Wednesday, November 01, 2006

The Weapon of Choice

The trouble with writing crime short stories is that although I can come up with endless characters and situations I have trouble coming up with weapons and a good description of the crime--forensics stuff. Usually I can write around it, but in a story I'm working on now, I need to choose a weapon for someone to use in a lab. At first, I thought of a dart gun. Makes sense they would have tranquuilizer guns around with lab animals. But it seems to make the whole scene humorous. So now I'm using a knife. Does any ordinary Joe know knife skills well enough to kill? A gun enters the scene later, so I can't use that. I guess I need to buy some books on weaponry and forensics. Or stick to off-scene murders. Or go back to tragic stories of Alzheimers's patients and lost loves.

2 comments:

Christa M. Miller said...

What kind of lab? You could use a syringe, a scalpel... might there be a person-sized autoclave, or vat of liquid nitrogen? How about whatever material they run tests on? (The death could still occur in the lab.)

pattinase (abbott) said...

I like the scalpel idea. That might work well. The murderer is from the outside world and wouldn't know much about tests, etc. But he would know about scapels probably and it sounds more convincting than a knife as a weapon in a lab. Thanks!