The Murderous Possibilities of Bathtubs, Showers, and Spas

Bathtubs are disappearing. Not in a needs-to-be-investigated sort of way: they’re being routinely removed as hotels renovate (to enable faster and easier cleaning between guests), or not included in the first place in new condo and sometimes even single-family home design.

The Death of the Bathtub is probably not a great murder mystery title.

But bathtubs are being snuffed out. Eliminated.

Google’s wretched AI overview agrees that this is occurring and adds that “This trend is due to changing lifestyles, a desire for more space, and a preference for functionality and accessibility.”

But baths are in our nature. Roman baths. Taking the waters at Bath. Having a bath drawn (oh lovely verb, plus the luxury of someone else running the bathwater, adjusting the temperature, and ensuring the fluffiest of towels are at the ready).

It’s worrying, because baths are a great help in mystery fiction.

People found drowned (in mysterious circumstances, sometimes with the wrong kind of water in their logy lungs), or who have been electrocuted via an electric toaster tossed into the bathwater are a mainstay of a particular kind of mystery story on television and in print.

And there are some notorious real-life instances, including one in Toronto that haunts me.

Spas also present murderous possibilities: the sauna door locked from the outside, the heat turned up; and here, too, there are some real-world stories that I’m sifting through, with alarm. I think I first encountered this trope in a Charlie’s Angels episode. I will be doing a search for any Scandi Noir featuring murderous spa visits.

But death in the shower. This seems prosaic: one might suffer a cardiac event or stroke in the shower, but a murder seems . . .

Oh. Psycho, of course. Possibly the most famous murder scene in all of film history.

But with that singular exception, I maintain that baths have been employed much more frequently for nefarious purposes.

Shifting to real estate: we once owned a home with a gorgeous jacuzzi in a large bathroom that had been expanded to include the home’s third bedroom. And it was terrible. Turning on the jets caused black sludge to begin churning out, and cleaning this proved impossible; we never used them again.

The sauna in the basement, installed by the home’s Icelandic owner, a decade earlier, was also useless for us: I’m sensitive to heat (much more sensitive than I’d realized at the time, in fact, because of my Addison’s Disease). So it became a storage space, stacked with boxes of books.

In my current home, the original 1915 clawfoot bathtub is an iron and enamel behemoth.

But it is without a shower, and the home, in fact, is shower-less, which may be why I was able to purchase it: you can sell a house without a bathtub, I’m guessing, more readily than a house with no shower and no obvious way to install one.

But this bathtub is a beauty. It takes a while to heat up, as water is added, but then it retains heat for an hour after it’s drained. Our cat treats it as a savanna: the instant she hears the last drop swirl down the drain, she hops in and begins demanding a cool pool of drinking water in her warm tub. Her arthritic back legs are making this increasingly challenging and we’ve contemplated (because cat owners do absurd things) building her a ramp to the tub, and another to the high queen bed where she likes to spend part of each day.

No cat would want a house with only showers.

And no mystery writer, because that limits possibilities for the imagination.

But I’m a bit regretful that our Toronto home’s sauna was never even tested, in the five years we spent there. I hope the new owners have made better use of it. In entirely innocent ways, of course.