Make it Stop*

There’s an old saying that ‘sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.’ But the truth is that words are powerful enough to cause a great deal of damage. That’s how strong words are. And the thing about words is that even when the person who says hurtful things apologises sincerely, the words don’t go away. If you add to the terrible power of words physical threats, it’s easy to see why bullying can be so devastating. If you’ve ever been bullied, you know exactly what I mean. And the hurt that bullying causes isn’t a passing ‘childhood’ kind of thing. Again, if you’ve ever been bullied, you know exactly what I mean. Bullying leaves lasting scars in real life and we certainly see that in crime fiction too. I’m only going to mention a few examples because my guess is that you already get my point.

Agatha Christie’s Appointment With Death features a bully (she is referred to as a ‘mental sadist’ here) Mrs. Boynton. She is the mother of Ginevra ‘Jinny,’ and the stepmother of Lennox, Carol and Raymond. Mrs. Boynton has ruled her family with tyranny and bullying and now, they are more or less cowed. The only member of the family who seems not to be intimidated by her is Lennox’s wife Nadine. When Mrs. Boynton decides to take her family on a sightseeing tour of the Middle East, it seems like a real chance for the family members to be able to live ‘like normal people.’ But what they soon find out is that Mrs. Boynton has her own reasons for taking this trip. When she suddenly dies during a visit to the ancient city of Petra, everyone thinks at first that she’s had heart failure. But Colonel Carbury isn’t entirely satisfied, so he asks Hercule Poirot to investigate. It turns out that Mrs. Boynton’s murder has everything to do with her history as a bully, and in that sense one can’t help but feel sympathy for her killer. Throughout this story one sees the evidence of the lasting scars of bullying, even in adulthood.

Although Ann Cleeves’ Raven Black isn’t, strictly speaking, about bullying, we do see it in the novel. Seventeen-year-old Catherine Ross is killed shortly after New Year’s Day near the fictional town of Ravenswick, Shetland. Inspector Jimmy Perez is called in and begins to investigate. As he begins to find out more about Catherine’s life, he learns that she was a relative newcomer to the area. Catherine had a mind of her own and was not easily intimidated. But as Perez looks into the case, he finds out that like most schools, Catherine’s had its share of bullies. Their effect is clear even though the novel doesn’t describe scenes of bullying. Perez can identify in that sense with the victim. We learn in this novel that he came in for his share of bullying as a child. He was sent to a school where two boys in particular bullied him and made his life miserable. Then he was befriended and as he puts it, ‘saved his life.’ That memory complicates Perez’ investigation when that friend ends up being a suspect in Catherine Ross’ murder.

There’s also Simone van der Vlugt’s The Reunion, in which we meet Sabine Kroese. She’s recently begun a new job after recovering from a nervous breakdown. All goes well enough at first. Then Renée, a co-worker whom Sabine recruited and who has since been promoted, begins to make Sabine’s life increasingly difficult. This stirs up old feelings and memories for Sabine, who endured bullying in secondary school. At that time, she was very close to her best friend Isabel, until Isabel joined ‘the cool crowd.’ Then Isabel and her friends began to make Sabine the butt of their jokes and life got increasingly unbearable for her. One night, Isabel disappeared, and there’s never been a satisfactory explanation. Sabine herself has very little memory of what happened that night, but her experiences at her new job bring back those past events and gradually, she begins to recover her memory. As she does so, she comes to see that she may know the truth about what happened to Isabel. This novel shows as much as anything else that bullying happens in adulthood too.

Certainly we see that in Simon Lelic’s Rupture (A Thousand Cuts). One hot afternoon, recently-hired history teacher Samuel Szajkowski goes into a crowded auditorium at the school where he teaches and shoots a fellow teacher and three students. Then he turns the gun on himself. DI Lucia May is assigned to the case, where she’s expected to ‘rubber stamp’ the official explanation that Szajkowski just ‘snapped’ as the saying goes. But as May begins to interview colleagues, administrators and students, she slowly learns that this school nurtured a culture of bullying. May knows all too well what that sort of culture is like; her own workplace has a similar mindset and she has been the target of a fair amount of bullying. As her story and the story of what happened at the school seem to run parallel, we get a firsthand look at the terrible consequences of bullying.

