The Alphabet in Crime Fiction: Cars

Well, let’s C…I think the 2013 Crime Fiction Alphabet meme has reached – yes, it has reached – the third stop on our crime-ridden journey. Thanks as always to Kerrie at Mysteries in Paradise for being such an excellent tour guide. My contribution (appropriate, I think, for a journey) is cars.

We all know that cars can be very dangerous. That’s why there are laws against drink driving, mobile ‘phone use while driving, and speeding. It’s why we’re always told to buckle up and stay alert. But if you look at crime fiction, you also see that cars aren’t just deadly because of accidents. They can be very effective murder weapons.

Agatha Christie mentions car-related deaths a few times in her work. One incident is part of the plot of 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 a variety of reasons they all accept. When they arrive, they’re a little surprised that their host has not yet made an appearance. Still, they settle in. That night after dinner, each guest is accused of being responsible for the death of at least one other person. Everyone is shocked at this accusation and at first there’s a round of denials. But then one of the guests Anthony Marston suddenly dies of what turns out to be poison. Later that night there’s another death. Now the guests begin to see that they’ve been lured to the island by a murderer. As one by one the guests die, the survivors try to discover who the murderer is and stay alive. And what was the death of which Anthony Marston was accused? A hit-and-run car crash that killed two children.

Mickey Spillane’s My Gun is Quick also features deadly use of a car. In that novel, PI Mike Hammer is in a coffee shop when he meets Nancy Sanford, a young woman down on her luck who’s turned to prostitution. Hammer gives her some money to try to help her escape ‘the life’ and it seems that she will be able to start over. A few days later, though, Hammer learns that Nancy has been killed in a hit-and-run incident. There is no evidence that she was murdered but Hammer doesn’t believe her death was an accident. So he begins to investigate. He discovers that Nancy was trapped in a major prostitution ring. Before she was killed, she was collecting evidence against the ring leaders in hopes that they would be arrested. Needless to say, Hammer takes it on himself to finish what Nancy Sandford started.

In Elizabeth George’s A Traitor to Memory, twenty-eight-year-old violin virtuoso Gideon Davies is terrified one night when he finds himself unable to play. He seeks out psychological help to try to figure out what is causing this block and starts digging into his past. In the meantime, his mother Eugenie faces a very ‘here and now’ danger. One night, she is killed in what looks like a hit-and-run accident. As Inspector Thomas Lynley and Sergeant Barbara Havers soon discover, this was no accident. Eugenie Davis’ death is related to her son’s inability to play, and both are related to a long-ago tragedy in which two-year-old Sonia, Gideon’s sister, was drowned. At the time of her death, her nanny Katja Wolff was imprisoned for the drowning and has recently been released. As the novel evolves we see how this too relates to the rest of the story.

Melbourne activist Anne Jeppeson finds out the hard way just how dangerous cars can be in Peter Temple’s Bad Debts. She is killed in a hit-and-run incident and Danny McKillop is arrested for it. There’s a lot of evidence against him, too. After serving eight years in prison, he’s released and one of the first things he does is contact the lawyer who defended him Jack Irish. Irish was, to put it mildly, not at his best at the time of the trial; he was using alcohol to ease the pain of his wife Isabel’s murder and did a poor job of defending McKillop. So when McKillop calls him, Irish feels a sense of obligation. But by the time he gets around to meeting with his former client it’s too late; McKillop has been murdered. Irish decides to find out why and by whom, and slowly he pieces together what happened. McKillop was framed for Anne Jeppeson’s murder and the truth about what happened to both victims is bound up with politics, greed and corruption.

And then there’s Phil Smedway, whose life and death are part of the plot of Catherine O’Flynn’s The News Where You Are. Smedway was a beloved regional TV presenter who ‘hit it big.’ He was also a mentor to his successor Frank Allcroft. Then one day Smedway was killed in a hit-and-run incident during his regular jog. Everyone, including the police, thinks that this was a tragic accident. But Allcroft begins to wonder when he is drawn to the place where Smedway died. The road at the site is straight and clear of obstacles, so it would have been easy for even a drunken driver to see and avoid Smedway. What’s more, it wasn’t raining or snowing the weather wasn’t a factor. Allcroft decides to start asking questions about Smedway and his death. As he slowly finds out the answers, he also learns quite a bit about Smedway’s life.

