Archive for August, 2013

Crime Writers Beware: You Can’t Make This Stuff Up.

Thursday, August 29th, 2013

In my last post I wrote about unusual ways of knocking off victims in crime novels.  This post I’ll be writing about one of the weirdest reasons to kill anyone I’ve ever come across. Karaoke. And guess what?  It’s not fiction.  It seems that people who sing Karaoke…especially Frank Sinatra’s My Way and John Denver’s “Country Roads” in bars in places like Malaysia, Thailand, China and the Phillipines are getting gunned down or hacked to death largely because of what they decide to sing.

My first clue that this was actually happening came in an article I found not in the National Enquirer where I might have expected it , but in America’s most respected  “Gray Lady”, our “newspaper of record,” the New York Times.

Under the headline “Karaoke Killing,” the Times reported:

“A 23-year-old Malaysian man was killed on Thursday night after reportedly enraging other customers who felt that he “hogged the microphone” at what Malaysia’s Star Online described as “a coffeeshop-cum-karaoke outlet” in the town of Sandakan, on the island of Borneo.

The Guardian’s Ian MacKinnon adds some regional context:

Karaoke rage is not unheard of in Asia. There have been several reported cases of singers being assaulted, shot or stabbed mid-performance, usually over how songs are sung.

Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” has reportedly generated so many outbursts of hostility that some bars in the Philippines now do not offer it on the karaoke menu anymore. In Thailand this year, a gunman shot eight people dead after tiring of their endless renditions of a John Denver tune.”

A little further research via Google revealed the John Denver tune in question was “Take Me Home Country Roads.”

Britain’s Daily Telegraph, a generally staid and politically conservative paper, reported last March that “John Denver Karaoke Sparks Thai Killing Spree.”  According to the article

“A gunman in Thailand shot-dead eight neighbours, including his brother-in-law, after tiring of their karaoke versions of popular songs, including John Denver’s Country Roads. 

Weenus Chumkamnerd, 52, put his gun to the head of a respected female doctor and seven of her guests as they partied at her home in Songkhla Province, South Thailand

“When I began shooting nobody pleaded for his life because they were all drunk,” he said after his arrest.

He said he was so furious with their awful singing that he did not notice he had murdered his own brother-in-law.

“I warned these people about their noisy karaoke parties. I said if they carried on I would go down and shoot them. I had told them if I couldn’t talk sense into them I would come back and finish them off,” he added.

Apparently he couldn’t talk sense into them.   A third and even more horrific example of Asian Karaoke killings was reported by the Telegraph exactly one year ago today on August 30, 2012.  The headline read: Chinese Toddler’s Karaoke Tantrum Ends in Bloodbath “

 

The article went on to report: 

“A Chinese toddler’s refusal to give up the microphone during a family karaoke evening started a quarrel that left two men hacked to death with a meat cleaver.

The evening began jovially enough when Mr Yun, the owner of a noodle shop in the central Chinese city of Xi’an, invited his family to celebrate Qixi, China’s Valentine’s Day, with a singing session at a local karaoke parlour.

But by 11pm, there was discord in the room. Mr Yun’s four-year-old son was hogging the microphone and his parents were indulging him.

Two of the boy’s uncles began chastising Mr Yun and his wife for having raised a spoilt child; a “Little Emperor”, as the Chinese say.

According to the Xi’an police, the argument became heated to the point where the two uncles began pushing, and then punching, Mr Yun.

Finally, Mr Yun’s nephew, who also worked in the noodle shop, ran back to the restaurant and fetched a meat cleaver.

The man, named as Mr Hui, hacked the two uncles to death, inflicting at least ten wounds on each uncle. He has since been arrested.

Lest you think these cases are unusual, just try Googling “Karaoke Murders Asia.”  When I did I got 3,460,000 hits. Admittedly many of these must be repeats of the same stories but still…

Now in our roles as crime writers we are charged with coming up with interesting and unusual motives for murder.  But I have a feeling that if any of us (with the possible exception of James Patterson who can get away with anything) ever tried in a million years to make the motive for murder somebody singing a Frank Sinatra song in an Asian Karaoke bar, your editor would laugh you out of the room. Which would be bad, unless of course you were Carl Hiaasen who likes making his editors laugh.

What not to ever ask a writer.

Tuesday, August 27th, 2013

This is a short post that will link you to a New York Times piece that describes absolutely perfectly what it feels like to be in the first months of writing a new novel.  Just click the link below.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/24/dont-ask-what-im-writing/?hp

How Do I Kill Thee? Let Me Count the Ways.

Wednesday, August 14th, 2013

James Hayman:  It’s pretty much a given that in mysteries and suspense thrillers that there’s got to be a victim. Somebody or, in some books, a whole bunch of somebodies have got to be done in. One of the interesting challenges for the crime writer is coming up with an original idea on how to commit murder.

