Money Makes the World Go Around*

Banking – and I don’t mean only high finance – is such an integral part of our lives that we don’t really think about it unless there’s some sort of problem. And with today’s direct deposit, ATMs and electronic banking transactions we really don’t even need to go into a bank very often. And yet our financial lives are a part of who we are. So when there’s a crime, especially if the crime may have a financial motive, the police waste little time going into victims’ and suspects’ banking histories. And it’s surprising what they can find there. In fact there’s even a forensics specialty in accounting and banking. Detectives and attorneys use things such as ATM transactions and debit card purchases to marshal evidence for and against people too. With the prevalence of banking in our lives it’s no wonder it shows up so much in crime fiction. The topic of banking in crime fiction is quite broad so this post only gives me the space to touch on a few aspects of it. But a quick glance is all you need I think to really see how important banking and finance are to the genre.

Starting from the days of Arthur Conan Doyle and even before, bank robberies have been the subject of crime fiction stories. That’s what’s behind Conan Doyle’s The Adventure of the Red-Headed League. In that story pawnbroker Jabez Wilson is offered an opportunity that seems to good to be true. He is hired for good pay to copy the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The only proviso is that he cannot leave his new place of employment while he is ‘on duty.’ Happy enough to comply with that rule he begins his job. All goes well until the day he goes to work only to find that his employers seem to have disappeared. Wilson asks Holmes to look into the matter and Holmes begins to investigate. He finds that Wilson was being manipulated by a gang of thieves who wanted to use Wilson’s pawn shop as a base from whence they would tunnel into the nearby City and Suburban Bank.

Bank robberies are also integral to the plots of Robert Pollock’s Loophole or, How to Rob a Bank and Michael Connelly’s The Black Echo. In both of those novels there’s a plan to use underground tunnels as a way to break into a bank. For those who are interested, I recommend reading Pollock’s novel first, since it takes place about thirty years before Connelly’s does, and it’s really interesting (or maybe it’s just me) to see how technology and bank security changed over time.

A bank robbery also plays an important role in Karin Fossum’s He Who Fears the Wolf.  In that novel, Oslo Inspector Konrad Sejer and his assistant Jacob Skarre are investigating the murder of Halldis Horn, who lived alone after the death of her husband. The evidence seems to point to Errki Johrma, who has mental illness and a very troubled personal history. But Sejer isn’t sure at all that Johrma is the killer. And since Johrma has disappeared, there’s no way to question him about the crime. Then, there’s a bank robbery to which Sejer is a sort of eyewitness. He’s passing by Fokus Bank, where he has an account. Not far from the bank he sees a young man who for several reasons makes him uneasy. When the man goes into the bank Sejer goes in too but then chides himself for being overly suspicious. Sejer leaves the bank but he’s only a few blocks away when he hears a shot. He returns to the bank to find out that the man he observed robbed the bank and has escaped. That robbery ends up being related, ‘though in an unexpected way, to the murder investigation.

Bank transactions themselves can provide clues to the motive for a crime and to the person who committed it. We see that all through crime fiction. For instance, under the name Emma Lathen, the writing duo of Mary Jane Latsis  and  Martha Henissart created a very popular series featuring banking vice president John Putnam Thatcher. He is employed by international banking giant Sloan Guaranty Trust. In that capacity, he oversees many of the bank’s transactions and gets involved with banking clients. And because of his knowledge of the way banking works, he’s often able to find financial clues that solve murders. For instance in Going For the Gold, the Sloan has been selected as the official bank of the 1980 Winter Olympics. Thatcher travels to Lake Placid, New York where the games are to be held to oversee the bank’s handling of the myriad transactions the games will generate. When one of the athletes is murdered, Thatcher discovers that the victim was involved in a traveller’s cheque counterfeiting scheme. Another athlete who works at a bank gives Thatcher important information as to exactly how the scheme worked in individual bank branches and he is able to put the pieces of the puzzle together.

Financial transactions are important, even if only mentioned briefly, in Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express. Wealthy American businessman Samuel Ratchett is on his way across Europe on the world-famous Orient Express train when he is stabbed late one night. Hercule Poirot is aboard the same train and his friend M. Bouc, a company director, persuades him to investigate. It’s soon discovered that Ratchett is not who he appears to be. In his real identity he’s hiding a dark secret that has everything to do with his murder. Ratchett’s past catches up with him in part because his murderer has discovered through his financial transactions exactly how he managed to escape it, so to speak.

Peter Temple’s Bad Debts introduces us to occasional lawyer and private investigator Jack Irish. When he gets a series of messages from a former client Danny McKillop, he doesn’t take them seriously at first. Then McKillop is murdered. Partly out of a sense of guilt for not paying closer attention to the messages, Irish begins to look into what happened to the victim. Eight years earlier McKillop had gone to prison for the hit-and-run killing of Melbourne activist Anne Jeppeson. Irish’s investigation raises the strong possibility that McKillop was framed for Jeppeson’s death and that she was, in fact, deliberately murdered. With help from journalist Linda Hilliard, Irish discovers through financial and banking transactions exactly what the motive was for Jeppeson’s killing. Those transactions are also part of what leads him to the real killer.