Oh, and lest you think that the only danger from cars comes from hit-and-run incidents, consider Ellery Queen’s The Dragon’s Teeth. In that novel, wealthy and eccentric Cadmus Cole hires Ellery Queen and Beau Rummell, who’ve just opened up a detective agency. Cole wants to find his only living relations. One is Margo Cole, who’s been living in Paris. The other is Kerrie Shawn, an aspiring actress who’s trying to make a success of herself in Hollywood. The two women are no sooner found than word comes that Cadmus Cole has died at sea. According to the provisions of Cole’s will, both Kerrie and Margo will have to move into Cole’s upstate New York mansion and live there in order to claim his considerable fortune. Not long after the young women move in, Kerrie is trapped in the mansion’s garage and is nearly killed by carbon monoxide poisoning from a running car engine. Later she’s accused when Margo is shot. Kerrie learns that not only is it dangerous to inherit a lot of money, it’s very dangerous to be around cars.

 

See? Cars may be necessary for a lot of people’s lives, but they do carry high risks. Buckle up and enjoy the ride!

 

Oh, and if you want to ride along with us as we continue our crime fiction journey, we’d love to have you. Check out the meme details right here!

That I Can Tell You in One Word…Tradition!*

Tradition plays a very important role in our lives. Whether it’s family tradition, religious tradition, sport tradition or something else, our traditions give us a sense of continuity and stability. And that can be comforting and very helpful in a world that sometimes seems upside-down.

There are traditions in crime fiction too. For example, one tradition in crime fiction is that there is an obvious crime, usually murder, which is then investigated. That tradition began with the earliest crime fiction and has continued even to recent releases. For instance, Teresa Solana’s A Not So Perfect Crime, released just a few years ago, features the poisoning murder of Lídia Font. Her wealthy and politically powerful husband Lluís Font is a likely suspect. He believed that his wife was having an affair, and even hired Barcelona private investigators Eduard and Josep ‘Borja’ Martínez to follow her and find out if she was being unfaithful. But Font claims that he’s innocent, and he wants his name cleared. So he asks the Martínez brothers to continue working on his behalf and find out who the real killer is.

Another tradition in crime fiction is that the sleuth pursues leads, makes sense of evidence and finds out who committed the crime. Again, we see that tradition in a lot of modern crime fiction. For instance, Jørn Lier Horst’s Dregs begins with the gruesome discovery of a left foot that has washed up on shore near the Norwegian town of Savern. Chief Inspector William Wisting and his team begin the process of looking for clues, following leads and so on. Then another left foot is discovered. And another. It turns out that these discoveries are linked to the disappearance of a group of residents that have gone missing from the same old-age care home. Wisting and his team also discover that the missing people had another connection, this one going back to the years during and just after World War II. The tradition of narrowing down the list of suspects and finding out whodunit and whydunit is an important part of this novel.

And then there’s the tradition that crime fiction stories are told from the perspective of the sleuth and/or a sidekick/assistant. Although readers may get a look at what other characters do and say, the real focus of the novel is the sleuth. Of course not every early crime novel was written this way (for instance Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone wasn’t). But from the beginning, it’s been customary for crime stories to be told from the sleuth or sidekick’s point of view. And many modern novels follow this tradition. For instance, Elly Griffith’s Ruth Galloway series is told from the perspective of Galloway, who is a forensic archaeology expert at the University of North Norfolk, and the perspective of DCI Harry Nelson, the official investigator of these cases and also the father of Galloway’s daughter Kate.

These and other crime fiction traditions are a critical part of the genre. They are at its roots and they give readers and authors both a structure and a set of important parameters. But here’s the thing. Times change. Ideas change. People change. And if the genre didn’t evolve too, it would become stale and outworn. It wouldn’t meet the needs and interests of today’s readers and it would limit today’s authors. So traditions are perhaps most helpful if they are integrated with adaptation and innovation.

