On Writing — A Few Thoughts On Solving Crime The Old Fashioned Way

NCIS — Top-Rated Crime TV

It appears that every popular TV show dealing with crime has the same ingredients.  There is a team, with a tough curmudgeonly leader who has a tragic past, a couple of younger, attractive action members, a colorful eccentric medical examiner and a funny, lovable, quirky computer geek or two who, with just a couple of quick taps on the keyboard, can come up with whatever is needed precisely when it is needed. Crime solved.

I appreciate the modern approach.  Even though actual crime solving lags behind its TV counterparts technologically, pursuit of criminals through DNA, digital tracking devices, cell phone towers and computer hacking is real and increasingly common.

However, because I am of a certain age – the age of uncertainty, I suspect – the only challenge for the modern writer is not so much the ability to deliver a clever plot, but a hungry technological mind. When all else fails, the computer will match an overlooked hair with the DNA on a computer match. This puts readers, who haven’t the high-tech background, at a great disadvantage when attempting to solve the crime along with the on-screen protagonists.  Colombo’s brilliant villains don’t stand a chance.  And Perry Mason loses his cases before the trial even begins.

What I miss most in contemporary crime fiction (movies, books and TV) is character development — not just of the protagonists, but also of other characters important or who should be important to the story. The underlying theme of a really good story is about the depth of as well as the failure or survival of character itself.  I believe the reason books like The Maltese Falcon or L.A. Confidential suggests that readers rightfully want a tight mystery with a well-developed motive for the crime, we also want there to be something larger at stake.  

Opinion — The Appropriate Tools To Carry out Judicially Approved Homicide

Southern Ohio Correctional Facility

I’m not an expert on death; but as a mystery writer I am not only interested in how it occurs but it’s use as a punishment, usually reserved for people who commit murder.  And while I have  wished death or worse on people who have done unspeakable things to others, for as long as I can remember I have been anti-death penalty. My views have only been strengthened by the science of DNA and the eye-opening work of the Innocence Project.  Many innocent people have landed on Death Row. 

But let’s assume executions are based on infallible court decisions, which they cannot be and that they are a legitimate crime deterrent, which they aren’t or that they are at least cost-effective, which isn’t true, is it necessary to carry it out in such a gruesome manner?  The evolution of executions in the U.S. has tended toward the more civilized. No more stoning. The guillotine is gone. Public hangings have disappeared.  The electric chair and gas chamber have been rendered obsolete. Yet, despite our advanced technology, we cannot develop a quick, painless, means to an end.

“As the lethal drugs flowed into his veins in the Ohio death chamber, Dennis B. McGuire at first “went unconscious” and his body was still, his daughter, Amber McGuire, said Friday.

“’But a few minutes later,’ she said, ‘she was horrified to see her father struggling, his stomach heaving, a fist clenching.’’’

“’He started making all these horrible, horrible noises, and at that point, that’s when I covered my eyes and my ears,’” said Ms. McGuire, who watched the execution on Thursday at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility, near Lucasville. Mr. McGuire’s execution, conducted with a new and untested combination of drugs, took about 25 minutes from the time the drugs were started to the time death was declared. The process, several witnesses said, was accompanied by movement and gasping, snorting and choking sounds. “ — New York Times, January 17, 2014.

Unless the death penalty is supposed to exact vengeance against both the criminal and his or her family, shouldn’t we simply put the intended on a slow drip of increasing doses of morphine or abolish the death penalty altogether?