The Murder of Crows
Rey Berkelmans
As the sun slowly rose above the horizon, across the hundreds of trees, everything sat still. It was your average morning after all, cold wind blowing through the leaves. The leaves from the tree surrounded the flock, with the light from the sunrise shining brightly throughout the gaps in the leaves, as the thick shadows covered everything else.
I stretched out my wings, as several other crows around did the same. An average morning, indeed.
“Dead body!” A sharp squawk came across the forest. “Stabbed by a beak!”
Like living shadows, several pitch-black crows lifted their heads as they turned to look towards the noise, which was from a young crow named Plucky. “I found a dead crow!”
“Who cares?” A crow chuckled from the crowd. “Poor fool probably just became hawk food!”
The murder of crows laughed at Plucky, who froze mid-air, as though he didn’t expect this response.
“But he wasn’t eaten!” Plucky cawed back. “This isn’t the work of a hawk! It has crow written all over it!”
The laughter from the other crows quickly ceased, as most of the flock stopped to glare at Plucky, fluffing up their feathers in rage. The ambient murmurs of the jungle were suddenly drowned by the silence, before the other crows started calling out in anger. “How dare you say such a thing!” “Mind your own business!” “You’re a liar!” “What makes you such a genius, huh?! What makes you so smart?”
“It’s true I swear! I also found other black feathers from another crow around the corpse!”
This shut everyone up. Silence stretched over the forest. Suddenly, a large crow stepped forward. His feathers were dark, as though they were the pitch black night sky, although more scruffy than usual today. The crow was known by the name ‘Mr. Beaks’. His size made him appear as though a shadow consuming everything when he stretched out his wings, and his wits terrified every other crow around him. Plucky quickly silenced himself too, his eyes went wide from nervousness.
“No need to point fingers, we’re all friends here after all. Now, how did you not know the other feathers also belonged to the victim?”
“They were way darker than the victims! Covered in a bit of blood as though they were plucked out!”
Mr. Beaks narrowed his eyes towards Plucky, studying him closely for a few seconds. “Take me to the corpse.”
The two birds quickly took off in flight, as I also flapped off in pursuit, followed by a crowd of other crows.
“Here!” Plucky called out, before dipping into the leaves of the forest. Mr. Beaks and everyone else quickly followed suit.
The scene of the murder was horrific. Blood splattered against the roots of different trees. The body of a crow lay between the bloody roots, as though wrapped and trapped by them, his neck had a large wound, as though torn wide open. Several smaller cuts spread across the crow’s body, blood leaking onto their skin and over the few feathers that had not been torn out.
Mr. Beaks approached the body, eyes narrowed as he thought. “Interesting.”
“It’s Feathers!” “Feathers is dead?” “Free food?” The other crows began chattering to themselves. Most of the crow’s eyes shifted to another crow, Bitey. Bitey was always arguing and fighting with Feathers after all, so it would be natural to assume she may be the murderer.
Bitey fluffed herself up. “It wasn’t me! I may have hated his guts, but it wasn’t me! I bet it was Branches!” The flock’s eyes shifted to another crow.
“What? It wasn’t me! You hated Feathers! It must have been you!”
“Liar!”
The flock began arguing. I looked over to see Mr. Beaks watching them curiously, before cawing out himself. “Enough!”
The rest of the flock shut up pretty quickly, turning all their attention towards Mr. Beaks. “We still don’t know if another crow killed Feathers! Quit arguing!”
I looked towards a loose feather on the floor. It was dark, as though stained by oil. I quickly snatched it up in my beak and hopped closer to the corpse. Mr. Beaks turned to look at me. “And what are you doing?”
“Checking something.” I mumbled out with the feather in my mouth. I slowly placed the feather next to the corpse, and confirmed my suspicions. “I knew it.”
Mr. Beaks looked at me curiously before drawing his attention towards the loose feather, the dark feather standing out against the bright red blood that it sat upon. “Oh?”
“This feather is way darker than the rest of the feathers. Another crow was here. Plucky was correct. A crow did this.”