For instance, for many years, the crime fiction tradition was that PI sleuths were male (I know there were a few early female PI sleuths; I’m talking in generalities here). But authors such as Marcia Muller, Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky changed the PI tradition. The genre is better because it includes stories that feature Sharon McCone, Kinsey Millhone and V.I. Warshawski. Not only has that innovation welcomed many new readers and authors, it’s also breathed new life into the PI sub-genre. Yes of course there are still traditional male PI fictional sleuths and some of them are terrific characters. But adapting the sub-genre to meet new needs has improved it.

When Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was published, she got quite a lot of criticism for it because she broke with one of the important traditions in crime fiction. She had kept with the custom of the sleuth (in this case Hercule Poirot) who investigates a murder (here, the stabbing death of retired magnate Roger Ackrody). But she did part with tradition in a fundamental way and plenty of people didn’t like that. There was a feeling she hadn’t ‘played fair.’ And yet, if you read through that novel, there are several clues as to whodunit. This novel was an innovation and helped to change and develop the genre. In hindsight, it’s often regarded as one of Christie’s best and has one of the most famous dénouements in crime fiction history.

We also see a break with tradition in Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me. The story is told from the perspective of Central City, Texas deputy sheriff Lou Ford and concerns the investigation of a brutal beating and later, a murder. So far, so traditional.  But Lou Ford is not at all a ‘typical’ lawman. He has a hidden dark side – he calls it, ‘the sickness’ – that affects much about him and plays a critical role in the novel. Thompson’s creation added an innovation to the genre and opened it to all sorts of different kinds of plot twists and protagonists as well as new ways to build tension.

And then there’s the crime fiction tradition that a crime novel involves an obvious crime and the ensuing investigation. That tradition is one of the founding principles of the genre. And yet, opening up the genre to include novels where there isn’t an obvious murder or other crime has allowed for memorable novels. For instance, Catherine O’Flynn’s What Was Lost tells the story of Kate Meaney, a ten-year-old would-be private investigator. She’s even got her own agency Falcon Investigations. Kate is content with her life until her grandmother Ivy decides she would be better off going away to school. She insists that Kate sit the entrance exams at the exclusive Redspoon School and Kate reluctantly agrees after her friend Adrian Palmer persuades her to go. Palmer even goes with Kate to the school to keep her company. Then, Kate disappears. Despite an intensive police search, no trace of her is found, not even a body. Palmer is blamed for her disappearance, although he claims he’s innocent. In fact, his life is made so difficult that he leaves town. We learn the truth about Kate when twenty years later, Palmer’s sister Lisa and a friend of hers Kurt return to the mystery and piece together what happened. Without spoiling the story I can say that this isn’t at all a typical crime-followed-by-investigation kind of novel. And yet it’s powerful.

Traditions link us with the past. They give us a safe structure and they are important in helping us order our lives. But without innovation and change, traditions become limiting. They seem to be most helpful to us when they are seasoned with evolution. What do you think? When you read, what sort of balance between tradition and innovation do you like? If you’re a writer, how does tradition fit into what you write? Or doesn’t it?

 

On Another Note…
 

 

This post is dedicated to the memory of Jackie Robinson. On 15 April 1947, he became the first African-American to play in a major-league U.S. baseball game. Baseball has always been a sport rich with tradition. It still is. But then-Brooklyn Dodgers President and General Manager Branch Rickey saw that in order to attract new fans and make the game more popular, baseball would need to evolve and change the tradition of fielding only White players. Rickey had the idea and Robinson had the courage, the class and the baseball talent to make that idea a reality. And baseball is far better for it. So are we as a people.

 

 
 

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from the prologue to Jerry Brock and Sheldon Harnick’s Tradition (Book by Jospeh Stein).

Coming Home After School, Flying My Bike Past the Gates of the Factories*

Sometimes it happens as early as eight or nine years old, and sometimes not until the mid-teen years. But there’s usually some point in life where we come of age – where we begin to see others’ perspectives and see the other people in our lives differently. We stop seeing life through the eyes of little children and begin to see it with more maturity. A lot of people think of ‘coming of age’ stories as being either ‘literary’ or perhaps YA stories but the fact is, coming of age plays a role in crime fiction too. And when it’s done well, we can get a real sense not just of the crime that’s featured in the plot, but also of the fundamental changes that happen to us as we start to cross that threshold.

