This week we continue reminiscing about my high school days and tell the story of a murder mystery I wrote for a creative writing assignment during my junior year.

Hi, this is Chris Young. Welcome to episode 29 of Contemplating Life.

It’s been a busy week for me and I don’t have time to write a completely new episode from scratch. It’s already Friday and it takes me a day to record, edit, and upload everything by Sunday. But I do have a story to share that originally appeared in my blog and is relevant to our current series so I did a quick rewrite of that. I think you’ll enjoy it.

It was the second semester of my junior year at Northwest High School and my regular English teacher needed some time off for some reason. We had a substitute teacher named Mrs. Allen. When she wasn’t substitute teaching she was a professional writer. She claimed to have published several short stories and poetry.

I recall discussing with my friend Dennis what a wonderful teacher Mrs. Allen was. Several people had said they wish they could’ve had her full time but Dennis and I concluded that would be a shame because only one class at a time would have the benefit of her skills. By serving as a substitute, she could spread her joy around to more people.

Whenever Mrs. Allen came in for an extended period she would throw out the curriculum and give us a writing assignment.

This was the second time I had her as a substitute. In my sophomore year, my teacher got married and took a week off. That time we wrote her essays that were suggestions on married life. I wrote a humorous piece about how she should purchase fast food, take it out of the bags, put it on fancy plates, and serve it up as a gourmet meal. When she returned from her honeymoon and read the stories she had very nice things to say about my suggestions. She thought it was really funny.

I don’t recall why my teacher needed time off during my junior year. Our assignment this time was to write a short story. There’s an adage that says, “Write what you know.” So I decided to write a bit of science fiction. That was the majority of what I read those days and still is.

I stole the basic premise of the story. My dad had told me he had read a story or seen a movie somewhere where a guy got away with murder by stabbing someone with a sharpened icicle. The murder weapon had melted and evaporated leaving no trace of the weapon or fingerprints. I decided to steal that idea as the basis of my own little murder story.

Apparently, the idea is more common than I had thought it was in those days. I’ve done some Google searches today to attempt to identify the story my dad told me about all those years ago.

There is a murder mystery role-playing game called “The Icicle Twist” which I presume has something to do with stabbing someone with an icicle. IMDb has a keyword category of several films in which someone is stamped with an icicle but they are all more modern than what could have been the basis for my dad’s story. I’ve seen questions about a young adult novel from the 1980s which is obviously after I was in high school so that’s not the origin.

My best candidate is a 1925 story called “The Tea-Leaf” by Edgar Jepson and Robert Eustis. In that story, someone was stabbed with an icicle in a steam room. I seem to recall my dad telling me that in the story he read, the murderer was caught because they found traces of soot in the wound and somehow determined it had come from an icicle. That wasn’t the case in the Jepson/Eustis story.

I’ve linked that story and some other websites related to my research including some answers to Quora inquiries that suggest that it has actually happened. But then again, I’m not sure that someone replying to such a question is all that credible. There were no links to articles supporting the answer.

If anyone knows of similar stories either real or fiction, please send me a link. I’d like to know more about it.

After doing all this research, now I’m probably on someone’s watchlist for researching how to get away with the perfect murder. And so are you for listening to this podcast.

Much of my deep appreciation of the short story form comes from reading Edgar Allen Poe… Especially his classic short story “The Cask of Amontillado”. I’ve provided a link to the story in the description. The opening line is “The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as best I could, but when he ventured upon insult I vowed revenge.”

That’s the whole story in one sentence. Everything that follows is simply the details. It doesn’t explain who Fortunato was in any detail. It doesn’t say how he injured or insulted the narrator. It’s just the story of how he plotted and executed his revenge. He lured him into a basement wine cellar for a taste of Amontillado wine. Then he shoved him into an alcove, chained him to the wall, and sealed up the alcove with bricks burying him alive.

This shocking and brutal ending is what most people remember about the story. They even did a version of it in the classic horror soap opera Dark Shadows in episode 442 when Barnabas lures Reverend Trask into the basement and bricks him into an alcove. For me, the shocking ending wasn’t nearly as interesting as that opening sentence. To me, that’s the absolute essence and perfection of the short story form. You grab them with a catchy opening sentence and then end with a big surprise. That is what I wanted to go for.

So, back to my semi-plagiarized sci-fi murder mystery. We were going to commit the perfect murder by stabbing a guy with an icicle. This clearly had to be premeditated and well-planned in order to be a perfect murder. It’s not a crime of passion but rather a coldly calculated plot… emphasis on cold.