And it does have terrible consequences. Just recently the news has been full of at least two cases in the U.S. of bullying that reached harrowing proportions and resulted in the suicide of the bullying victims. That’s also happened in Nova Scotia and I know it happens elsewhere. We can all think of examples we’ve read about, heard about or worse, seen.

I don’t think anyone would deny that bullying is a problem. The question is what to do about it. Oh, sure, donating money to anti-bullying activist groups is a good thing. And there are several groups that are working on this problem. That’s a good thing too.  But the real root of bullying is the culture that tolerates and condones it. Somehow, young people learn that they can bully and everything will be OK. Somehow, there’s a message that ‘it’s just one of those things that happen at school.’ But they can’t. It won’t. And it’s not.

One way that people get this message that bullying is OK is that others stand aside, for whatever reason, and do nothing when it happens.  Another way people get this message (at least in my opinion) is that young people see the adults in their lives treat one another in sometimes truly awful ways. No wonder they get the message that bullying works.

I know I can’t stop every instance of bullying. But I am going to do two things. I hope you’ll join me. First, I invite you to use your words to build people up. One can do that without gushing and it can make all the difference in the world. Somehow, bullies learn to say terrible things and tear people down. What if instead, the lesson they learned from the beginning was how to use words in a constructive way? The people who have the most to gain and the most to lose by following our example are watching us.

I also invite you to speak up when you see bullying. Please let’s not stand aside while it happens. OK, it’s hard. It can be scary. And it can feel awkward, even judgemental, to say something when we hear certain slurs. But walking away from a situation is not solving the problem. It contributes to the problem.  And it reinforces to the bullying victim that she or he is all alone. Let’s speak up when we hear slurs or see bullying. Let’s talk to our children and grandchildren about how wrong it is to make targets of other people. I think too many real-life people have paid too devastating a price for bullying. Please, folks, let’s do the things we can to make sure that the only stories we read about bullying are fictional.

 
 
 

*NOTE: The title of this post is the title of a song by Rise Against.

Those of Us With Ravaged Faces, Lacking in the Social Graces*

Crime fiction confronts us with our own prejudices. And one of those prejudices has to do with what we consider attractive. Of course people’s definitions of what’s attractive vary, and each culture has its own view of what ‘counts’ as ‘beautiful.’ But just about everyone is drawn to the physically appealing rather than to people who are considered unattractive. That’s why it can be very refreshing when a major character (in crime fiction, that’s usually the sleuth) is not what people think of as physically attractive. That takes writing skill.

Gladys Mitchell’s Mrs. Bradley, for instance, is hardly what one would call beautiful. In The Mystery of Butcher’s Shop, she is described as

 

‘A small, shriveled, bird-like woman who might have been thirty-five and who might have been ninety, clad in a blue and sulphur jumper like the plumage of a macaw…’

 

Her clothes are notoriously unattractive and she’s sometimes described as having saurian features or a reptilian smile. She is not what most people would find physically appealing, but she is a brilliant detective. She’s a psychoanalyst who has a thorough understanding of motivation and personality. And in this novel, that helps her to find out who murdered local squire Rupert Sedleigh and how his body ended up in a local butcher shop. Interestingly enough, Mrs. Bradley was portrayed by the emphatically not saurian Diana Rigg in a television series and it’s very interesting to see that Mrs. Bradley’s (lack of) taste in clothes and her unattractive appearance were given an overhaul for that series.

Rex Stout’s Archie Goodwin doesn’t fare too badly as far as appearance goes but his boss Nero Wolfe could hardly trade on his looks. Wolfe fans will know that he weighs a seventh of a ton. That’s heavy by just about anyone’s standards. Archie later says that Wolfe weighs

 

‘…between 310 and 390…’   

 

And although Wolfe isn’t depicted as hideous-looking, he doesn’t win clients over with his handsomeness. Still, when Wolfe is on the case, it’s easy to forget (even when Goodwin mentions it) that he’s much heavier than most people consider attractive. In Fer de Lance, for instance, he and Goodwin solve the unusual murder of Peter Barstow, president of Holland University. They first learn of this case when Maria Maffei visits Wolfe and asks for him to help find her brother Carlo, who has disappeared. When Carlo Maffei is found dead, it comes out that he had designed the special golf club that was used to kill Barstow. So now Goodwin and Wolfe have to find out who paid Maffei to create this design and killed him before he could reveal what he knew.  In this novel and in other novels in this series, clients don’t come to Wolfe because of his appearance; they come to him because he’s very good it what he does. Wolfe may not be physically attractive but we really do forget that when he’s on the case.

