A Public Service Message

Writers Beware! Be careful what you google. I heard a report today of a man who'd been murdered with a bullet to the head, then dismembered and loaded into three suitcases, which were then tossed into Chesapeake Bay. Police have taken his wife into custody as the primary suspect. Apparently, they obtained her work computer history and found that ten days before the murder she had googled "How to Commit a Murder." They also found searches for "fast-acting poisons" and local "gun laws."

It occurred to me that as a writer I have googled some pretty suspicious stuff, "fast and slow-acting poisons, Strychnine, chloral hydrate, weapons of all sorts, corpse beetles, bombs, concealed gun laws, pressure points, blood volume in the human body, etc., etc. Hopefully, no one of my acquaintence will disappear under mysterious circumstances or I might find myself hoist by the petard of my own computer search history.

And now of course I'm wondering, how suspicious are you?

Sympathy for a Killer

It's hard for me to read a novel-length work about a main character that I don't like. I want to root for the main hero/protagonist in a book. I want to feel that I'm on the side of right against the side of wrong.

I also find it hard to write a protagonist who I don't like. (C. S. Harris said much the same thing on her blog recently.) Why is this a problem? Because I know that first impressions are as big in novels as they are in real life, and I worry that the protagonist in a piece I'm working on now will make a bad first impression. I like him myself, but I wonder if a reader, not knowing him as I do, would toss the book aside before giving him a chance. You see, he murders someone in the first few pages of the book. He murders them brutally after making them dig their own grave.

I wonder, could you read on about such a character? If so, what would it take to keep you reading? What would it take to make you forgive such a murder? Could you forgive it?