It’s the End of the World as We Know it*

It’s 21 December 2012 and despite all the speculation, the world hasn’t ended. All of the discussion of the Mayan calendar and the end of the world shows though just how fascinated people are with the future and what would happen if the world as we know it now ended. There’s been of course a lot of interest in real life and we certainly see it in crime fiction too.

In Agatha Christie’s One, Two, Buckle My Shoe (AKA The Patriotic Murders and An Overdose of Death) for instance, we meet Howard Raikes. Raikes is a radical activist whose goal in life is to tear down the existing institutions and infrastructure and build completely new ones. To him, the established institutions are The Enemy; they stand in the way of a better world. Raikes is dating Jane Olivera, whose uncle Alistair Blunt is the embodiment of The Establishment. Blunt is a successful and powerful banker who stands for stability, order and prudence. Although Jane agrees with Howard about some things, she isn’t as radical as he is, and she is fond of her uncle. Their debates form a sub-plot to the major plot of this story, in which Blunt’s dentist Henry Morley is shot. Because Blunt is so influential, he’s made several dangerous enemies who might very well try to get at him at the dentist’s office, so at first it’s thought that Morley’s death might be a attempt-gone-wrong to get at Blunt. Chief Inspector James ‘Jimmy’ Japp is assigned the case and works with Hercule Poirot, who is also one of Morley’s patients, to find out who the killer is. The case gets complicated when another patient dies of an overdose of anaesthetic, and another patient disappears. The larger question of what the world should and could be like forms an interesting debate in this novel.

In Ellery Queen’s The Origin of Evil, Queen takes a house outside Hollywood so he can get some writing done. His dream of peace and quiet is ended when he gets a visit from nineteen-year-old Lauren Hill. Her father Leander has recently died of a heart attack that she suspects was deliberately brought on. She tells Queen of a series of macabre ‘gifts’ her father received and claims that he must have had a secret enemy. What’s more, Hill’s business partner Roger Priam has been receiving ‘gifts’ too. At first Queen doesn’t want to get involved but the strange nature of the puzzle intrigues him. So does Priam’s absolute refusal to co-operate in any way. So Queen begins to investigate Hill’s history as well as that of Priam. Then there’s an attempt on Priam’s life. Now Queen and the local police begin to get more involved. Queen finds that the key to Hill’s death and the other events in the story lies in the two men’s history. In the course of this novel we meet Roger Priam’s stepson Crowe ‘Mac’ McGowan. Mac lives in a tree on the Priam property where he’s built himself a house. He wears as little as possible, and much of the time nothing at all. Mac’s claim is that the world is about to end because of nuclear attacks, so he wants to be prepared for life after The Bomb.

Isaac Asimov speculated a great deal about what the future might hold if life as we know it ended. For instance, his The Caves of Steel takes place in and near a futuristic New York City in which humans have divided into two groups: Earthmen and Spacers. Spacers are the descendents of people who left the planet to explore other worlds. They look to other planets as the best chance for the survival of the species and their technology reflects that. They’ve also developed sophisticated positronic robots that are an active part of their society. Earthmen on the other hand are the descendents of people who never left the planet. They live in extremely large domed mega-cities and look to making more use of Earth’s resources to ensure the survival of the species. Earthmen and Spacers dislike and distrust each other; in fact, they live in separate communities. So when famous Spacer scientist Dr. Roj Nemennuh Sarton is murdered, the Spacers believe an Earthman is responsible. In order to ease the tensions between the two groups, New York Police Commissioner Julius Enderby assigns Earthman homicide detective Elijah ‘Lije’ Baley to investigate. He also assigns Baley to work with a new partner R. Daneel Olivaw. At first Baley treats this like any other investigation. But then he discovers to his dismay that Olivaw is a positronic robot. If there’s anything Earthmen hate and fear more than Spacers, it’s robots. So the two detectives have to overcome several barriers in order to find out who killed Sarton. In this novel, not only do we see Asimov’s speculation at work; we also see the fear of the future reflected in the Earthmen’s attitude towards space exploration, robots and other developments.

