Death by Banana

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Let's face it - us writers are just a little bit crazy. There's a good chance that if you are a writer and happen to be reading this, then you understand exactly what I mean. Especially us Mystery/Thriller writers. We make up ways for people to die - that's what we do in our spare time. We are the breed of people who think gunshot wounds are just a little bit boring and drowning is just a tad too overdone.

In our world, the more blood the better and Cannibalism is practically Christmas. Not to mention the random thoughts that take over our mind during the day. We could be standing at the kitchen counter, buttering a bagel, and see a banana on top of the bread box. Instantly, we think: "How do I kill someone with a banana?"

Consider the vast amounts of death on television now - and not just plain ol' die-in-your-sleep death, but murder. Hell, if it wasn't for the television show Criminal Minds, I'm fairly confident that those writers would be institutionalized somewhere. I mean, really, someone who places his victim's eyes in his taxidermy pets? That's not sane - but it is awesome.

Coming up with the C.O.D. (Cause of Death) in Do No Evil was a layered process. The state the bodies were in when found didn't necessarily kill them, but what the murderer did to his victims was more important than how he killed them - although even his murder "weapon" had meaning in the killer's life. That's the great thing about plotting murders (besides the stress release, obviously) - everything has symbolism.

I'm trying to convince Kym to have a murderer in our next book who uses household items to kill people. I bet that you're more than a little interested in how we'd off someone using a paper clip, a toilet paper roll, a hole puncher, a measuring cup...

Or, once again, a banana. But deciding how to kill someone with a banana isn't enough in the days of CSI where instead of corpses there are blue hologram bodies which spin and rotate at will. Let's say, for example, person A would kill person B by shoving a banana through their eye and into their brain. Sure, any sick psycho can come up with that...but writers have to consider so much more. For example:

-How much force does it take for the banana to go through the eye?
-How ripe would the banana have to be so it wouldn't mush in the process?
-Would a plantain work better than a banana?
-Would death of banana-through-eye be fatal and plausible?
-How do severe eye injuries lead to death?

And those are just the initial questions. Eventually one answer leads to five more questions until you spend thirty percent of an entire three-hundred page book describing the realistic events that occur when person A shoves that banana into person B's eye. And we enjoy it.

That, dear readers, is why us writers are just a tad bit crazy.

-Ashley