Writing assassins - the basics

As a writer who writes assassin characters, I have done research on the subject. It is scary how many people actually know how to find an assassin in several different countries (and I'm not even touching the dark web for my research!).

First of all, let's discuss what a hitman/hitwoman is in comparison to an assassin.
Hitmen/hitwomen is a subclass of the term assassin and kill for cartels, mafia, or just kill random people off the street (because of patterns of living and various other reason, random people are not hard to kill). An assassin kills for a living, to put it simply.

In my research, I've also found that there are professional and amateur. The difference is training. For example, an ex-military special agent may have far more skill than a teen runaway trying to get some cash. Amateur also tends to get caught far more easily, and professionals tend to be older, while an amateur is more likely younger (not always the case). Keep this in mind when you write your character's kills and results of that situation.

For all those writers who are writing assassins, it is good to know that there are both freelance and those connected to mafia/cartels/crime families. I, personally have written a female freelance assassin in one of my work-in-progress stories. You can also easily connect your killer-for-hire to a crime family or a gang.

And now we come to the subject of the female assassins. Women have been spies for years and through many wars, because no one suspects there is a knife in a baby stroller, poison in a bottle of whiskey, or a message hidden in a skirt (look up civil war dresses- it's fascinating!). Men in many societies didn't frisk women coming into military camps, making it almost too easy to get in and deliver a message, or even kill a high ranking official. Female killers seduced and outsmarted to get into favorable places and access high officials, and since society saw them as nurturing mothers and harmless women, they often had the element of surprise and the added bonus that a man was killed by a woman, which would cause other men to possibly look down on the victim.

 One thing to note is women's status. Writing women killers may mean that your killer gets away with their crime, or a harsher sentence when and if they are caught (like an insane asylum) if your setting is a time when women were seen as lesser and thrown into an asylum for reading novels and being different. It depends highly on your time period, so check your facts on how women were treated if you write a female assassin or hitwoman, especially if she gets caught and killed.

I hope you mystery readers/writers enjoyed this basic writers' guide to writing assassins. There's always more information to be found, more details on how men and women kill and such, so let me know if anyone wants to know more.


This information was provided by these sources: https://www.quora.com/Do-assassins-hitmen-exist-today

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/life/seducation-stabbing-guns-hidden-pushchairs-secret-world-female/