A Dying Message Justification List

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.

1. The victim left an unconventional dying message because they were not in position to say or write the culprit’s name.
   1.1. The victim lacks knowledge (e.g. the victim doesn’t know the culprit’s name, or forgot it)
   1.2. The victim lacks time
   1.3. The victim is incapable of communicating in a conventional manner (e.g. the victim is mute or illiterate)
   1.4. The victim lacks resources (e.g. they have no writing material at hand)
   1.5 The victim is unable to leave a straightforward message because they don’t want the culprit to know that they left it.
   1.5.1. The victim doesn’t want the culprit to destroy or alter the dying message.
   1.5.2. The victim is afraid of what the culprit might do if they are unable to destroy or alter the dying message.
   1.6. The victim leaves a dying message for religious/cultural reasons (e.g. it is a taboo for the culprit’s name to be spoken or written)
   1.7. The victim can’t leave a straightforward dying message for psychological or emotional reasons (e.g trauma stops them from saying the culprit’s name)
   1.8. The culprit’s name is difficult to spell or pronounce, or they don’t have a name at all.
   
2. The victim did not leave a cryptic dying message
   2.1. A straightforward dying message is misinterpreted
   2.1.1. The victim didn’t realize that their words or actions would be interpreted as a dying message
   2.1.2. The culprit’s name doesn’t sound or look like a name, but is misinterpreted as such
   2.1.3. The person named by the victim couldn’t have committed the crime and the investigators, mistakenly believing that the victim knows this, assume the dying message is not meant to be taken literally.
   2.2. The victim did not leave any dying message, but a sound, object, or piece of writing present for unrelated reasons at the crime scene is misinterpreted as a dying message by the investigators.
   2.3. The victim thought they were playing the part of the victim in a murder game/film and are killed for real after leaving the pretend message.
   
3. The victim left an unconventional dying message because they wanted to prevent ambiguity
   3.1. The victim’s name looks or sounds like someone else’s. Or would if it were expressed with the victim’s limited resources.
   3.2. The victim knows that a straightforward dying message would be misinterpreted, so they leave an unconventional dying message which has an unambiguous meaning once interpreted correctly.
   
4. The dying message is cryptic because the crime scene has been altered.
   4.1. The dying message was faked by someone else.
   4.2. A genuine dying message was altered by someone else.
   4.3. A genuine dying message was altered by the environment or by accident.
   
5. The dying message is cryptic because it’s not about the culprit’s identity.
   5.1. The victim deems that what’s at issue is not the culprit’s identity, but the circumstances behind the crime.
   5.2. The dying message would not be believed unless the investigators were to be provided with extra information. The victim then attempts to deliver the extra information and the culprit’s identity with their limited time/resources.
   
6. The victim left a dying message for the sake of leaving a dying message.
   6.1. The victim has a weird sense of humour.
   6.2. Artistic reasons. (the victim wanted to make their own death more dramatic)
   6.3. The victim is the culprit (faked own death/committed suicide) and wants to divert attention from themself.
   6.4. The victim doesn’t want to leave a dying message, but has to. (e.g. The victim doesn’t want the culprit to be incriminated, and doesn’t want to incriminate an innocent person. But the victim is attacked under circumstances where, if the victim were to say nothing, everyone would suspect the right person. So the victim leaves an undecipherable dying message.)
   
7. Conditional dying messages: the dying message is intentionally set up by the victim so that it can only be correctly interpreted under certain circumstances or at a specific time.
   7.1. The dying message can only be correctly interpreted if something they are unsure about turns out to be the case. (e.g. they want to protect the culprit, but if during the investigation the culprit turns out to be behind another specific crime from the past, the victim wants the culprit to be implicated in the victim’s case as well.)
   7.2. The dying message can only be correctly interpreted once something happens (e.g. the culprit has taken a hostage, and the victim only wants the culprit’s identity to be revealed once the hostage is no longer in danger)