by Piper Bayard of Bayard & Holmes
Genres from thrillers to crime to romance and others often include scenes where characters need to hide or seek out secure places. In my last article, 5 Home Defense Techniques for Any Character, my military and intelligence veteran writing partner Jay Holmes and I discussed the benefits of perimeter lights, security cameras, dogs, and brains. Today, we’ll look at more ways that we and our characters can shore up our home defenses.
There are only upsides to our characters getting to know their neighbors when it comes to home security.
The best way our characters can get to know their neighbors is to take walks. Notice what people have in their yard, what cars they drive, whether they are home during the day, etc.
Holmes is a living example. When he moved last year, he started walking in the neighborhood as soon as he had a contract on his house. He spoke with every person he saw outside and was often invited in for tea.
Two months later when I visited, we took a walk, and he knew who was just divorced, who had kids and how many, who had served in the military, who was disabled, who was remodeling, etc. He had been inside two-thirds of the houses for three blocks in every direction before he ever spent a night in his own. In other words, if we and our characters just talk with our neighbors, it can make all the difference for home safety.
It’s always best to get in and out of the car while safely inside the garage. However, many people use their garage for either storage or a work space, or they don’t have a garage. That leaves the driveway or parking lot, and those are fertile grounds for many crimes from carjacking to kidnapping.
To keep our characters safe, they need to exercise extra caution when getting in or out of vehicles. Have them look around before they get out of their cars and check the surrounding area and the back seat before they get in. For an expanded discussion of driveway crimes, see Writing Believable Driveway Crime: Carjacking & Kidnapping.
Many cars today come equipped with a button that can be programmed to open our garage door. We and our characters should not use them. That’s because most people leave their cars in the driveway at least now and then. All a criminal has to do to get into the home is to break into the car and put up the garage door.
Criminals can hack vehicles with keyless ignition systems from outside a building. This is called a “relay attack,” and it can be accomplished with cheap equipment found online or at an electronics store. One character holds a key fob relay box close to the outside of a building. The box picks up the signal from an unprotected key fob inside and relays it to a second device that a second character holds near the car. This fools the car, and the vehicle can be unlocked and/or started. Great for car theft, planting surveillance devices, hiding in a back seat or trunk, or, if the car’s garage door opener is programmed for it, to get into the house.
To protect against this, our characters can keep key fobs in plain old candy, cookie, or chocolate cocoa tins. If our characters want to be fancy, they can get Faraday cages to enclose their key fobs. That said, they need to make sure the Faraday cages work. Mine didn’t, which is why I switched to a candy tin.
If our characters need to make do in a pinch, they can also wrap their key fobs in tinfoil. They should be sure to wrap the tin foil around and fold it over at the edges so that it is well-sealed. (See picture.) This is also a way to secure a phone, though I would recommend two or three layers for a phone.
If our characters are traveling and don’t have access to a tin or tin foil, putting the key fob in a microwave also works. If none of those are available, they should put it as far away from the vehicle as possible.
Have characters hook up timers to lights, curtains, shades, and small appliances in their homes and set them for irregular intervals to make it look and sound like someone is always there. Most burglaries occur around 10 a.m. because that is the most likely time that no one will be home. Burglars wanting to avoid encounters with homeowners will back away from a home that appears to be occupied.
If an intruder is a home invader, they are altogether a far more deadly animal than a burglar.
If all precautions fail, and our characters experience a home invasion while they are present in their homes, they should not grab a knife and start hunting down the invader in their home. I’m sure we’ve all noticed how badly that goes in fiction.
Instead, our character should grab a weapon, preferably a firearm, a crossbow, or some other lethally forceful projectile. Then they should make their presence known and dash for their bedroom to get behind the bed and call 9-1-1. If our characters do not have weapons, they need to look around the room they are in and improvise. (See 10 Common Bedroom Objects to Use as Weapons and 10 Common Kitchen Objects to Use as Weapons.)
The home invader might see our character first and get the jump on them. Gaining a defensive position is the better option, particularly if the invader wakes up our characters in the middle of the night.
