My Christmas wish this year is for Santa to bring me a murder board.
Let me explain. I watch a lot of murder mysteries on television, including Netflix features like The Thursday Murder Club and series like Death in Paradise. Shows like these increasingly have one thing in common: murder boards.
Forget
stakeouts or messy confrontations. A good murder board is all that’s needed to
solve the case.
Murder boards
are a relatively new staple of detective shows. Columbo didn’t use one.
Neither did Jessica Fletcher in Murder She Wrote. That was their
loss.
What's necessary
Requirements
for a proper murder board include, first of all, a large bulletin board, with thumbtacks and a ball of red string.
Here’s what
happens: first the murder occurs and then, seemingly from out of nowhere, the
board appears in the detective’s office.
Soon the
detective is tacking up photos of the victim, suspects, and clues to the board. Even
small items, such as a ticket stub or a phone number scrawled on a napkin, may
get posted on the board.
As a side note,
I’ve noticed the photos on the board look better than you’d expect for a murder
investigation. It makes me think that the suspects knew what was coming and
decided to have a nice photo on hand for the board.
But my favorite part of a murder board show is the scene where the detective gets a flash of inspiration – from the board, or course – and figures out who did the dirty deed.
The suspects
are gathered, confronted with the evidence, and an accusation follows. The detective’s
reasoning is so complete, so exquisite, that the accused makes a full
confession on the spot without pausing to ask for a lawyer first.
Murder in my own backyard
Already I can think of lots of uses for my murder board. For example, just recently one of my cats managed to murder a bird while inside a screened-in patio.
It was a
classic locked room mystery. If I’d had a murder board I could've displayed
photos of the crime scene, along with photos of the feline suspects and the winged
victim, who was dragged through the cat flap and deposited on our bedroom rug.
For clues I
could have added incriminating paw prints, along with lots of feathers. And although
this baffling crime took longer to solve without a murder board, I finally
figured out the solution - who did it, why, and how.
“Who” was the older, more experienced of my two tabby cats, who already had a rap sheet filled with deadly rodent and bird assaults. (I eliminated the younger cat because I’ve watched her try to hunt bugs and it’s pathetic.)
“How” was by stretching
a lethal paw under the inch or so of clearance between the bottom of the catio
frame and patio and dragging the victim into her lair.
And of the
course, I had the motive, the “why.” The murderer was a cat, i.e. a trained
assassin, and her deadly instincts were all the motive she needed to kill.
Although I
didn’t get a formal confession, the perp (Zelda) was taken into custody, severely
reprimanded and temporarily deprived of her patio privileges. The inch-wide gap
was blocked.
Case closed.
Other uses
I can think of other uses for my murder board, too. It would be handy for tracking appointments
and solving household mysteries such as who put an empty box of cereal back in
the pantry or who used the last of the toilet paper without replacing the roll.
I can picture
my lovely new board sitting in the kitchen. We could call it “Mom’s Murder
Board.”
And no crime
in our house would ever go unsolved again.
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