WHEN A MYSTERY WRITER CAN’T FACE MURDER, by Mollie Hunt, Cat Writer

Bank Robber Aiming at Security Camera, Cleveland, Ohio, March 8, 1975, on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition “Crime Stories: Photography and Foul Play,”

Whether you write cozies, thrillers, police procedurals, or suspense, the plot of a mystery most often revolves around murder. Suspicious death is endlessly fascinating to our readers, and therefore to us as well. Grisly and graphic or gentle and off-stage, it’s people killing people that makes a good story. Right?

But what if murder suddenly comes too close to home? A while back I was working on a cozy mystery in which someone was murdered in a small, coastal town. Then it happened— a friend was killed near our beach house in Ocean Park Washington. Suddenly I couldn’t face the words I’d so callously scribbled on the page. Suddenly murder wasn’t fun anymore.

Thankfully I came out of it after some time and went on to write many more stories involving violent crime. But that experience taught me to be gentle. I will never know how my writing affects my readers. They may be suffering in ways I cannot guess. 

When my last mystery was published, I requested a review from a well-known reviewer. She was happy to comply, but she asked first if there were any references to suicide in my book. Her son had killed himself, and this was someplace she didn’t want to go, even in fiction. I was thankful she could be so candid about her trigger.

Recently more and more bloggers are posting “trigger warnings” at the top of their posts so people with various issues know before they read that the content may be disturbing. I love this. I’m reasonably tough when it comes to reading material, but I appreciate knowing if the post will contain anxiety, rape, violence, harming of animals, or such so I can make the choice whether I’m up to it or not.

I write both cozy mysteries and sci-fantasy. Either way, I want my stories to make people happy in spite of their morbid theme. In a cozy mystery, the crime is a puzzle for the reader to solve while enjoying interesting characters, attractive scenery, and a few mild chills along the way. In my cat sci-fantasy, I shake it up a bit, but I still wish to leave the reader with a sense of hope. Other writers write other stories for other readers. For example, Stephen King made his millions pushing the horror envelope. But no matter what you write, be thoughtful. I still see no excuse for killing the pet.