In John D. MacDonald’s The Green Ripper, ‘salvage consultant’ Travis McGee loses his beloved girlfriend Gretel Howard to a mysterious illness. When it turns out to be deliberately induced, McGee decides to go after whoever is responsible for her murder. He traces her death to a Northern California group called the Church of the Apocrypha, This group is committed to the tearing down and destruction of civilisation because the members believe that’s the only way that humans can be saved. McGee infiltrates the group so that he can find out why Gretel was targeted and take vengeance.

Alex Scarrow’s Last Light and Afterlight both depict the end of life as we know it when the world’s supply of oil is deliberately shut off. In the first book Andy and Jenny Sutherland and their two children happen to be in different places when the oil supply stops. They try desperately to survive and re-unite and although the main plot in this novel concerns the reason the oil’s been shut off, I honestly think the Sutherland family and the way they cope is the more interesting aspect of this novel. But that’s only my opinion, so feel free to differ with me if you do. The second novel takes place ten years after the events of the first. By this time Jenny Sutherland has become the leader of a small group of survivors who have made a home for themselves on a former North Sea oil rig. The novel concerns what happens when they discover another badly wounded survivor in a nearby town, and when they learn that another group of survivors, who live in the Millennium Dome in London, may have fuel. In both of these novels Scarrow takes a look at a harsh new world in which everything we take for granted has changed.

And then there’s Ben Winter’s The Last Policeman. In that novel, a meteor will hit Earth in approximately six months. Most people are giving up on life, quitting jobs, using drugs and in general living as though the world will end. For them, it will. And different people are reacting to it in a number of ways. But police detective Hank Palace is unique; he’s still trying to do his job. That’s why he takes a special interest when Peter Zell dies.  Everyone thinks Zell’s death is a suicide like so very many others. But Palace doesn’t think so and investigates just as though there were no oncoming meteor. I confess I’ve not yet read this book, but it’s just too good an example for me not to mention it.

There are other examples too of course. Everyone’s got a different view of when and how life as we know it will end and it’s both fascinating and scary to speculate on it. No wonder authors face this demon in their novels.

 
 
 

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from REM’s It’s the End of the World as We Know it (and I Feel Fine).

I’ve Been Swimming in a Sea of Anarchy*

I’m sure we all have times when we wish we could do whatever we wanted. But life’s not like that and if you put it in perspective, it’s a good thing it isn’t. Imagine for instance a world where there was no recourse if someone swindled you because they wanted to, or a world in which people who were larger, more powerful and better-armed could take whatever they wanted from you. Of course things like this do happen. But those are often exceptions, rather than the rule. In case you’re having trouble imagining the way life would be without a sense of order, all you need to do is look at crime fiction to see what happens when anarchy starts to gain the upper hand.

In Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None (AKA Ten Little Indians), a group of people is invited for a stay at Indian Island off the Devon coast. For different reasons, each person accepts the invitation and everyone gathers at the island. On the first day all seems to be going well and the guests settle in. Then, after dinner on the first night, each one of the people on the island is accused of causing the death of at least one other person. As if that’s not shocking enough, one of the guests suddenly dies of what turns out to be poison. Late that night there’s another death. It’s soon clear that one of the people on the island is a murderer whose plan is to kill all of the others. Meanwhile a storm has come up and cut the island off from the mainland. One by one, the guests continue to die and the survivors have to do whatever they can to stay alive. It’s an interesting and eerie case of what happens when paranoia combines with the lack of a sense of the normal order of things.

