Murder Is Neither Fun Nor Easy

For a stone-cold killer maybe but not for a crime writer.

I’ll bet they think, isn’t she sweet, the younger San Francisco demographic watching me hobble up the California hill, one hand on my cane, the other pulling my rusty cart behind me on my way to the senior shopping hour early on a Sunday morning.

There she goes, that little old lady, smiling mindlessly at everyone, probably with a few screws loose at her age, but we humor her as she buys her milk and mush for her dinner. Can she even chew solid food any more they wonder as they hurry past me, fearing old age might be as contagious as the virus?

Little do they know that my walks fuel my research.

How will I scorch my next victim is often on my mind?

Yeah, don’t judge a book by its cover. I may look like butter wouldn’t melt in my mouth, but in my head, I’m planning ways to tear your guts out. If by “your,” I mean the victim of my next murder mystery.

In all the ways I’ve tried to blow up stereotypes of aging on this platform, the image of little old ladies as repositories of sweet thoughts, pure as the driven snow, is one of them.

My first article was a slightly tongue-in-cheek piece about my sex life to set the record straight that women my age don’t get gray hair and wrinkles by baking cookies and serving tea for eighty years. No, my friends. It’s the war of the sexes fought most often between the sheets that ages us. As well as the aftermath of the battles, the R&R between the sheets that makes it all worthwhile.

But back to one of my favorite subjects of late, homicide.

I’ve already used stabbing, gunshot, poison by a deadly herb, and a little-known cardiac arrhythmia I learned when I was a medical secretary back in the day. All human forms of murder. Thankfully, I still have many other homicidal tricks up my sleeve for future books.

But what beggars my imagination this morning is how would a spirit from an imaginary uncontested tribe in the African bush off a few members of the medical staff of a hospital in a modern city he mistakenly thinks is torturing people with medical interventions he doesn’t understand?

Is a poison blow dart too extreme?

And where would he find such an implement in a San Francisco medical center? Eat their brains? But wouldn’t someone stop him?

And you thought novel writing was all staring out the window and looking pensive and important in British tweeds.

I actually had this story all wrapped up several weeks ago after two years of tinkering with what should have been a quick and dirty genre supernatural thriller.

But I made the mistake of showing drafts of it to my literary writing group, who have standards far above my own “good enough for government work.” They threw out vast chapters of a book I thought would garner a few reads when I published it on Kindle.

So, in the intervening two years, I’ve polished it to a high sheen. But then I feared I’d edited it out of the genre. Some readers say just give me a good story and don’t confuse me with fancy writing.

I’ve been trying to do a little of both. But even though I’ve written many books with decent reviews, for some reason, this one has bedeviled me. Until, that is, last week, when I had a breakthrough about a hole in my plot.

Christopher Walken, in a famous SNL skit, called for more cowbell.

As I was turning out the light last week, my muse called for more murder.

The insight was right on the money. The next morning, I went to work streamlining the book, killing off a character, deciding another one had to go, and in my weekly Zoom meeting on Saturday, my brilliant writing group chose the last perfect victim from my cast of characters.

But now, the COD (cause of death) eludes me.

So, dear readers, if you were a ghost from a make-believe-tribe confronting the western way of healthcare, how would you do away with the practitioners of our arcane medical arts?

Frankly, I’m stumped.

The internet was no help. I looked up shooting and got basketball. Seriously, Google?

I’m trying to earn a living here. Cut a little old lady some slack.

I do have some things in my favor. I mean, it’s called fiction. I can make shit up. I do have an imaginary uncontacted tribe, after all.

Most uncontacted tribes, of the few left in the world, are not in Africa. They survive in either in the Amazon or one of the Pacific’s remote islands. But that doesn’t work for my storyline, which I’ve set in Africa, a place I’ve visited.

So, my choice of location was a stretch. But, as I said, fiction.

I did find a reference to a possible uncontacted tribe in the Great Rift Valley, so that’s where I placed the roots of my fictional spirit. Geographically, his (do spirits have a gender?_ Google, help me out here) village doesn’t sound like the Zambezi River near Victoria Falls, which I have visited and described down to the last papyrus frond. One out of two isn’t bad.

On my trip, I spent an evening in The Boma, a tourist trap really, and for a dollar, a tribal man made up to look like a witch doctor (see above ref. to tourist trap) threw bones for me, a form of fortunetelling.

The experience had one aspect of eerie truth to it. A decade later, the evening became the basis for my book.

However, the man, whom I remember as very interested in the United States, and unlike other Zimbabwe nationals I’d met, did not reveal animosity toward his president, Robert Mugabe, gave me no clues about how the spirit of an uncontacted African tribe might take revenge on his enemies.

You’d think I’d have this down by now. Homicidal revenge. I wrote my first murder mystery eight years and fifty or so books ago with various cookbooks, children’s books, romances, chick lits and literary/historical fiction in the interim. Oh, yes. I also made a brief detour into porn.

Well, probably not technically porn. Some might call it erotica, but I think it’s called hot romance. I gave those few stories a plotline to raise it to the level of “literature.” But I don’t think the buyers of those books were interested in raising their IQs.

I was well into my seventies when I wrote those books, purely as a way to earn money. I’d read that the genre was a money machine. I edited the genre for clients and decided I’d give it a try.

I used to think I could write anything, but since discovered two genres that stump me: sex and horror. I don’t have any moral misgivings about writing erotic material. The words just don’t flow out of my fingertips.

I ventured into supernatural stories a few years ago and almost instantly realized I’d found my artistic home. The stories flow like the Zambezi River, but so far, my muse has not whispered a means of killing off the medical staff of Heavenly Hope, my fictional medical center.

I’m getting sick of waiting to find a finish for this book. A common trick for writers who get stuck is to switch to a different project and shake up their imagination.

Maybe I need to go back to writing porn. I’ve never intentionally harmed anyone in my life. But as far as action behind bedroom doors? Well, you know what they say. Write what you know.

I’m an editor and writer on Medium with Top Writer status. I’m also an editor for the publication, Rogues Gallery. I’ve published 55 titles on Amazon and edit for private clients. If you’d like to hire me as your editor for fiction, non-fiction, or business writing, please contact me here. If you’d like to read more of my work on Medium, click here to sign up for my newsletter. Thank you for reading and stay safe.