This week: But that wouldn’t happen in real life Edited by: Arakun the twisted raccoon  
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Quote for the week: "Whatever hysteria exists is inflamed by mystery, suspicion and secrecy. Hard and exact facts will cool it."
~Elia Kazan |
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Part of the fun of reading mysteries is trying to figure out what will happen next. In order to make it possible for the readers to do that, events must proceed in a realistic fashion. It is annoying to read mysteries where things happen that would not occur in a real life investigation.
I've read many mysteries where someone sneaks in to a suspect's home, finds an important piece of evidence, and brings it to the police. If anyone actually did this in real life, the police would not be able to use it. There would be no proof that it was ever in the suspect's possession. The police would have no way of knowing if the person bringing it in had really found it in the suspect's home or was just trying to frame the suspect.
Police officers themselves have to be very careful of the way they collect evidence. They need to make sure they document the chain of custody every time evidence changes hands to prove it was never contaminated or altered. Unless they believe someone is in immediate danger, they need to have a warrant to search a suspect's property without permission.
Another unbelievable event I've seen in mystery stories is members of the public entering a police station and either stealing a piece of evidence from a detective's desk or finding information on a police computer. Detectives don't just leave evidence lying around on their desks. It is kept under lock and key in an evidence locker where no members of the public are allowed. It would be very difficult for anyone who does not have official access to a police computer to open confidential files or even know where to look for them. This situation might be believable if your character was a skilled hacker, but they would still have difficulty getting enough time on the computer without being observed.
Characters in mysteries and thrillers also seem to run around hospitals doing whatever they want without attracting any attention. In one TV show I saw several years ago, a man went in to a hospital to kill a patient in the ICU. He put on a white lab coat and wandered down a long hall until he found the patient's room. The patient was unconscious and was receiving oxygen through a nasal canula tube. He turned on the TV to cover any noise, made a big dramatic show of cutting the oxygen tube, and slipped out of the room unnoticed. The patient immediately began gasping for air and went into cardiac arrest, but the nurses only realized something was wrong when they heard the TV in an unconscious patient's room.
There are almost too many things wrong with this scene to list. First of all, most modern ICUs are large, open areas with the nurse's station in the center and patient rooms around the outside. The rooms have plexiglass walls facing the nurse's station so anyone wandering in would be seen. Also, he could have just turned off the oxygen or removed the tube from the patient's nose, but I guess cutting it was more dramatic. Most patients who are only receiving oxygen through a canula are not in such bad shape that they would immediately stop breathing and go into cardiac arrest if the oxygen was removed. It would take a while before their oxygen levels dropped enough to have a really negative effect. And ICU patients are all on heart monitors. If the patient's heart rhythm changes or stops, alarms start going off immediately.
Your story doesn't have to read like a medical or legal encyclopedia, but make sure you do research on any events that you want to happen in your story to be sure they are realistic.
Something to try: Write a mystery story where the chain of custody of evidence is important. |
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Mystery: November 17, 2021 Issue [#11079]
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