One of the first things you discover as a crime writer is that the range of plausible murder methods is disappointingly small. Basically, it’s stabbing, throat-cutting, strangling, shooting, drowning, burning alive (yike), asphyxiating, pushing off a high building, or bonking on the head. Most of these methods hold very little potential for the murderer to express his or her individuality. For example, you really can’t shoot someone except with a ballistic weapon. Stabbing can occasionally be done with a shard of ice instead of a metal blade, but keen crime-readers are aware of this variation, and the presence of an otherwise-inexplicable damp patch on the carpet (and no visible weapon at the scene) will quickly alert them. So it is basically only in the category of bonking-on-the-head that an author in pursuit of true glory can come up with something properly new. I like to think that my own Murder by Milk Bottle is, in its small way, bringing something original to the genre—although in my heart I’m pretty sure that umpteen previous examples of milk-bottle-carnage will come to light just as soon as the book has been published.
Basically, any heavy object, applied with the right degree of force, can be a murder weapon. This insight reminds me of James Thurber’s brilliant comic murder story Mr Preble Gets Rid of His Wife (written in the 1930s), in which a weedy man has the idea of killing his overbearing spouse, but runs into problems the moment he nonchalantly suggests that they go down into the cellar together. (“We never go down in the cellar any more,” he says airily, hoping to get the ball rolling.) The trouble is—as his wife flatly reminds him—she is always two steps ahead of him; she knows he intends to kill her; and what’s more, she knows that any plan he’s come up with will be at best half-baked.
“You’re never within a mile of what I’m thinking,” he protests, feebly.
“Is that so?” barks the wife. “I knew you wanted to bury me the minute you set foot in this house tonight.”
Accompanying him down to the cellar (to prove her point), she demands to know what he’s intending to kill her with.
“I was going to hit you over the head with this shovel,” he says, lamely.
“You were, huh?” she sneers. “Well, get that out of your mind. Do you want to leave a great big clue right here in the middle of everything?… Go out in the street and find some piece of iron or something—something that doesn’t belong to you.”
Sulkily, he agrees to go out and search. “But there won’t be any piece of iron in the street,” he grumbles, leaving. “Women always expect you to pick up a piece of iron anywhere.”
“And don’t be long!” she calls after him. “I’m not going to stand down here in this cold cellar all night and freeze!”
In the kitchen with the candlestick? In the ball room with the wrench? Obviously, since the game Cluedo first appeared in 1949, there have been extra efforts to avoid such predictable blunt instruments. And the best variation on lead-piping-in-the-library came pretty quickly after Cluedo was first released, as it happens, in Roald Dahl’s classic story “Lamb to the Slaughter”, which most readers will know from the collection Someone Like You (1954).
This story has stuck in the minds of millions, it seems, and is universally recognized from the description, “the one with the leg of lamb”. When I executed a very unscientific poll among friends, asking them to name the most unlikely murder weapons they could remember, every single person said, “Do you know the one with the leg of lamb?” In the story, a spurned woman takes a heavy, hard leg of lamb from the freezer, brains her cheating husband with it, and then pops it into the oven. Later she serves it to the policemen attending the scene, who are stumped about the weapon, which remains to be found. “Personally, I think it’s right here on the premises,” says one, as he chews his meat. “Probably right under our noses,” says another, helping himself to extra mint sauce.
Why in particular does everyone remember this story? Partly, I think, because it’s funny and can be summed up in a sentence. I remember a dramatization of it on TV in the 1970s (in an iconic British series, with hilariously low production values, called Tales of the Unexpected) and I now can’t imagine how such a tight anecdote of a story was stretched to half an hour. True, there are interesting incidentals, such as that the murderer is six months pregnant, and that the asking-for-it husband is a detective. Also, she cleverly makes a visit to the local shop to buy potatoes and a tin of peas, so that she can come home and be shocked to find her husband lifeless in the living room. But the basic beauty of “Lamb to the Slaughter” is its one-two simplicity: a woman trapped by domesticity kills with a hunk of meat from the freezer, and then turns the weapon into food.
A similarly oh-so-satisfying murder method is the bludgeoning-by-typewriter in Stephen King’s Misery (1987), when the crazy Annie Wilkes finally gets her come-uppance for incarcerating her favourite author—Paul Sheldon—and forcing him to write a novel. There is so much going on, psychologically speaking, in the basic, brilliant idea of Misery that it’s hard to know where to start at unpacking it, but King himself has said that in the book, writing fiction is Sheldon’s way of keeping himself alive and prolonging hope, and that this provided a chance to say “some things about the redemptive power of writing that I had long felt but never articulated.” Personally, I think there is something hugely suggestive about externalising the despot who resides within every author (commanding us, “Keep writing! Keep writing even when your typewriter doesn’t have all the letters!”) and then—cathartically—killing it off. But also it just makes great story-telling sense that Sheldon should eventually use the weapon of his torture against his torturer. I remember seeing the West End play of Misery (in 1992, with Sharon Gless and Bill Paterson) but weirdly the braining-with-the-typewriter moment just doesn’t come back to me. But to be fair, it wasn’t yesterday: it was nearly thirty years ago.