Most people probably wouldn’t call Ann Cleeves’ Vera Stanhope ‘a looker.’ She’s somewhat overweight, has eczema, and although she keeps clean, she doesn’t exactly take a lot of pains with her appearance. Stanhope is aware of the fact that she’s not conventionally beautiful, and sometimes that makes her self-conscious, as in Silent Voices. That novel begins with Stanhope going for a swim at the local gym/spa. She specifically chooses early morning for her doctor-prescribed workout because she’d rather not be there at the same time as the club’s usual habitués, young women who are tanned, thin and have beautiful faces. During this trip Stanhope makes a horrifying discovery. When she goes to the steam room after her swim, she finds the body of social worker Jenny Lister. Once she’s on this case, it’s easy to forget that Stanhope is not what you’d think of as ‘pretty’ at all. Instead, she’s intuitive, thoughtful, determined and a very good detective.

Reginald Hill’s Superintendent Andy Dalziel isn’t exactly magazine-cover material either, physically speaking. In A Pinch of Snuff, for instance, Hill says that Dalziel’s face is

 

‘…as heavy and ugly as a slag heap.’

 

What’s more, Dalziel’s overweight and makes no effort to behave in what most people would call a socially acceptable way. But he is a sound human being with real intuition. What’s more, he’s loyal, ethical and a very good detective. Although he’s often called, ‘the Fat Man,’ his appearance really doesn’t matter in terms of his ability to solve cases. In this novel for instance, he and Inspector Pascoe investigate the Calliope Kinema Club, which has a reputation for showing extreme and sometime violent pornography. It’s all legal though, or it least it seems so until Pascoe’s dentist suspects that one of the actresses has been actually hurt or worse. When Pascoe looks into it though, the actress seems to be fine. Still, Pascoe isn’t quite satisfied. Then the club’s owner Gilbert Haggard is murdered, and the club is wrecked. Now Dalziel and Pascoe have to find out what was really going on there that would lead to murder.

And then there’s Alan Orloff’s Channing Hayes. He’s a standup comic who survived a terrible car accident that claimed the life of his fiancée Lauren Dempsey. In Killer Routine, he’s just getting back into the ‘standup life’ as co-owner of The Last Laff, a Northern Virginia comedy club. Then, Lauren’s sister Heather disappears one night just before she’s supposed to go onstage at the club. Hayes is worried about Heather so he starts asking questions and before he knows it, he’s up against Heather’s difficult parents, dangerous ex-boyfriend and several other people in her life who don’t seem to want her to be found. Hayes has a scarred face and a withered left hand because of the accident, so most people who meet him wouldn’t exactly call him gorgeous. Hayes knows this and it sometimes makes him self-conscious. But it doesn’t take away from his ability to find out what happened to Heather Dempsey. And as the story goes on, it’s easy to forget that Hayes isn’t conventionally good-looking.

All too often, media images tell us what we’re supposed to find attractive and what physical qualities we’re supposed to admire. And all too often, that means the marginalisation of those who don’t fit those images. I’m glad that crime fiction doesn’t fall into that trap and I respect authors who have the skill to create strong and sympathetic characters who aren’t conventionally attractive.

 

 

 

*NOTE:  The title of this post is a line from Janis Ian’s At Seventeen.

Everybody’s Makin’ Believe That They Know*

It’s surprising how much of what we do and how we react is based on our assumptions – on what ‘everybody knows’ is true. ‘We all know,’ for example, what people like the biker in the ‘photo are like, right? ‘We all know,’ don’t we that a muffin has fewer calories than a doughnut does.** Right? Right? Wrong And that’s the thing about ‘what everybody knows.’ Most of it’s based on assumptions that may or may not be true at all. But those assumptions govern a lot of what we do, say and think and it can be hard to confront them. Those kinds of assumptions are such an important part of the way people think that we shouldn’t be surprised that they turn up a lot in crime fiction too. And sometimes they can have serious, even tragic consequences.

