And I’d Do Anything to Just Feel Better*

Most of us have had to face our share of sorrow, loss and sometimes real tragedy. It just seems to be a part of life. The question isn’t really, ‘Do people have to face some terrible things in their lives?’ They do. The more important (or maybe that’s just my view) question is, ‘What do people do to go on after something terrible’s happened?’ Notice I didn’t say, ‘…to get over it after something terrible’s happened.’ That’s because we don’t really ‘get over’ tragedy and sorrow. They change us. But people do go on.

This is a pretty important issue in crime fiction because a lot of what happens in crime fiction involves tragedy. After all, people get murdered. Their friends and loved ones mourn them and the sleuth has to deal with the trauma of those cases. What’s more, because we all have to deal with life’s sadness and sorrow, it’s realistic when sleuths have their own scars from which they have to heal. It’s too easy to fall into the trap of the stereotypical sleuth who drowns in a bottle to cope with life’s damage. It’s much more interesting and I think engaging when sleuths and other characters find different ways to cope.

For instance there’s the character of Henrietta Savernake, whom we meet in Agatha Christie’s The Hollow (AKA Murder After Hours). She is a talented and highly-regarded sculptor who’s having an affair with Harley Street specialist John Christow. Christow is more absorbed in his passion for his profession than he is in his relationships with either his wife Gerda or his mistress. But the triangle continues until one fateful weekend when John and Gerda Christow are invited to the country home of Sir Henry and Lady Lucy Angkatell. Henrietta is also invited as she’s a cousin of Lucy’s. On the Sunday afternoon, Christow is shot just before lunch. Hercule Poirot, who’s taken a nearby cottage as a weekend getaway, was invited for lunch and when he arrives, practically the first thing he sees is the murder scene and Christow’s apparent killer standing over the body, gun in hand. But something about the scene strikes Poirot as artificial. So when Inspector Grange begins his investigation, Poirot is not convinced that the killer is yhe most obvious person. He and Grange look into the case and slowly get to the truth. At one point, Edward Angkatell, who has also been staying at the house, tries to console Henrietta; here’s her response:

 

‘What did you think? That I’d sit gently crying into a nice little pocket handkerchief while you held my hand? That it would be a great shock but that presently I’d begin to get over it? And that you’d comfort me very nicely?’

 

In fact, that’s not what Henrietta does. Here is how she begins to move on:

 

‘‘Instead I must take my grief and make it into a figure of alabaster…’
Exhibit No. 58. ‘Grief.’ Alabaster. Miss Henrietta Savernake…’  

 

That way of coping is a very effective fit for Henrietta’s character.

Sometimes characters deal with their trauma by trying to regain some kind of control over their lives. That’s what we see in Copenhagen police detective Carl Mørck, whom we first meet in Jussi Adler-Olsen’s Mercy (AKA The Keeper of Lost Causes). As that novel begins, Mørck is recovering from a line-of-fire incident in which one of his colleagues was killed and another left paralysed. He’s physically ready for work again, but mentally still dealing with the trauma. Although he doesn’t really think about it this way, Mørck wants to regain control over his life after what happened. He goes about this in a couple of ways. One of the sub-plots in this novel is his determination to catch the man responsible for what happened and see him brought to justice. Another way in which Mørck tries to take back some control is that he becomes even less of a ‘team player’ than he normally is. In fact, he becomes so difficult to work with that he’s ‘promoted’ to a new department, ‘Department Q,’ which is set up to investigate ‘cases of special interest.’ The job itself doesn’t interest him much at first, but the chance to do what he wants, when he wants, does.

We also see that search for control if you want to call it that in Arnaldur Indriðason series featuring Reykjavík police inspector Erlendur. When Erlendur was a child, his brother Bergur was lost in a blizzard and has never been found. The boy’s loss was difficult enough for the family to cope with. But Erlendur feels an additional sense of loss and guilt because he was with his brother when the blizzard struck although they had gotten separated. Erlendur has never been able to forgive himself for not bringing Bergur back safely. He has gone on with his life though. And in an interesting story arc, Erlendur has faced his trauma and tried to regain control over that part of his life by searching for his brother. Now that he’s a cop, he tries to find out everything he can about that day so that he can either find his brother or his brother’s remains.

