Murder, Magnets and Hacks.

I am happy to introduce our latest SleuthSayer, filling in for Leigh who is single-handedly fighting off Hurricane Irma at the moment. 

Unlike all the other inmates of this asylum, Mary Fernando, MD, is not a professionally published mystery writer.  She was, however, a 2017 finalist for the Arthur Ellis Award for Best Unpublished Crime Novel (Canada). 

She is the first of what we hope will be a new class of SleuthSayer: the special consultant.

Mary will talk about medical mayhem.  She will also field questions from readers and writers about medicine as it relates to crime.  Please don't ask her about your rash.

We are still working at where her permanent slot in our monthly calendar will be, but this is a great chance for her to get started.  Let's give her a big SleuthSayers welcome!  - Robert Lopresti

by Mary Fernando

“Magnets are a simple way to kill someone,” he says, sipping his wine.

“How?” I ask, pen in hand, recording the conversation by scribbling illegibly in my notebook.

My Saturday night guest is a cardiologist. He opens up blocked heart vessels with stents, puts in new heart valves and uses defibrillators to bring people back from the brink of death. When my guest is not busy saving lives, he spends his time being a fabulous husband, a loving father to his children, a puppy-daddy extraordinaire and engaging in extreme sports. He is also a voracious reader of mystery novels, making him a wonderful combination of someone who saves lives and ponders how to kill people. Although I find this combination a delicious one, I am not sure everyone would share my opinion. So I am disguising my guest’s identity by a pseudonym, Mystery Cardiologist, or MC.

The illegible scribbles I use to record this conversation are the unfortunate side-effect of my own medical training.

Now, back to the magnets and murder.

MC understands that a writer wants to kill a character in a manner that doesn't draw attention to the fact that they are being murdered, and that the death should look, at first glance, like an accident or natural death. He also knows that it is always important to have a means of eventually discovering the murder.

“Using lifesaving devices like pacemakers to kill people is a great way to murder someone,” MC continues, nibbling on cheese. “Basically, these devices have failsafe mechanisms built into them and these can also be used to kill people.”

By the time he has finishes off his glass of wine, and eaten more cheese, he explains this in full.

A pacemaker is surgically inserted if the natural heart rhythm is not working. It keeps the heart going at the right pace, hence the name pacemaker. These electronic devices consist of a battery and computer circuitry inserted under the skin in the upper chest or shoulder with wires that extend into the heart. The pacemaker both detects the rhythm of the heart and, when the heart’s rhythm is wrong, it adjusts the heart rate by sending out signals to correct it. More that 3 million Americans have pacemakers. Generally they are inserted in older patients, over 65 years old. Less than 10% are inserted in those under 45. In older people, pacemakers are inserted when the heart rhythm is thrown off by aging or heart attacks. In young people, congenital heart disease or even unexplained slow heart rates are reasons for pacemaker insertion.

A means of turning off key functions of a pacemaker is needed, for example, in the event of surgery where electrosurgical cauterizing might confuse the pacemaker’s sensing system. So a magnet protects the pacemaker’s function when something could confuse its sensing system by going into a failsafe mode with often a very slow pacing heart rate.

So, back to killing with a magnet.

If a character needs to be killed and is dependent on a pacemaker, hold a magnet over their pacemaker, and when they are weakened by a slow heart beat, gently push them into an oncoming car or over a cliff. This creates an apparently accidental death. Sans screaming. This also has the added benefit of damaging the pacemaker, so the crime is covered because pacemaker function can be analyzed.

Now, when your detective comes in and starts questioning this death, they have a means of figuring it out. The pacemaker that the murderer thought would be damaged is, in fact, intact enough to be ‘interrogated’ - that means, the programming can be examined and it can be discovered that the heart rhythm was thrown off before the character’s death. Perhaps the magnet could be found in the murderer’s home.

MC explains there is another, more modern way to kill someone with a pacemaker that allows for murder from a long distance. A pacemaker needs to have a means of reprogramming it. This ability to reprogram a pacemaker makes it vulnerable to being hacked, that is, reprogrammed with a deadly rhythm. But if the pacemaker is hacked, you would want to remove the evidence of this hack, again by hacking the device while the victim is driving a car or climbing a mountain. The resulting accident would damage the evidence of the hack.

“Hospitals are a great place to kill people,” continues MC, popping a chocolate. “Sick people dying in hospitals are unlikely to be autopsied. Even if doctors ask for an autopsy, the family often says no.”

So, giving a character a pacemaker and using the failsafe mechanisms of the pacemaker to murder with magnets or hacking, provides an intriguing way to murder. The interrogation of the pacemaker provides the necessary means of discovering the crime.

