Murder in Fiction.

Fiction is different from real life— fictional life makes more sense. Everything that happens in fiction is part of a plot. Real life is just one thing after another.

Fictional murders, even in ‘gritty, realistic’ stories, tend to make more sense. In real life, a murder often seems motiveless or senseless, or the reason is crazy, like that serial killer who claimed he had to kill people to prevent an earthquake.

Fictional murders, like other fictional behaviors, have to be motivated. And in most fiction, that motivation has to be something an ordinary person might understand.

Murder mystery murders.

In conventional murder mysteries— the kind now tamed down and called ‘cozies,’ the murder at the center of the plot has a commonplace motive. Financial gain is very common, as it allows there to be a number of suspects, especially if the murder victim was wealthy and had a number of heirs.

Marital jealousy, a big motive in real murder, doesn’t work so well in a murder mystery since that motive points to one suspect usually. If that proves to be the motive of the ultimate killer, that factor must be hidden to make the killer’s identity a mystery.

Murder to prevent a revealing of secrets is also a possibility, especially if the author can frame the victim as someone who habitually ruined people by revealing their shameful secrets.

The suspect individuals in a mystery may have a variety of possible motives, rather than having them all after money or all protecting secrets. The main thing in the traditional murder mystery is that there must be a variety of suspects. No one can be standing over the dead victim with a knife in his hand— unless that someone is actually innocent and the real killer must be located.

Criminal enterprise murder.

In many types of adventurous fiction, the murders go back to a central criminal mastermind or Dark Lord.

The initial corpse can be a result of whatever the criminal enterprise normally kills people for— someone who didn’t go along with the gang’s extortion plot, a witness, a rival gang member, a young wizard whose magic powers might be stolen, whoever owns the McGuffin….

Afterwards, murders tend to be plot complications in the quest of the hero to stop the criminal villain. Witnesses that the hero wants to question might get murdered first. A friend or associate of the hero might get killed to intimidate the hero.

The more murdery your criminal enterprise villain or Dark Lord is, the more important it is for the hero to stop him. Also, the more corpses the hero encounters along the way, the more power the villain seems to have. Does it seem hopeless? It should. You want your hero to face an almost impossible challenge and win.

Incidental murders.

Every fictional life is precious. But some minor charaters must die or disappear as part of the plot, and sometimes murder is the cause.

It’s common to make fictional characters orphans, since that makes them more vulnerable. Sometimes that orphaning happens by means of a murder.

Murders in your character’s backstory can be just sad events, or perhaps your character will need to get justice/revenge for a murdered father. This need not be the central theme of the plot, however.

Sometimes an incidental murder might just be an obstacle to your hero’s actions. That one person with the important information is now dead so the hero must make other plans. At other times, the murder can point up dangers. If your hero goes to a dangerous city and the first person he speaks to ends up murdered by the end of the day, that illustrates the dangers of the city.

The hero kills.

In commercially viable or non-grimdark fiction, the hero can’t be a murderer. If the hero kills, it must be justified— defense of others or self-defense, ideally. Sometimes a bad guy just won’t surrender and must be killed to protect others.

In certain circumstances, the hero may do a ‘justice killing.’ In a remote region— in the pioneering West, or on a remote planet— there may be no realistic way to get a murderer to formal justice.

Also, in a dystopian totalitarian regime like the real-life regimes of Stalin, Mao or Hitler, a killer might be protected by the ‘judicial’ system because he is part of it. If the hero kills such a killer for righteous reasons, that will stop him from going on killing.

A fictional hero must have a very strong motivation to kill. Perhaps he lost a loved one, or has some strong emotional connection with the victim. He must have strong knowledge of the guilt of his target. In a dystopian regime, that killing judge has to be proved to be doing more killings than he needs to, rather than serving as a brake on a killing regime.