Some people choose to move on by making major life changes. That’s what Nevada Barr’s Anna Pigeon does. As we learn in Track of the Cat, she lived the New York ‘social life’ with her husband Zach, a talented actor. Then, tragically, Zach was run down and killed by a taxi. Pigeon has dealt with her grief by leaving New York and her socialite life. She’s become a National Park Service ranger and nurtured her love of nature and wildlife. She’s gotten good at her job and although there are things she misses about New York, she’s gone on with life. As we see Pigeon’s character evolve throughout the series, we see that she doesn’t really ‘get over’ Zach. At the same time, she moves on to a new chapter in her life. She even allows herself to love and marry again.

We see the same kind of choice in an earlier series by James Yaffe, featuring his investigator sleuth Dave. Dave’s a former NYPD cop whose life revolved around his work and his beloved wife Shirley. When Shirley dies, Dave finds himself unable to keep living the life he’s always had. So he makes a major change and moves to Mesa Grande, Colorado, where he takes a job as an investigator working for the Office of the Public Defender. His new job and new life don’t mean that Dave ‘gets over’ the loss of his wife. But he starts over and finds a new place for himself.

As fans of Åsa Larsson’s attorney sleuth Rebecka Martinsson know, Martinsson has had some traumatic things happen to her. As we learn in Sun Storm (AKA The Savage Altar), she grew up in Kiruna, but left for a trauma-inducing reason (no spoilers here). She returns when a former friend is accused of murder. That case leads to more trauma for Martinsson, and so does the case she investigates in The Blood Spilt. So how does Martinsson go on after the things that happen to her? After a time under psychiatric care, she makes a major life change, giving up her job in Stockholm and remaining in Kiruna. As Until Thy Wrath be Past begins she’s taken up a position as the local district prosecutor and is slowly putting the pieces of her life back together.

Some people find comfort in a new relationship when something traumatic happens. There’s an example of that in Geoffrey McGeachin’s The Digger’s Rest Hotel. It’s 1947 and Melboourne cop Charlie Berlin has recently returned from Europe where he served as a bomber pilot and was also taken as a POW. He’s seen his share of awfulness and it’s left him with what we would now call PTSD. He is sent to the town of Wodonga to investigate a series of robberies that have apparently been committed by a motorcycle gang. While he’s in the middle of working on that case the body of sixteen-year-old Jenny Lee is found in a local alley. Now Berlin has a brutal murder to solve as well as the robberies. In the course of this investigation he meets journalist Rebecca Green, who has her own share of scars. One of the sub-plots of this novel is the healing each begins to experience as they work together and later, become involved.

We don’t really ‘get over it’ when something traumatic happens. But we can go on. Sometimes we start a new life; sometimes we do other things. That’s why it’s so human and believable when characters do things to make themselves feel better and go on.

 

 
 

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from Santana’s Just Feel Better (Yes, that’s Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler on lead vocals).

The Time Has Come to Say Fair’s Fair*

One of the important purposes that members of the clergy are supposed to serve is helping others. And for many of those in the religious life, that means pursuing social justice. We’ve all heard terrible accounts of corrupt (or worse) ministers, priests, nuns, rabbis and the like. Those stories are all the more upsetting because those are people we’ve been taught to trust. But there are a great number of people in the religious life who work for social justice and sometimes take great risks pursuing it. They advocate for the poor and disenfranchised, they speak up for human rights and a lot more, too. The real world is better for them and we see them in crime fiction as well.

