Kill Well has a plot with people embarked on nefarious deeds with the objective of protecting a big oil pipeline project and there is a murder, and a contract killer, and an operative who sets it all in motion for a man who serves the interests of a particular few who are in the position to keep hold of a whole lot of money if they can keep things going their way. I mean, sounds noirish, right?

Well, there are quite a few corporate manslaughter cases at any given time, and regularly these—such as a few of the Covid nursing home cases—get their day in court and convictions delivered. There is the true story of Jeffrey Wigand, a former tobacco industry executive who risked everything to expose the corrupt practices of his former employer, Brown-Williamson. In fact, there are a dozen or so films based on true events that deal with whistleblowers and the dangers they’ve faced.

But an interesting question is whether direct murder in the interest of corporate entities really happens. There is the case of Silkwood v. Kerr-McGee, the story behind the movie Silkwood. Today, in the news, is Shahidul Islam, a Bangladeshi union leader who was murdered in June; at the time, Islam was involved in negotiations with a local textile producer. There are plenty of white-collar racketeering cases that have been prosecuted, and any number of such cases at the state level can includes crimes such as murder, kidnapping, gambling, arson, robbery, bribery, extortion, dealing in obscene matters, and drug crimes. The several cases against opioid producers are well known, including a case counties in Kansas and Missouri filed on federal racketeering against more than a dozen opioid painkiller manufacturers for misleading marketing and distributing practices, alleging that the actions intentionally mislead addiction dangers for their own profits.

But murder? Well, one research project, looking over a thirty-year period, found fifty recorded cases in which the white-collar perpetrator had murdered or paid somebody else to murder the person who discovered the crime.

Do you know that the International Monetary Fund—hardly a left-wing outlier—has concluded, in studies started in 2015, that the use of fossil fuels have resulted in 1.6 million premature deaths annually, and that is just from pollution/particulates, with the cost of climate change harder to determine, but growing increasingly significant.

A very interesting paper has recently been accepted for publication in the Harvard Environmental Law Review, in which the authors argue fossil fuel companies “have not simply been lying to the public, they have been killing members of the public at an accelerating rate, and prosecutors should bring that crime to the public’s attention.”

I’ll stand by my plot device in Kill Well, both intrinsically and as metaphor.