We see that combination for instance in James W. Fuerst’s Huge. Twelve-year-old Eugene ‘Huge’ Smalls has his share of challenges. He has trouble making friends, he isn’t really good at controlling his anger and his relationships with his teachers are not exactly productive. And yet, he’s a brilliant boy. Huge’s real dream in life is to be a detective like Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe or Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade. Huge gets his chance when his grandmother hires him. She wants him to find out who defaced the sign at the retirement home where she lives. Huge agrees and immediately begins looking for suspects. Among them are several of the people he knows at school and as Huge considers each of them, we watch as he slowly begins to grow up. He learns more about them and himself than he imagined he would.

In Catherine O’Flynn’s What Was Lost, we meet ten-year-old Kate Meaney. Kate wants more than anything else to be a detective, and she’s even started her own agency Falcon Investigations. Kate doesn’t have a lot of friends, but that doesn’t bother her. She has her agency, her business partner Mickey the Monkey (a stuffed animal who rides along with her in her backpack) and she has Green Oaks Shopping Center, which has just opened. Kate suspects that Green Oaks will be a very good place to look for suspicious characters so she spends as much time there as she can. In some ways, Kate is very mature for her age but in a lot of ways, she’s still very much a child with a child’s imagination and a child’s refusal to see the dreariness of much of her Midlands town. Then her world changes. Her grandmother Ivy believes that Kate would be better off going away to school so she arranges for her to sit the entrance exams at the exclusive Redspoon school. Kate is reluctant to go but she’s finally persuaded by her friend Adrian Palmer, who even promises to go with her to the school. The two go to Redspoon but Kate never returns. Her body isn’t discovered but everyone suspects that Adrian is responsible for her disappearance. In fact, he leaves town swearing not to return. Twenty years later, we learn what really happened to Kate when Adrian’s sister Lisa and a Green Oaks security guard Kurt form an unlikely friendship and begin to look into the past.

Pablo De Santis’ The Paris Enigma introduces us to Sigmundo Salvatrio, the son of a Buenos Aires shoemaker. Salvatrio is enthralled with detection so he is overjoyed when he gets the opportunity to attend the exclusive Academy for Detectives run by world-famous sleuth Renato Craig. Craig is the co-founder of a group of other world-famous detectives known as The Twelve that is slated to do a presentation during the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris. However, shortly before he’s scheduled to leave Buenos Airies for the fair, Craig falls ill and cannot attend. He sends Salvatrio in his place and that’s when the boy’s coming of age really begins. One of the other members of the Twelve is murdered and Salvatrio works with the group’s other co-founder Viktor Arkazy to find out who the killer is. Then there is another murder and Salvatrio learns plenty of lessons about adult reality.

Alan Bradley’s Flavia de Luce is also at the crossroads between childhood and adolescence. On the one hand, she’s very knowledgeable about chemistry, quite observant and intelligent. On the other hand she’s still got a child’s way of looking at life in some ways. She’s got two older sisters who are the bane of her existence and a father to whom she’s devoted. She’s at the same time both savvy and imaginative. For instance, in A Red Herring Without Mustard, she has an encounter with a Gypsy who starts to tell her fortune. Flavia begins to think that the Gypsy may have been able to connect with her mother Harriet, who died when Flavia was a baby. Here’s a bit of their conversation:

 

‘‘Tell me about the woman you saw on the mountain,’ I said. ‘The one I shall become.’…
‘Cross my palm with silver,’ she demanded, sticking out a grubby hand.
‘But I gave you a shilling,’ I said. “That’s what it says on the board outside.
‘Messages from the Third Circle cost extra,’ she wheezed. ‘They drain my batteries.’
I almost laughed out loud. Who did this old hag think she was? But still, she seemed to have spotted Harriet beyond the veil, and I couldn’t let skepticism spoil even half a chance of having a few words with my dead mother.’