In Michael Connelly’s The Black Ice, L.A.P.D. detective Harry Bosch discovers that one of his fellow cops Calexico “Cal” Moore has apparently committed suicide and that it happened on Bosch’s patch. He goes to the scene of the death only to be told to leave the case alone, that Moore had “turned” – gone dirty – and the department doesn’t want to be embarrassed by that. In fact, Bosch is given a set of eight other cases to solve to keep him away from the Moore case. But this being Harry Bosch, he doesn’t let the case alone. He begins to find little signs that Moore did not commit suicide and starts exploring Moore’s possible connections with a Mexican gang that’s been dealing in “black ice,” a dangerous drug that contains heroin, cocaine and PCP.  Bosch traces Moore’s dealings and history to a Mexican border town area that’s basically a “no-man’s land” ruled by the drug gang. He’s warned several times and with good reason not to go there, but that doesn’t stop him. In the end, Bosch finds out what the connection is between the Mexican drug gang, the death he’s investigating and two other deaths that occur in the novel. And no, it’s not the obvious connection.

There’s a real sense of what happens when anarchy starts to take over in Alex Scarrow’s Last Light and Afterlight. Those novels tell the story of Andy and Jenny Sutherland and their children and what happens to them when the world’s supply of oil is suddenly and deliberately cut off. In Last Light they happen to all be in different places when the oil is cut off, and each of them tries desperately to re-unite with the others. Throughout that novel we see how the old saying that “only the strongest survive” plays out as people scrabble to survive. In Afterlight, which takes place ten years after the events of Last Light, some groups of people have established more or less orderly communities. One of those communities, located on an oil rig, is led by Jenny Sutherland. The members of the community have managed to put together a life and a sort of social order that allows people to live together reasonably well. Then the group rescues a badly wounded man Valerie Latoc, whom they find in a town not far from the oil rig. They bring Latoc back to the rig and nurse him to health. That’s when the trouble begins as Latoc begins to sabotage the fragile sense of community that the group has developed. Together these novels offer among other things a gripping look at what happens when the normal sense of order breaks down and anarchy begins to prevail.

There’s also a look at what happens when anarchy threatens in Deon Meyer’s Blood Safari. Emma le Roux hires personal bodyguard Martin Lemmer to protect her as she takes on a very dangerous challenge. Twenty years earlier, Emma’s brother Jacobus disappeared from Kruger National Park where he was working in a special branch of the South African military – the Nature and Environmental Conservation Unit.  At the time it was assumed that Jacobus le Roux had run afoul of poachers and paid the ultimate price for it. But Emma has recently seen a man on television whom she believes strongly is her brother. So she decides to find out for herself what the truth is about Jacobus’ disappearance. Emma and Martin Lemmer leave Cape Town, which has its own very real dangers, and travel to the Lowveld, which has nearly no law at all – at least no dependable responsible law enforcement. They quickly find that there is much, much more to Jacobus le Roux’s disappearance than a fight with poachers. It turns out that the truth has everything to do with some very ugly political, social and economic realities. Throughout the novel, we see that in a lot of ways, this is a “kill or be killed” kind of situation. As Lemmer and le Roux try to find out answers, they also have to face off against some very, very nasty people who don’t mind killing and who have little to fear from law enforcement. That adds a solid layer of suspense to this novel.

We see a similar effect of the suspense brought on by anarchy in Roger Smith’s Dust Devils. In that novel, former reporter Robert Dell is the only survivor after he and his wife and two children are ambushed not far from Cape Town. Then, Dell is framed for the murders and sent to prison to await trial – a trial that’s likely to be a sham. He’s freed from prison when his father, with whom he hasn’t had contact in twenty-five years, manages to engineer his escape. Dell’s father Bobby Goodbread has “inside information” on the murders of Dell’s wife and children and he has his own reasons for going after the killer. So Dell and his father leave Cape Town and head towards Zululand where the killer has a home base. Along the way we learn that the murderer is Inja Mazibuko, a locally powerful Zulu warlord who committed the murders on orders from his boss. Also traveling to Zululand, but for a different reason, is Disaster Zondi, a bureaucrat who’s just lost his job. The three men get ready for a confrontation with Mazibuko, but Mazibuko is a very powerful man with connections all the way to the top of the South African government. And in the part of Zululand where they’re headed, there really is no trustworthy law enforcement, especially not for “regular” people. Throughout the novel we can see how the feeling of anarchy has affected people. Nearly no-one can be trusted, and many of the characters live in fear for their lives and stay as inconspicuous as they can, just to stay out of trouble and survive. In the end, though, we find out exactly why Dell’s family was attacked and who’s behind it, and we see how Goodbread, Dell and Zondi deal with the chaos in which they find themselves.