Plucky fluffed up his feathers and looked to be proud of himself, Mr. Beaks however eyed me with suspicion. “You are correct. Another crow was here. But to be sure it was a killer crow is difficult to tell.”
“Maybe.” I looked around. “But maybe not.” I quickly made my way over to another branch, where a clump of feathers sat attached to blood. “The other crow here was injured too. Which means either a crow is lying and did see what happened or…”
“Someone here is a killer.” Mr. Beaks finished my sentence, his eyes were now stuck onto me, staring into my soul.
“I knew it!” Plucky silently celebrated to himself.
“Well, I think we all know who the murderer is,” Mr. Beaks turned his attention to Bitey yet again. “You hated Feathers, you’re the most obvious suspect. Plus,” Mr. Beaks took a step towards Bitey, as though he was prepared to attack, his shadow completely covering Bitey, “your feathers are pretty dark, aren’t they?”
“I-”
“Yeah!” “It has to be her!” “She’s a murderer!”
“You’re all insane!” Bitey took a step back. “It wasn’t me you idiots, why would I kill my brother?!”
All the other crows paused, as they didn’t know that. I didn’t even know that.
“Oh?” Mr. Beaks took another step closer. “Then who else could have done it?”
“Wait!” I quickly flew and landed myself between the two. I paused for a second under Mr. Beak's glaring eyes. “Bitey doesn’t have any physical injuries, it couldn’t have been her!”
“Oh? Then who?”
I glared at Mr. Beaks. “You.”
Mr. Beaks glared down at me, his eyes vibrant with rage and aggression. “You’re being ridiculous. What reason would I ever have to kill him?”
“You were growing jealous of Bitey.” Bitey puffed up in nervousness. “You were planning on killing her, so you could keep your place as the smartest bird here.
“This is dumb!” Mr. Beaks turned around. “What a stupid accusation!”
“But Feathers found out what you were planning to do to her, didn’t he? You were setting up the perfect kill spot, far away from the flock, where the death could be easily blamed on a hawk. But then Feathers followed you and saw what you were doing. He attacked. Due to the surprise you weren’t able to protect yourself, resulting in you injuring yourself.” I looked at Mr. Beak's rough feathers. It's no mystery why they were roughed up now. “You panicked. Turned around and attacked Feathers, killing him. You didn’t know what to do, you flew back to the flock and acted like nothing happened. You were only found out because Plucky found the body. Not so clever now, are you?”
Mr. Beaks was glaring down at me. “You’re wrong. I’m the smartest crow.”
“No. You’re not. Couldn’t kill a crow properly and even left all your feathers around from the attack.”
I motioned to the feathers scattered across the ground, standing out against the dust and blood of the ground.
“Wrong!” Mr. Crow immediately yelled. “I meant to kill Feathers, not Bitey. Bitey was too strong for me to fight without some injury. Feather’s death was meant to discourage Bitey.” A step forward. “ I chose this area so they would find the body and there wouldn't be a mystery about ‘what happened to Bitey?’” Another step forward. “I only allowed Feathers to injure me slightly so people would think I would have been too injured or ‘moulting’ to kill Feathers.” Another step. “And I am still the smartest crow here.”
“Not smart enough to not admit to the murder in front of the flock, are you?”
Mr. Beaks immediately stepped back, his eyes darting around to different crows, the murder’s eyes glowing red, staring at Mr. Beaks. “No!”
“He committed the murder?” “Mr. Crows killed!” “Punish him!” The members of the flock chirped out. It had been a while since they had eaten, after all.
“You stupid bird!” Mr. Beaks whipped around to me. “You’ll die for that!”
“Will I?”
Mr. Crow didn’t have a chance to respond before the rest of the flock pounced. Bloodied feathers flew in the sky. I saw multiple crows with blooded beaks tearing and ripping into flesh. The ground was stained with blood.
I took one last look at the corpse of Mr. Beaks, before turning and leaping up into the air. It was time to go home.
Reflection
My creative story, ‘The Murder of Crows’, is a exploration of morality being black and white and therefore allows readers to reflect on their own actions and morals.