You have to get someone to a place where you have an icicle handy. You have to prepare it to a sharp point and keep it cold until you can do the deed.

While trying to craft my catchy opening sentence, I came up with the idea that committing the perfect murder was something that had been pursued ever since Cain slew Abel. Although I believe people are fundamentally good, there is always something inside us that tempts us to do violence against our perceived enemies. We’ve always been searching for the perfect murder. It’s one of those eternal quests like building a better mousetrap.

Wait a minute!

What did I just say?

My muse had spoken. I had my opening line. I had my hook that would tell the entire story in one sentence and draw you in to make you want to read more. I had my Amontillado-like opening line which would read as follows…

“Man has always had two great ambitions. To build a better mousetrap and to commit the perfect murder. I have accomplished the latter on the man who accomplished the former.”

That was my entire story in one sentence… well actually three… but certainly one short paragraph. Somebody will build the legendary better mousetrap. The only reason you would want to kill such a person is that somehow they cheated you out of the honor of building it yourself. So the perpetrator and victim were former business partners. The victim cheated his partner and that was the motive. The story is told in first-person by the murderer as a revenge story in the same way that Amontillado was told.

I already had my method to commit the perfect murder with the melting murder weapon. Now I had to build a better mousetrap. That’s where the science fiction elements come in. Our inventors used genetic engineering to create a virus that would be deadly to mice but harmless to any other species.

Apart from the big opening line, I also learned from Edgar Allen Poe the beauty and ingenuity of a plot twist. Something shocking at the end of the story that gives the reader something unexpected. You grab them in the beginning. You lead them on a journey. You have to end on a high note as well. I came up with that as well but I won’t spoil it.

When I originally wrote this up for my blog in November 2020, I couldn’t find my copy of the story, didn’t remember the name of it, and naturally did not remember the name of the teacher. You didn’t really think I could remember the name of a substitute teacher 50 years later, did you? Two months later, I found the original manuscript and posted that on my blog. I have linked a PDF copy of the scanned manuscript in my own handwriting complete with the teacher’s notes and all of her circling my spelling errors. You can also see it in the YouTube version of this podcast.

The version I present here is as it was written with the spelling and punctuation corrected.

I will now read you my short story which I wrote in my English VI class at Northwest High School, March 16, 1972. Then I’ll tell you about what happened afterward. This story is titled…

Man has always had two ambitions: to build a better mousetrap and to commit the perfect murder. I have done the latter to the man who did the former.

David Brown was my victim. He had been a friend and business partner for some time until he dumped me from the company two months ago. We were in the pesticide business and our main product was rat poison. Business had been slipping because of bad talk about pesticides polluting the environment. People would rather clean up the trash to get rid of the rats than buy our poison.

Then Dave came up with the answer. His formula affected only rats. It altered their chromosomes so that only male offspring were produced. In a generation, the rats would be extinct because there would be no females to reproduce. Dave put the product on the market the week after our partnership was legally dissolved. He had ruined me and I had to return the favor.

I once read a mystery story where a man was stabbed with a sharpened icicle. The 5urderer was never caught because no weapon was found; it melted away. The idea started out as just a wild notion, and I didn’t take myself seriously at first.

Then, just to pass time I started to work out details, but just to pass time. The longer I worked on my plan the more it appeared possible. Also as my plot started to gel; I grew more hateful each day toward my lost partner. I would look out my bedroom window and stare transfixed at the glistening spears growing downward from the eaves of my house.

Then I did it. On the night of December 30, I left my house and walked around the side, and carefully snapped off an icicle. As I walked towards my car, I chipped off pieces with my pocket knife till there was a clean sharp point. I left the heat off in my car so that the 10° weather would keep my weapon sharp. I knocked at the door with my icy weapon behind my back. Dave answered the door.

“Well, if it isn’t Bob Johnson my old partner. Come on in.”

I tried to stay calm, “I just wanted to let you know that I’ve decided I’ve been foolish about holding a grudge against you for putting me out of business.”

He smiled, “Well now, isn’t that sweet of you? Now, tell me why you’re really here.”

I slowly made my way over to him and patted him on the back. “Well, let me tell you about it.”

My arm swung around with every ounce of force in my body.

He dropped.

I pitched my icy weapon into the fireplace and left without closing the door. I drove down the street and went into a bar and got very drunk.

