All through that night, and through the timeless time that followed that night, Ellery was inhabited by a ghost. The ghost had a dripping finger, and the finger kept redly writing over and over the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth letters of the alphabet. It covered every surface of the inner man with its cryptic symbols, until Ellery thought he must burst with its corruption.
And he failed to exorcise it.
– The Scarlet Letters by Ellery Queen
This is something I wrote months ago in response to a blog post at the To Solve A Mystery blog, but never published. It has been sitting on my desktop until now, and it’s probably incomplete, but I think some people might be interested, so I might as well post it and be done with it.
I have kept the general categories broadly the same in spirit as in post original post, rewriting them to be less specific and more comprehensive.
And if you are interested in dying message taxonomies, see also Arisugawa’s The Moai Island Puzzle for a one on the different forms a dying message can take.
Well then, without any further ado, here is a list of dying message justifications. For when you can’t fathom why the victim in the story you are writing (or solving!) wouldn’t just say or write the victim’s name.
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Reasoning Novels 