Tag: realism

Rolled Carpet: Dead Body Not Included

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn death5 Comments

Several of us were “talking” on Facebook this morning about the fact we can’t see a rolled up carpet alongside the road without thinking there’s a dead body in it.

If any organized crime enforcers are reading this blog, I have a question: Do real killers roll bodies up in carpets?

If a cop or a nosy neighbor sees a couple of guys putting a roll of carpet in the trunk of a car at night, you’d think the scene would be a dead give-away.

This picture probably causes nightmares.
This picture probably causes nightmares.

Perhaps we’ve seen too much TV where bodies are lamely rolled up in carpets. A popular show last year showed a bunch of college students moving a body that way. Gosh, if that’s the disposal method of choice for students, just think about older people who’ve seen a thousand crime shows where carpets and the dead always went out in the trash together.

When I see ads for rolled up carpet, I expect a disclaimer at the bottom that says: Dead Body Not Included.

There must be a better way of removing the dead from our presence that doesn’t attract attention. The wood chipper in Fargo had possibilities until a lot of people saw the movie and assumed that if they heard a wood chipper at night, somebody was going to be reported missing in the morning.

The TV series Bones finds interesting (and usually gross) ways of disposing of bodies at the beginning of each show. They seem to like the “high yuck” factor to attract the disturbed segment of the population.

As an author, I speculate about this kind of thing for research purposes.  However, what with the feds spying on us, it’s become harder and harder to do Google searches like “How Can I Hide Uncle Ned’s Body” without some web crawler bot finding it and flagging the query at one of the alphabet soup agencies that claims it isn’t watching for key words like “body” and “rolled up carpet.”

We hear on TV and the Internet that cops think cop shows are unrealistic. They could help. All it would take would be a web page with information like this:

  • How to put granny on an ice floe without getting caught.
  • How to poison your husband/wife so that even Abby on NCIS won’t figure out how it happened.
  • How to dispose of a body without getting caught by the police.
  • How to successfully launder money, hire a hit man, move weapons around the country, and get away with running a numbers racket out of your kitchen.

Frankly, all of us would benefit from this kind of information: (a) authors would make books and screen plays more realistic, (b) readers/viewers would have higher quality entertainment, (c) kids would stop getting scared when they see rolls of carpet in the ditch because nobody would be using carpet improperly any more.

Those of us who have been scarred for life worrying about what’s in rolls of carpet would finally know that carpets are safe.  The country would save billions of dollars that go to therapists who are helping patients cope with this problem. (My guess is that most health insurance companies don’t over “Carpet Phobia.)

Personally, when I see a roll of carpet, I want to visualize how beautiful it will look in the living room rather than thinking, “hmm, I have seen Dad for a couple of days.”

–Malcolm

AtSeaBookCoverMalcolm R. Campbell is the author of “At Sea,” “Conjure Woman’s Cat,” “Sarabande,” and other books in which no dead guys have been rolled up in a carpet.

Amazon Author’s Page

The Writer’s Comfort Zone

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn authors, writers3 Comments
Robert Hays

Today’s guest post is by Robert Hays, author of four novels, including Blood on the Roses (Vanilla Heart, July 2011) and The Life and Death of Lizzie Morris (Vanilla Heart, January 2009). He has worked as a newspaper reporter, public relations writer, magazine editor, and university professor and administrator.

The Writer’s Comfort Zone

Most writers seem to do their best work when they stay within their own comfort zone. This may be through genre—once you’ve written a couple or romance novels, for example, or a murder mystery or two, you’re likely to begin a new work of that kind with a better idea of where you’re going with your story and have a good sense of its possibilities and  limitations. I don’t consider myself a genre writer, but after being a journalist for most of my adult life I’m definitely a realist. This means my comfort zone is in settings that will seem familiar to readers and characters that are like people I know. Further, my story line is likely to be based on actual experiences, either my own or those I’ve read about or heard about and can research for realistic detail.

I love Malcolm Campbell’s exotic fantasy novels, particularly since he uses my home region—central Illinois—as a setting. But I could never write what he writes. Or if I did no one would want to read it. I’m glad there are writers, like Malcolm, who are more creative than I.

Being a realist has its advantages. When I decide that I want to tell a story based on some past experience, I’m half way home. This was especially true in the case of my newest work, Blood on the Roses. During my last few years of teaching at the University of Illinois, I learned that students today—our best and brightest twenty-year-olds—have little knowledge of the history of racism in America. Perhaps they’ve heard about it in school, but they don’t really understand it or comprehend how bad it was. They have never experienced anything like it.

Understanding Our Past

I believe we need to know and understand our past. The bitter as well as the sweet, the ugly along with the beautiful. We need to know the wrongs if we are to make sure they don’t happen again.

Blood on the Roses is about racism and other prejudices. It is set in east Tennessee in 1955, which just happens to be the year before I was sent to the South by the U.S. Army and witnessed racial segregation as state policy for the first time. It also is the time of the Emmett Till murder in Mississippi and just months after the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed school segregation. I remember very well the “Impeach Earl Warren” billboards along major highways in  the South. This all became fodder for my mill, and the reader will understand that this is an authentic story of life at that time.

I love the South. I love Southern people. I’ve been married to one for decades, as a matter of fact. Blood on the Roses is not an indictment of Southern people or the Southern way of life. It is an indictment of racism as it existed then, and as it must never be allowed to exist again. And it is solidly grounded on my realistic journalist’s view of the world as I saw it.

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Visit Robert Hays’ blog site at http://authorroberthays.wordpress.com/ or his personal web site at http://home.comcast.net/~roberthayswriter/site/. You may also like his review of Kathryn Stockett’s bestselling novel “The Help.”