 

It’s that mix of childhood and a more mature outlook that makes Flavia an interesting sleuth and in this case, she puts her skills to work when the Gypsy who seems to know so much about her life is found murdered.

Megan Abbott’s The End of Everything is the story of the tragic coming of age of thirteen-year-old Lizzie Hood. She is best friends with Evie Verver and the two girls tell each other all their secrets. Everything changes when Evie doesn’t come home from school one afternoon. At first, no-one worries that much about her absence but as evening wears on and she still hasn’t come home, her parents get worried. They and later the police ask Lizze for all of the information she has. As Evie’s best friend, she may know something Evie never told her family. But Lizzie doesn’t remember much and isn’t able to be of any help.  But she is desperate to find her best friend so she decides to do her own investigation to try to get some answers. As she does so, she learns that a lot of the childlike beliefs she had about Evie may very well not have been accurate. And as she really confronts the tragedy of Evie’s disappearance, Lizzie has to look at things with a different and painfully more mature perspective.

William Kent Krueger’s Ordinary Grace tells of one terrible summer in the life of Frank Drum. In the summer of 1961, Frank Drum is thirteen years old and mostly occupied with playing baseball, going to the local river and finding adventure where he can. His best friend is his younger brother Jake, although as the book begins he isn’t usually willing to admit it. The summer begins to pall when a boy Frank and Jake knew is killed on a local railroad track. Everyone thinks at first that it was an accident, but it might not have been so accidental. There are other deaths too. But the most tragic event, and the pivotal event for Frank Drum, is when there is a murder in his own family. Now he has to grow up quickly and look in a different way at people he’s always known. Little by little he learns the truth about what happened as he and Jake find some evidence, listen in on conversations and so on. As Frank begins to make sense of the events around him, we see how he starts by thinking in a fairly childish way but matures as the summer goes on.

Not all of these novels are what most people think of ‘typical’ crime fiction novels (as though there were such a thing). But they all have an interesting mix of the coming-of-age theme and of course, crime. It’s not easy to tell a story through the eyes of a young person coming of age but when it works well the result can be a really innovative perspective.

 

 
 

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from Simon and Garfunkel’s My Little Town.

I’d Rather be Anything but Ordinary Please*

One of the things that can make a fictional sleuth or protagonist interesting and memorable is an unusual way of thinking. I’m not talking here about simple creativity of thinking although of course that can be an appealing trait. I’m really talking about a mindset that sees the world in a different way. Like anything else in a crime fiction novel, an unusual way of thinking can be overdone and so pull the reader out of the story. When that happens the sleuth is less believable. But when it’s done well, having a sleuth or other protagonist who looks at the world in a very unusual way can add richness to a story and can make for a very memorable character.

For instance, Arthur Upfield’s Queensland police inspector Napoleon ‘Bony’ Bonaparte is half Aborigine/half White. His way of looking at the world and his cases is unusual in part because of his cultural background. On the one hand, Bony is well aware of the European way of looking at life. He is a police detective, so he knows police procedure and he understands that way of thinking. At the same time, he is well versed in ‘the book of the bush.’ He thinks in terms of what the signs of the bush and nature tell him, and often gets very useful information from what he sees in nature when he investigates.  For instance, in The Bone is Pointed, Bony investigates the five-month old disappearance of Jeff Anderson, who was working Karwir Station, a ranch near Green Swamp Well, when he disappeared. One morning, Anderson went out to ride the fences on the ranch; only his horse returned. At first, everyone thought the horse (who was known for being difficult) threw him, but there is no sign of his body. No-one misses Anderson very much as he’s both sadistic and mean-tempered. But Sergeant Blake, who investigated the disappearance, now believes that Anderson either was murdered or deliberately went into hiding. Bony is assigned to investigate the man’s disappearance and begins to look into the case. He uses a very unusual but effective combination of his knowledge of the bush and the people who live there and his knowledge of police procedure and working with European-Australians to find out what really happened to Jeff Anderson.

