From an Unlikely Source

I found an interesting article about mysteries, British mysteries, and using novel plots in real life (here). It is a post called Murder She Read? by John O'Sullivan and it was posted on the conservative website for National Review, The Corner.

The allusions to George Orwell and the evolution of the British Mystery make this post worthwhile to read from a literary standpoint, but it's not till this passage that the reader understands why this is posted in The Corner:

"One result of the decline of the English (and American) murder is that murders today have to be made interesting by being made technically complex. That is far easier to ensure in a thriller than in real life. It is impossible to imagine, for instance, a real-life murderer planning the convoluted crime in Scott Turow’s novel, Presumed Innocent, in which an angry wife tries to get her husband blamed for the murder of his mistress by injecting his semen into her vagina. Such things just don’t . . ."


It is at this intersection that the post takes a dynamic and rather gruesome turn. Apparently a woman in Spain tried out the Turow plot on her own (read more here).

How often does this occur? Using a plot device in a book to stage a real life murder? Probably not as often as the opposite, using a real life murder to concoct a fictional murder plot I'd say.