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Murder by Toaster
Mysteries With Surprisingly Lethal Weapons
Return to Fiction_L Booklists Menu
February 2003
Compiled by Molly Williams,
of Waterboro (ME) Public Library, from contributions by the members of Fiction_L.
(To use this list in your library, book club, etc., please include the following credit line: "Compiled by the subscribers of the Fiction_L mailing list." This list may not be used for commercial purposes.)
Mysteries, suspense novels, thrillers, and crime novels in which relatively or
usually harmless items are employed as effective murder weapons.
*** THIS LIST IS FULL OF SPOILERS, SO BEWARE! ***
- PETER ABRESCH Bloody Bonsai An Elderhostel Mystery (1998)
- An obnoxious busboy in a senior citizen elderhostel in Bold Harbor (north of Cape May) is found with a bonsai tree sticking out of his chest. He's just the first.
- DONNA ANDREWS Crouching Buzzard, Leaping Loon (2003)
- The practical joker in a software gaming company is strangled with a mouse cord while riding throughout the office on the automated mail cart. In the Meg Langslow series.
- GEORGE BAXT A Queer Kind of Death: An Inner Sanctum Mystery (1966)
- Murder-by-radio-tossed-into-bathtub. Ben Bently, a young actor/model, is found dead in this bath. Set
in Manhattan subculture. Features black, gay police detective Pharoah Love.
- GEORGE BAXT Swing Low, Sweet Harriet (1967)
- Murder (accident?)-by-radio-tossed-into-bathtub. Story: Four women rose to stardom in the Hollywood musicals of the
30s, but their careers were ruined with the murder of their producer, movie mogul Barclay Mill. 33 years later, Mill's unsolved murder crops up again when one of the women, making a come-back through television, hires Seth Piro to
ghost write her autobiography. Pharoah Love, a New York detective and Seth's friend, gets the impression that the murderer is alive and well and part of the Mill circle in Manhattan.
- LAWRENCE G. BLOCHMAN Murder Walks in Marble Halls
- Novelette in the collection CHAPTER AND HEARSE, ed. Marcia Muller and Bill Pronzini. The rod from a card catalog drawer is the weapon. Set in the New York Public Library. In The Saint Mystery Library No. 13 (1960), ed. Leslie Charteris.
- RHYS BOWEN Evans to Betsy (2002)
- A Constable Evans Mystery: Someone is killed in a locked steam room turned on to maximum. Plot: Constable Evans is looking into the death of the director of the Center for Celtic Spirituality in Wales.
- C. J. BOX Savage Run (2002)
- An environmental activist is done in by an exploding cow. Series features a game warden in Wyoming. Box's second Joe Pickett mystery.
- JOHN DICKSON CARR Terror's Dark Tower
- Story in which there's murder via gimmicked binoculars. In the collection THE DOOR TO DOOM AND OTHER DETECTIONS (1980).
- HELEN CHAPPELL Dead Duck (1997
- Judge Findlay S. Fish is killed with an expensive antique snow goose decoy. Features Chesapeake Bay (MD) reporter Hollis Ball.
- AGATHA CHRISTIE The Bird With the Broken Wing
- This short story in THE MYSTERIOUS MR QUIN (1930) employs a ukulele string as a murder weapon.
- BEVERLY CONNOR Dressed To Die (1998)
- A combustible (and mythological) substance called 'Dragon's Blood', made up of sulfur, quicklime, and bitumen, is used as a weapon.
- ROALD DAHL Lamb to the Slaughter(1953)
- Short story, first published in the September 1953 issue of Harper's, about a wife who kills her husband by battering him with a frozen leg of lamb, then later feeds the evidence to the investigating officers. Alfred Hitchcock's favourite Dahl story. In over 20 collections, including The Collected Short Stories of Roald Dahl (1992); Someone Like You (1969); and Lamb to the Slaughter and Other Stories (1995), along with 'The Bookseller,' 'The Butler,' 'Parson's Pleasure,' and 'A Piece of Cake.' Available online.
- ROALD DAHL The Way Up To Heaven
- A wife kills her husband by leaving him trapped in an elevator between floors in their house while she goes away on vacation. Available in the collections Kiss, Kiss and The Umbrella Man and Other Stories.
- JO DERESKE Miss Zukas and the Library Murders (1994)
- A librarian working at a library that is in the process of converting from a card catalogue to a computerized network becomes an amateur sleuth after discovering a body in the fiction stacks, a card catalog drawer rod through the victim's heart.
- TIM DORSEY Florida Roadkill (1999)
- About a crime spree through South Florida. A number of murders with everyday objects, including a man killed by a pair of women's designer jeans. She puts them on him while he's unconscious and leaves him in a bathtub. As they shrink, he slowly dies of lack of circulation. Other 'weapons' employed are a can of Fix-a-Flat and a rum enema.
- UMBERTO ECO The Name of the Rose (1984)
- Brother William of Baskerville is sent to investigate charges of heresy against Franciscan monks at a wealthy Italian
abbey but finds his mission overshadowed by seven bizarre murders. A monk poisons the pages of the scandalous book Poetics by Aristotle; when anyone licks his fingers to turn the pages, they ingest the poison.
- IAN FLEMING Goldfinger (1959)
- A woman is murdered by a full-body gilding of gold paint, which supposedly cut off air to the skin, causing death. Story: James Bond must stop the evil Goldfinger from robbing Fort Knox.
- DICK FRANCIS Comeback (1991)
- Mystery set in Tokyo, Miami, and Gloucestershire, England involving the cruel fates befalling racehorses. The killer uses an overdose of potassium chloride in i.v. bags to kill horses and a human.