For example, in Dorothy Sayers’ The Nine Tailors, we meet Rector Theodore Venables. On New Year’s Eve, he comes upon Lord Peter Wimsey and Wimsey’s valet/assistant Mervyn Bunter. Their car has been in an accident near Fenchurch St. Paul and they’re stranded, so Venables takes them in. Wimsey and Bunter are settling in at the rectory when word comes that Will Thoday, one of the bell-ringers, is ill and can’t participate in the New Year’s change-ringing. Wimsey agrees to take his place and the change-ringing is a big success. The next day Venables is called to the death-bed of local squire’s wife Lady Thorpe, who dies of the same influenza that struck Will Thoday. Wimsey and Bunter stay for the funeral and then, when their car is ready, they go on their way. A few months later Wimsey gets a letter from Venables. Sir Henry Thorpe has died and preparations are being made to bury him next to his wife. But to everyone’s shock, another corpse is discovered in the gravesite. Venables wants Wimsey to return to Fenchurch and investigate. Wimsey agrees and he and Bunter go back to the village and begin asking questions. The unidentified body turns out to be connected to a decades-old robbery and some missing emeralds and Wimsey finds out the truth about the case. Towards the end of the novel, a dangerous flood strikes the Fenchurch area and many of the people are at grave risk. Theodore Venables shows both his courage and his dedication to caring for others as he does his best to help the people of Fenchurch.

Donna Leon’s Blood From a Stone features Don Alvise Perale, who was a parish priest in Oderzo, north of Venice. He saw his vocation as more than just meeting the spiritual needs of his parishioners. To him, it is important to help all of those who are desperate, poor and disenfranchised. When his parishioners objected to his opening his home to a non-Christian family from Sierra Leone, Perale got a letter from the bishop telling him to make the family leave. That’s when Perale left the priesthood. He is still a social activist though and that’s how he comes to work with Commissario Guido Brunetti in this novel. Brunetti is trying to find out the identity of a Senegalese man who was shot, execution-style, when he was laying out his wares in an open-air market. Brunetti suspects that Perale may have connections to the Senegalese immigrant community and wants his help identifying the victim. Perale’s first instinct is to protect the vulnerable members of this community from harassment, so he doesn’t want to tell Brunetti anything. But Brunetti is able to persuade him that there will be no repercussions, so Perales finally agrees to help point Brunetti in the right direction. With Perales’ help, Brunetti finds out where the dead man lived. That’s how he finds out that the man had with him a valuable cache of diamonds. Those diamonds are connected to an illegal arms-trafficking ring and to the murder.

One of Margaret Coel’s sleuths is Father John O’Malley, who works on the Arapaho Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. Originally from Boston, Father John is a Jesuit priest who is slowly making his way back from what he refers to as The Great Fall – alcoholism. He no longer drinks and is trying to find a new place for himself within the Catholic Church. Father John sees himself as much more than just a person who presides over religious services. He takes personal responsibility for the people he serves, and often for those on the Reservation whom he doesn’t exactly serve. In The Eagle Catcher, for instance, Arapaho tribal chair Harvey Castle is murdered shortly after asking to meet privately with Father John. Then, Castle’s nephew Anthony is arrested for the crime. Father John is certain that Anthony is not guilty, so he asks Arapaho attorney Vicky Holden to help him look into the case. Soon enough, it comes out that Castle’s death may involve some very highly-placed people – people whom the mission depends on for contributions and other support. Father John is fully aware that he could face serious consequences for continuing to investigate. He and Holden persevere though and in the end, they find out who killed Castle and why.

One of the ‘regulars’ in Kerry Greenwood’s Corinna Chapman series is Sister Mary. She’s a Melbourne nun who works tirelessly to make things better for street people and others whom society has forgotten. Sister Mary is compassionate and caring, but make no mistake: she is a force to be reckoned with. Everyone respects her for the work she does and she has a way of getting people to do what she wants. Among many other things, Sister Mary is the organiser of the Soup Run, a mobile kitchen that travels to Melbourne’s worst areas to distribute food, non-alcoholic drinks and medicine to those who need it most. Chapman, who is Greenwood’s main sleuth, contributes bread from her bakery to the Soup Run and takes her turn riding along to help serve. Like everyone else, Chapman listens to Sister Mary. What makes Sister Mary so effective, both as a character in this series and as a social justice activist, is that she doesn’t back down from a difficult challenge. She bullies people for funds, permission, equipment, whatever is needed without actually making people feel that they’re being bullied. And she does an immense amount of good without preaching her own spiritual beliefs.