So we’ve had a notional piece of iron, a frozen hunk of meat and a heavy inadequate typewriter. Are there many memorable bottles, I’m wondering? Well, it turns out that a jeroboam (ie very large bottle) of champagne is employed to fatal effect in Ngaio Marsh’s Vintage Murder (1937), the fifth of her Inspector Alleyn novels. A crime-writer friend told me about it. She remembered it particularly because she had no idea what a jeroboam was until reading it, which I imagine puts her firmly in the majority. In the novel, a theatrical troupe is on tour in New Zealand and a well-rehearsed on-stage celebration (involving the jeroboam brought down gently on a rope, using a counterweight) goes horribly wrong. Interestingly, although the murder occurs at the end of Chapter Four, I think it’s ok to give the game away here. The cover of every edition of Vintage Murder seems to show a very large champagne bottle. The title rather spills the beans as well.
How literal-minded should we be about the word “weapon”? Can I include the bell-pull in Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Speckled Band”? The bell-pull itself is harmless enough, but—as we all remember—down it travels the trained Indian swamp adder that makes the victim die of fright in a locked room. If we are counting animals as weapons, the murder at the heart of Doyle’s great racing-stables story “Silver Blaze” is also pretty perfect, when it is revealed that the eponymous horse was itself responsible for striking the fatal blow on a wicked man attempting to nobble him. And I am of course reminded of Florida writer Carl Hiaasen’s delicious habit of letting nature take its own special (and often horrifying) revenge on bad guys. Ravenous Floridian alligators seem always to be circling with their mouths open—but it’s not only local fauna that chomp up villains. Lions and rhinos sometimes get a turn as well.
Researching for this piece, I’ve come across mentions of outlandish fictional murders committed by exploding cow (yes!), poison-tipped corkscrews, trick golf clubs, bullets fashioned from ice, and so on. But somehow these weapons don’t speak to me. On the one hand, they seem a bit over-elaborate, and on the other I would feel awful about revealing them without the author’s permission. Somewhere I stumbled on a reference to The Blissfully Dead by Louise Voss and Mark A. Edwards (2015), which suggested that the weapon making the cuts on the victims’ bodies would come as an interesting surprise to the reader, so last week I read it all the way through, only to find I had misunderstood this helpful pointer. The Blissfully Dead is a very well structured story, though. And it isn’t too much of a spoiler (since we learn it pretty early on) to reveal that the really nasty thing about the murders is that when the victims die in agony (officially from strangulation) it’s due to the perfume that’s been sprayed into every cut.
Being a bookish sort of person, I am very drawn to murders in libraries (people skewered with the rods from the card-file cabinets; keen library-users whooshing along on tampered-with library ladders and then unexpectedly flying out of open windows) and I always warm to death-by-book, however it’s managed. The sudden death of the self-taught Leonard Bast in E.M. Forster’s Howards End when a bookcase falls on him is one of my favourite moments in literature (although it’s sadly not a murder; it’s just very heavy irony.) But who can resist the idea, in Noreen Wald’s The Ghostwriter (1999) of someone being battered to death with copies of Crime and Punishment and The Godfather? In Ruth Dudley Edwards’s Clubbed to Death (1992) someone is apparently bludgeoned with a rolled-up copy of The Economist—though I suspect a piece of Cluedo-style lead piping would have to be inside it. Best of all in this murder-by-book category, however, is the famous discovery at the end of Umberto Eco’s 1980 novel The Name of the Rose that the corners of the pages in a manuscript copy of the second volume of Aristotle’s Poetics have been maliciously poisoned. Studious monks who turn the pages—and lick their thumbs to do so—therefore pay the ultimate price for their curiosity (and you might argue that they also pay the price for their appalling habit of damaging priceless ancient books with thoughtless monastic spittle).
So that’s it. Summing up, I would rank them thus:
Top unlikely weapon (no contest): The leg of lamb. Masterly idea, beautifully executed, quickly absorbed, never bettered.
Runner up: Typewriter with important keys missing. Joyful release, totally fitting, just slightly dates the story. You wouldn’t get far nowadays coshing someone with a computer keyboard. They might not even notice.
Third: Hoof of nervous horse with a justified grievance. Classic, ingenious, and also the occasion for Holmes’s deathless remark about the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.
Fourth: Huge bottle of champagne dropped from above. The actual passage in the book is a bit of a let-down, being mostly about the screaming of the women present. But it’s still a great idea.
Fifth: Exploding cow. Having thought about it a bit more, I really should look into that one. It’s from C.J. Box’s Savage Run (2002).
Sixth: The second volume of Aristotle’s Poetics, concerning comedy, which is famously “lost”. A clever McGuffin in the context of The Name of the Rose, although I have always suspected that this volume never existed. It’s my opinion that Aristotle tried to write about comedy and found it too hard, so he just pretended he’d mislaid the second volume whenever people came round asking to borrow it.
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