People . . . people who need killing

When you’re writing a humorous mystery, one of your challenges is to find a way to knock someone off and still allow the rest of your characters—and your reader—to regain their senses of humor in relatively short order.  For me, the best way to accomplish this is to choose a victim who needs killing.  That’s a wonderful old Southern expression.  When someone who has made life hell for everyone around them finally gets his or her comeuppance, there’s a good chance someone will remark, philosophically, "Well, he needed killing."

I don’t generally kill off nuns, pregnant women, small children, hard-working do-gooders, or (of course) dogs.  I look for someone who has ticked off a whole lot of people—at least one of them so badly that that someone will decide the offender needs killing.

Sometimes I look in my own life.  For example, when I was starting to plot Owls Well That Ends Well, I remembered something that had happened a couple of decades ago.

Like so many fans of Sherlock Holmes, I turned the final page of "The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place" and sighed with dismay because it was, alas, the last Sherlock Holmes story Conan Doyle ever wrote.  Though at least in 1927, when the story was published, readers could hope that he would write more adventures. By the time I got my copy of the complete Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle had been dead for decades, and clearly wasn’t going to weigh in from the afterlife with new work. 

In the seventies, the BBC TV series "Rivals of Sherlock Holmes" introduced me to authors whose stories might satisfy my craving for more mysteries in the Holmesian vein.  I became particularly fond of R. Austin Freeman’s John Evelyn Thorndyke.  Dr. Thorndyke is both a doctor and a lawyer and solves his cases using then-current scientific knowledge, making him one of the first forensic scientists in detective fiction.  And since between 1907 and 1942 Freeman wrote, by my count, twenty-one Thorndyke novels and thirty-eight short stories, there was a lot of good reading out there . . . if only I could get my hands on the books.

They were all out of print by that time.  Today, of course, I could search online for them—and for that matter many of them are being brought back into print in new trade paperback editions.  But Alibris and ABEBooks and their ilk came into being in the 90s. When I first began hunting for Freeman, I had to haunt used bookstores to get my Thorndyke fix.  One used book store in particular was a goldmine, as long as I didn’t mind the prices—which seemed to be escalating rapidly as my interest in Freeman continued.  Maybe I began with the cheap, relatively easy to find volumes and was now hitting the pricier ones.  Maybe I wasn’t the only reader suddenly interested in Freeman and the books’ value was escalating because of increased demand.  Or maybe, just maybe, the owner was hiking the prices to take advantage of my interest. I’ll never know.

I do know that one day, at a used book sale, I ran into the owner.  "I found something on the dollar table that you’re going to want when you see it in the store," he said.

And when I visited the store, I found he was right.  I did want that faded volume—but not at $150.  I had the presence of mind to glance over it and shrug, murmuring, "Already got that one."

Of course, I didn’t have it.  I’ve blocked out what the book was, so I have no idea if I ever found and read it.  And it wasn’t really the price that threw me—it was the fact that he’d told me he’d found it on the dollar table. If he just hadn’t said anything, maybe I’d have bought it.  I certainly didn’t begrudge the man the expertise that allowed him to recognize on the dollar table a book worth $150.  But did he have to tell me?

It rankled.  After all those years, it still rankled—until I finally decided to kill him off.  Fictionally, of course.  I gave my love of Freeman to one of my characters.  I had another character snag a sought-after volume of Dr. Thorndyke’s adventures off the dollar table at a yard sale.  And then I had my book-snatcher do a few other nasty things to ensure that, when he was found dead, there would be no shortage of suspects.

I have no idea if the real book dealer was (or is) anything like my fictional character—I didn’t know him that well and haven’t run into him in years.  Maybe I was the only person he ever annoyed.  More than likely he didn’t even come close to "needing killing."  And it doesn’t matter, because I didn’t base my character on him.  I used that one incident—ascribed the worst possible motives to its perpetrator—and in that way, created someone who did need killing.

And not only did it work in the book, but it exorcized the resentment I’d been feeling for so long.  These days, if I ran into the bookseller, I’d probably greet him as a friend. Maybe I’d even tell him about the character he accidentally inspired.

Or maybe not.  We mystery writers can kill people on paper and get all sorts of things out of our systems, making us among the mildest and mellowest of souls.  I don’t know if used booksellers have any similar form of catharsis.  Maybe I should fall back on the well-known phrase that appears at the beginning of so many novels: "This is a work of fiction and any resemblance between the characters and persons living or dead is purely coincidental."