In researching this and trying to understand my own version of morality, I was inspired by classic crime fiction stories such as The Man with the Twisted Lip by Arthur Conan Doyle and both Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie, and I was able to take conventions from these stories and the crime fiction subgenres such as cozy crime and hard-boiled crime and make my own improvments and subvert different convetions to suit my narrative and message in my creative.
Converting these conventions allowed me to build off of classic crime fiction stories and make my own story. Therefore, the ideal audience for my creative is classic crime fiction readers, as this story allows them to reflect on crime fiction as a whole, along with their own actions and moralities.
The conventions and tropes I took from different crime fiction stories and subgenres such as such as characters being secluded, focus on the puzzle/plot, the murderers speech at the end revealing their motives, graphic violence, the detectives friend/sidekick, and a ‘hard-boiled detective’.
I chose to use all these conventions and tropes to help my creative to reflect and appear more similar to other crime fiction stories, and therefore subverting these conventions helps build off of these conventions and tropes and to help explore morality and make readers reflect on their own actions and morals.
The first convention that is subverted in the story is the lack of human characters. In other words, all the characters in this story are crows.
“Ah, but people don't run true to form in love affairs.” (Christie, A. 1937).
This is a quote from Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie, demonstrating how this story heavily focuses on human-like issues.
I chose to write this story with crows instead of humans due to the fact that humans are complicated, and due to the fact I know more about birds than humans, I believed it was more effective to write with crows instead of humans to allow me to demonstrate the message of the story. It is easier to show how crows act, and they do not have as complicated morals as humans. It allows me to show characters acting and their morals being more inhuman, and therefore this allows the audience to reflect on their own actions and morals.
The next convention that is subverted is the detective not solving the murder, and along with this, the detective being the murderer.
In most crime fiction stories, the detective is the one who solves the murders. They are usually the one of the few characters with a strong moral compass, but in this story, the opposite is true.
“suppose you believe it’s very wrong to kill a person who has injured you—even if they’ve taken away everything you had in the world?” Poirot said steadily: “Yes, Mademoiselle. I believe it is the unforgivable offence—to kill.” (Christie, A. 1937).
This quote is from the detective of the story Death on the Nile. This shows how many detectives think and believe in detective fiction stories.
Therefore, subverting this convention surprises the audience. Most crime fiction readers would likely not expect this, as there is very little to none popular detective fiction stories which show the detective as the one who should not be trusted and as the murderer. Therefore, if the detective’s moral compass is not correct, it forces the readers to question their own moralities and actions.
The final convention that was subverted was the violence. Cozy crime usually strays away from violence and sex, but I chose to have my creative show violence to force the readers to have a cruel, dark look at the world. This allows the readers to be forced to reflect on themselves and their actions and morals.
Therefore, I do believe my creative work was successful as an exploration of morality being black and white and therefore allowing readers to reflect on their own actions and morals.
References
Doyle, A. (1891). The Man with the Twisted Lip.
Christie, A. (1934). Murder on the Orient Express. Collins Crime Club.
Christie, A. (1937). Death on the Nile. Collins Crime Club.
Cozy mystery. (7 Mar, 2022). Wikipedia. Accessed 27 May, 2022 from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cozy_mystery#:~:text=Cozy%20mysteries%2C%20also%20referred%20to,a%20small%2C%20socially%20intimate%20community.
Whodunit. (2022). Vocabulary.com. Accessed 27 May, 2022 from https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/whodunit#:~:text=A%20whodunit%20is%20a%20mystery,almost%20always%20a%20murder%20case.
Hard-boiled fiction. (1 Mar, 2016). Britannica. Accessed 27 May, 2022 from https://www.britannica.com/art/hard-boiled-fiction
Langfield, C. Conventions of Cosy Crime. (ND). Subverting the Genre. Accessed 27 May, 2022 from https://subvertingthegenre.weebly.com/conventions-of-crime-genre.html
Red herring. (20 May, 2022). Wikipedia. Accessed 28 May, 2022 from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_herring
Death on the Nile Quotes. (2022). Goodreads. Accessed 28 May, 2022 from https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/3038762-death-on-the-nile