B is for Bullet or Bribe or Bed and Breakfast Murder
Just because your sleuth finds a bullet casing or shell, and what the medical examiner or forensic scientist says it matches the hole in your victim doesn't mean one size fits all. The detectives work has just begun regarding the weapon and the murder.
A mystery writer needs to know the different kinds of weapons. What they do when they are used to kill and more. If no one sees the murderer enter or exit or a murder occurs with everyone in the room, was a gunshot heard? Or, was the victim stabbed? Was there a gunshot but the gun wasn't the murder weapon after all?
If you have an AK47 as the murder weapon, does your diminutive, hundred pound, paraplegic woman have the wherewithal to fire it? Can she control the bursts the weapon may produce? Is she capable of steadying the weapon's repercussions? Of course you could prove she could and did, foreshadowing the event –showing her strength somewhere earlier. Remember motive and opportunity aren't enough. Plausibility counts with your reader or, your willingness to like and trust the narrator you, as the reader, hear.
Bullet and blood are only half the puzzle, but they are extremely important when the sleuth finally reveals what the weapon was and who wielded it.
Bullets of different types do different kinds of damage, blood patterns tell distance from the victim and so much more. A bullet could become a bribe, a bullet could end a quiet stay at a Bed and Breakfast with murder—or a bullet could trip up the criminal depending on how you use it. Know your weapon, know your trajectory, know what the body and the scene will reveal and your reader will be hooked to follow you, perhaps not just to the end of the story but even from book to book.
For the next stop on your A to Z reads visit click on the side bar at the top right of this blog A-Z Challenge
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2 comments:
For a sweet lady you have a penchant for violence. Things must be rough up in Northern Wisconsin. LOL.
Thanks for you posts. Like a bullet, your short, concise nuggets of insight impact deep into my writer's psyche more like a 9mm than a .357cal.
Billie, I love mysteries but there is so much to know, so much to keep track of that they must be very difficult to write. This is a lovely take on the A to Z challenge. Thanks for the info.
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