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Unusual murder weapons in crime fiction

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In the Breaking Bad episode "Salud" several people drink poisoned liquor, including the poisoner. The poisoner survives because he induces vomiting soon after drinking and has medical resources prepared to treat him afterward. That wasn't what I expected.

I actually expected the poisoner to have taken prophylactic naloxone and served liquor poisoned with a potent, short-half-life opioid like sufentanil. It could kill his enemies directly via respiratory depression or just render them unconscious so he could drag them all into the swimming pool to drown. This would be the modern version of the old murder mystery trick "poisoner gradually builds up his tolerance to arsenic from small doses, then consumes arsenic-poisoned food/drink along with the victim." It would have the advantage of not being as hazardous or laborious as building up a tolerance for arsenic. It would also have been a clever chemistry based approach to murder in a series that often showed off some bit of chemistry.

I don't know if this naloxone/opioid poisoning trick has been used in other shows or published works. A quick search for "murder" "mystery" "naloxone" didn't turn up anything likely.

> poisoner gradually builds up his tolerance to arsenic from small doses, then consumes arsenic-poisoned food/drink along with the victim

Probably most famously in "The Princess Bride" (not arsenic, though).

Probably not, at least as a proportion of the population, given that by the 1930s the entire reading public of the USA and UK knew about arsenic eaters. Probably most famously in Strong Poison by Dorothy L. Sayers (1930)[0].

Also taught in schools across the British Empire in the early 1900s would have been the stories of King Mithridates[1], or of the Arsenic eaters of Styria (see this 1869 Scientific American Article [2]).

0: https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2017/may/09/chilean...

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mithridates_VI#Mithridates'_an...

2: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-arsenic-eater...

Isn't it sad that an article written in the 1860d contains more interesting content and actual data than even the average article or op ed price today?

Regardless, that was a very interesting read!

That's just survivor bias.

> (not arsenic, though)

Iocaine. I bet my life on it!

He also took charcoal tablets. No idea if that would actually make a difference.

> It would also have been a clever chemistry based approach to murder in a series that often showed off some bit of chemistry.

It wasn't Walter White doing the poisoning. The character whose plan it was was not a chemist; it would be out of character for him to solve his problems with esoteric chemistry.

The character does know drugs well (wouldn't this be more drug knowledge than chemistry?) and interacts with at least two ~trusted chemists regularly. He'd also have many available people to ask for help, including a medical doctor who is definitely in on the plan.

If I had to guess, it probably just worked out better in terms of story and visuals the way it was done. (going from memory, take with salt): the scene with him vomiting up the poison was a nice quirky/mystereous start to the reveal, and having to rush him to medical assistance both added suspense and gave a reason that Mike could be wounded (to add realism) and be treated by the doctor (to not lose the character).

Seems a bit odd that that didn’t turn anything up, since naloxone was a fairly key element in the excellent, and very recent murder mystery Knives Out

> Basically, it’s stabbing, throat-cutting, strangling, shooting, drowning, burning alive (yike), asphyxiating, pushing off a high building, or bonking on the head.

Weird the author forgot poisoning.

Lately one of my luddite friends keeps mentioning how computers will soon kill us all. Perhaps to add to his torment, I like to retort that computers won't need to kill us, they'll just need to convince us to kill ourselves.

Certainly there are many ways to affect that outcome via social media. I wonder what other tools the deepfake future will provide? Stealing the voice of a dead loved one could be used to great affect to push a troubled soul over the edge.

This being HN, I'm sure we could come up with quite a list of devious mechanisms. I am reminded of the two morons who planned to use x-rays to terrorize innocents: https://www.cnn.com/2013/06/19/justice/new-york-terror-charg...

There are loads of murder methods the author hasn't thought of.

Just off the top of my head, you could have murder by: g-forces, laser (James Bond), removal of medicine, excitement to heart attack, introduction of disease, cannibalism, wood chipper, exsanguination, leaving no choice but suicide, freezing, and, in the case of one famous King of England, a red hot poker up the rear end. I'm sure I've read all of these at some time in one book or another.

I recently read a book where the killer convinces victims (via hypnosis) to swallow their tongue, which blocks the airway and suffocates them.

Decades ago, there was an episode of Hawaii-50 where the killer used bullets made of ice, so there was no evidence to work with.

