Lean on Me When You’re Not Strong*

Millions of people volunteer their time and energy to help those in need. And the best kinds of volunteers are the ones who don’t make a big fuss about it. They see a need and without judging or asking anything in return, they try to meet that need. I won’t go on and on about the different causes for which they work. There is far too long a list of urgent needs out there for me to do that. Suffice it to say though that volunteers have a huge impact. Certainly they do in real life; I’ll bet you volunteer yourself and if you do, you know what a difference the work you do makes. That’s why you do it. There are many, many volunteer and volunteer groups in crime fiction too.

In Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles for example, Captain Hastings is recovering from a wartime injury. He accepts an invitation to visit an old friend John Cavendish while he heals up, and is looking forward to a pleasant stay. Instead, Hastings is drawn into a case of murder when Cavendish’s stepmother Emily Inglethorp is poisoned. By chance Hastings discovers that another old friend Hercule Poirot is staying in the nearby village and asks him to investigate. Poirot agrees, not least because Emily Inglethorp was his benefactor.  As the novel goes along we learn that several members of the family do their share of volunteering, mostly in aid of the war effort. Cavendish, for instance drills with the local volunteer militia. His wife Mary volunteers as what would later be known as a Land Girl. And Emily Inglethorp plays quite a key role in all sorts of local charity groups. Although this fact of their lives isn’t the motive for the murder, it’s an interesting perspective on their lives.

Deborah Crombie’s In a Dark House introduces us to Helping Hands, a group dedicated to helping abused women and their children find safe places to go and make plans for their lives once they get there. One night, a warehouse fire in Southwark is reported by a resident at Helping Hands, and Superintendent Duncan Kincaid and his lover DI Gemma James go to the shelter to interview the person who called in the fire.  There they meet Kath Warren, the director. What makes this fire of special interest is that the body of an unidentified woman was found in the remains. It seems that the shelter may be more than casually related when it turns out that Laura Novak, a member of its board of directors, has disappeared and could be the fire victim. There are three other equally strong possibilities though and Kincaid and James investigate all of them as they work to figure out who set the fire and who the dead woman is. I don’t think it’s spoiling this novel to say that the Helping Hands group didn’t engineer the fire or Novak’s disappearance. But we do get some interesting insight into the workings of a volunteer group, its leadership and the way such groups are viewed.

Kerry Greenwood’s Corinna Chapman volunteers with the Melbourne Soup Run, a mobile soup kitchen that serves Melbourne’s street people. She’s a baker so she provides bread; she also takes her turn going on the run with other volunteers who travel from one part of the city to another. At each stop the Soup Run gives out coffee and tea, food, some medicines and other supplies like blankets and clothes. Chapman is quite matter-of-fact about her volunteer work. She doesn’t talk much about it; she just rolls up her sleeves as the saying goes and does what needs to be done. The Soup Run is overseen by the indefatigable Sister Mary, one of Melbourne’s strongest advocates for those in need. Sister Mary has a remarkable skill at getting people to part with their time, their money, their donations, their official permission, whatever is necessary to get the job done. And she’s one of the few people Chapman co-operates with nearly automatically. The Soup Run proves useful to Chapman too, in a few mysteries. For instance, in Devil’s Food, Chapman’s father seems to have disappeared. Through the Soup Run she makes contact with other Melbourne volunteer groups and services and is able to find out what happened to him. The Soup Run is also a source of clues in Earthy Delights, in which she helps to solve the mystery of a series of junkie overdose deaths.

In Peg Brantley’s Red Tide we meet volunteer guide dog handler Jamie Taylor. By day she’s a Colorado bank loan professional. She also trains and handles Gretchen, Socrates ‘Socks’ and McKenzie, who are search-and-rescue dogs. When the need arises Taylor and her dogs go on search and rescue missions. That’s how they get involved in an eerie discovery. Convicted serial killer Leopold Bonzer has told the FBI where he buried his victims and Taylor and her dogs are sent to that remote field. They find the bodies but they also find bodies that Bonzer could not have buried there. Now it looks as though a ‘copycat killer’ is using the same field. Each in a different way, Taylor, her sister Jacqueline ‘Jax’ and FBI Agent Nick Grant investigate to find out who this new killer is and how that relates to a tragedy in Taylor’s own past. Among other things, this is an interesting look at the way search-and-rescue operations are carried out and how dogs are used in the process.

