{"id":766,"date":"2015-06-08T01:00:34","date_gmt":"2015-06-08T01:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/?p=766"},"modified":"2020-01-18T08:56:16","modified_gmt":"2020-01-18T13:56:16","slug":"when-motives-miss-by-a-mile","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/when-motives-miss-by-a-mile\/","title":{"rendered":"When Motives Miss by a Mile"},"content":{"rendered":"

I started reading crime fiction in high school: Agatha Christie, the Swedish writing team Maj Sj\u00f6wall and Per Wahl\u00f6\u00f6, John Creasey, and the comic work of Phoebe Atwood Taylor.\u00a0 I wasn’t great at solving puzzles, but I was always fascinated by what would actually drive someone to murder.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"phoebe<\/a><\/p>\n

That fascination took a different turn when I started reviewing crime fiction for The Detroit Free Press<\/em> in the 1990s and continued to do so for about a decade.\u00a0 Motive now wasn’t just something to study, it had to to be convincing, it had to fit perfectly into the entire clever construction of plot–or the carefully-built edifice buckled and sometimes even collapsed.\u00a0 Reading crime novels where the motive for murder or mayhem was weak made me determined to ensure that my own mysteries never fell short that way.<\/p>\n

And because I watch a lot of crime drama on TV and crime movies, I’m often thrown when a motive just doesn’t seem believable.\u00a0 Case in point.\u00a0 In a recent episode of Forever<\/em>, whose sleuth is a medical examiner, a ballerina’s foot was found at a theater.\u00a0 She was initially presumed dead until it was forensically determined that the foot had been surgically removed so as not to kill her.\u00a0 Weird, right?\u00a0 The suspects narrowed down quickly to her ex-surgeon brother and all the evidence was discovered in his home.<\/p>\n

But why?\u00a0 Jealousy?\u00a0 That didn’t add up.\u00a0 They’d escaped Cuba together so she could have a great career and she on the point of stardom, about to be dubbed a prima ballerina<\/a> (the show actually got this wrong, mistaking a prima ballerina assoluta for a prima ballerina)<\/p>\n

There’s a good chance in crime fiction that the “least likely” suspect is the one who did it, and when she was was found alive, I couldn’t imagine why she would have had her brother do it.\u00a0 But she did, and here’s the bogus motive the writers came up with: 1) she had a degenerative bone disease and 2) she had only a year to dance and so 3) she wanted to go out in glory and be remembered forever that way.<\/p>\n

I’ve known dancers and I thought this was ludicrous.\u00a0 What dancer would consent to having her foot cut off even if she wouldn’t be able to dance again?\u00a0 What person<\/em> would consent to such horrible mutilation and be left crippled for the rest of her life?\u00a0 Nothing about the character made her seem unhinged enough to do something so radical.<\/p>\n

Sometimes crime writers of all kinds try so hard to be original or surprising that they end up just coming off as ridiculous.\u00a0 This was one of those times.\u00a0 She was still able to dance and she could have danced with the title and then retired for whatever reason and remained legendary.\u00a0 Now she’s a legend in a freakish way (and is missing a foot!).\u00a0 Why would any dancer want to be remembered like that?<\/p>\n

Lev Raphael’s 25th book is the Michigan bestseller Assault With a Deadly Lie<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0 You can read about his other mysteries at his web site<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I started reading crime fiction in high school: Agatha Christie, the Swedish writing team Maj Sj\u00f6wall and Per Wahl\u00f6\u00f6, John Creasey, and the comic work of Phoebe Atwood Taylor.\u00a0 I wasn’t great at solving puzzles, but I was always fascinated by what would actually drive someone to murder. That fascination took a different turn when … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,208,2],"tags":[278,222,219,220,223,280,281,146,221,279,212,495],"class_list":["post-766","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tv-movies","category-tv-shows","category-writing","tag-agatha-christie","tag-ballet","tag-crime-fiction","tag-crime-writing","tag-dancers","tag-john-creasey","tag-maj-sjowall-and-per-wahloo","tag-movies","tag-murder-motives","tag-phoebe-atwood-taylor","tag-tv-shows","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/766","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=766"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/766\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5457,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/766\/revisions\/5457"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}