Psycho Killers

I recently had cause to watch the DVD version of a P.D. James novel. I had been a big fan of P.D. James writings way back when I was a kid - some classic reads they were. Since those days of childhood book burns on my nose, I gave up mysteries. "Why?" you might ask. Go ahead, ask - I just wait over here until you are done talking to yourself.

I gave up mysteries because they weren't. It was always obvious who did it and why, within the first chapter. I believe I mentioned this before in other blog posts, for all of you who fell for the "go ahead and ask me why" trick in the previous paragraph.

Recently, I decided that I haven't hit my head into a wall enough recently, so I should give them a try again. I bought some Solar Pons books, but had to give up for the aforementioned "no real mystery" reason. Then I started watching the DVD versions of novels, and in doing so, I noticed something that I had never noticed before - the murderers are always psycho killers.

I read something the other day about WWII (ie World War 2) - something like 90% of the guns used during that war were never fired. 90% of the people who stormed the beaches died because they just couldn't shoot a fellow human. The idea of the article was that wars are actually fought by the small part of humanity that are actually psychotic - people who do not see their fellow humans as fellow humans.

Something else that I had read a long time ago also came into play: there is an easy way for the police to tell who committed a crime. If you accuse two people of a crime, one of whom actually did it, and lock them both up, only one of them will sleep that night. An innocent person will not sleep, because they worry that justice might not prevail or something to that effect. While the guilty person will have had been worrying about getting caught, and now that he/she has been caught, they can finally rest.

Putting this all together, the thing that bothered me about this P.D. James DVD was that there was a murder. The person who committed the murder was just trying to blackmail someone, but was found out, so he killed her. Throughout the entire movie, the guilty party was fun and friendly. He suffered no guilt from the murder, even though murder wasn't his original intent. He was basically a psychopath. That is when it struck me that all of the murder mysteries are about psychopaths - all of them seem to have the attributes of them rather than of a normal person who just committed a crime beyond their intent. Just because someone is willing to steal, does that mean that they would kill someone? Actually, no, but yet that always seems to be the plot in stories.

So, I now have another reason to stick with my previous No More Mysteries rule - not only do they give it away in chapter one, but they do not understand criminals who aren't psychotic.

The Edward

PS Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against psychotics - some of my favorite companies are run by them. But all of them in the books are of the pedestrian type. Where are the crime novels about people being beaten to death with a giant clown shoe? Poisoned with larks' vomit? Wrapped in springs and thrown off a roof to see if they bounce? Criminally Insane? More like Criminally Lame!