Our Very Own DARE Thread

My first mystery story dealt with arson and computer fraud, not murder. That's too easy. Try this:

"The butler did it."

Double points if the victim isn't the butler's employer or part of his employer's family.

Triple points if whatever the butler did has nothing to do with the main mystery.

Oh, I'm stealing this one for my novel...

Anyway, here's a dare of my own:

I dare you to use a spoon as the murder-weapon.

Alright. I'll take the spoon.

I dare you to make the latin name of either an insect or a flowering plant (tree, shrub, whatever as long as it flowers) an important clue to solving the case.

Double points if it reveals part of the guilty party's name

Tripple points if its discovery leads to an unexpected plot twist

Quadruple points if you use the breed of louse (lice being the plural) whose latin name is derived from the author of "The Far Side" comics. You can find this in his 10th anniversary book.

"I dare you to make the Latin name of either an insect or a flowering plant (tree, shrub, whatever as long as it flowers) an important clue to solving the case.

Double points if it reveals part of the guilty party's name

Triple points if its discovery leads to an unexpected plot twist"
I'm taking this one- can't wait to look up Latin names....

Here's one-

Never introduce the police in the investigation.

Ooh, I'll take two!

Gale, yours I like. Especially as the working title of my book is "Twice Bitten, Once Dead."

And lizsh , yours as well. No police introduction.

This should be interesting....

All right, my dare: I dare you to make a paraplegic a central character.

Double points if he/she is not the victim, solver or criminal.

Triple points if he/she provides critical information that is misunderstood at first.

Quadruple points if he/she is the butler.

I like knzluna's dare..... I might have to try to do that in mine

I dare someone to.....

Make at least one of the detective/solver/a major character excluding the person who commited the crime have extreme scyhizophrenia

My book is more of a spy/thriller story, but there will be some mystery in it. (No matter what I do, it keeps creeping in, even in a fantasy-adventure novel.) Not having the police involved, except for my MC having to alibi an informant ("Round up the usual suspects." Yes, I'm going to use that exact line because I love putting references in.) is easy!

I like Caeraerie's dare. I am going to take it.

I would like to dare someone to make the solver of the crime a blind person.
Midge

I dare you to conceal a weapon other than poison inside food.
Double points if it is neither a gun nor a knife.
Triple points if it kills the wrong victim.

Alrighty! I love it when I haven't even started and dares get the juices flowing! I accept dares by midge and first_to_blink. I will have a blind detective AND a weapon concealed in food that is not a gun nor a knife nor poison. And I will even consider having the nasty thing kill the wrong victim as soon as I figure out who has to die.

Meanwhile, I DARE you to have a female detective conceal the murder weapon from the police.
Double points if the detective and her partner solve the case in one weekend during the policeman's ball.
Triple points if the partner of the detective is an animal (other than human). lol

Hope you have fun with these. -- Mama Q

taking sideburns's 'the butler did it' dare

i dare you to write a mystery that takes place in one day.
double points if it takes place in the same room.
triple points if it takes place in the same hour.
eternal glory if you can write 50.000 words about a mystery that technically only takes 15 minutes to solve.

2 points for each time a character dies.

Double points for a very dumb reason the character dies, like because they fell into a pond and couldn't come up because there were ducks all over the top.

Triple points for the main character to make the main character accidentally attract all the ducks there.

Quadruple points the main character discovers that the dead drowned character haunts a duck now.

Quintuple points the duck kills people and that's the reason the main character is a detective!

I dare you to use a spoon as the murder-weapon.

Dude. It's fairly obvious you ripped that off from my 2005 NaNovel.You know, Three-Ring Muder? Come on... the one with a detective named Darkside. Set in a jazz circus.

Okay, I kid, I kid. (Unless you actually did "borrow" it from Three-Ring, in which case I am very flattered.) Great minds think alike, after all! :)

I'm so taking the butler one. The spoon one is quite tempting too, but I did kill a character in last years NaNo with a spoon, so I'm not sure.

And I dare you to use a book as the murder weapon

double points if it's the bible

*peeks head in* I usually hang around the fantasy lounge, but my story DOES revolve around a detective trying to find and arrest a serial killer, so I think it counts as a mystery...

I dare you to make your mystery impossible for your MC(s) to solve. That's not to say that it can't BE solved--just that it's impossible for your main chars (whoever's doing the investigating or whatnot) to solve.

And yes, I'm doing that. *grins*

And...I dare you to use the line "the butler did it" to mean that the butler was the murder weapon.

I like Subieko's dare! Not so sure about the butler, but the idea of a human murder weapon. . . Hmmm . . . *ponders thoughtfully* Yes, that has promise!

I dare you to have a character who spontaneously offers definations of various words.

Double points if the words are ones that everyone knows the meaning of anyway.

Triple points if the definitions are usually subtly wrong.

Eternal glory if these subtly wrong definitions, taken together, turn out to be a clue essential to solving the mystery.