The police questioned me and never suspected me after I told them our partnership had been dissolved.

Three days later I attended the funeral. I was the last person to leave the church. As I walked out, I stopped on the top step to watch the hearse drive away. I reached back to pull my collar up to shield myself from the cold wind when a cold crystal clear icicle fell from the eaves of the church and slid down my back.

So there it is. My first great work of science fiction – written over 50 years ago. I hope you enjoyed it.

Mrs. Allen really liked the piece. She read several excerpts from some of the best stories in the class but she started with mine. She heaped praise upon the story especially focusing on the opening paragraph. She said to the class, “I’m going to read you this opening paragraph and I want you to guess which of your classmates wrote it.” She read the paragraph more than one of my classmates identified it as mine. I don’t know what it was about their opinion of me that led them to identify me but I couldn’t have been happier.

Then she pointed out that I had misspelled the word “always” with two Ls and looked at me and said, “You know better than that.” I didn’t have the heart to tell her I really didn’t. As you may recall from previous episodes I’m a terrible speller.

She concluded her review of my work by saying, “Know when to quit.” She thought that the news item at the end was unnecessary. I guess I wasn’t confident that the reader would know that the guy who killed someone with an icicle was killed by an icicle. I’ve tried to apply that advice about knowing when to quit when I write other stories but I think in essence she was saying trust your audience to get your point. That was the real lesson.

At the end of the semester, they give you a folder with all your homework in it so you can review your grades, but they want you to turn it back in so you can’t sell your term paper to someone next year. I kept my copy of the story and turned back the folder with everything else in it.

As I was reviewing the story just now, I probably would have rewritten a couple of sentences and fixed some other grammatical issues suggested by Grammarly. The two-month timeline in the story doesn’t make much sense. There are some other things that need fixing. In retrospect, I probably should have switched from first-person to third-person when I’m describing the icicle falling off the church.

Overall I think it’s pretty damn good for a 15-year-old author. I’m still quite proud of it over 50 years later.

Mrs. Allen’s written notes included, “Very clever story – good use of words, good introduction.” The grade was “A-”.

On the last page, she wrote, “I like the ‘irony of fate’ ending.” Then she attached a handwritten note as follows…

This is a great story! You have a natural knack for telling a tale. This one is suspenseful and well organized. Your sentences and phrases are well formed.

The “better mouse trap” gimmick is worth repeating or at least mentioning, a second time.

About the title – Why not “A Partnership Dissolves”, using of course, a play on the word “dissolved.”

As for myself, I prefer the story to end with – “… our partnership had been dissolved.”

Knowing when to quit is a neat trick to learn.

Many thanks for sharing your story. You have the potential for a “selling” author.

Mrs. Allen

I remembered her saying to me in person that I could’ve shortened the ending and repeated the comment “know when to quit.” But I seem to recall in person she simply suggested leaving off the news article and ending it with the icicle down the back. But her notes say that it should end after the police questioned me. On the other hand, she liked the ironic ending so that speaks to leaving at least the irony and perhaps cutting the news article.

Mrs. Allen encouraged me to continue writing fiction but I never did until a few years ago. I’ve already talked about my successes writing nonfiction but for a variety of reasons, I didn’t think I could write fiction despite her encouragement. Let’s be honest… I stole the plot from something my dad told me about something he had read. Just because I know how to tell a story doesn’t mean I know how to make one up.

At some point in future episodes, I will talk about my next attempt to write fiction which didn’t begin until August 2020. The short version of that story is that I’ve written 10 pieces in the past three years and I’ve collected over 15 rejection emails from magazines and websites.

As I’ve explained before, I’m currently enrolled in a writing seminar and I’ve written another story that grew out of that class. Again it is a somewhat science-fiction murder mystery. It doesn’t have quite as catchy an opening paragraph as “Cold Chills” but I still like it. It’s a much longer piece at just under 10,000. After I get some more feedback from friends and family I’ll start submitting it and hopefully, I can put an end to this streak of rejection letters. If not, I’ll simply have to wait for my muse to inspire me again. Until then, I’ll keep writing biographical nonfiction and other commentary.

Next week, I’ll discuss more events of my senior year. As I teased at the end of the previous episode upcoming topics include: the senior prom, another town hall meeting, and more stories about my mentor Mr. Irwin. I will go on actual dates with (spoiler redaction). And I’ll relive the joys and fears of graduation.

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I will see you next week as we continue contemplating life. Until then, fly safe.