And then there’s Mildred Nilsson, a priest of the Swedish Church to whom we’re introduced in Åsa Larsson’s The Blood Spilt. Nilsson takes personal responsibility for the members of her congregation and in particular, she works to raise awareness of domestic violence with the goal of stopping it. When she is found murdered, attorney Rebecka Martinnsson has the thankless task of working on behalf of the Swedish Church to arrange for Nilsson’s widower to move and resume possession of the house he and Nilsson had been using. In that context, Martinsson works with Inspectors Anna-Maria Mella and Sven-Erik Stålnacke, who are investigating the murder itself. They find that more than one person resented both Nilsson’s outspokenness and what they saw as meddling in their lives.

It’s sometimes very risky to live out the tenet of social justice, but there are members of the religious community who do it all the time. It’s a refreshing change to see them in crime fiction (and I know I haven’t mentioned them all. I’m thinking, for instance, of G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown). That’s especially true when you consider how many awful things have been done by those who were supposed to protect the weakest among us. It’s good to know they’re not all like that.

 

 
 

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from Midnight Oil’s Beds Are Burning.

You Gotta do it Till You’re Through it So You Better Get to it*

If you’ve ever been ill or away and then had to get back into your routine, you know how hard that can be. At the same time as it’s good to get back to work, it’s also difficult to get back into your daily life. And for detectives it’s even more of a challenge. Many of them deal with things that are awful to face even on the best of days, let alone when they’re getting back to work after some time away. But that resilience – that ability to get back into the routine after getting knocked down, so to speak – is a really useful trait if you’re a detective. The challenge of getting back to work can also add a layer of interest to a story.

Peter Temple introduces us to part-time lawyer/part-time investigator Jack Irish in Bad Debts. Irish is getting back to work after his wife Isabel was shot by one of his clients. His first response to losing his wife was to hide at the bottom of the bottle so to speak. But as Bad Debts begins, he’s stopped that instinctive response to life and now does occasional legal work as well as a sort of side business in finding people who would rather not be found, mostly to  get them to pay debts they owe. Life is slowly returning to stability for Irish until he gets a ‘phone message from a former client Danny McKillop. McKillop was imprisoned on charges that he killed Anne Jeppeson in a drink-driving hit-and-run incident. Now he’s been released and is desperate to talk to Irish. Irish doesn’t respond right away and by the time he follows up to see what McKillop wants, it’s too late; McKillop himself has been killed. Irish feels a sense of obligation to McKillop’s family. He was the attorney who defended McKillop in the original case and did an unprofessional job of it because of his drinking. So he decides to find out the truth behind both deaths. In this novel we see how at the same time as Irish is glad to have a purpose, he also finds it difficult sometimes to be back on the job.

That’s also true of Dick Francis’ Sid Halley, a former jockey whose left hand was permanently injured in a racing accident. After he recovers enough physically to work again, he spends two years working at a detective agency. But he really comes back to work in Odds Against. In that novel, Halley’s ex-father-in-law Charles Roland hires him to uncover a plot to take over the Seabury Racecourse, which Roland owns. Halley finds it difficult to get back to life around racecourses. He’s insecure, especially because of his injury, and he’s been away from the scene for a few years. But he finds the resilience he needs to search out the truth about the racecourse plot. He also discovers a new career for himself as a racetrack investigator.

Gail Bowen introduces us to her sleuth, political science expert and academic Joanne Kilbourn, in Deadly Appearances. Kilbourn and her family are coping with the loss of her husband Ian, who was murdered when he stopped to help a young couple who were having car trouble. Since that time the family has stuck together but of course, it hasn’t been easy. When Kilbourn’s friend Androu ‘Andy’ Boychuk is poisoned during an important political speech he’s making, Kilbourn decides to face her grief by writing a biography of him.  As she finds out more about Boychuk’s past, she also gets to the truth about who killed Boychuk and why. And that gets Kilbourn into a great deal of danger. So as the next novel Murder at the Mendel begins, Kilbourn is getting back to work, this time in a guest teaching position in Saskatoon. There, she finds that an old friend Sally Love is having a show of her controversial art at the Mendell Gallery. Kilbourn wants to renew their friendship but it turns out to be difficult. Then, local gallery owner Clea Poole is murdered, and Sally is a likely suspect. Kilbourn is still dealing with her own setbacks, but she finds the resilience she needs to help Sally – and to deal with the truth about the history of their friendship.