Hey, Subi! I'm doing a fantasy-mystery too. ^_^

My dare:
Insert yourself into your story - not as a major character, though, just a person who pops in and out.
+Bonus if you appear in every chapter
++Double bonus if everyone seems to know your name.

In a serious moment have the Lion Kings Circle of Life song start playing.
+ bonus points if someone sings along
++ extra points if everyone sings along
+++ triple points if no one turns the song off until it ends.
(this is inspired by real events, I had this happen during the weekend at a scout ceremony. was totally unplanned and some did sing along but it was turned off. SO they did not get triple points.)

Another dare.
Have some refer to the murder weapon as the "killing thingy"
+bonus points if its the villian
++double points if its a friend of the deceased
+++triple points if its law enforcement.
++++ quad points if this is what gives the villian away.

I like the Lion King one!

dares:

have a character say "i'm going to kill you with a ballpoint pen!" only to find out that that's really what happend.
bonus points if ball point pens don't exist in your world/time period
double bonus points if someone says "Nuh uh, can't be done."
triple bonus points if the person who threatened didn't actually do the killing.

Hiya, Twin! Hooray for fantasy-mysteries! ^__^

And the forum posts are displayed weirdly now...I gotta play around with my settings...

Oh--right. Dares. Errrrmmm...

I dare you to use a spork as the murder weapon (someone had to say it! *laughs*)
*bonus points if the victim is not stabbed with the spork

"Another dare.
Have some refer to the murder weapon as the "killing thingy"
+bonus points if its the villian
++double points if its a friend of the deceased
+++triple points if its law enforcement.
++++ quad points if this is what gives the villian away."
I want this one =] sounds like great fun!

and I'm leaving...

I dare you to have an animal or any species other than a human end up being the perp.
+bonus points if it is an animal that exists in this universe/on this planet.
++double bonus points if the animal is completely aware of its actions.
+++triple bonus points if the animal has an actual entirely plausible motive beyond that it is violent or prone to taking shiny things.
++++quadruple bonus points if it does not take place at a zoo, pet shop or other animal housing facility [it can take place in a private home where the animal was a pet, if it must.]

I would like to dare someone to make the solver of the crime a blind person.
Midge

I am stealing this one, I have another somewhere about a blind person, they should fit together well.

And leaving ...

I dare you to have at least a portion of your novel told from the villian's point of view.
+ bonus points - if you still manage to not reveal who the villian is to the readers
++ double bonus points - if your main characters clearly comes in contact with this person at least once, and does not recognize them
+++ triple bonus points - if your readers do not realize who the villian is when your MC meets him or her
++++ quadruple bonus points - you tell at least a fourth of the story from the villian's POV

First, a stupid one.

I dare you to make the culprit a mime.
BP if the mime never speaks.
DBP if nobody suspects the mime until the end.
TBP if nobody finds it weird that there's a mime at the crime scene in the first place.

Okay, a serious one now.

Make the main character turn out to be the villain.
BP if another detective, who was a minor character up until then, discovers it.
DBP if your main character was posing as a detective
TBP if, while acting as the detective, your character successfully pins the blame on someone else, and makes it believable.

*edits post* (Ah, double post. Sorry about that!)

oooh this will fit with my nano..I'll try to go for quadruple points too.

I dare you to have a character who spontaneously offers definations of various words.

Double points if the words are ones that everyone knows the meaning of anyway.

Triple points if the definitions are usually subtly wrong.

Eternal glory if these subtly wrong definitions, taken together, turn out to be a clue essential to solving the mystery.

--------------------this one has much promise too..I will use it.

Well, it's not told from her POV, since she doesn't HAVE one (a part of her mind is sort of...not there. Literally.), but one of my chars--the FMC--actually killed 9 of the people in the detectives' case. And she spends just about the whole story with the MC. And hopefully the readers won't realize till the end, because a huge part of the story is the MC figuring it out!

Okay, I can actually take that one, sortof... I already took the spoon for the main crime and I've got a clever way to do that. As for the animal, does it count if the animal is the perp of a secondary crime that is connected to the initial crime, even in a roundabout manner? I would think so. Mmm... convoluted plot.

Leaving:
I dare you to insert a 6 or 7-year-old child as a principal character in the book
+bonus points if the child points out an important clue
++DBP if the child is extremely creepy
+++TBP if the child is insane and/or dead
++++QBP if the child happens to be the perp!

Do you watch Midsomer Murders? One episode took place at a boy's boarding school and the murder weapon WAS a giant spoon!

Ok, I'm in for the 6- or 7-year old child as a main character and will go for triple because she's dead! (thanks kznluna!)

And I dare someone to write a mystery that includes:
*a potluck dinner
**that includes a poisoned goulash dish
***which is the suspected cause of death
****but the victim actually succumbed to an allergy to the clams in the "chowdah"