There are of course other crime novels that feature this theme or context of anarchy; space has only allowed me to mention a few. It can be an effective tool to ratchet up suspense and to add interesting plot twists and threads.

 

 

 

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from Sheryl Crow’s Everyday is a Winding Road.

A Constant Battle For the Ultimate State of Control*

Most of us like to have at least some control over our lives. We all know that there are things that happen to us that we can’t control, but most of us try to stay in control overall. That’s what can make it so scary when life seems to spin out of control. Sometimes it happens because people try to handle things they really can’t handle. Other times it happens because of outside events (like a natural disaster for example). And other times it happens for other reasons. For whatever the reason, the feeling that things are spinning out of control is suspenseful and scary; that’s one reason for which it can add such an effective layer to a crime fiction novel.

For example, in Agatha Christie’s And Then There None (AKA Ten Little Indians), ten people receive an invitation to stay for a time on Indian Island off the Devon coast. For different reasons each accepts the invitation and they all gather on the island. Oddly enough, their host doesn’t make an appearance but everyone settles in and the evening starts off well enough. Then after dinner, each guest is accused of causing the death of at least one other person. That’s unsettling enough. Then, one of the guests suddenly dies of what turns out to be poison. Then another dies during the night. Now the guests start to get very worried. Then a storm comes up, cutting the island off and making it impossible to leave. As one by one, more guests die, the others feel increasingly out of control of what’s going on. They try to take some measures (e.g. trying to find out who the killer is, locking their doors, not being alone) but it doesn’t seem to do any good and that sense of everything spinning out of control adds a solid layer of suspense to this novel.

Ellery Queen’s Ten Days Wonder introduces us to Howard Van Horn, son of a wealthy manufacturing tycoon. Van Horn’s had some difficulties lately with short “blackouts,” where he has no memory of what happens. But otherwise his life is fairly ordinary. Then one day his world spins completely out of control when he wakes up from one of these episodes with blood on him. Terrified that he might have done something horrible, Van Horn seeks out his college friend Queen and asks for his help in figuring out what happened. Queen agrees and together the two men try to fill in the proverbial blanks. The trail leads to Van Horn’s hometown of Wrightsville where his father, stepmother and uncle still live. While they’re in Wrightsville, Van Horn has another “blackout.” On the same night, his stepmother Sally is killed. Now Van Horn is not only plagued with troubling chunks of missed time, but he could be a murderer. That feeling of life spinning out of control for Van Horn adds a crisp layer of tension to this story as he and Queen try to find out the truth.

In Karin Fossum’s When the Devil Holds the Candle, life spins completely out of control for Sivert Skorpe, who goes by his nickname Zipp. Zipp’s best friend – his only friend, really – is Andreas Winther. The two young men have known each other most of their lives and do everything together. One afternoon Zipp and Andreas are aimlessly wandering around when they get the idea to find a way to get some extra money. They follow through on their plan – a purse-snatching – and that in itself has some unexpected and later tragic consequences. But that’s only the beginning for these two young men. Something else happens (sorry – no spoilers here) that really upends Zipp’s formerly organised world and now things begin to spin completely out of control for him. The night ends dramatically and Andreas disappears (no, Zipp doesn’t kill him – told you; no spoilers). Andreas’ mother contacts the police when he doesn’t come home and Inspector Konrad Sejer and his assistant Jacob Skarre look into what happened. In the meantime, they are also investigating a tragic shooting at a party when some characters let things get out of control. At the same time, Sejer’s personal life begins to feel to him a bit like it’s spinning out of control. He’s in a new relationship with the very free-spirited Sara Struel, who is far more spontaneous than Sejer is and sometimes that’s disconcerting. Fossum thus explores that sense of everything spinning out of control on several levels in this story.