The other reason is that an attack might be a needless risk. Most of the time, intruders enter homes to commit burglary. They don’t want encounters with homeowners, and if they realize someone is at home, they leave as quickly as they can.
If the intruder knows our character is in the house and the intruder stays, they don’t just want our character’s Pokemon collection. If the intruder enters the bedroom where our character is waiting, it is one of the few clear-cut cases in life when all force is necessary force. Our characters need to bring the full fight without hesitation the second that door is opened.
At the end of the day, there is no fool-proof way for our characters to stay safe, whether in their homes, in their driveways, or out on the streets. That’s just the nature of life. However, situational awareness and simple safety precautions do eliminate ninety percent of random crimes against our characters.
Moral of the story: Don’t let our characters be low-hanging fruit.
What questions do you have about home defense? And please share any home defense techniques you already use down in the comments!
* * * * * *
Piper Bayard and Jay Holmes of Bayard & Holmes are the authors of espionage tomes and international spy thrillers. Please visit Piper and Jay at their site, BayardandHolmes.com. For notices of their upcoming releases, subscribe to the Bayard & Holmes Covert Briefing. You can also contact Bayard & Holmes at their Contact page, on X (formerly Twitter) at @piperbayard, on Facebook at Piper Bayard, or at their email, BayardandHolmes@protonmail.com.
All photos are non-editorial and paid for from Deposit Photos except for the tinfoil pouch for the keys which are property of Piper Bayard.
Copyright © 2024 Writers In The Storm - All Rights Reserved
Coming from a retired Marine and old grunt: it's a truism that you're best off taking the offensive strategically but the defensive tactically, meaning take the initiative in shaping the situation, but in terms of actual fighting (if necessary), make them come after you rather than you going after them.
I would much rather be dug in where the other guy has to give me a shot at him to get to me, than go hunting for him. That's especially valid if I'm dealing with someone who's had more practice at this than I have, which will probably be the case if he's invading my home. I know the layout and can probably navigate in the dark, too. Of course, it doesn't hurt to have a weapon or two where you can get your hands on them fast, as long as they're safe from children and thieves and you know how to use them.
One other really good idea, if it's practical in your circumstances, is to have at least one medium-to-large dog. Even if you don't have one, putting a "Beware of Dog" sign on your fence is a deterrent.
This article is good for homeowners in general as well as authors writing about them.
Thank you for sharing your experience, Jim. You articulate that beautifully! And dogs definitely do help.
May your muse be generous!
How a character responds when in a home-invasion situation is another way to show character, problem-solving abilities, and a host of other fiction problems. I had a lot to learn.
In Pride's Children: PURGATORY, the first novel in my mainstream trilogy, a reclusive disabled author lives in a house on a hill in New Hampshire, with no close neighbors. When she goes on the talk show which starts the story in NYC, she knows her pseudonym will be exposed, and fans will know who she really is - thinks at the time it's worth it in exchange for national exposure about the disease which has robbed her of energy and a normal life.
No good deed goes unpunished: a fan tracks her down, thinking she has defamed him because of what he sees of himself in her stories, and tries to break into her house 'to talk to her.'
As a former physician, she wonders if she'll be able to use the sharp knives in her kitchen in self-defense - if he gets close. 'Do no harm' is a strong deterrent.
Anyway, at the end of several tense scenes, she ends up agreeing to have a remote-controlled security gate installed at her narrow entrance - a gate which plays many parts in the rest of the story.
I worked hard on the logistics - like the way it turned out - and it had many chances to find out what our character was made of, including that she decided NOT to use the natural-cave panic room that came with the house, fearing her claustrophobia and the untested phone in it.
There are an enormous number of things I had to consider, all of which gave me ways to determine her physical courage, principles tested, and support systems in rural New Hampshire. In deep snow.
Sounds like you've given home defense quite a bit of thought with a character that has many issues to balance. Thank you for sharing your experience.
Hi Piper,
Great tips, plus you gave me a great excuse to pick up a tin of chocolate.😊
LOL. An excellent interpretation of this article. I know Holmes would approve, as well.
[…] More Home Defense Techniques for Any Characters […]