For instance, in G.K. Chesterton’s short story The Honour of Israel Gow, Father Paul Brown travels to Glengyle Castle in Glasgow, where Archibald Ogilvie, Earl of Glengyle has recently died. Glengyle lived alone except for his groundskeeper/house servant/personal assistant Israel Gow. Gow is an eccentric who, it seems, knows a lot more than he’s saying about his master’s death. ‘Everybody knows’ that Gow is deaf and perhaps ‘not in his right mind.’ ‘Everybody knows’ he may even practice some form of witchcraft or devil worship. But what ‘everybody knows’ turns out to be quite flawed, as Father Brown is able to show. When he puts the pieces of Glengyle’s death together, we learn that things are not what we assume them to be.

We also see the powerful role that ‘what everybody knows’ can play in Agatha Christie’s Five Little Pigs (AKA Murder in Retrospect). In that novel, Carla Lemarchant hires Hercule Poirot to solve the sixteen-year-old murder of her father, famous painter Amyas Crale. ‘Everybody knows’ that Crale’s wife Caroline was the jealous type who could be violent. ‘Everybody knows’ that she killed her husband because of his affair with Elsa Greer, whose portrait he was painting at the time of his death. In fact, ‘everybody knows’ a lot about what happened on the day of the murder – until Poirot looks into the case more deeply. He starts with the assumption that if Caroline Crale was not guilty, somebody else was and interviews all five of the people who were ‘on the scene’ on the day of the murder. Those interviews, plus what Poirot learns from everyone’s written account, show that ‘what everybody knows’ about Caroline Crale and about the day of her husband’s murder is very skewed and wrong.

In Ann Cleeves’ Raven Black, DI Jimmy Perez investigates the murder of Catherine Ross, who’d moved not long before to Ravenswick, Shetland. At first there doesn’t seem to be much of a need for an investigation. ‘Everybody knows’ that eccentric loner Magnus Tait is probably the killer. He doesn’t have many visitors, let alone friends. He was probably the last person to see Catherine Ross alive, though. And ‘everybody knows’ that he is probably responsible for the disappearance of another girl Catriona Bryce several years earlier. No physical evidence really connects Tait with Catherine Ross’ murder but ‘everybody knows’ he is guilty. The more Perez looks into the case though, the more he begins to question what ‘everybody knows.’ So despite pressure to wrap the case up, Perez continues the investigation and in the end he finds out who really killed Catherine Ross and why.

There’s a very clear example of the damage people can do when they believe what ‘everybody knows’ in Wendy James’ The Mistake. Jodie Evans Garrow has what most people would call a very good life. Her husband Angus is a successful attorney who’s being suggested as the right candidate to be the next mayor. Her two children are healthy and doing well enough in school and Jodie herself is what most people would call content. Then her daughter Hannah gets into an accident and is taken to a Sydney hospital – as it turns out, a hospital that Jodie knows all two well. Years earlier, Jodie gave birth to another child Ella Mary at that hospital. When a nurse who was there at the time remembers Jodie, she asks what happened to the baby. Jodie claims the baby was given up for adoption, and that’s when the real trouble begins. There turns out to be no record of the adoption, and it’s not long before people begin to ask private and then very public questions about Jodie. Before long, ‘everybody knows’ that she deliberately killed the baby. ‘Everybody knows’ that she’s mentally unstable and a lot of other things about her too. Even her family begins to wonder if ‘what everybody knows’ might be right. Only one person, Jodie’s friend Bridget ‘Bridie’ Sullivan, is really interested in what actually happened, rather than ‘what everybody knows’ happened. And as we find out the truth, we learn that ‘what everybody knows’ can’t always be trusted.

In Andrew Nette’s Ghost Money we meet Max Quinlan, an Australian ex-cop who’s taken up the business of finding missing people. He’s hired by Madeleine Avery to find her brother Charles, who seems to have disappeared. She’s willing to pay top money, so Quinlan agrees to take the case and travels to Bangkok, the last place Avery was known to have lived. That’s when he discovers the murdered body of Robert Lee, Avery’s business partner. Avery himself has disappeared but clues that Quinlan finds suggests that Avery has gone to Cambodia. Quinlan follows the trail there and takes with him a host of assumptions about Cambodia, its people and the tactics he should take to track Avery down. He’s wrong on just about all counts. It’s not until he lets go of ‘what everybody knows’ about Cambodia that he’s able to find out what happened to Charles Avery. What makes this story especially interesting is that Max Quinlan isn’t the stereotypical ‘White person with a racial bias against Asians.’ He’s half-Vietnamese himself, and he’s lived and worked in Bangkok before, so he thinks he knows how to operate in Cambodia. It’s a fascinating portrait of a character who has to confront what he always ‘knew’ about a place and its people.