There’s a similar sense of everything getting out of control in Shona MacLean’s A Game of Sorrows. Alexander Seaton is a university teacher in 17^th Century Aberdeen. His life is fairly settled and he’s even got his eye on a young woman he wants to marry. Then one night he gets a startling visit. His cousin Sean O’Neill Fitzgarrett has traveled from Ireland on an urgent mission. A local poet has cursed the O’Neills, an ancient and proud Celtic family, and part of the curse has started to come true. What’s worse, there’s been an attempt on Fitzgarrett’s own life. O’Neill family matriarch Maeve O’Neill has sent Fitzgarrett to bring Seaton back to Ireland to find the poet and prove that the rest of the curse can’t come true. That’s the only way, so thinks Maeve O’Neill, to lift the curse. Seaton’s world shifts, if you will, to begin with when he discovers the existence of a cousin he never knew he had. Then when he reluctantly agrees to go to Ireland, he finds that life goes completely out of control for him. He’s in an environment he’s not familiar with, that observes a religion he’s been brought up to believe is wrong, and with people whose culture he doesn’t understand. And then, as he and Fitzgarrett try to get to the truth about the bizarre incidents happening with the family, things get even more upside-down for Seaton. He no longer knows whom to trust, especially given the incendiary politics of the time. We also see this theme of things spinning out of control in the person of Maeve  O’Neill. She is the matriarch of a proud and old family who refuses to come to terms with the fact that the world is changing daily. Her reaction to it adds a real layer of suspense to the story.

One of the most suspenseful explorations of what it’s like to feel out of control (in my opinion, so feel free to differ if you do) is Martin Edwards’ short story 24 Hours From Tulsa. That’s the story of a sales representative named Lomas, who’s feeling very much as though his ordered world – the one he’s always known – is spinning out of control. He’s always done his job and lived his life and raised his marriage in a certain way but now the old patterns have been completely disrupted. His children have changed and are growing away from him. His wife has just announced she’s leaving him. And to make matters even more unsettling, the world of Lomas’ work is getting more out of his control too. More and more, his job requires technology and he feels hopeless at understanding it, let alone using it. Even the roads he uses to get to his various clients are changing too as new construction’s being done. Lomas no longer feels that he has any control over his life. So at a rest stop, he takes some drastic action and the buildup to that climax adds a strong layer of tension to the story.

There are a lot of other stories too (Alex Scarrow’s Last Light and Afterlight come to my mind) that explore the theme of what happens when people feel themselves spinning out of control. It can make for a gripping undercurrent in a good crime story.

 

ps.  Oh, the ‘photo? That’s my new Kindle Fire. Talk about getting out of control…  There is no hope for me now is there?

 

 
 

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from Billy Joel’s A Matter of Trust.

 

There’s Never Been Any Reason For Me to Think About You*

One of the more common reasons I’ve heard for people not liking or not finishing books is that they just didn’t care about the characters. Most authors will tell you that they want the characters to matter to readers because if they don’t, readers won’t get involved in the story. And that makes a lot of sense. On the other hand, most readers don’t want to feel that they’re being manipulated – that their heartstrings are being pulled, if you will. So an author has to strike a delicate balance to get readers to care about characters and interested in knowing what happens to them without being exploitative.

For instance, in Agatha Christie’s Cat Among the Pigeons, newly-hired games mistress Grace Springer is shot one night in the brand new Sports Pavilion at Meadowbank, an exclusive girls’ school. It’s not long before the police suspect that she was killed because she found out more than was safe for her to know. Then one of the students is kidnapped. And there’s another death. Now it seems that Meadowbank may have to close its doors permanently. Julia Upjohn, one of the students, slowly begins to put the pieces of the puzzle together. She visits Hercule Poirot, who’s acquainted with a friend of her mother’s and tells him what she’s deduced, and he gets involved in the case. Throughout this novel, we feel a real sympathy for Honoria Bulstrode, the headmistress and co-founder of Meadowbank. She’s worked hard for years to establish Meadowbank’s reputation, and we can’t help but care about what happens to the school for her sake. And yet, Christie doesn’t get overly sentimental about Bulstrode’s character or about the case itself.  For that reason, the reader doesn’t feel exploited.

Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse is another character for whom we can feel real sympathy; he’s won millions of fans because we really care about what happens to him. Part of the reason for that is that he’s got a very effective balance of strengths and flaws. Yes, he’s crotchety and it’s sometimes hard to work with him. He can be sharp-tempered and he’s not good at taking advice. And yet, underneath that we see another side of him. For instance, in The Jewel That Was Ours, Morse and Lewis are assigned to find out what’s happened to the Wolvercote Tongue, a piece of an Anglo-Saxon belt buckle that was supposed to be donated to Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum. When Theodore Kemp, curator of that museum, is killed the day after the disappearance of the Wolvercote Tongue, Morse and Lewis are sure the two events are related, and so they are. In the process of searching for answers, Morse meets Sheila Williams, a university event organiser who was helping to co-ordinate the public event at which the Wolvercote Tongue was to be presented to the Ashmolean. As it turns out, she also has a strong motive for murdering Kemp. Morse is smitten with her and she seems to feel the same way. In fact, they spend a night together and agree to see each other again. Morse shows up a bit early and waits for quite a while but Williams doesn’t meet him as planned, so Morse decides to drown his sorrows at a hotel bar:

 

“As he came to the door, he looked inside – and stopped. There, seated at the bar, a large empty glass held high in her left hand, her arm resting on the shoulder of a youngish (bearded!) man, sat Sheila Williams, her black-stockinged legs crossed provocatively, her body disturbingly close to her companion’s.
Morse held back, feeling a great surge of irrational and impotent jealousy. About which he could do nothing. Absolutely nothing. Like a stricken deer he walked back to the foyer where he wrote a brief note (‘Unavoidable, urgent police business’) and asked the concierge to take it through to the bar in about five minutes or so, and hand it to a Mrs. Williams – Mrs. Sheila Williams.”

 

You almost can’t help but care about Morse at times like this. Especially if you’ve ever been treated that way.

In Alex Scarrow’s Last Light and Afterlight, we follow the fortunes of the Sutherland family. Andy and Jenny Sutherland and their children Leona and Jake live what you might call an ordinary life until the world’s oil supply is suddenly and deliberately cut off. When that happens, the Sutherlands are all in different places. Each of them tries desperately to re-unite with the others, and it’s that story that keeps the reader’s attention as much as does the story of the international intrigue and plotting that’s led to the oil cutoff. The members of the Sutherland family are not painted as heroic, “larger than life” characters. They’re also not drawn in an overly sentimental way. And that’s perhaps part of the reason that we care about them so much. We want to know what happens to them; it matters.

That’s also the case in Catherine O’Flynn’s What Was Lost. In that novel, ten-year-old Kate Meaney has started her own detective agency Falcon Investigations. She spends as much time as she can at the newly-opened mall Green Oaks, looking for crimes to solve. Then one day, she’s scheduled to sit entrance exams at Redspoon, an exclusive school. She gets on the bus to the school with her friend Adrian Palmer, but never comes back. It’s assumed that Adrian Palmer is responsible for her disappearance and probable death and in fact, sentiment against him runs so high that he leaves town. Twenty years later, Palmer’s sister Lisa works at Green Oaks in a dead-end job as Assistant Manager of Your Music. She’s in a dead-end relationship too and in fact her life is in stasis until the night she strikes up an unlikely friendship with Kurt, a security guard at the mall. Kurt’s been troubled by odd images he’s seen on the mall’s cameras: a young girl who, Lisa discovers, looks a lot like Kate Meaney. Each in a different way, these two get to the truth about what really happened to Kate and as they do, we care about them. We also care very much about Kate. The characters in this novel are multi-dimensional. Neither Lisa nor Kurt (nor anyone in their families) is perfect. Neither is Kate. They are very human and that’s a very important part of why we care about what happens to them.