The immediate means of death may be straightforward.  The literature is replete with killers who dispatch their victim or victims by shooting them, stabbing them, whacking them on the head, strangling them with ropes, belts or hands or pushing them from a high place. A rooftop. A cliff. But even in these cases there is often a twist that makes the murder more than a simple, if evil, act.

In real life murder is often prosaic.  One of the most common forms of violent death in Maine or, I suppose,  anywhere else is domestic violence. Most typically a husband gets pissed off at his wife, loses control, and kills her.  Maybe with his fists.  Maybe with a gun. Maybe with a knife. Often the death is the culmination of years of beatings and abuse.  It’s awful. It’s tragic. It happens. But it doesn’t make for a story that readers will stay with for three or four hundred pages.

People who read thrillers and murder mysteries read them for entertainment. They want to be drawn in to the story by something more devious, more sinister or, sometimes, more bizarre than some bully beating the crap out of his wife because he’s bored or because his dinner is served cold or he had a bad day at work.

In fiction, we as writers have to tickle the imagination of our readers and keep them reading.  We can do this by making not only the motive for murder and the personalities of our killers and victims interesting, but also by inventing means of murder so devious or so awful that the reader can’t imagine it happening to anyone, even a character in a book.

Hannibal Lechter eating the faces of his victims is one obvious example.  But a writer needn’t go to such extremes to achieve the goal.

A few years ago, when I was beginning to write my first thriller, The Cutting,  I attended a Stonecoast novel writing workshop in Freeport, Maine.  In one of the sessions, the workshop leader, author Michael Kimball, posed the questions, “What is the most terrifying experience you can imagine? What is the worst way to die you can think of?”

The class came up with a number of answers, some involving the level of pain inflicted. Being tortured to death, for example. Being burned to death and so on.  One person said the idea of drowning was what frightened her the most. But I (admittedly a claustrophobic) and several others in our group, said what scared us most was the idea of being buried alive.  Kimball agreed and we were given an in-class assignment to write a short piece about the experience. After which we discussed Kimball’s terrific thriller Undone.

In the opening scene of Undone, a character named Bobby Swift has agreed to allow himself be buried alive as part of an elaborate scheme to fake his own death in order to keep $2 million he and his wife have borrowed for a supposed business deal.  His wife Noel is then supposed to dig him up and the two are supposed to take off together for a life of fun and games in the Cayman Islands where the money can be banked in an anonymous account. But, guess what?  Bobby’s wife has other plans and no intention of splitting the money.  Some of the most terrifying and compelling scenes I’ve ever read are of Bobby lying in a coffin in the ground and slowly realizing, as his air runs out, that he’s been royally screwed.

A far more famous variation on the buried alive theme is the one in Edgar Allan Poe’s classic short story, The Cask of Amontillado, which was written in 1846.  In this story the narrator, a stone mason,  lures his victim, a man he despises, who is a self-impressed connoisseur of fine wines named Fortunato, to his cellar by telling him that he has acquired something that could pass for Amontillado, a light Spanish sherry. He tells Fortunato he needs someone skilled enough to taste the sherry and tell him if it is the real thing. He says that if Fortunato is too busy he will ask a man named Luchesi to taste it.

Fortunato considers Luchesi a competitor and scoffs, claiming that Luchesi is an amateur, who could not tell if a sherry was a real Amontillado or not.  Thus seduced, Fortunato enters the killer’s underground wine vault and where he is made ill by fumes of limestone rising from the ground. He is told by the killer that the antidote to dizziness from limestone is sherry.

Fortunato starts drinking the Amontillado and becomes intoxicated. The killer then proceeds to wall in the wine vault. We read in fascinated horror as the killer fills in the last of the bricks and we hear Fortunato’s desperate pleas to allow him to escape. But it is not to be.  The last line of the tale is a Latin phrase meaning “May he rest in peace.”

In my own first suspense thriller, The Cutting, though no one is buried alive, the means of murder are also key to the horror of the tale.  In The Cutting, the villain dispatches his conscious but restrained victims (in all but one instance attractive young women, the outlier being an attractive young man) by cutting open their chests with a scalpel, spreading their ribs and removing their hearts. The ostensible motive is to make money by profitably using the hearts in black-market organ transplants.  But as we read we begin to understand that the killer’s motives are far more complex than simply making money.

Clearly, there are many, many other examples of books where the means of murder is key to the plot and goes far beyond the ordinary “bang-bang, you’re dead.”  I would love it if in the comments section, my fellow crime writers and other readers of this blog  offer their own favorite examples of unique and interesting ways to dispatch a hapless victim.