In Martin Edwards’ The Coffin Trail, we meet DCI Hannah Scarlett who has to get back to work after a case she was investigating falls apart. She’s been made the scapegoat for everything that went wrong with the case and after a brief break, is re-assigned to avoid a public-relations disaster. Although it’s ‘sold’ as a ‘fresh challenge,’ Scarlett knows that being assigned to head the Cumbria Constabulary’s Cold Case Review Team is s demotion. Still she takes up her new job and gets back to work. Scarlett and her new team are soon involved in the investigation of the deaths of Gabrielle Anders, a somewhat enigmatic beauty who’d recently moved to the Lake District, and Barrie Gilpin, the autistic young man who was said to have killed Anders. With help from Oxford historian Daniel Kind, who’s recently moved back to the Lake District himself, Scarlett and her team find out the truth about the Anders and Gilpin deaths. Then later, in The Arsenic Labyrinth, Scarlett has to get back to work again after a serious personal loss that she suffers in the previous novel The Cipher Garden. Scarlett finds it difficult at times to get ‘back in the game’ as the saying goes, but also finds the resilience she needs.

So does Jussi Adler-Olsen’s Carl Mørck, whom we first meet in Mercy (AKA The Keeper of Lost Causes). As that novel begins, Mørck is recovering from a scene-of-crime incident in which he was gravely wounded, one of his colleagues was murdered and another was left with paralysis. At first, Mørck has little interest in getting back to work. He’s hardly maudlin about it but he is still suffering from the trauma of what happened. In fact, he is so difficult to work with that he’s ‘promoted’ to the newly-created Department Q, which is charged with investigating cases ‘of special interest.’ Despite Mørck’s lack of interest in doing much of any work, he’s soon drawn to the case of the disappearance of Merete Lynggaard, a promising politician who disappeared five years earlier. Everyone’s always thought she drowned in a tragic ferry accident. But there are hints that she may actually still be alive. So Mørck and his assistant Hafez al-Assad work together to find out what really happened to Lynggaard and where she is now, if she is indeed still alive.

And then there’s Stockholm attorney Rebecka Martinsson, whom we first meet in Åsa Larsson’s Sun Storm (AKA The Savage Altar). Martinsson returns to her home town of Kiruna when a former friend is accused of murder and asks for her help. Finding out who the real murderer is takes a serious toll on Martinsson but she gets back to work after a fashion in The Blood Spilt. In that novel, Martinsson works with police detectives Anna-Maria Mella and Sven-Erik Stålnacke to find out who murdered local priest Mildred Nilsson. The events at the end of that novel set Martinsson back even further so to speak, so she takes some time away. Then, at the beginning of The Black Path, Martinsson returns to work again and gets involved in the investigation of the murder of Inna Watrang, Head of Information at Kellis Mining. Although returning to work is difficult for her, Martinsson is pleased to slowly feel her life become a little more stable.

It’s never easy to get started working again after a time away. That’s especially true if the time away was spent coping with illness or trauma. But most detectives do get back to work again, and that balance between wanting to be back in a routine and needing to deal with whatever takes one away from the routine can add real interest to a story.

 

 
 

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from Elvis Costello’s Welcome to the Working Week.

I Trusted You Till I Learned the Score*

One of the worst kinds of crimes, at least in terms of the scars it leaves, is the sort of crime where those in positions of a lot of trust abuse that trust and take advantage of those who are vulnerable. We see lurid stories of that sort of thing in the newspaper, on television and the Internet when, for instance, a teacher or parent abuses children, or a shady ‘charity’ bilks honest donors and worse, those for whom those donations were intended. Abuse of trust is also a major theme in crime fiction and that makes sense. First, it happens in real life so it’s realistic to have it play a role in a novel. Second, abuses of trust are fairly often crimes, and even when they stay just this side of illegal, they can lead to a strong motive for murder.

