November digireads: Novel in progress

The characters have had their way. A sequel pulls together disparate threads bouncing from axon to dendrite. Not in a regimented lock-step fashion but still rather orderly. A title once settled upon appears to be the engine that pulls the rest of the cars along the track. The destination is unclear, but it will be a product of all that goes before as has happened many times in the past.

Looking at Microsoft Word’s selection of fonts, one jumped out and it was chosen for title page, header and footer and chapter headings. That mechanical part of the process was satisfying in that it put a framework around what would become the story.

So for a mystery and a murder mystery at that a method to kill the victims remained to be fixed upon. Recalling the news stories of wives doing their husbands in with eye drops posed an interesting research project to find out every aspect of the killings as well as the murder “weapon.”

Eye drops are more lethal than heretofore expected. The nasty ingredient is tetrahydrozoline, a blood restrictor. In the eye it poses no problem and because of its chemical properties clears the redness rather quickly. However, in the body, in large doses it disrupts many of the functions that contribute to life and that’s what makes it so deadly.

Finding characters and names for those characters challenges the gray cells. One easement to that problem is that one or more characters from the previous novel will appear in the sequel. Finding the nemesis character and naming that character oftentimes proves daunting. In this case it was relatively easy. I thought about Shelley Winters playing Ma Barker and she seemed to be a good model for my anti-hero. Shelley. And what about a last name? The Irish are not thought of as really murderous people, but then one has to remember the Boston Strangler and others from Massachusetts. So she became Shelley O’Shea. And still staying with Shelley Winters her description seemed to be ready made. But thinking about what she wanted to do with the murders she was going to commit, I thought that emulating the physical description of Sue Grafton would be just right. Shelley wants to be at the top of the heap of mystery writers and looking like Ms. Grafton (r.i.p.) would in her mind amplify her ambition.

Three characters from the previous book: Janet Slade, Pete Slocum and Sam Berg didn’t require much thought since their characters had already been described. What they needed was not a rehash of what had already gone before but a fresh look at what was now happening. With the solution to the Jabberwocky murders the relationship between Janet and Pete had to change. And Berg had to be told that Pete would be readmitted to the police force after his clearance by the Internal Affairs group.

Now that the characters are firmly grounded, the action has to progress. With the first murder, which isn’t classified as a murder until the toxicology results are returned, Shelley has to be frustrated that her plan appears to be on hold since there is no mention of the murder in the press or on TV. She thinks that the only positive aspect is that she has committed the perfect crime. But that is about to change.

One of the classic clues often overlooked by perpetrators is the stray hair or piece of fabric. In this novel the stray hair becomes the fulcrum on which the villain is broken. To morph that stray hair into something as powerful as a fulcrum requires painstaking analysis of the hair and after that aspect of the investigation is complete the next phase is even more difficult and that is to find where the hair originated. Police labs can determine the kind of hair (human or animal), age, color and other attributes but they cannot determine the origin of the hair, i.e. whether it came from a scalp or whether it was part of the daily existence most people experience.

Janet Slade and her partner Pete Slocum continue on with the day-to-day activity of a homicide investigation. They have one person of interest, a man who has chosen to become a woman. He works at the same company as another of the women in the story, Kath Gryphen, a would-be novelist. Kath is friends with Janine Slade, Janet’s sister. Kath is using the Fat Alley murders as a template for the mystery novel she’s writing. When Janine asks her about the novel, Kath is reluctant to reveal all of the aspects since Janine is Janet’s sister.

So the novel continues with "Murder Most Foul" occurring in Fat Alley. A third victim, a legislator causes the news media to characterize the killings the result of a serial killer. A second serial killer since the Jabberwocky murderer is safely locked away in the main jail. Who the new killer is remains a mystery baffling all the effort that Janet and Pete are putting into the case. They have no fingerprints, no witnesses but they do have a murder weapon. Something as seemingly innocuous as Visine, but when taken in large amounts can be fatal. Store searches in the area do not bring up any purchasers that can be linked to the crimes. Both Janet and Pete are frustrated and hope that something comes of the one clue from Harvey Mittleton’s murder, the hair found on the couch in Fat Alley where Mittleton was dumped.

The novel isn’t finished, but this look at its genesis is. So I think you will find “Murder on Fat Alley” a fun read. Looking forward to publishing it and getting your comments in the form of an Amazon review.