That ability to make readers care about characters without being overly sentimental about them is part of the reason that Denise Mina’s Garnethill trilogy is so well-regarded. Those novels feature Maureen “Mauri” O’Donnell, who comes from a hellish home life and has had some very bad things happen to her. In part because of what’s happened in her life, she’s got a tough exterior. She’s made some dubious associations and some real mistakes and she’s got some real faults. But we care about her. She’s strong, brave and even has a sense of humour despite the things she has had to face. She can be compassionate and she is determined. On one level the reader sympathises with her because of what’s happened to her. But it goes deeper; the reader can also respect her and it’s not hard to be on her side.

And that’s one of the reasons that characters can stay with us, and that we think about them, even when we’ve finished the novel. Which characters have had that effect on you? Why do you think that is?

 

 
 

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from Head East’s Never Been Any Reason.

There Goes My Hero, He’s Ordinary*

One of the things that makes for a well-written crime fiction story is the way it portrays ordinary people when they are faced with extraordinary and terrible circumstances. Most of us don’t have superpowers (although I sometimes wish that I did ), so we identify most with characters like us – characters who go through life the best they can. When those characters rise to an occasion and meet extraordinary challenges, they show us what humans can achieve. That’s a pretty positive thing, and it’s no wonder that we admire them the way we do.

For instance, in Agatha Christie’s 4:50 From Paddington (AKA What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw!), Miss Marple shows just what an ordinary elderly lady with a keen knowledge of human nature can achieve. In that novel, Miss Marple’s friend Elspeth McGillicuddy is on a train, on her way to visit Mss Marple. She glances out of the window and into the window of a passing train. When she does, she witnesses what looks very much like a murder – a woman is being strangled. At first, no-one believes Mrs. McGillicuddy; after all, the police can’t find a body and no-one fitting the description has been reported missing. But Miss Marple stands by her friend and believes her. She begins to do a little research and deduces that the body was probably thrown from the train and most likely ended up at Rutherford Hall, the home of Luther Crackenthorpe and his family. With the help of professional housekeeper Lucy Eyelesbarrow, Miss Marple slowly figures out who the woman is and who killed her. The trouble is that she doesn’t have any real evidence. So she rises to the occasion and puts her own self at risk to get the murderer to confess. I like the loyalty she displays in this novel.

In Dorothy Sayers’ Strong Poison, we meet Joan Murchison. She’s a secretary who works for an agency owned by Miss Katharine Climpson. She takes on much more than she bargained for when she agrees to help Lord Peter Wimsey with a case. Mystery novelist Harriet Vane will soon be tried (for the second time) for the murder of her former lover Philip Boyes. Wimsey is quite sure that Vane is innocent and besides, he’s fallen in love with her. So he’s more than eager to clear her name. Wimsey believes that there may be an important clue to the murder among the papers of attorney Norman Urquhart, so Murchison goes undercover as a newly-hired secretary at the office to find out what she can. In doing that, she undertakes her share of risks and is in fact almost caught out. But she rises to the occasion and is able to find what Wimsey needs. And all this to clear the name of someone Murchison has never met.

And then there’s Margaret Billy Sosi, a sixteen-year-old Navajo who figures strongly in Tony Hillerman’s The Ghostway. Sosi gets a troubling cryptic warning from her grandfather. The message disturbs her enough so that she goes to see him. When she gets to his home, she finds that he’s disappeared. So she goes on a dangerous trip to Los Angeles to try to search for him. The authorities at the school Sosi attends alert the police when she leaves the school, and Navajo Tribal Police Sergeant Jim Chee is assigned to find her. He comes to believe that her disappearance is related to another case he’s investigating – the death of Los Angeles Navajo Albert Gorman, who’s relocated to the Big Reservation and who happens to be distantly related to Sosi. It turns out that Chee is right. Chee does track Sosi down, but really, it’s she who shows some real heroism. Twice she saves Chee’s life and in the end, she’s as responsible for catching Gorman’s killer as Chee is.