Peter Høeg’s Smilla Jaspersen also has a very unusual way of thinking about the world. She is half-Inuit/half-White and was brought up on Greenland. So by the standards of most people in Copenhagen where she now lives, she doesn’t look at the world in the usual way. She is also a scientist who has learned to think about the world like a scientist does. And in Smilla’s Sense of Snow (AKA Miss Smilla’s Feeling For Snow), she uses her unusual way of thinking to solve the mystery of the death of Isaiah Christiansen. Isaiah is a young boy, also a Greenlander by birth, who lives in the same building where Jaspersen does. When he dies after a fall from the snow-covered roof of the building, everyone puts it down to a tragic accident. But Jaspersen thinks otherwise. First, Isaiah was extremely at home in the snow and wouldn’t have made the kinds of mistakes that can end up in a tragic fall. What’s more, certain aspects of the snow and the marks in it suggest to Jespersen that the boy’s death was more than just a fall. So she begins to investigate. The answers lead Jaspersen back to Greenland and an excavation there where Isaiah’s father died. Throughout this novel, we see Jaspersen’s unusual way of thinking, at the same time both scientific and informed by her cultural background. She understands snow, ice and glaciers in a very traditional, culturally-contextual and deep way; she has a real feeling for them. At the same time she understands them from a scientific point of view and those two ways of thinking give her a very unusual perspective. They also point her in the right direction in solving this mystery.

We see a very unusual way of thinking in Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Christopher Boone is a fifteen-year-old boy with autism. He’s high-enough functioning to communicate and to do quite a lot for himself. But he doesn’t think like ‘the rest of us’ do. When he discovers that his neighbour’s dog has been killed, he decides to be a detective like Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles and find out who was responsible. The novel is written from Christopher’s point of view and that gives us a glimpse into how a person with his form and level of autism might see the world. It’s an interesting perspective and although Christopher is not skilled socially, we see that he is highly accurate at remembering details. His unique skills are part of what leads him to the answers he’s looking for – and to a truth about himself that he never knew.

There’s also the unique perspective of Dr. Jennifer White, whom we meet in Alice LaPlante’s Turn of Mind. White is a skilled Chicago orthopaedic surgeon who specialises in hand reconstruction. She has also been diagnosed with dementia. As the novel begins, White is still able to function fairly well although she has had to retire from active work. Her daughter Fiona and son Mark have arranged for her to have a live-in caregiver Magdalena. One night, White’s neighbour Amanda O’Toole is murdered and Detective Luton is assigned to the case. Forensic tests show that O’Toole was mutilated in a way that points to a murderer with highly developed medical skill, so Luton begins to wonder whether White might be guilty. But the evidence isn’t completely convincing, so Luton isn’t sure White is the murderer. White’s advancing dementia means she has progressively fewer lucid times and even if she did think the way ‘the rest of us do,’ Luton knows she wouldn’t be likely to admit to the murder if she is guilty. So Luton has to use all of her abilities to get to the truth about Amanda O’Toole’s murder. It turns out that the O’Toole and White families have a long history together and that this murder has everything to do with their pasts. Since this novel is told from Jennifer White’s perspective, we get to see the case unfold through the eyes of someone who thinks in a very unusual way.

Catherine O’Flynn’s What Was Lost introduces us to ten-year-old Kate Meaney, who has a unique way of looking at the world. As the novel begins, Kate dreams of being a detective, and has already started her own detective agency Falcon Investigations. Her partner is Mickey the Monkey, a stuffed monkey who travels everywhere in Kate’s backpack. Kate’s favourite occupation is looking for suspicious characters and activity and there are few better places to do that than the newly-opened Green Oaks Shopping Center. Kate doesn’t have a lot of friends, and she doesn’t think the way other people do, but that doesn’t bother her. She’s perfectly content to live the way she’s living. But her grandmother Ivy, who is her caregiver, thinks Kate would be better served by going away to school. So she arranges for Kate to sit the entrance exams at the exclusive Redspoon School. Kate is finally persuaded to go when her friend twenty-two-year-old Adrian Palmer agrees to go with her to the school. The two board the bus together but Kate never returns. No trace of her is found, and everyone blames Palmer for her disappearance. In fact, his life is made so difficult that he leaves town. Twenty years later his sister Lisa is the assistant manager at Your Music, a store in Green Oaks. Her job is to put it mildly uninspiring and she’s in a dead-end relationship. But life changes for her when she meets Kurt, a security guard at the mall. Kurt’s been seeing strange things on his security cameras: a vision of a young girl with backpack that has a monkey sticking out of it. Lisa is reminded of Kate, whom she met a few times, and each in a different way, Lisa and Kurt explore the past as we learn what really happened to Kate. Throughout this novel we see that Kate thinks in a way that’s unlike just about anyone else. That aspect of her personality makes her perhaps the most alive person in the novel, even twenty years after she’s disappeared.

