Chapter Five: The Four Motives

Why do people do bad things?

As a mystery writer, there’s one thing that’s very important to me: I want to write an ending that gives my reader a real jolt of surprise. And in my long and storied career as a mystery reader, I’ve observed that merely identifying one killer from a pool of likely candidates is rarely astonishing enough to deliver that jolt.

It feels a little like opening up the envelope at the end of a game of Clue and learning that it was Miss Scarlett this time. Yes, I’ve got more information. But have I really gained very much in my understanding of the characters? Have I had my preconceptions challenged? Have I experienced shock, followed by that wonderful feeling of amazed realization as my mind integrates the clues I’ve observed with the new reality that’s just been revealed?

Not so much. Fortunately, there are several of ways of delivering a healthy shock to your reader. And one of them is to keep the Villain's motive a secret up until the very end.

But we’ve got a problem, because at the same time as we’re trying to craft a surprising, unexpected, never-saw-that-coming motive, we also have to grapple with an important reality: there are really only a few reasons that real people kill. Almost all murders are committed for one of these four reasons:

• Love

• Money

• Power

• Fear

That’s it. These four primal motives make up the backbone of nearly every mystery novel you will ever read. That’s the key word, by the way: primal. We don’t kill for convenience, or out of a petty annoyance. We kill when our deepest needs and yearnings are on the line.

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Love

Love Murders deal with the primal human emotion of desire. The desire for love, but also the desire for sex, and the desire to be found desirable by another person.

To explore a few of the possible forms the love motive can take, let’s lay out a few characters: Regan and John, a power couple who seem to have the perfect marriage, and Maggie, the nanny they’ve just hired. Before long, a flirtation grows between Maggie and John—and then blossoms into a full-blown affair.

We now have a situation absolutely primed for a Love Murder—but who will murder who?