about it or getting a single drop of blood on his skin, hair, clothes, car, or bat.

Few people in the community knew about his acquittal. He’d gone from making headline news at the beginning to appearing in a small text-only byline on page four of the newspaper. When he was released, no one was interested. They’d even forgotten about the crime. A young tattooed man dressed in a torn leather jacket was finally able to walk out of prison. But he did it alone. While he was locked away, he’d lost his job, his girlfriend, his credibility and a good portion of his life. It ruined him.

Although it sounds like poorly written fiction, this particular story isn’t fiction. It happened this way in a real person’s life. In short, it came down to that fingerprint and a dumb lie he told the police. He lied for a good reason — and a stupid one — it saved him from dealing with his jealous new girlfriend.

“Don’t ever go into that bitch’s house,” she demanded, “or it’s fucking over!”

She hated that bitch with a passion because the two of them had made a child together. If it were up to her, she would’ve stopped child visitations altogether, but doing that would’ve turned her into a bigger bitch than the bitch she despised.

“Pick him up at the front gate. DON’T go inside, EVER!”

Kids are kids. They don’t care about what Daddy’s new girlfriend tells him to do. And what would a childless woman know about getting children ready for access weekends anyway? Surprisingly, only one fingerprint was found inside the victim’s home. When the police questioned him on the day after the murder, they did so in front of his jealous girlfriend. What a mistake. What a terrible mistake.

An acquittal doesn’t equal freedom. There’s no going backwards after going through the grinder. That would be like taking the mince from the sausage casing, passing it back through the machine and expecting it to return to a side of beef.

Who commits a murder? Anyone can commit murder, just like anyone can have their life ruined by the sausage machine.

As a writer, it’s tempting to share real-life stories like these by providing interested readers with an accurate, up-to-date account of what happened. It’d be a way to let the police know they didn’t do their job — and to keep the public informed about the failures behind some major crime investigations. Alas, I’m not that kind of writer. I’m not here to fix Law’s little boo-boos.

Life isn’t perfect.

Sure, it has some warm and fuzzy moments that satisfy our romantic sides, but evil’s anarchy exists too. That’s where I like to go when I take a long stroll inside fiction.

In my world, good doesn’t always save the day. Killers don’t always get caught. When writing SEETHINGS, I looked at our strange attraction to yearning for happy-ever-afters and then seeking the moral high ground by THE END. I then skewed their perspectives to get a better story — and, I think, it feels totally plausible.

You see, once upon a time, the police caught someone with tattoos and wearing a torn leather jacket. He was said to have bludgeoned his ex-girlfriend to death with a baseball bat. He was taken into custody but released much later. That was the third time someone like him went through that process — and I know exactly what happened in each case.

It’s not luck that keeps me from being discovered. I work hard at shifting the guilt by thoroughly researching my victims. I then rely on the predictability of strangers to encourage happy-ever-afters via clichés to find suitable villains without delay. It’s then up to the sausage machine — the community, Law, social media, and the news cycle – to get things horribly wrong for him and wonderfully right for me.

You could say that this process leads to my happy-ever-after.

Find out why inside the pages of SEETHINGS.

– A