In Agatha Christie’s Cat Among the Pigeons, what starts out as a normal summer term at exclusive Meadowbank School turns disastrous when games mistress Grace Springer is shot in the school’s new Sports Pavilion. Then there’s a kidnapping. And then there’s another murder. While Headmistress Honoria Bulstrode works hard to reassure parents that their daughters are safe, many of them feel that their trust in the school has been violated and they pull their daughters out. In the meantime, one of the pupils Julia Upjohn visits Hercule Poirot, who is an acquaintance of a friend of Julia’s mother. She tells him of the events at Meadowbank and he agrees to look into the matter. In the end, the murders and the kidnapping are all related to a revolution in a Middle East country and a cache of valuable gems. And many of the events in the story happen because Miss Bulstrode has put too much trust in someone – and made her school vulnerable.

There’s a chilling example of abuse of trust in Ruth Rendell’s A Judgement in Stone. When George and Jacqueline Coverdale hire Eunice Parchman as their housekeeper, it’s obvious that they trust her with their home and possessions. And although the new housekeeper is a little eccentric, all seems to go smoothly enough at first. She certainly does her job well enough. But as we soon learn, Parchman is keeping a secret from her employers and she’s desperate to prevent them from learning it. And although she’s afraid of them on that score, she also has her share of contempt for them. When George’s daughter Melinda accidentally discovers what the housekeeper’s secret is, the result is tragic. What makes it all the more tragic is that much of what happens could have been prevented if the Coverdales hadn’t trusted the wrong person.

Susan Wittig Albert’s Chile Death also has as one of its themes the abuse of trust. Former attorney China Bayles now owns and runs an herb and spice shop called Thyme and Seasons. Her partner police officer Mike McQuaid is in a nursing home recovering from a line-of-fire shooting incident that has left him paralysed. So now he’ll have to re-think his life and his identity. Then, there are allegations of abuse at the nursing home where McQuaid is staying. There are even reports that the manager may be skimming money from the residents. Then a nursing-home employee is fired for stealing, but claims that she was framed. In the meantime, McQuaid is dealing with the major changes in his life and so is Bayles. To take him out of himself so to speak, McQuaid’s persuaded to serve as a judge for an upcoming chili cook-off. He’s reluctant to appear in public but he finally agrees. On the day of the cook-off, fellow judge Jerry Jeff Cody, an insurance executive, is poisoned. Bayles looks into the murder and discovers how it’s related to the abuses and fraud at the nursing home.

In Åsa Larsson’s The Savage Altar (AKA Sun Storm), Stockholm tax attorney Rebecca Martinsson returns to her home town of Kiruna when her former friend Sanna Strångard is accused of murder. Sanna found the body of her brother Viktor in a local church and alerted the authorities. That’s stressful enough for her but then it’s discovered that Sanna may have had a motive for killing her brother. She tells Martinsson that she’s innocent and asks Martinsson to defend her. Martinsson has her reasons for being reluctant but she agrees to take the case and begins to investigate. As she looks into the lives of the people in Viktor Strångard’s life, especially those involved in the church where his body was found, she finds quite a lot of abuse of the trust people often put in church leaders. And that strikes an all-too-familiar chord with Martinsson, whose reason for leaving Kiruna in the first place had to do with a breach of that trust.

Abuse of trust and taking advantage of those who are vulnerable plays a major role in Michael Connelly’s The Fifth Witness. Lisa Trammel’s mortgage is being held by WestLand Financial, part of WestLand National, an L.A.-based bank. When her husband Jeff leaves her, she’s no longer able to make payments on her home. The bank threatens foreclosure and she visits attorney Mickey Haller to get some help with her situation. Haller looks into the matter and finds some evidence that the bank may be engaging in fraudulent mortgage re-assignment, and he’s trying to use that abuse as the basis to re-negotiate his client’s loan and find a way to help her. Trammel has her own mental issues so instead of taking responsibility for her part in the foreclosure (she didn’t pay the mortgage or contact the bank to try to make some arrangement), she blames the bank entirely. In fact, she sets up a citizens’ action group and even pickets the bank, claiming its foreclosure policies are predatory and illegal. Then Mitchell Bondurant, the mortgage officer who was handling the Trammel account, is murdered in the bank’s parking lot. Trammel is accused of the murder and certainly she had motive. But as Haller looks into the case he finds that she wasn’t the only one. So now he has to look into the bank’s practices, Trammel’s claims of innocence and the personal relationships that Bondurant had at the bank to find out who is responsible for the murder.