‘Everybody knows’ what former prisoners are like, right? That’s exactly the set of assumptions addressed in Angela Savage’s short story The Teardrop Tattoos. In that story, a woman has recently been released from prison after serving a murder sentence. She’s given a place to live not far from a local day care facility, and settles in with her beloved pit bull Sully. She cultivates the ‘tough lesbian’ image, complete with tattoos, because ‘everybody knows’ what they’re like and leaves her alone, and that’s exactly what she wants. Then one day, she gets a complaint from the local Council because Sully is a member of a restricted breed. She’s forced to give Sully up and plans the revenge she’ll take on the woman who lodged the complaint. Throughout this story we see several examples of what ‘everybody knows’ and how very wrong that can be. And as we get to know the protagonist, we find out that there’s much more to her than what everybody thinks.

And that’s the thing about believing things that ‘everybody knows.’ Everybody isn’t always right.

 

** A Starbuck’s Apple Bran muffin has 380 calories. A Krispy Kreme original glazed donut has 200 calories. Of course there are differences among brands and varieties of muffins and donuts, but still… And you thought this blog was just about crime fiction.

 

 
 

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from Billy Joel’s Careless Talking.

Baby Come Back*

Authors have many reasons for ending a series that features a particular sleuth. Sometimes they find themselves losing interest in the sleuth. And talented authors don’t want to bore readers. So they end a series before that happens. Other times the series was intended from the beginning as a limited series. There are other reasons too that authors decide to bid adieu to their sleuths. But it doesn’t always stay that way. Authors take a big risk when they bring back a protagonist they’d thought was finished, but it can end up being the right decision.

One of the most famous examples of this of course is Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. The star of 56 short stories and 4 novels, Holmes was supposed to take his last bow in The Adventure of the Final Problem. In that story he has a face-to-face conflict with his nemesis Professor Moriarty at Switzerland’s Reichenbach Falls. The fight ends with both men hurtling over the falls. But as Conan Doyle fans will know, the public outcry against the death of Holmes was so great that Conan Doyle was persuaded to resurrect him. This he did in The Adventure of the Empty House. In this case it was as much public opinion as anything else that led Conan Doyle to bring his protagonist back. It was risky in the sense that he had to come up with a credible way for Holmes to return. But it turned out to be most successful.

Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh Inspector John Rebus retires at the end of Exit Music. His last major case, the main focus of that novel, is the murder of Russian dissident poet Alexander Todorov. Todorov’s murder is set up to look like a mugging gone wrong, but Rebus soon suspects otherwise. There are several possible suspects too, including Rebus’ old nemesis Morris Gerald ‘Big Ger’ Cafferty. In the end Rebus and his team find out the truth about that murder and another death that occurs in the story. The novel also features the ‘goodbye’ celebration for Rebus, and thus the series ended. But Rankin has brought Rebus back in Standing in Another Man’s Grave. In that novel, Rebus has returned to work as a civilian for the Lothian and Borders Police’s Cold Case unit. That’s how he gets involved in the search for the truth about Sally Hazlitt’s disappearance. Sally disappeared in 1999 during a holiday trip to a chalet. Her body hasn’t been found, so her mother Nina hasn’t given up hope. Nina Hazlitt asks the Cold Case unit to look into the matter and Rebus gets interested and begins to investigate. He finds that there are two deaths that might be connected to Sally Hazlitt’s disappearance; if so, this could be much bigger than just one disappearance. Rebus’ return makes a lot of sense and is quite believable. First, he’s never been able to stay away from work. Second, he hasn’t died and miraculously returned. He retired, and not long ago. So it makes sense that he might be back. In this case the choice to bring Rebus back has worked out well.

Philip Kerr wrote the first novels featuring his PI Bernhard ‘Bernie’ Gunther beginning with 1989’s March Violets. In that novel, which takes place in Berlin just a few years before World War II, Gunher is hired to find a stolen diamond necklace. The case turns out to be much more complex than that though. Gunther starts getting notice from some very important people and is chosen to solve some difficult and dangerous cases in The Pale Criminal and A German Requiem. There the series ended in 1991. Or so it seemed. Fifteen years later Kerr brought Gunther back in 2006’s The One From the Other. Since that time there’ve been four other Bernie Gunther novels and a fifth is due in April of 2013. The recent novels have been extremely well-received and (in my opinion, so feel free to disagree if you do) justly so. In this case, the decision to bring a sleuth back was a wise one. It’s logical too considering the kind of character Gunther is and the fact that Kerr didn’t end the first trilogy of novels with Gunther’s death.

