Some Musings on what your murderer should look like

What does a murderer look like? What kind of person thinks about killing someone else anyway? Well, other than people like me and those of you reading

this blog post.

In JEAN ROSTAND’S “Thoughts of a Biologist.” He wrote “Kill one man, and you are a murderer. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill them all,

and you are a god.”

The categories embodied in that quotation is a good starting point to think about when you set out to develop the character in your book destined to be the murderer. Someone who

kills for love, money, sex, custody of children or power would qualify as a murderer.

Those who kill in military settings are not murderers in the popular sense of the word. They’re soldiers in battle and killing is part of war.

Genocide, on the other hand, goes a step beyond military conflict into religious fanaticism and is likewise not murder per sey. It does, however qualify

as a crime against humanity and goes a long way towards proving that old saying: “there is nobody more dangerous than a religious fanatic with a large supply of munitions.” Just take a look at central Asia where suicide bombers think nothing of killing hundreds of innocent people in a bus station or on a train

for reasons known only to the fanatic who convinced the suicide bomber to kill him or her self and to take the innocent with them.

So, who exactly is the murderer in your book? Is he or she someone grinding an axe over an old or recent real, or perceived wrong done to them? Is this murderer avenging something that happened during a hitch in the military, be it a battle incident or something he or she learned later on that turned out to  be a terrible

wrong to someone? Did battle experiences impair his/her judgement in some way? How about the religiously motivated “God wants me to do this” type of murderer?

There are many variations to each of those categories. Many writers, myself among them, prefer to deal with the individual murderer who is killing because of one of the basics. Love, child custody, money, property, power or the rights to one of the foregoing. My reason for this is simple, most any average, otherwise law abiding citizen can genuinely be pushed into killing someone.

IT’s sad, but true. The criminal justice court systems across the modern world are jammed with crimes of this most basic variety.

Be realistic, anyone can be made nearly homicidal. Are you honestly going to tell me that you’ve never thought murderous thoughts about that snow plow driver who plows you in after you just spent 3 hours clearing your driveway?

So, what is the murderer in your story going to look like? Wild eyed and fanatical? An excitable, quick-tempered mid-level business manager? The quiet, respectable mother with the husband and 3 kids who came unhinged in a hard to see, moral sense and kills to protect her family from some perceived danger? How about a police officer taking the law into his or her own hands?

Then there’s that mass of “the unseen” murderers out there.

I mean those you run across every single day and just don’t “see.” You know the people I mean, the teller at the bank, the HR administrative assistant in your office, the clerk at the grocery store, the man or woman behind the meat or vegetable counter at the vegetable store or butcher’s shop, the physician’s assistant at your doctor’s office, the mechanic who fixed your car, that always smiling receptionist or that furniture salesman who didn’t convince you to buy that new recliner.

When you smiled politely at him or her and said “No thank you, I think I’ll wait to buy one another day.” Did you just push them over the edge and not know it?

When a character like that is well written into your story, the “unseen” murderer can end up making a reader so paranoid that even someone like Stephen King will sleep with the lights on for a few nights. The more realistic, daily-life type of murderer you come up with, the less sleep Stephen King is going

to get.

By the way, I restrict the characters in my books to humans. I’m just not capable of writing a murderous pet cat or dog into any story idea of mine. That’s Stephen

King’s genre and he’s the best at it.

I suggest that you stick with the real world and make your murderer one of the many unseen people you see every day.