Angela Savage’s PI sleuth Jayne Keeney looks into a case of abuse of trust in The Half Child. Frank Delbeck has hired Keeney to look into the death of his daughter Maryanne, who fell (or jumped, or was pushed) from the roof of the hotel where she was living. The official police report classified the death as a suicide but Delbeck doesn’t think his daughter killed herself. So Keeney travels to the town of Pattaya, where Maryanne Delbeck was a volunteer at the New Life Children’s Centre. New Life is an orphanage that also has a facility for what are called ‘boarders.’ Those are children whose mothers or fathers have not yet given them up for adoption but are unable to care for them. The idea is that the children will stay there until their parents either relinquish them or get into circumstances where they can take care of them. As Keeney begins to investigate Maryanne’s death, she discovers some evidence that there may be some serious abuses of trust going on at New Life. There are hints that parents may be being illegally coerced into releasing their ‘boarder’ children for adoption. There is even the possibility that some of the ‘boarders’ are being stolen from their parents and given to unwitting adoptive families. Did Maryanne know or suspect what was going on? If so is that why she was killed? Or did Maryanne’s personal life (which also contained secrets) have something to do with her death? As Keeney sorts out this case, we see through the eyes of some of the mothers of the ‘boarders,’ as well as through the eyes of adoptive parents, what happens when the trust we put in official institutions is abused.

Abuses of trust are perhaps all the more serious because those who are victims are often vulnerable at the start. That’s in part why they make us so angry when they happen in real life. That’s also why they can resonate so much in crime fiction.

 

 

 

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from Lefty Frizzell’s I Don’t Trust You Anymore.

Little to Win and Nothing to Lose*

Most people weigh the consequences of what they’re going to do, at least a little, before they do it. And that’s what can make it so dangerous when people feel they have nothing to lose. That belief can push people to do some awfully dangerous and sometimes terrible things. In crime fiction, characters who feel they have nothing to lose can add to the suspense of a story, though.

For instance, in Donald Honig’s short story Come Ride With Me, a man named Gannon goes into the Quick Stop diner with a specific purpose in mind. He’s just committed a robbery that ended in a murder and now he needs to ‘borrow’ a getaway car. He waits at the diner until he sees exactly the kind of car he wants. The driver is Lee Carstairs, who’s doing well financially and who drives a fast, late-model car. Carstairs uses the telephone and while he’s doing so Gannon takes his chance and hides in the back seat of the car. But as he soon finds out, he’s picked the wrong car. As it turns out, Carstairs has other plans with his car and we learn that he has nothing to lose by carrying them out.

In Stephen J. Cannell’s The Tin Collectors, we meet LAPD homicide cop Shane Scully. One night he gets a frantic call from Barbara Molar, wife of Scully’s former partner Ray Molar. Barbara says that Ray is trying to kill her and begs Scully to help. Scully races over to the Molar home in time to save Barbara, but Molar shoots at him. Scully shoots back to defend himself. Molar’s bullet misses; Scully’s hits its mark. At first Scully thinks that what happened will be dealt with in a routine Internal Affairs investigation. After all, it was a ‘clean’ hit. But soon Scully finds himself a pariah on the force, since Molar was a beloved cop. Then it becomes clear that this is not going to be a routine investigation. The Internal Affairs authorities are planning to take Scully’s badge and perhaps charge him with murder. Scully knows now that this is far bigger than just a questionable shooting. He starts to ask more questions and finds himself targeted by some very powerful and corrupt people. Now, with little left to lose professionally, Scully goes to great lengths to try to find out who is targeting him and why.

