Calling All Mystery Writers

Here's the plot for your next who-done-it. A cricket coach, murdered.

Cricket, for feck's sake. Is there any sport more moribund and sedate? They take breaks for tea; they play for days on end before the match ends, and the players are required to wear white flannels. Now put that sort of boredom in a murder mystery and make it exciting.

Wait, make it even more bizarre and have the coach murdered right after the Pakistan team loses to Ireland. Yes, Ireland, home of the GAA and hurling and hatred of all that is British. The Irish team wins the match, unexpected and against all odds, and then the Pakistan coach turns up dead the next morning.

Need something for filler? Write a bit about the scenes in Pakistan, where various players and the coach are burned in effigy for losing to, of all the countries on the planet, Ireland. You'll need a date for the match. St. Patrick's Day would be appropriate. Then set your novel against a backdrop of religious tension, and you've got it made.

For a bit of detail to the murder scene, you could describe how the coach was found in his hotel room. Oh, right, you'll want to set the story in the Caribbean. Lots of lovely description you could put in, get that touch of the poet going, tropical flowers with excessive color, the heat and the humidity. Anyway, the coach is found in his hotel room, mouth hanging open, blood and vomit everywhere. Go on now, get to writing.

You can make up your own ending, or you can use the Jamaican coroner's report to flesh out the manuscript. How's that for a story, the losing coach murdered by strangulation. Manual strangulation, to be more precise. Of course the room will be full of fingerprints, and the police will take prints off all of the players. As the writer of this particular story, you can decide if it was a player on the team who wrapped his hands around an old man's neck, or you can make a rabid fan the perpetrator of the crime.

There's something about cricket, a passion that I neither share nor comprehend, but Jamaican police are investigating the murder of the Pakistan coach, who was indeed found dead in his room and reportedly died of manual strangulation. Sad to imagine that a man could be killed for a fan's perception of his failed play calling, for losing a match that the coach did not actually, physically, play. The players lost, the coach gets the blame, and so it's always been. But to kill a man over a game? And a boring, stupid game at that?

If you put it in a novel, no one would believe it.