> bullets made of ice

This was one of the topics on the very first episode of Mythbusters:

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6pcm0l

If you wanted to kill someone with a bullet made of ice, or, IMHO even cooler, dry ice, you'd forgo a conventional cartridge, which would contaminate the scene with gunpowder anyway.

You'd use something like compressed air. You can reduce the instantaneous pressure delivered to the projectile which helps fix the melting problem. You'd want to chill the barrel a bit, but some melting might be good there as long as the water doesn't refreeze in the barrel and stop successive rounds. Basically you're making a potato cannon that shoots ice.

Bonus for freezing the water/co2 out of the air itself. You wouldn't even need to carry ammo.

"Do you expect me to talk?!?!?"

"No, Mr. Bond - I expect you to die."

Classic stuff.

I recall a story from a 1970's anthology where the victim was injected with a harmless clear liquid. Of course he was checked out by doctors - who found no negative affects. He then went home and the family Alsatian (German Shepherd) killed him because his body scent had been changed.

> Certainly there are many ways to affect that outcome via social media

It's mildly amusing that you're clearly erudite enough to know about that rare usage, but still managed to typo it :)

(I'm not gloating or belittling - typoes affect the best of us!)

I don't see any typos in his post...?

In the sentence, the outcome of a murder is being put into effect, rather than the outcome is being altered or affected.

affect: to influence (someone or something)

effect: to cause to come into being

I can't find anything definitively stating "affect" to be incorrect and "effect" to be correct in this instance. I say they're interchangeable in this context.

Sorry, I edited my earlier outcome for clarity.

Here is the context again:

> Lately one of my luddite friends keeps mentioning how computers will soon kill us all. Perhaps to add to his torment, I like to retort that computers won't need to kill us, they'll just need to convince us to kill ourselves.

> Certainly there are many ways to affect that outcome via social media. I wonder what other tools the deepfake future will provide? Stealing the voice of a dead loved one could be used to great affect to push a troubled soul over the edge.

Anyway, are we talking about changing the death from being caused explicitly by computers to users being motivated by computers to kill themselves? I think the comment is instead talking about there being myriad ways computers could manipulate their users into killing themselves. It depends on the predicate of "that", but one construction seems more consistent.

Shouldn't the second "affect" also be "effect"?

It's somewhat ambiguous, but after rereading I agree that effect is probably more appropriate.

Effect is the right word, both times (once as verb and the second time as a noun).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20375233

> I say they're interchangeable in this context.

How can they be interchangeable when they mean radically different things?

Both sentences might be valid, and we might have no way to determine which one was meant, but the two are clearly not interchangeable.

Apologies. I generally think of affect as a verb and effect as a noun but that's not always the case. It sounded correct to me as I was typing it upon my porcelain writing chair.

No apologies necessary - like I said, typoes get the best of us, and their presence is no cause for shame.

Mandatory xkcd;

https://xkcd.com/326/

>> The public was never in any danger, the source said. The device created by the defendants was deemed inoperable and not a threat to the public.

Yet one of them got 30 years and the other one got off lightly with 8 because he pleaded guilty [1].

That sounds disproportionate to me. Reading a few more news items about the case, it seems the man who got the 30 years was clearly coockoo but despite his occupation ("industrial engineer") didn't have the means to produce a "weapon of mass destruction" (he was convicted under a law targeting "dirty bombs" [2]). I find his lawyer's defense that he (and his co-defendant) was entrapped by the FBI plausible.

In any case, is it really illegal to work out elaborate ways to kill people? Can you go to prison just because you have an overactive imagination? Or because you are really a bit of a cunt and don't care about other peoples' lives, or you hate a particular group of people, even though you've never actually harmed anyone?

Do we put people in prison just for talking shit?

_________

[1] https://www.foxnews.com/us/new-york-man-gets-30-years-in-pri...

[2] https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/new-york-man-gets-30-years-in-p...

Yes, poisoning was on my mind too. It reminded me of a dark & clever short story I read a long time ago, but cannot remember the author or title.

Setting: America circa early/mid 19th century (maybe late 18th?)

Plot (warning, spoilers): A timid shopkeeper is regularly bullied by the town drunk. The shopkeeper hires the drunk, who continues to abuse him, and now starts stealing from him too.

The shopkeeper sends him on an errand to pick up some goods from another town. The next day the bully is found dead, some distance down the road, still in the carriage he was driving.