The big test of any murders you may commit in your fiction is, how well do readers accept it? Do they feel it is a tragic but necessary part of the plot, or are they mad at you, the author, for an unneeded killing? Reading should take your reader to an exciting adventure, not introduce interesting characters doomed to die so an author can earn his grimdark credentials.

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The facts about ‘Satanic ritual killings’ #spiritualwarfare

Recently I bought and read a book called ‘Law & Disorder: Inside the Dark Heart of Murder’ by John Douglas, a pioneering FBI profiler. In one of the cases he covered in the book, he touched on the one-time hysteria over the concept of Satanism and Satanic murders.

At the height of the craze, Satanic ‘experts’, often Evangelical pastors or laymen, claimed that there were fifty thousand child abductions a year, mostly, it was implied, due to Satanists and their blood lust. Douglas said the statistic was about right, but the majority of those cases were kidnappings by a non-custodial parent.

Satanic ‘experts’ kept the fear up by making lists of Satanic symbols, many of which had other purposes, confusing Satanism with Wicca and Neopaganism, and declaring that young persons who were fans of Heavy Metal music, or who played games such as Dungeons & Dragons, were probably doing so because such things were ‘Satanic.’

The reality, as John Douglas’s FBI statistics show, is there was NOT ONE case in which one or more persons in a Satanic group or coven conspired to commit a murder. There were individual killers, such as the Night Stalker, who claimed to be inspired by Satan or who had Satanic-seeming tattoos, or who said that the Devil caused them to commit the crime in question. But these loners were nothing like what the Satanic hysteria claimed was happening.

The problem is that many Christians, particularly Evangelical ones, read books or heard sermons that made them believe in the Satanic ritual killings theory. Some took ‘facts’ from this and put them into spiritual warfare stories. Others to this day believe it because a sweet old pastor told them it was true back in the day, and their sweet old pastor, now gone to his reward, would not have lied to them.

But sweet old pastors and devout Christian mentors can be mistaken. If the pastor heard false information from a Christian source they felt was trustworthy, they may have passed it on thinking it was fact. In the same way, a sweet old lady teacher I had in a Christian school once told me that God refuses to listen to the prayers of Catholics because Catholicism was so ‘unchristian.’ While I am convinced that this lady would not have lied to me, I now believe her belief was wrong, that God would not have allowed Christianity to vanish from the Earth from the Early Church days until the ‘Reformation’, and that God listens to all prayers, even those from persons who have very little knowledge of religious truth.

Now, I know Spiritual Warfare novels are popular among some Christians. But the facts are important. While I was a Neopagan and rejecting Christianity, I read a book by Frank Peretti which seemed to me to be demonizing Neopagans and was very ill-informed. This book pushed me even further away from Christianity by these errors. Not, I expect, the effect the writer was going for.

When the Death Penalty is Necessary

Yesterday the Boston Marathon Bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was sentenced to death for his crime. Which brings the question of the death penalty to mind. We know the PBS/Progressive/Europeanish faction hates the death penalty, largely because their role models, the Western European nanny-states, have banned it and declared it ‘uncivilized’. But just because fools hate something doesn’t mean wise men have to be for it.

I used to consider myself anti-death-penalty. My home state of Michigan outlawed the death penalty some time in the 1850s, and that’s pretty much OK with me. But as I’ve matured and thought things over, I have to account for the fact that many good and decent people of the past have accepted the death penalty as a sad necessity for an ordered society. In the laws of the Old Testament of the Bible, many acts called for the death penalty. Jesus Christ never banned it— even though he himself was executed. Saint Paul, author of many of the epistles of the New Testament, also eventually an execution victim, never objected to it. As an intelligent person I believe I must take into account that just because many modern people believe the only decent approach is to ban the death penalty, there are many people who are/were intelligent, thoughtful and good who thought the death penalty was right.

In many cases, the death penalty is clearly an option. Some guy kills his wife and their children, you could execute him or give him life-without-parole or give him life-with-parole and you have the impression of the man that even if you let him out of prison early, he’s not going to go out and kill anyone else.