This is just a snippet of my conversation with MC. He came up with other intriguing ways to murder people, many using failsafe mechanisms and, at times, using medical interventions to cover up a murder. I recorded it all in illegible scribbles, providing me with more info for my next blog.

Mystery #1: How to Balance Motherhood, Work, and Writing

Hi everyone, I want to tread lightly as we mourn the great writer and friend, BK Stevens. I'd written this post three years ago, and tucked it away for an emergency day that didn't come, although I came close many a time.

Sleuthsayers have been very kind to me, but I've struggled to balance my 'big three': medicine, writing, and my children. This summer, I realized it would be best for my family and my sanity if I gave someone else the opportunity.

Next month, you will meet Dr. Mary Fernando. I first met her through Capital Crime Writers, the Ottawa writers' association. Her first novel, An Absence of Empathy, was nominated for the Unhanged Arthur for Best Unpublished First Crime Novel, sponsored by Dundurn Press. In addition to her obvious talents as a physician and a writer, Mary likes to laugh, and I think you'll have fun together.

Shoot. Her face is cut off (perhaps fitting in a crime blog?), but that's Mary Fernando, me, a skull, and Elizabeth Hosang.

Best wishes, everyone. Perhaps it's fitting that my last column is about family. Yesterday, my eleven-year-old son, Max, turned toward me. "You said you weren't working in August."

"I said I wasn't working [at the hospital] as much. But that means I'm writing more. You know that."

"I hate your writing. I hate it. It takes you away from us."

So I'll work on getting our family back on track. Today, we watched the partial solar eclipse. Tonight was their last, despised swimming lesson. Tomorrow they'll revel at a barbecue before I start back at the hospital again.

See you online, and at Bouchercon in Toronto!
Cheers,
Melissa
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Original post:
When I was in med school and residency, I knew I wanted kids, but I had no idea how I’d make time for them AND emergency medicine AND writing. So I used to corner parent-writers at parties and say, “How do you do it?”

Dr. Ilsa Bick, a writer and a psychiatrist, said, “You have an advantage. You started writing young.”

“What does that have to do with anything?” I shook my head, genuinely confused. Writing in my twenties wouldn’t help me stay up all night with a colicky baby.

But now I see a few advantages, like before I procreated, I’d already written my million words of garbage, I’d published a handful of short stories and won a few awards (including Writers of the Future, where I met Ilsa), I’d written a few novels, and I’d perhaps most importantly, I’d learned iron-clad self discipline.

From the Kobo office. Cool place.

Still, since this spring, I’ve been wrestling with the question of how to become a more attentive mom.

Over the past two years, I’ve doubled my emergency room shifts per month. I still need to write. So motherhood was sliding on to the back burner. Now that my daughter has enough of an attention span longer than a few minutes, it’s all too easy to foist both kids off on the electronic babysitter (Netflix and/or YouTube).

So I tried a few different tactics.

I read about how other people prioritize their family life.

I wrote about balancing medicine and my family for the Medical Post.

And I started doing video diaries/vlogs (video blogs), walking my dog with my kids while talking about writing.

Last year, the fearless fantasy writer, Michael La Ronn, introduced me to #walkcasts. Those are podcasts you record while walking. Walking is a good idea for writers, who tend to be sedentary. And podcasts are fun, as you can hear on Michael's podcasts here. So I recorded ten of them, but I never got around to putting them in order, labeling them, etc.

On impulse, at the end of August, I started recording videos instead. Just a minute or two. Just long enough to say a few words about writing and show people the neighbourhood and our dog Roxy’s hind end as she trots in front of me.

I can’t say my videos are blowing up YouTube. My son Max laughed and said, “Why do you only have two views?” But you know, for once I’m not as worried how many likes or views I get. This is my way to combine two of the big loves of my life, and if the rest of the planet doesn’t see it, well, it’s probably just as well for my kids’ Internet privacy.

No matter what happens, or how many trolls give us the thumbs down, I will love my kids. And I will love writing. This feels like a win to me. It makes me more present if I’m recording my walks instead of just getting lost in my own thoughts.

If a young’un were to ask me now, “O Great and Wise Melissa, how do you do it?” I’d say supportive partner is priceless. A tight circle of family and friends will keep you afloat. But it takes ferocious will to make time for multiple serious interests. Do you let the kids weep for a few minutes while you finish your word quota for the day, or do you let the words slip away because kids come first? 

Medicine waits for no one. Are you willing to scale back your career now for the sake of your writing, or go all-out doctor and pick the pen back up in twenty years? You decide.

You can see how writing can easily drop off the to-do list. That’s why I encourage you to keep writing no matter what. Even one line, one word a day. Just keep at it, and it will add up to a song lyric, a poem, a short story, or a novel. Something beautiful for you, and maybe for the world.