My Love Affair with Murder, Mystery and the Macabre: A Timeline

I do love a timeline. It’s a little bit of an obsession — like my obsession with murder, but different. I’ve written about how sketchy timelines can help you in your work, I’ve created an end-of-life timeline to illustrate the death process, and, with my startup Pictal Health, I’ve been helping patients create timelines of their health history so that they can understand and communicate about it better.

But less talk, more murder. Last week I put together a timeline to demonstrate my lifelong interest in murder, mystery, mayhem, macabre, and British crime procedurals. Here it is:

What did I learn?

One thing this exercise revealed to me is just how consistent my murder affliction has been over my lifetime. The 16-year-old me who gave a presentation in speech class about Jeffrey Dahmer is the same 39-year-old me who binged a year’s worth of My Favorite Murder podcasts in a handful of months.

Things I also noticed: my formative years, age 5–15, were filled with mystery, crime and horror books. Makes sense; with my parents watching shows such as Cheers and Silk Stalkings in the living room, and as a minor growing up in the 80s and 90s, I didn’t have access to crime TV. You will thus notice a book-oriented cluster on the left side of the timeline.

Then, in my itinerant years, ages 18–27, I didn’t own a TV and got into other types of books (magical realism, Allende, etc.) So there is a big gap in this phase, with little murder activity.

From age 27-present, I have a) had a boyfriend-now-husband who watches a lot of TV and also enjoys murder/mystery; and b) traveled quite a bit for work and thus had access to HLN and other murder TV sources. Thus the TV-oriented cluster on the right of the timeline.

The most important factor in my recent murder revival has been listening to Karen and Georgia on the My Favorite Murder podcast. Not only do I receive a weekly dose of comedy and murder (comurdy?), but they also have given me some great recommendations for detective shows like Shetland, which I have inhabited completely. Yes, I am a murderino, and also a mysterino (and perhaps a comedino.)

My deepest thanks go to Karen, Georgia, and all of the others who have encouraged me on this lifelong quest.