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From: Jasper
Date: 10/18/03
Time: 11:13:02 PM
Remote Name: 68.73.207.167
Jean,
You are right about Murder mysteries being great “cookbooks” for real murders. The plot doesn’t matter as much as the limited possibilities involved and the real-world elements they must contain to be believable.
Someone is murdered or appears to have been murdered. Someone is accused of doing it. The accused is guilty or the accused was framed.
The writer builds the story from there through a god’s-eye view of the killing and the aftermath, from the killer’s point of view or from the perspective of other people – the accused, an accuser or a defender. Writers can let you in on who the killer is at any point, including a scene before the opening credits or leave you hanging till the end. They can tell some or all of the story through the eyes of the victim or make you guess who the victim is going to be.
A who done it, doesn’t have to be a WHO done it. It can be a HOW done it. The writer can tell you everything the killer did to make the murder look like an accident or a suicide or to throw suspicion for the murder onto someone else. The viewer’s job is to figure out what the killer did or didn’t do that will trip him up or allow him to succeed. If you’ve seen enough of these movies, you know that you can’t take anyone off your killer suspect list including the victim. It could be anybody the writer chooses.
Real investigators don't think like that. When they begin to hear theories of elaborate murder schemes they tune out, just the way they do in the movies. They match the evidence they have to a suspect, find that the suspect does not have a solid alibi and that’s the end of it. In most police homicide departments you don’t have brilliant detectives looking for that tiny bit of evidence that will tell them the truth. You have brilliant and not-so-brilliant detectives looking for evidence that will give the prosecutor a conviction.
If you know how the police and prosecutors think who will handle a particular case, you can learn everything else you need to know from the movies to get away with murder. --Jasper