But there are other circumstances where it seems that the death penalty— if you believe in it at all— is called for. Some of these circumstances mostly apply to the past, while others are still with us today. Here is my look at such circumstances:

1. Societies that don’t have the concept of prolonged imprisonment as a punishment. This applies to many civilizations of the past. They had prisons, but those prisons were just a holding area to keep someone until the authorities decided what to do with them. If a man spent five years in such a prison, his society wouldn’t look on those five years as a punishment, but as five years in which he escaped being punished. Punishment meant things like being flogged, amputations for some crimes, in some cultures, or death. Without the concept of life imprisonment as a punishment, you couldn’t ban the death penalty without having to face the concept that you’d be letting murderers loose, possibly to kill again.
2. Nomadic or highly primitive societies without the capacity to build functional prisons. How would a nomadic tribe go about giving a murderer life imprisonment? You’d have to assign a group of men to do nothing but guard the murderer as your tribe moved from place to place. If a tribe did that, they would lose out on the labor power of the men assigned as guards, which would hurt the tribe’s ability to feed itself. If the tribe were attacked, it would have to do without the guards joining in the defense. Even tribes that were not nomadic, in primitive circumstances, could not manage to keep their murderers imprisoned for life. They might have heard of the concept of imprisonment-as-punishment, might even think it is superior, but they don’t have the material ability to carry it out without endangering the tribe’s survival.
3. Societies with ‘leaky’ prisons. This can happen even in modern times, though normally only in Third World countries, and in rural/remote sections of the country. If criminals can regularly break their confederates out of prison, or bribe the guards and warden to let their confederates out, you can’t really sentence a murderer to life imprisonment as a substitute for the death penalty with any hope that he will still be in prison for any length of time.
4. Societies with out-of-control liberal judges. We think we have a lot of them here in the US. But imagine if it were worse. Imagine we have enough of such judges that the average person sentenced to life-without-parole would be back on the streets within five years because some judge thought the man’s rights were being violated. If we couldn’t get rid of such judges, keeping the death penalty would be one way to keep some of the worst murderers off the streets— though those same liberal judges would try to get rid of the death penalty.
5. Killers who kill in prison. The hope we have when we sentence a murderer to life-without-parole is that he will not be able to do any more killing. If an inmate kills within the prison, especially if he has made many violent attacks short of murder while in prison, death may be the best way to get the killing stopped.
6. Serial killers. These are people who have made a habit of killing. This is the worst type of bad habit imaginable. Locking a serial killer up may stop him killing during his imprisonment, but it will never be safe to let him out. And the crime is so over-the-top evil it’s kind of hard not to consider the death penalty in such cases. That being said, many captured serial killers are model prisoners, not violent, and some cooperate with scientific studies of serial killers. In my opinion, it’s only the worst of the serial killers that need the death penalty.
7. Killers whose crimes are an act of war. Think of the Oklahoma City Bombing or the Boston Marathon Bombing. These are killers who considered their killing an act of war against our society, and who wanted their crimes to be imitated by others. If enemy soldiers came pouring over our borders, we’d send our military to stop them with deadly force, even though some of those enemy soldiers would certainly die. Killing killers whose crimes were meant as an act of war shows that we take such deeds very seriously.

As a Christian, I don’t delight in the idea of the death of any person, no matter how wicked that person is. We are all sinners, all have done wicked things. And I don’t like the idea of a murderer ending up in hell. I hope every murderer turns to Christ in the end. But I can’t ignore the victims of crime, whose blood cries out for justice, and the possible future victims some of the most dangerous killers might take. I don’t like the thought, but I am beginning to believe that in some cases, such as the Boston Marathon Bombing, the death penalty may be the better way to deal with it.

What do you think about the sentence in the Boston Marathon bombing case? What sentence do you think would be the most just?