With 25 mysteries published (and another on the way), I'm constantly looking for new ways to do in my victims. I've used guns, gas, sharp blades,...
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... an explosion, strangling, carotid pressure, poisons, suffocation, drowning, falls...,
...being fallen upon (crushed by a stone angel monument), and common-or-garden blows to the head with a blunt instrument. I'm sure there are others I've forgotten.
I've never got around to electrocuting anyone, though electrical safeguards in the 1920s left something to be desired. And I've never used fire, simply because I find the idea altogether too gruesome.
Do the writers among those reading this have a favourite method of murder? Do you find yourselves trying to avoid a method you've used before? Is the method important to your story, or doesn't it matter much how your victim dies as long as he's good and dead?
For me, it varies. The stone angel was hugely symbolic (Styx and Stones). In The Bloody Tower, I used the layout and history of the Tower of London to dictate the method. In Fall of a Philanderer, it was alliteration as much as anything that made the Philanderer fall to his death!