More recently, Belinda Bauer’s Rubbernecker introduces us to Patrick Fort, a young man with Asperger’s Syndrome. Fort’s father was struck by a car and killed when Fort was young and it’s partly for that reason that Fort is fascinated by what makes people die. He enrols at university in Cardiff to study anatomy mostly because of his fascination with the causes of death. Part of this novel is told from Fort’s perspective as he and his peers study a cadaver. Patrick notices some things about the cadaver that don’t tally with the official reports and that makes him curious about this death. Bit by bit we learn through Patrick’s very unusual way of looking at the world what happened to the dead man. Another thread of this story which is later tied in with Patrick’s experience is told from the perspective of Sam Galen, who’s in a coma in a neurological unit but hasn’t lost his ability to think. As he slowly re-unites with the world, we learn what happened to him and what life is like in that unit.  We get another perspective on the same unit from Tracy Evans, who is a nurse there. I confess I haven’t yet read this novel, but it was such a good example of a protagonist (in this case Patrick Fort) with a unique way of looking at the world that I couldn’t resist mentioning it.

Sarah Ward at Crimepieces has done a terrific review of Rubbernecker. Her review is what got me thinking about protagonists who don’t think like ‘the rest of the world’ so thanks, Sarah, for the inspiration. Folks, Sarah’s excellent blog is well worth a spot on your blog roll if you’re not already following it.

Characters with unique ways of thinking have to be drawn deftly or the story risks contrivance and melodrama, to say nothing of the risks to believability. But when such a character is done well, having an unusual way of looking at the world can add depth to a novel and set it apart from others.

 
 
 

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from Avril Lavigne’s Anything but Ordinary.

If You Strip Away the Myth From the Man*

Today would have been U.S. President Abraham Lincoln’s 203^rd birthday. There’ve been a lot of stories told about Lincoln, some of them true and some of them not. And that’s got me to thinking about how myths about people get passed along. When someone becomes famous or notorious, myths start building up about that person until the myths sometimes matter more than the person does. What’s more, the person behind the myths is almost never the person portrayed in them. But that usually makes the real person more interesting. Just a quick look at crime fiction should be plenty to show you want I mean.

Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot for instance is fully aware of his near-mythical status. In fact if truth be told he likes having that much fame. In Murder on the Orient Express for instance, he is at dinner before boarding the famous Orient Express for its three-day journey across Europe. While he’s eating, he’s approached by an old friend M. Bouc, a director of the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits. Bouc says,

 

‘‘But you, you are at the top of the tree nowadays, mon vieux!’
‘Some little success I have had, perhaps.’ Hercule Poirot tried to look modest but failed signally.’

 

The myths about Poirot’s skill at solving crime get new fodder in this story when on the second night of the journey, American businessman Samuel Ratchett is stabbed. Bouc asks Poirot to investigate and he agrees. Readers of Christie’s Appointment With Death will notice a reference to the way Poirot’s reputation is affected by what happens in this story. The reality is though that Poirot as a person is more interesting than his reputation. That’s why a lot of people like the fact that sometimes Christie’s stories are narrated by Captain Arthur Hastings, who shows us what the real Poirot is like, warts and all as the saying goes.

Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe has also achieved near-mythical status. And some of the myths about him (e.g. that he doesn’t leave his brownstone if he can avoid it) are true. Most of Wolfe’s clients don’t really see ‘the real Wolfe’ though. They come to the brownstone, they tell him about their cases and he and his team solve those cases. Other than the fact that he’s irritable and arrogant, lots of people don’t know how much of what they’ve heard is myth and how much is true. But Archie Goodwin knows. And because the Nero Wolfe stories are told from his perspective, we get to see the Nero Wolfe behind the myths. For instance in Too Many Cooks, Wolfe is reluctantly persuaded to go to the very upmarket Kanawha Spa in West Virginia. He’s been invited to address a meeting of Les Quinze Maîtres, the fifteen greatest chefs in the world and as fans of Nero Wolfe will know, there isn’t very much that can induce Wolfe to travel. But this does. Not long after Wolfe and Goodwin arrive, one of the master chefs Phillip Laszio is stabbed. Wolfe refuses to investigate at first but is finally persuaded. In this novel we see some of the man behind the myth. For instance, Wolfe doesn’t refuse to travel out of arrogance; he’s afraid of (or shall we say very uncomfortable with) being on things that move. He’s vulnerable in other ways too and that look ‘behind the myth’ makes Wolfe more interesting.

But of course, having myths passed around about you – even if they’re in praise – isn’t always a good thing. For instance in Katherine Howell’s Silent Fear, Sydney detective Ella Marconi has to deal with the jealousy that myth-building can cause. She’s gotten quite a good reputation for solving difficult cases and word has gotten around. In this novel she and her team are working on the murder of Paul Fowler, who was shot while tossing a football around with a few friends. Another detective John Gerard has been assigned to the team and it turns out that he’s both jealous and malicious. He often refers to Marconi as ‘the great Marconi’ or ‘the great Ella Marconi’ and it’s obviously done spitefully. At first she tries to make clear that she’s no hero and no better at the job than anyone else is. But Gerard keeps up his campaign. In the end, Marconi has almost as much trouble dealing with Gerard’s jealousy and blunders as she does solving the case. Fans of Ella Marconi will know that the real person behind the ‘office myths’ is wrong sometimes, makes mistakes and is certainly not the ‘larger-than-life’ character that the myths would have one believe. But those myths get in the way of everyone seeing that.

We also see a case of myths getting in the way in Wendy James’ The Mistake. Jodie Evans Garrow has what looks like a good life – successful husband, enduring marriage, two healthy children. But then her daughter Hannah gets in an accident. As fate would have it, Hannah is taken to the same hospital where years before, Jodie gave birth to another child Ella Mary. When Jodie goes to visit Hannah, a nurse at the hospital remembers her and asks about the child. Jodie says she was given up for adoption. But when the overzealous nurse looks into the matter, she finds that there are no adoption records to support Jodie’s story. When the story begins to get around, all sorts of questions arise: What happened to the baby? Why aren’t there any records? Did Jodie have something to do with the baby’s disappearance? The more these questions are asked, the more of a pariah Jodie becomes. People begin to believe all kinds of myths about her and matters aren’t helped by the fact that even Jodie’s own mother contributes to the myth-building. In the end, we learn the truth about Jodie’s life and about Ella Mary and the reality of Jodie’s life is much more interesting and more human than the myths about her are.

In Catherine O’Flynn’s The News Where You Are, we are introduced to regional TV presenter Frank Allcroft. He’s happily married and has a good relationship with his eight-year-old daughter Mo. But he’s reached a crossroads in his life. At the same time as he’s trying to figure out his own direction, he’s also coping with the death of his legendary mentor Phil Smedway, who was killed while out jogging. Smedway was also Allcroft’s predecessor at the TV station so his loss has hit Allcroft hard. Everyone thinks the death was a tragic hit-and-run accident. But Allcroft isn’t so sure. He pays a visit to the scene of the accident and discovers that the road there is straight and even. Even an impaired driver should have been able to see Smedway in time to avoid him, and there’s plenty of space on that part of the road for a car to move out of the way. The more Allcroft thinks about it the more he wants to know why Smedway died. As he starts to ask questions, he learns more and more about his mentor, about the myths that had been built up and about the reality behind them. By the end of the novel Smedway becomes a much more interesting person in real life than the myths about him are. Among other things this novel also explores the way myths affect the person behind them.

People who become almost mythological are still people. And if you look behind the legends and myths and stories, you often find that the reality is much more interesting than the myths are.

 

 
 

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s Heaven on Their Minds.