Monica Ferris | An Author’s Least-Favorite Question

You hear it at every Q and A: Where do you get your ideas? The question makes
most authors cringe because the answer is silly and obvious: Everywhere.

But it’s especially hard on mystery authors, because of a guilty secret. A Saint
Paul police investigator and I were having a lively conversation about some of
his cases when he said, mildly surprised, “You have a criminal mind.” He
expanded on that. “A professional criminal is always looking for an opportunity
to commit a crime. He goes into a grocery story and automatically looks for the
location of the office and whether the door stands open and if it does whether
the safe is also open. He goes to a bar and notices if there’s a drunk with a
fat wallet. He sees a car in a driveway outside an upscale house being loaded
with suitcases by a family going away on vacation and stores the address away in
his head. You do the same thing, except you turn all those things into stories
rather than actually committing the crime.”

Yes, and so the proceeds of the crime come to my pocketbook legally.

But he’s right. Actually, it’s worse than that. I join an organization and
immediately start looking for what I call “pressure points.” Who is mad at whom?
Who is being careless with the accounts? I go into an unfamiliar building and
start looking for places to store a body (dropped ceilings are nice, but they
leak). It’s not deliberate, it’s just that I’ve been writing crime fiction for
so long that it’s habitual; like the artist who automatically notices the play
of light on surfaces, I can’t help but notice how a simple twist on a behavior
would make a clever criminal puzzle.

For example, reading a history of Renaissance Italy, I came across the notorious Borgia family. One of them murdered someone by soaking the victim’s gloves in poison. Really? I thought. What kind of poison can be absorbed through the skin? A number of them, apparently. Are any of them odorless? Not sticky? Fast-acting? So that if you soaked knitting yarn in it and gave the yarn to an ardent knitter . . . Well, yes, nicotine for example. And so we have Knit Your Own Murder. Have you ever observed that this would be a good "thing" for a murder? If so, what?