- SARAH HOSKINS FROMMER Murder in C Major (1986)
- Murders befalls recent additions to Oliver, Indiana's orchestra, first to an oboe player and then the flutist. The first victim is killed with puffer fish poison.
- JAQUELINE GIRDNER Fat-Free and Fatal (1993)
- A "salad shooter" is used as the murder weapon. Kate Jasper, amateur sleuth in this series, takes a vegetarian cooking class and one of the student's is found choked to death by the salad shooter's electrical cord.
- CHARLES GOODRUM Dewey Decimated (1977)
- Someone removes the rod from an old card catalog drawer, stabs the victim with it, then replaces the rod.
- SUE GRAFTON B is for Burglar (1985)
- Kinsey MIllhone searches for a missing wealthy widow. A window sash or part of a window that had been pried out is
used to bludgeon someone to death, then put back in plain sight.
- H.F. HEARD A Taste for Honey (1941)
- A 'murder by bees' mystery featuring Mr. Mycroft as the detective -- meant to be Sherlock Holmes in his Sussex retirment.
- GEORGETTE HEYER Behold, Here's Poison (1936)
- A tube of toothpaste injected with nicotine kills two family members.
- DEAN JAMES Posted to Death
- A Simon Kirby-Jones Mystery (2002): The reformed vampire-turned-sleuth from the American South settles in an English village and investigates the murder of a mean-spirited postmistress. The villaness attempts to murder Our Hero (a vampire) with a garlic canape.
- STEPHEN KING Misery (1987)
- Horror novel about an author who is stalked and threatened by his 'Number 1 fan.' The author finally kills the retired nurse who has been holding him captive by crushing her skull with a manual typewriter.
- CHARLOTTE MACLEOD Rest You Merry (1978)
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- Nose drops poisoned with taxine from yew bushes prove fatal. Debut of Professor Peter Shandy of Balaclava Agricultural College in New England.
- MARGARET MARON Corpus Christmas (1989)
- A wealthy trustee to a small, private Manhattan museum is killed at the museum's Christmas party. Weapon is a walking stick from a museum display. Second in the Sigrid Harald series.
- MARGARET MARON Baby Doll Games (1995)
- NYPD homicide detective Sigrid Harald is outraged when a shadowy figure kills a dancer before an audience of horrified children. The dancer is thrown from a scaffold onto an iron fence during a performance. In the Sigrid Harald series.
- JAMES MELVILLE Sayonara, Sweet Amaryllis (1983)
- When Mrs. George Baldwin swoons in the midst of a madrigal at an exclusive cocktail party, everyone thinks she's drunk. But it's really the fugu (blowfish) poison that's taken effect. Inspector Tetsua Otani novel.
- JAMES MELVILLE Kimono For A Corpse (1987)
- A wealthy businessman is 'accidentally' killed by a falling chandelier that might have crushed anyone in the crowded room. Set in the international fashion world. Inspector Tetsua Otani novel.
- T.JEFFERSON PARKER Where Serpents Lie (1998)
- The murder weapon is a 31-foot-long, 545-pound anaconda. [OK, not normally thought of as harmless, but it is unusual!] Features Terry Naughton, a California sheriff's deputy who heads Orange County's crimes-against-children division.
- JULIE PARSONS The Courtship Gift (1999)
- The main character returns from work and finds her husband dead of anaphylactic shock brought on by a bee sting. Psychological thriller set in Dublin.
- MELVILLE DAVISSON POST The Doomdorf Mystery (1914)
- Story in which a victim is murdered by a shaft of sunlight. Features Uncle Abner as the detective. Apparently a similar idea is central to M. McDonnell Bodkin's 'Murder by Proxy' (1897).
- MARY REED and ERIC MAYER Three For A Letter (2001)
- A boy is murdered with a prototype artificial hand. This is the third in the John the Eunuch Byzantine historical mystery series
- MARY REED Cat's Paw (1988)
- Murder by cat -- the victim being strongly allergic to same -- is hinted at in this short story, collected in Mystery Cats (1991).
- DOROTHY SAYERS The Nine Tailors
- Changes Rung on an Old Theme in Two Short Touches and Two Full Peals (1934): Murder by change ringing (a form of church bell ringing).
- DOROTHY SAYERS Busman's Honeymoon
- A Love Story with Detective Interludes (1937): Murder with a hanging flowerpot.
- BRAM STOKER The Squaw (1893)
- Short story in which a man is murdered by Countess Elizabeth Bathory's infamous Iron Maiden. Story: An Indian spirit pursues a man to his eventual death in a medieval Nuremberg torture chamber. Stoker's most anthologised story.
- NANCY TESLER Shooting Stars and Other Deadly Things (1999)
- A Carrie Carlin mystery. A local philanthropist has been killed by a cyclist wielding an unusual murder weapon -- a stick and a star.
- TREVANIAN Shibumi (1979)
- A sharpened pencil is used as a lethal weapon, as is a drinking straw. Story: A massacre in Rome airport, involving the CIA, and the perfect assassin, Nicholai Hel, in Japan.
- NOREEN WALD Ghostwriter (1999)
- An autographed copy of The Godfather and a copy of Crime and Punishment are murder weapons.
- NATHAN WALPOW The Cactus Club Killings (1999)
- Murder by homicidal succulent Euphorbia abdelkuri (with its poisonous sap). A Joe Portugal mystery.
- MARY WELK A Deadly Little Christmas (1998)
- An exploding Christmas tree is a murder weapon. A Caroline Rhodes mystery.
- KATE WHITE If Looks Could Kill (2002)
- The protagonist, who is allergic to peanuts, is given a food with peanut butter in it, which almost kills her. Features Bailey Weggins, the single, thirty-something, true crime writer for a leading Manhattan woman's magazine.
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