In Robin Cook’s Seizure, we are introduced to U.S. Senator Ashley Butler. He’s been a strong force against stem cell and other kinds of controversial medical procedures and research. But everything changes completely when he is diagnosed with Parkinson ’s disease. He knows that unless he gets some kind of medical miracle, he’ll never be able to achieve his goal of becoming president. In a professional sense he has much to lose. But he has nothing to lose at all by pursuing a cure and for that he contacts Dr. Daniel Lowell. Lowell’s been conducting promising research and has pioneered a controversial surgical procedure that may be exactly what Butler needs. So together, Butler and Lowell go to extraordinary (and very, very dangerous) lengths to perform the surgery. One of the dangers for instance is that the clinic chosen for the procedure is the Wingate Clinic, located in the Bahamas. The owners of that clinic are guilty of several legal and ethical violations and when Lowell and his co-worker Stephanie D’Agostino discover that, they also find that they are in real danger of their lives.

In C.J. Box’s Three Weeks to Say Goodbye, Travel Development Specialist Jack McGuane and his wife Melissa are the proud and happy adoptive parents of beautiful baby Angelina. Everything changes though when they learn that Angelina’s biological father Garret Moreland never waived his parental rights. Now he wants to exercise them. The McGuanes are devastated by this news and they decide to do what they can to keep their daughter. They face difficult odds though. First, Moreland’s father is a powerful local judge who is determined that Angelina will be given to his son. In fact he starts off by basically trying to buy the McGuanes’ co-operation. When that doesn’t work he uses his authority and orders the McGuanes to relinquish custody of Angelina in 21 days. With nothing much to lose, Jack McGuane decides to do whatever it takes to keep his child. ‘Whatever it takes’ turns out to be more than either McGuane bargained for but to them, there is no real choice.

We also see get that sense of ‘nothing left to lose’ in Åsa Larsson’s The Blood Spilt. In that novel, Kiruna police inspector Anna-Maria Mella and her partner Sven-Erik Stålnacke investigate the murder of local priest Mildred Nilsson. Attorney Rebecka Martinsson works with Nilsson’s widower to arrange for the return of their house to the Swedish Church so she gets involved in the investigation too. Nilsson had some controversial views and was not at all afraid to share them. So there’s more than one suspect in this case. But slowly, Martinsson and the police get to the truth. In this novel, the murderer is a person who has nothing left to lose, or so it seems to that person. That sense of desperation is part of what drives the killer on instead of stopping before the murder is committed.

Lindy Cameron’s Redback is the story of a crack team of Australian retrieval specialists called Redback. They’re called in when people need to be rescued from extremely dangerous situations and that’s exactly what happens on the Pacific island of Laui. The island is hosting the Pacific Tourism and Enviro-Trade Conference when a group of rebels disrupts the meeting and takes the delegates hostage. Team Redback, led by Bryn Gideon, is called in and rescues the conferees. It’s not long before that incident is connected to a terrible train explosion, two murders and an explosion on a U.S. military base. As it turns out, a shadowy group of terrorists is using a video game called Global WarTek to recruit members and give instructions. Several local terrorist groups with nothing to lose and a lot of fanaticism are only too happy to follow those instructions. So Gideon and her team have their proverbial work cut out for them as they go up against a group that’s not supposed to even exist.

Camilla Grebe and Åsa Träff’’s Some Kind of Peace tells the story of Stockholm psychologist Siri Bergman. She is dealing with the horrible trauma of having lost her beloved husband Stefan in a diving incident. Otherwise, though, she’s managing her life – more or less. Then one day she gets a chilling letter that makes it clear she’s being stalked. Other incidents happen too, all of them designed to frighten and discredit her. Then one day she discovers the body of a patient Sara Matteus in the water near her home. As if that’s not bad enough, the death is made to look like a suicide for which Bergman is responsible. When the evidence shows that Matteus was murdered, the police even wonder whether Bergman might have committed the crime. In order to clear her name and save her own life, Bergman has to find out who is responsible for the murder and for stalking her. It turns out that the killer acted out of a sense of desperation and the belief that there was nothing to lose. While that’s not precisely the killer’s motive, it does drive the killer ‘over the edge.’

And that’s the thing about having nothing to lose. It can also mean one has nothing to keep one from pushing the limits and doing things that can turn tragic.

 

 
 

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from  Strawberry Alarm Clock’s Incense and Peppermint.