The twist: Among the goods being shipped was a large quantity of wood alcohol (isopropyl for you nerds). In those days, wood alcohol was sold in small barrels, but for this large amount, the barrel is the same size used for grain alcohol. The bully had started drinking on his way back and, being illiterate, drank the wood alcohol thinking it was booze and killed himself.

Does anyone remember the author or title of this story?

>The twist: Among the goods being shipped was a large quantity of wood alcohol (isopropyl for you nerds).

Chemist-nerd here. Wood alcohol is methanol, not isopropanol. It is considerably more toxic.

Thanks, that makes more sense for the story.

After much searching, I found it— the story is “Bargain” by A. B. Guthrie. Originally published in 1952 as “Bargain at Moon Dance”.

I found this reprint of the original: https://classic.esquire.com/article/1952/10/1/bargain-at-moo...

Still a creepy story after all these years.

Many of those listed seem to have been picked for their offbeatness, serving dark humour.

My own favourite is Anton Chigurh's captive bolt stunner (No Country For Old Men - Cormac Mcarthy), which seems more chilling for the brazen way he carries it round as though it's the most natural killing implement in the world.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18ty16dd41I

(Warning: As you might expect - contains violence).

Considering the scale of beef consumption, it might be!

Fitting, since Chigurh views most people as no more than cattle - just going with the flow, no guiding principles - while he rigidly adheres to a chosen set of values to the death. The Partially Examined Life podcast did a great episode on this book: https://partiallyexaminedlife.com/product/ep-63-existentiali...

When they Cry (Higurashi no Naku Koro ni) has a very intriguing crime weapon at the center of its mystery: a weaponized virus / biological weapon.

As a biological weapon, it causes death but under a most unusual manner: the victim believes that worms are crawling under their skin around their throat, so all victims claw at their own throat until they die. Other symptoms include paranoia, distrust, high levels of stress, and outbursts of violence.

Without giving away the "whodunit", it suffices to say that the villain takes advantage of the symptoms to accomplish the villain's goals.

---------

A virus that affects the brain, and causes a predictable change of behavior makes for a most interesting "murder weapon". With some careful planning, the villain is able to have some cause-and-effect, the paranoia / violent outbursts of the villain's victims was used to make the villain's conspiracy deeper and more mysterious.

Its not like the villain can read minds: but knowing that a victim will slowly grow more paranoid and violent as time goes on is sufficient for the masterminded plan to be carried out.

As such, it was insufficient to solve "the murder" of the story. To find the mastermind, you had to understand the meta-weapon. Yes, X killed Y in the local landfill, but X wasn't the mastermind... just another victim to the paranoia that the mastermind infected upon X.

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An unusual crime weapon is most needed for a mystery. By making something unusual, it provides a dramatic promise to the reader that the story is worth following.

By the way, if you want a really good paranormal murder mystery I can't recommend Pale enough: https://palewebserial.wordpress.com/about/

“Something terrible happened, of a scale that words cannot easily convey. We need you to look into it. No need to solve it. Simply… look into it.”

It's by the author of Worm.

More precisely, it is in the Pact universe.

For some reason I love Worm but dropped Pact after reading a third of it. Maybe I just don't like the paranormal horror genre compared to super heros.

Pact is Wildbow's least favorite work to recommend since he thinks life issues made him a worse writer at the time. Pale so far is the work he's happiest to recommend of all of them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Billiard_Ball

I am ashamed as an Asimov fan I forgot this. I think the downvotes are because you did not explain the clever methodology of the kill in your post.

I recall a story that used fish hooks, swallowed in pills that were supposedly medicine for stomach pains. There was a huge electromagnet under the bed that would be pulsed sometimes, yanking on all the fish hooks.

I really liked the anaphylactic shock induced by putting rabbit hair into the car ventilation system of the highly allergic victim in the Midsomer Murders episode "Red in Tooth & Claw".

Midsomer Murders also feature wine bottles launched from a catapult.

An interesting murder weapon could be ads. Psychologically torture the person by making certain ads follow them everywhere until they give up and commit suicide.

The funny thing is my mind went exactly to that lamb leg they pictured!

Yours and that of every single person (writer's italics) whom the writer interviewed for this piece.

I did wonder how all of the writer's friends are well read enough to know Dahl's short stories, but uncultured or at least dry enough not to recognize what goes in a jeroboam. That's a small intersection.

The funny thing is that it is my idea as well. I don't remember reading that short story or any adaptation of it, and I even had to look up who Dahl was.