And then there’s Nina Borg, whom we first meet in Lene Kaaberbøl and Agnete Friis’ The Boy in the Suitcase. Nina is a nurse at Ellen’s Place, a shelter and service provider for refugees. She’s also volunteered in several different world ‘danger zones’ and takes her work in service to others very seriously. But one day she gets a very unusual case. Her friend Karin asks her to go to the Copenhagen train station and pick up a suitcase. She does so only to discover that it contains a little boy. He’s dazed and drugged, but he is alive. So she tries as best she can to find out who he is. Her first call is to Karin, but Karen seems to have disappeared. Now Nina has to find out for herself who the boy is and get him to safety. In doing so she finds herself up against some ruthless people who want that child. Meanwhile, we meet Sigita Ramoskiene, the Lithuanian mother of three-year-old Mikas, who has been abducted. As she frantically searches for her son, we learn that he is the child Nina found. Each in her own way the two women work to find out why Mikas was abducted and return him safely.

Sylvie Granotier’s The Paris Lawyer features Catherine Monsigny, who’s recently become an attorney. She has a full-time job at the law office of Maître Renaud, but she also volunteers her time to an association that works with undocumented immigrants who get into legal trouble. Her purpose in doing the volunteer work is mostly to get experience. That’s how she learns of the case of Myriam Villetreix, originally from Gabon, who’s been arrested and charged with the murder of her wealthy husband Gaston. The case has been getting a lot of media attention and if Catherine gets her boss’ permission to defend Myriam, it could launch her career. She gets that permission and begins to look into the case only to find that it’s more complicated than it seems on the surface. There is evidence against her client and there is motive. What’s more, this trial takes place not far from where Catherine’s mother was murdered when she was a tiny child. No-one was ever arrested for the crime and the memory of that day has haunted her since then. Being in the area spurs Catherine to try to find out who killed her mother while she is also searching for the truth about the murder of Gaston Villetreix.

There are of course many other crime fiction novels that feature volunteers, and quite frankly, I’m glad they get ‘air time.’ It’s easy enough to click a link and donate money. It’s not so easy to give up your time and your mental and physical energy. But volunteers do it all the time in a million different ways, and without going on about it. They deserve our respect and gratitude. Mostly, they deserve to have us join their company.

 

 

 

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from Bill Withers’ Lean on Me.

Sometimes it Feels Like You and Me Against the World*

One of the important and far-reaching social changes of the last fifty years has been in our views of single parenthood. Today millions of people raise children without a spouse or partner and not because they were widowed. Single parenthood has become an everyday fact of life in many countries and it’s interesting to look back and see how our views of it have evolved. Just a quick glance at a few crime fiction novels shows how society’s attitudes have developed over the decades.

In Agatha Christie’s Death in the Clouds (AKA Death in the Air) for instance, we meet Elise Grandier. She is maid to Marie Morisot, who does business as a moneylender under the name of Madame Giselle. One afternoon, Madame Giselle is en route from her home in Paris to London when she suddenly dies. It’s not long before it’s established that she was poisoned. Hercule Poirot is on the same flight, and he works with Chief Inspector James ‘Jimmy’ Japp and French authorities to find out who the murderer is. At one point, Poirot interviews Elise to see if she can shed any light on her mistress’ murder. Since she was not on the plane, she isn’t a suspect, but Poirot thinks she may be helpful. As they talk, he discovers the reason for her fierce loyalty to Madame Giselle. Years earlier, Elise had a child out of wedlock. At that time, the only real choice she had was to go away, have the child and return after the child had been given up for adoption. Madame Giselle took her in and was good to her and Elise has never forgotten that. While that small story thread is not the motive for the murder, it does give us a glimpse of the attitudes of the day towards unwed parenthood.

Rex Stout’s Champagne For One was written approximately twenty-five years after Death in the Clouds, and in it we see some differences in the way single parenthood is portrayed. In that novel, Archie Goodwin is persuaded to attend a dinner party at the home of wealthy and influential Louise Robilotti. Among other charities she supports is Grantham House, a home for unwed mothers. The goal of this institution is to give these young women a place to live until they have their babies and then support them until they find husbands or jobs. Mrs. Robilotti takes a special interest in Grantham House and every year, she invites a select few of its residents to her dinner party. This year, one of the Grantham House invitees is Faith Usher. During the dinner, one of the other residents Rose Tuttle tells Goodwin that Faith has brought cyanide with her and intends to commit suicide. At first Goodwin doesn’t believe her, but not long afterwards, Faith actually does die of what turns out to be cyanide poisoning. Everyone is convinced that she made good on her threat and committed suicide. But Goodwin isn’t convinced. So, despite a great deal of pressure from the Robilotti family and the police, he starts to investigate. And in the end, he discovers who really killed Faith Usher and why. This novel doesn’t exactly portray these unwed mothers in the most positive of lights. They are still represented as needing to be redeemed if that’s the word. But it is interesting to see how by the late 1950’s, there was at least more acceptance that sometimes young women become pregnant even if they are not married.

