West Heart Kill by Dann McDorman

Author:Dann McDorman [McDorman, Dann]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2023-10-24T00:00:00+00:00

Methods

Shooting. Stabbing. Drowning. Burning. Blunt object. Poison. Fists. Feet. Teeth. Strangulation. Asphyxiation. Defenestration. Explosion. What the Romans called damnatio ad bestias (“condemned to the beasts”). Also, less direct methods: denying medication, inducing a heart attack, inducing a seizure, inducing a suicide…

The human body is a feeble thing, and there are many ways to die.

Murder mysteries tend to be coy about the actual moment of death: a clean and simple stabbing, a single gunshot wound, or, best of all, an elegant poison that leaves no garish mark upon the body—these are the preferred techniques of the genteel detective novel, a tradition that continued through the hard-boiled fiction of later decades. But mystery’s cousins are seldom so blood-shy. The narrator of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” murders an old man and then hides the corpse beneath the room floorboards, above which he conducts that final, ruinous conversation with police (“tear up the planks!—here, here!—it is the beating of his hideous heart!”). In Roald Dahl’s “Lamb to the Slaughter,” a wife kills her husband by bashing him over the head with a frozen leg of lamb and then serves it for dinner to police investigating the case, effectively making them accomplices in the elimination of the murder weapon. In Patricia Highsmith’s “Slowly, Slowly in the Wind,” a farmer murders a neighbor and then hides the body by disguising it as a scarecrow in his field, where it is later discovered by children on Halloween.

Agatha Christie’s notebooks offer a veritable forensic murder workshop, with multiple methods proposed, evaluated for novelty and effectiveness, and then accepted or dismissed. Christie at one time worked as a pharmacist; it’s not surprising, then, that poison was among her preferred methods. In America, the FBI produces a regular report on homicidal techniques, filled with endless tables of grisly statistics that read like a catalogue of cruelty (“Other” being a particularly hair-raising survey of misanthropic inventiveness). The FBI statistics confirm what Christie knew intuitively—that poison is, by and large, a woman’s method of murder. The statistics also demonstrate a companion point: that strangulation is a distressingly common way for women to die (most often, at the hands of a husband or lover). The discrepancy between these two dry facts speaks to the brutal realities of gender, power, and physical violence in domestic life, the harsh secrets of the closed doors behind which men have loved and hated and killed women for centuries.

The most poetic murder in the detective canon may come courtesy of Dorothy Sayers, who discovered an ingenious way to kill using nothing but the tolling of the bells, bells, bells…

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.