Alex Scarrow’s Last Light and Afterlight introduces us to the Sutherland family. Andy and Jenny Sutherland and their children Leona and Jake are tragically torn apart in Last Light when the world’s oil supply is suddenly and deliberately cut off. They all happen to be in different places when that happens, and the story of their desperate attempts to re-unite is an important part of this story. In Afterlight, which takes place ten years after the events of Last Light, those who’ve survived a world without oil have begun to manage to carve out lives of sorts for themselves. Jenny Sutherland has had to search deep within herself to find the strength to carry her family through this time and now, she leads a small group of survivors who live on an oil rig off the Norwich coast. They’re starting to put their lives together when word comes that another survivors’ group, this one based in London, may have oil. Scarrow tells the story of why the oil supply has been cut off, but the real story in these novels is of the Sutherland family, who are ordinary people. Yet they show true heroism as they try to cope with a harsh new reality.

Alan Orloff’s Channing Hayes has had to cope with some harsh new realities, too. He’s a standup comedian who’s also part owner of The Last Laff, a Northern Virginia comedy club. In Killer Routine, we learn that Hayes had a very promising career as a comic until he and his fiancée Lauren Dempsey were involved in a tragic car accident in which Dempsey was killed and Hayes badly injured. Hayes has to slowly put his life back together as he comes to grips with life without Lauren. In Killer Routine, he gets involved in the search for Lauren’s younger sister Heather, who disappears one night just before she’s scheduled to do a comedy performance. In Deadly Campaign, Hayes and his business partner Artie Worsham get drawn into the mystery surrounding an attack on the restaurant owned by their friend Thomas Lee. In both the novels, Hayes gets in deeper than he thought, so to speak, because of his loyalty to his friends. He’s also got to do the possibly more courageous thing – learn to live with what’s happened to him. What’s interesting here is that Hayes is a pretty ordinary guy – for a comic. But he meets the challenge when he gets plunged into some extraordinary events.

Jussi Adler-Olsen’s Merete Lynggaard shows real heroism, too, in more than one way. In Mercy (AKA The Keeper of Lost Causes), we learn that Lynggaard is an up-and-coming Danish politician. She’s made her share of political enemies, but that doesn’t really stop her. In her personal life, she has the care of her younger brother Uffe, who hasn’t spoken since the two were in a terrible car accident when he was thirteen and she sixteen. Lynggaard’s career matters to her, but Uffe comes first. Then one day, the two are taking a ferry trip when Merete Lynggaard goes over the side and disappears. Many people say that Uffi pushed her over, however accidentally, and she drowned. And since her body never washes up, nor does she return, that’s the assumption that everyone eventually begins to accept. But then, five years later, Copenhagen homicide detective Carl Mørck and his assistant Hafez al-Assad take a new look at the case. Their search leads them to believe that Merete Lynggaard may still be alive. When we find out what happened to Merete Lynggaard, we see just how heroic she’s had to be.

And that’s the thing about really well-written fictional heroes. They’re normal people. They don’t have super powers. That’s why we can cheer them on when they surpass themselves. It’s also why we can learn from them.

 

On Another Note…
 

 

There are real-life heroes like that, too. Today’s post is dedicated to one of them: Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who one year ago today was nearly killed by an assassin’s bullets. Giffords has surmounted impossible odds to recover from what could easily have been a fatal injury. Every day she works hard to continue her recovery. One of the moments I will remember always was when Congresswoman Giffords made a special trip to Washington on 1 August 2011, just seven months after her devastating injury, to cast a vote on a crucial national issue. That’s the scene pictured here and I will not forget it. Congresswoman Giffords, I salute you. You are an inspiration and I wish you well.

 

 

 

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from The Foo Fighters’ My Hero.