I have a shelf of cookbooks in my kitchen. Pretty predictable stuff: Bittman’s How To Cook Everything; Child’s The Way To Cook; The Gourmet Vegetarian Cooker; From A Monastery Kitchen; even (to connect with one of my favorite fictional characters) The Lord Peter Wimsey Cookbook.
Oh, and Bond’s Handbook for Poisoners. Let’s not forget that one.
Okay, so it’s silly. I have a few other silly things scattered around the house: on a shelf over my front door is a make-believe raven and my very own “pallid bust of Pallas.” Upstairs in a very short corridor a wall is covered with gilt-framed glass, creating my own miniature Hall of Mirrors. Silliness. And I really did use the Bond book, once, when looking into how my character Tyler might have poisoned her abusive husband Jack. But after that … well, I just like people’s reactions when they see it nestled next to Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle in my kitchen. I smile mysteriously as I serve up soups and stews.
The reality, though, is that most authors are not also medical doctors, and many authors—not just mystery writers, either—sometimes need to kill a character. It’s one of our missions: to show people at their best and their worst, at their beginnings and at their ends. And sometimes a character just needs to die … creatively.
That’s where the Bond book—and others like it, Writer’s Digest Books in particular does a nice one—come in. But perhaps you don’t want to shock your guests and lower the number of people willing to accept dinner invitations to your home; and perhaps you don’t see the point in investing in a book just to knock off Uncle George on page 82.
In that case, turn to Doctor Grasshopper, who writes the blog How To Kill Your Imaginary Friends: A Writer’s Guide to Diseases and Injuries, and How to Use Them Effectively in Fiction. Now, our doctor is a little too interested in himself to create uniformly useful posts, so you’ll need to wade through a lot of his thoughts on writing, observations about his life, and so on. But the posts are short and you can mine them for great things.
In no particular order, here are some other resources:
- How To Poison Your Fictional Characters- Excellent resource, well-written, very useful.
- How To Get Away With Murder – a little simplistic, but it will get you thinking.
- Murder or Suicide? – this is from the detective’s point of view, but still useful in your planning.
- How to Commit The Perfect Murder – really great, far too short.
And finally, for a bit of much-needed humor, try How to Murder Someone and Get Away With It — fun as long as you can ignore the misspellings!
So there it is. Lots of creative ways to kill off your pesky fictional character. The reality is that the most successful murders are the ones we never hear about, because they’re not seen as murder. So be creative. Find a new way, and let me know! And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!