There’s also Ann Cleeves’ Jimmy Perez. He is the Shetland Islands police detective who features in Cleeves’ Shetland Quartet. In the final novel of the quartet Blue Lightning, Perez suffers a devastating tragedy when he investigates the murder of Angela Moore, whose body is found at the Fair Isle Bird Sanctuary. Given what happens in the novel it makes a lot of sense that he would question what he’s even doing on the police force. It’s entirely believable that the series would end based on what happens in it. And in fact, Cleeves has gone on to create the very well-regarded Vera Stanhope series. But (and I’m very glad of this personally) she’s decided to bring Jimmy Perez back. We’ll see him again in Dead Water, scheduled for release in January 2013.

Bringing back a sleuth is a big risk, especially if it’s been a while since that sleuth made an appearance. Besides the work that author has to do in terms of plot and so on, the author also has to decide what’s happened in the intervening time. Is the sleuth older? What has the sleuth been doing? If it’s not credible, readers won’t ‘buy it.’ But when it does work it can be a very wise decision.

All this is making me wonder about other sleuths we haven’t heard from that could conceivably come back. For instance there’s Michael Connelly’s Jack McEvoy. McEvoy is a successful journalist who has made his name researching and reporting on important crime cases. We last saw McEvoy in 2009’s The Scarecrow, in which he investigates the rape and murder of twenty-three-year-old Denise Babbit. Sixteen-year-old drug dealer Alonzo Winslow has allegedly confessed to the crime but McEvoy finds that his confession is not genuine and that he’s probably innocent. So McEvoy throws himself into this story to find out the truth. In the end he does, and it makes logical sense that he would end his career there. And so far, he has. Connelly himself has said that McEvoy is on the proverbial back burner. But I wonder whether we might see McEvoy feature in another novel. I hope so.

What do you think? Do you think it’s stretching credibility too far when a character whose series has ended is brought back? If you’re a writer, what are your thoughts about bringing back a protagonist?

 

 
 

*NOTE: :The title of this post is the title of a song by Player.

I Can See Clearly Now*

In many crime fiction novels there’s a point in the story where we learn who the criminal (usually the murderer) is. Of course, a lot of crime fiction fans try to figure it out from the very beginning, but there’s often a point where the killer is named. That point’s sometimes referred to as the big reveal. It’s a crucial point in a story too for a few reasons. The obvious one of course is that that’s where the reader learns the answer to a central question in the story. If that point in the novel doesn’t mesh with the rest of the story, or if the criminal isn’t believable, the reader can get pulled out of the novel and be left frustrated and disappointed. Another reason the big reveal is important is that the circumstances surrounding it can add to the suspense in a novel. That can keep the reader engaged.

In a lot (but certainly not all) of classic and Golden Age crime fiction, the sleuth gathers the suspects together and names the killer. Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot is particularly fond of showing off that way – even he admits that about himself. But Miss Marple has her own ‘big reveal’ moments too. In 4:50 From Paddington (AKA What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw!)for instance, Miss Marple’s friend Elspeth McGillicuddy witnesses the murder of an unknown woman while en route by train to St. Mary Mead. The only problem is that there is no evidence for what Mrs. McGillicuddy says that she saw. No body is discovered and no-one has reported a missing person who fits the description of the victim. So almost no-one is inclined to believe Mrs. McGillicuddy – except Miss Marple. She deduces that the body must be on the grounds of Rutherford Hall, home of the Crackenthorpe family, and with help from her friend Lucy Eyelesbarrow, she finds out she’s right. When the body is discovered, the police get involved and all of the members of the Crackenthorpe family come under suspicion. At the end of the novel, Lucy arranges for Miss Marple and Mrs. McGillicuddy to come to tea at Rutherford Hall. That’s when Miss Marple catches the killer through a clever trick in front of the suspects. It works, too.