But I knew about the story of the murder with a frozen piece of meat (didn't remember it was lamb) that got served to the police afterwards. I guess it is one of these ideas that just stick around.

Note, I am French, so I may not know who Dahl is, but I definitely know what a jeroboam is ;)

"Rosebud." https://columbophile.com/2020/01/12/episode-review-columbo-h...

Ha! Just watched that episode a few days ago.

I think a more HN oriented Columbo murder was the high-tech, computerized phonograph...

"The Bye-Bye Sky High I.Q. Murder Case"

https://stereonomono.blogspot.com/2010/10/adc-accutrac-4000....

https://columbophile.com/2019/10/27/episode-review-columbo-t...

I'd add: induced epileptic seizure. Don't know if it was ever explored in fiction (or in reality, for that matter), but IIRC you can trigger epileptic seizures by flashing lights at the right frequency (5-30 Hz). In the world with ever-growing number of Internet-connected high-intensity advertising screens in public spaces, I expect that eventually someone will try this on people.

Fiction-wise, Change Agent had murder by bioweapons, carried out by an individual who had a certain (and plausible) immunity to all known pathogens.

BLIT has something along these lines, not exactly flashing lights but similar:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLIT_(short_story)

I like the idea of using harmonics to kill a person. Finding the harmonic frequency of the person's bones and using a sound wave to shatter them.

Does anyone know if this is plausible method?

I vaguely remember reading an anecdote once, in which infrasounds at the resonant frequency for chicken skulls killed a farm full of chickens; I remember reading it in... old Borland C++ IDE for DOS, of all places. I think that may have been in the documentation of a sound(...) function for controlling the frequency of the PC speaker.

This was a fun rabbit hole:

- http://bbs.idefix.net/textfiles/7hz

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11189688

Thanks for finding the reference!

Nice read for Friday night. Now, where's my biro (http://bhscsi.blogspot.com/2009/02/lieden-ballpoint-murder-c..., or https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balpenmoord if you can read Dutch)?

A fun one is actually cyanide, which is naturally in the stone (the pit) of apricots. If you dry and powder apricot pits, you'll get mild arsenic poisoning. If you eat enough of it, you will die.

The author favors murders in libraries ... that hits a bit too close to home - https://www.collegian.psu.edu/news/campus/article_b6280ed6-1.... I was only 5 at the time but lived a mere 4 blocks from that library.

I always liked a short story I read in a women's magazine of the wife who killed the husband with fatty foods and heart desease.

I thought it was full proof until a famous socialite was accused of this.

Always wondered if they copied the story, or the police copied the story or ways to kill is a smaller space than you intuitively think.

One of the weirder murders was in “The Nine Tailors” by Dorothy L Sayers, featuring Lord Peter Wimsey and much church bell ringing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Tailors

Came here to say that. A distant runner-up would be the murder by rubber gun and scarab beetle figurine in Murder Must Advertise, same author, same Lord Peter Wimsey.

I'd like to put in a word for the modus operandi in Busman's Honeymoon!

Of course, I don't think that counts as a murder- nobody intended to kill the victim, and no single person's actions resulted in the victim's death.

Sayers also wrote a short story for Six Against the Yard, a collection in which crime writers described their "perfect murder" and a recently-retired Detective Superintendent described how he would have solved them. Sayers' "murder" was the only one which he said he couldn't have- because he can't be sure that a murder was, in fact, committed.

It may be an odd thing to pick up on, but I'm sure the concept of murder-by-exploding-cow didn't come from Savage Run. For one thing a character is murdered the same way in the fantasy novel Skavenslayer, published in 1999.

New Zealand makes great Sauvignon Blanc wine, and one of the most well-known brands is Cloudy Bay. Apparently it became famous after being used as a murder weapon in a (more famous at the time) mystery novel.

Personally, it's how the weapons are unusually used that stands out to me. Tokyo Zodiac Murders remains one of the finest bits of stage magic I've read.

Frame for murder - double murder!

Drive to suicide.

Apparent suicide.

Traffic accident.

Push off a mountain.

Fill the room with nitrogen.

an ice knife anyone?

https://youtu.be/D-5PAN7AVSw?t=3556

Curare-tipped darts made of ice.

Missing nukes

Honestly I didn't finish the article after the author's confusion about why "Lamb To The Slaughter" is so well known. It was adapted by Alfred Hitchcock for his TV show in the 1950s, an episode that often appears on top TV episode lists and is mentioned in the second sentence on the story's Wikipedia page.

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