In Wendy James’ The Mistake, we meet Jodie Evans Garrow. She’s the wife of successful attorney Angus Garrow, who’s even being spoken of as the city’s next mayor. She’s got two healthy children and by all accounts, a good life. Then through sheer accident, her daughter Hannah is taken to the same Sydney hospital where Jodie herself gave birth to another child in 1986. A nurse who was there at the time remembers Jodie and her baby Ella Mary and starts to ask questions about what happened to the child. Her questions have devastating consequences for the Garrow family when an investigation is opened. Everyone wants to know what happened to the baby. Jodie claims she gave the child up for adoption, but no adoption records have been found. As the story gets more and more attention, Jodie becomes a pariah to most people, who begin to suspect that she might have been responsible for the baby’s disappearance. As the details of what really happened in 1986 unfold we get a sense of what life was like at that time for unwed parents. At the time Ella Mary was born, Jodie got a lot of sympathy – more than she would have a few decades earlier. She got support and there was an expectation that she would tell her parents and the baby’s father and all would be well. Jodie is not from an upper-class family, and what’s interesting is that that is more of a ‘black mark’ against her than is the fact that she got pregnant without being married.

Today it’s not at all uncommon for parents to be single. In both real life and crime fiction it’s taken in a very matter-of-fact way. For instance, Lene Kaaberbøl and Agnete Friis’ The Boy in the Suitcase features Sigita Ramoskiene, the Lithuanian single mother of three-year-old Mikas. Her life is by no means luxurious, but all is well enough until the terrible day when Mikas is abducted. When it’s clear that he’s not with his father, Sigita is terrified that something awful has happened to him and she goes on a frantic search for him. That’s how her path crosses the path of Nina Borg, a Copenhagen volunteer who’s made a frightening discovery: a little boy, drugged and dazed but alive, locked in a suitcase. It’s soon clear that the child Nina found is Sigita’s son Mikas, and each in a different way, the two women try to find out who abducted Mikas and why. Throughout this novel, the fact that Sigita is a single mother is not a major issue. She’s not regarded as ‘not quite good enough’ because she isn’t married and her character is painted quite sympathetically.

The same might be said of Anthony Bidulka’s Ethan Ash, who runs Ash House, a Saskatoon ‘frat house for the senior set.’ Ethan is the single father of Simonette, who goes by the name of Simon. When Bidulka’s sleuth PI Russell Quant meets Ash, he’s attracted and in Aloha Candy Hearts he and Ash begin a relationship. Ash’s devotion to Simon is real and he is portrayed believably and sympathetically. In the novels in which he features, his status as a single father is dealt with in a very matter-of-fact way. Certainly it doesn’t detract from the way others see him, especially Quant.

There are several sleuths, too, who are single parents. For instance Elly Griffiths’ Ruth Galloway is the single mother of Kate. Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch is the single father of Maddie, and was the child of a single mother. There are a lot of other examples too of single parents in crime fiction that space doesn’t allow me to mention. I’m sure I’ve not mentioned the ones you like best. So help me out and fill in the gaps I’ve left.

It’s never been easy to be a single parent. It still isn’t. But it is heartening (at least to me) to see that today’s attitudes about single parenting have evolved by and large from punitive to supportive.

 

 
 

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from Kenny Ascher and Paul Williams’ You and Me Against the World, made popular by Helen Reddy. Factoid you probably aren’t interested in but I’ll tell you anyway: Reddy’s daughter Traci has a spoken part in that recording of the song.

Everybody’s Working For the Weekend*

Another week-end has arrived! A lot of people look forward to the week-end as it offers them a chance to relax, get domestic things done, go out and catch up on things they can’t do during the week. The expression TGIF (Thank God it’s Friday!) captures the way a lot of folks think about the week-end. But before you get all excited you may want to take a look at how much crime fiction actually takes place during that time. Trust, me fictional sleuths do not get a break just because it happens to be sometime between Friday afternoon and Monday morning.

For instance, in Lene Kaaberbøl and Agnete Friis’ The Boy in the Suitcase, Nina Borg gets an odd request from her friend Karin. Karin wants her to pick up a suitcase from a locker at Copenhagen’s Central Station. What Karin hasn’t told Nina is that the suitcase contains a three-year-old boy. He’s in a drugged and dazed state but he’s alive. When Nina tries to find Karin to get some answers, she discovers that her friend has been murdered. She also learns soon enough that the person who murdered Karin is now after her. In the meantime Sigita Ramoskiene, a young Lithuanian mother, is looking for answers of her own. Her three-year-old son Mikas was abducted from a playground near Vilnius and she is desperate to get him back. Both she and Nina continue to search for answers and it’s soon clear that the little boy Nina found is in fact Sigita’s son Mikas. Each in a different way, and for most of the novel separately, the two women try to solve the mystery of who took Mikas and why.  So, when is Mikas abducted?  Saturday afternoon.

In Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventure of the Red-Headed League, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson get a visit from Mr. Jabez Wilson, a pawnbroker with a very strange story to tell. Wilson responded to a job offering that specifically targeted men with red hair. Despite competition from many other men who’d applied as well, Wilson got the job. All he had to do to earn extra money was to copy the Encyclopaedia Britannica. One day he arrived at his place of employment only to find that it was closed and the Red-Headed League he thought he’d joined was disbanded. Wilson wants Holmes to find out what happened to the Red-Headed League and solve the mystery of his odd employment. It turns out that this job was simply a ruse to get Wilson out of his pawn shop so that a gang of thieves could use it to dig a tunnel into a nearby bank. Holmes enlists local police officer Peter Jones and bank director Mr. Merryweather to go along as he and Watson prepare to trap the thieves. And when does all of this action take place? Saturday night. In fact, Merryweather gives up his Saturday evening rubber of bridge to go along on the chase. See what I’m getting at here?

And then there’s Håkan Nesser’s The Unlucky Lottery (AKA Münster’s Case). Waldemar Leverkuhn and a few of his friends went in together on a lottery ticket. To their surprise and delight the ticket came up a winner. The four men agree to meet to celebrate their win and they go out together. Very late that night, Leverkuhn’s wife Marie-Louise comes home to find that her husband has been stabbed. Intendant Münster and his team investigate the case beginning with Leverkuhn’s family and neighbours. When they find out about the winning lottery ticket they also investigate Leverkuhn’s friends. What the team finds is that this is not a simple case. There are few leads and despite the fact that Leverkuhn seemed to be an inoffensive elderly man, there was more to his life than it seemed on the surface. In case you hadn’t guessed already, Leverkuhn is murdered on a Saturday night.

And just so you know, Sundays are not any safer than Saturdays when it comes to crime fiction. In Agatha Christie’s The Hollow, Sir Henry and Lady Lucy Angkatell invite a group of friends and relations to spend the week-end with them at their country home. Among the guests are Harley Street specialist Dr. John Christow and his wife Gerda. Hercule Poirot has taken a nearby cottage and has been invited for lunch on the Sunday. When he arrives at the Angkatell home though, he’s dismayed to see what looks like a tableau arranged for his “amusement.” The body of John Christow is lying by the pool and the killer is standing over the body holding the murder weapon. At first Poirot is far from amused. But when he realises that this is no act he begins to ask questions. It’s soon clear that there’s more to this murder than the scene would suggest. He and Inspector Grange work together to find out who would have wanted to kill John Christow and what the motive is. Did you notice? That murder takes place on Sunday.

So does the murder of beloved former schoolteacher Jane Neal, whom we meet in Louise Penny’s Still Life. Neal is a resident of Three Pines, a small town in rural Québec. On the Sunday morning of Thanksgiving weekend, Neal takes an early walk with her dog. During her walk she’s killed by an arrow in what looks like a tragic hunting accident. Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté is assigned the case. Something about it just doesn’t fit with the theory of accident so Gamache and his team investigate more thoroughly. They find that several people in Three Pines are not telling everything they know about their own lives or their relationships with Jane Neal. It turns out that despite the fact that Three Pines is a close-knit community more than one person in the area had a reason to want Neal out of the way.

Sunday is also not a safe day for powerful politician Silvio Luparello, as we discover in Andrea Camilleri’s The Shape of Water. Early one Monday morning, two workers are assigned the task of cleaning The Pasture, a notorious area of the Sicilian town of Vigatà. In the process of cleaning everything up they discover Luparello’s mostly-unclothed body in a car. Inspector Salvo Montalbano is assigned the case and it’s not going to be an easy one. Neither Luparello’s political allies nor his family members want the circumstances of his death to be made public. He was found after all in very embarrassing circumstances in a place usually frequented by prostitutes and their clients. So the Powers That Be put a lot of pressure on Montalbano to “rubber stamp” the official verdict of death by heart attack. Montalbano doesn’t believe the case is that simple and he asks for two extra days to ask questions. He’s reluctantly granted the time and gets to work. He finds that Luparello had plenty of political enemies, political “allies” and even family members who are only too happy he’s gone.  And when did Luparello die? That’s right, folks: Sunday evening.

 

You see? Week-ends are just not safe! So if you do make plans, please be careful. I’m just saying…

 

 
 

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from Loverboy’s Working for the Weekend.