Margaret Maron’s Sigrid Harald uses a variation on this technique in One Coffee With. She and her assistant Detective Tilden are assigned to investigate the poisoning murder of Riley Quinn, deputy chair of the Art Department at New York’s Vanderlyn University. In the process of the investigation Harald and Tilden learn a lot about the inner workings of the department, including its rivalries and the cold reality of funding issues. It turns out that many of the department members had a motive for murder. So did some of the students. But bit by bit, Harald and Tilden find out who the killer is. Towards the end of the novel Harald makes an arrangement with another character and together they lure the killer out of hiding as the expression goes. That’s when the reader finds out for sure who murdered Quinn and why. Then Harald goes on to explain how the clues led her to the truth.

Of course, not all authors use that plot point of gathering a group of suspects together for the big reveal. In Ellery Queen’s The Fourth Side of the Triangle for instance, Inspector Richard Queen investigates the murder of noted fashion designer Sheila Grey and of course his son Ellery gets involved too. The first most likely suspect is wealthy businessman Ashton McKell, with whom Grey’d been involved. When McKell is cleared of suspicion, his wife Lutetia becomes a suspect and then so does his son Dane. There are other suspects too. Grey left a cryptic clue though, and the killer has unwittingly left a ‘calling card.’ When Ellery discovers this ‘calling card,’ he’s able to identify the killer. In this novel we learn who the killer is as the Queens confront that person. That is, it’s not a dramatic reveal in front of a circle of stunned faces. Rather, it’s a more personal encounter.

That’s what happens in Ann Cleeves’ Raven Black too. In that novel, sixteen-year-old Catherine Ross is found murdered in a field not far from the home of local misfit Magnus Tait. Tait’s the most obvious suspect since he saw the girl on the day she was killed, and since he was implicated in the disappearance of a young girl several years earlier. But Inspector Jimmy Perez doesn’t think it’s that simple and he is proven right. To find Catherine’s killer, Perez has to look into all of the relationships among the residents of Ravenswick, Shetland, where Catherine lived. Bit by bit he uncovers the complex network of relationships and history. He also learns quite a lot about Catherine’s personality along the way. In the end he deduces who the killer is and confronts that person. And in keeping with the nature of this novel, that confrontation isn’t an overly-dramatic scene involving a car chase or gun battle. It has its own drama, but that drama is more psychological and that’s an effective fit with the novel.

Sometimes authors don’t use a big reveal as such. They may include a confrontation between sleuth and criminal but that’s not when the killer’s identity is revealed. Instead, those authors show how the sleuth finds out who the criminal is. In other words the reveal comes as the sleuth figures out what really happened.

We see that for instance in Arnaldur Indriðason’s Jar City. Reykjavík police inspector Erlendur and his team are called to the scene when the body of a seemingly inoffensive elderly man named Holberg is discovered. At first there doesn’t seem much motive for murder. Holberg wasn’t wealthy and the place hadn’t been robbed, so money doesn’t seem to be involved. And Holberg didn’t have any obvious enemies either. But as the team gets to know more about the victim, we learn that Holberg was hiding a dark past. He’d been accused of several rapes, although he’d never been convicted. So it becomes quite possible that one of his victims chose to take revenge. Bit by bit Erlendur and team find out who the killer is and that’s how we learn that person’s identity. At the end of the novel, Erlendur confronts the killer with what he knows, so there is a scene between them. There’s a great deal of psychological tension in that scene too. But it’s not the stereotypical ‘big reveal.’

Some authors don’t really include a confrontation between sleuth and criminal in their reveal. That doesn’t mean the reveal can’t be highly effective though. For instance in Donna Leon’s Through a Glass, Darkly, Commissario Guido Brunetti and Ispettore Lorenzo Vianello investigate the suspicious death of Giorgio Tassini, night watchman at a local glass-blowing factory. Before his death Tassini had claimed that the glass-blowing industry was illegally dumping toxic waste. So there are several suspects including the local factory owners and their powerful supporters. Little by little Brunetti and Vianello find out who killed Tassini and that’s revealed in a more understated way. In that sense, there isn’t a big dramatic reveal. Brunetti never actually hauls the criminal away in handcuffs. But the reader knows who the killer is and at the very end of the novel, Brunetti gets the one piece of evidence he needs to make sure the killer faces consequences.

The big reveal can be dramatic or subtle. It can involve a violent confrontation or none at all. The best ones though have in common that they make sense given the characters and the kind of novel. Which big reveals have you liked best?

 

 
 

*NOTE: The title of this post is the title of a Johnny Nash song.