A trip to the bank proves to be of vital importance in Henning Mankell’s  Faceless Killers. Johannes Lövgren and his wife Maria are brutally murdered one night and Inspector Kurt Wallander and his team on the Ystad police force investigate the killings. It doesn’t look as though robbery was the motive; the couple was not known to be wealthy and besides, the murders are more brutal than one would expect in a case of robbery gone wrong. Just before she dies, Maria Lövgren says the word foreign, and that raises all sorts of suspicions, to say nothing of controversy. But a thorough investigation turns up nothing to connect the couple to any foreigners living in the area. Meanwhile the team looks in to Lövgren’s bank statements and financial records and uncovers some facts about his past that no-one knew. But Wallander still cannot make a direct connection between the killer and the victims. Then he visits the Union Bank, where Lövgren had a safe-deposit box. During his trip there he gets an unexpected clue and the same person later provides him with the conclusive evidence he needs to catch the killer.

There are plenty of other novels out there where the police trace bank transactions, debit card use and other financial clues that lead them to a criminal and a motive or that exonerate someone. It’s a realistic approach to getting evidence too since virtually all of us use banks in one way or another. When financial detail isn’t overly burdensome, it can add much to a story.  Do you find that kind of investigation interesting? If you’re a writer, do you include banking when you plan motive or clue-gathering?

 
 
 

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from Fred Ebb and John Kander’s Money Song.

>I’m a Fool to do Your Dirty Work*

>We all end up doing things we don’t want to do. We may be persuaded, paid, threatened or “guilted” into doing things that go “against the grain” for us, or it may just be “a favour for a friend.” Either way, we’ve probably all been in the situation of being pressured to do things we didn’t feel good about doing. That pressure to do someone else’s “dirty work” can add an interesting layer to a crime fiction story. First, it’s realistic. Most of us understand that feeling and can identify with it. Second, it can add tension and suspense. It’s also an interesting motivation.

For example, in Agatha Christie’s The Clocks, Special Services agent Colin Lamb is in the town of Crowdean on the trail of a spy ring. He gets caught up in a murder investigation when he quite literally bumps into a young woman who’s rushed out of a house screaming that there’s a dead man in the house. Lamb goes in the house to see for himself and sure enough, there’s an unidentified dead man inside. The murder seems like a complicated one with all sorts of strange clues, so Lamb takes the case to his father’s friend Hercule Poirot and challenges him to solve it. Poirot takes up the challenge and begins to sort through the case. Matters are made even more complex when another character in the story agrees to “do a favour for a friend.” When that character finds out that the “favour” was actually “dirty work” done to hide a murderer, there’s another death. In the end, Poirot and Lamb work together, each in his own way, to find out who the killer is and it turns out to be, as Poirot says, “a very simple crime.”

In Christie’s Hickory Dickory Death (AKA Hickory Dickory Dock), Poirot’s frighteningly efficient secretary Miss Felicity Lemon asks him to help her sister Mrs. Hubbard get to the bottom of a strange series of thefts at the student hostel she manages. Poirot agrees and pays a visit to the hostel. On the night of Poirot’s visit, Celia Austin, who’s one of the residents, says that she’s been responsible for most of the thefts. At first, it seems that the matter has been cleared up, although Poirot still feels there are some things left unexplained. Then, two nights later, Celia dies of what looks like suicide. It’s soon proven to be murder, though, and now Poirot and Inspector Sharpe look into the lives of the hostel residents to see who would have wanted to murder Celia and why. It turns out that Celia knew too much about someone’s doings, and, as the saying goes, signed her own death warrant by revealing what she knew to the killer. Later in the novel, we discover that someone at the hostel has known all along who killed Celia, but felt that there was no choice but to do some “dirty work” for the murderer. After another death, though, that character (who’d never banked on murder, anyway) no longer chooses to stand in with the killer and tells all.

Emma Lathen’s Murder to Go features some “dirty work” by Clyde Sweeney, a disgruntled delivery truck driver who works for Chicken Tonight, a fast-food restaurant company. Chicken Tonight’s franchisees are excited at the premiere of its newest recipe, Chicken Mexicali, and the dish is launched with fanfare. The timing is good, too, since there’s a pending merger between Chicken Tonight and Southeastern Insurance. Then, several customers are sickened after eating the new offering; one even dies. It’s soon discovered that Sweeney may have poisoned the ingredients before transporting them from the warehouse to the franchise restaurants. The case seems settled until Sweeney disappears and is later found killed. John Putnam Thatcher, vice president for Sloan Guaranty Bank (the company brokering the merger) investigates what’s been happening since it will likely affect the merger. What he finds is that Sweeney was doing “dirty work” for someone who wanted to scuttle the merger.

Janet Pisula pays the ultimate price for getting someone to do her “dirty work” in K.C. Constantine’s The Blank Page. She’s a shy, quiet student who’s found strangled in the room she’s taken at a rooming-house near the local community college. At first, there seems to be no reason for her to have been killed. She had, so it seems, no enemies; in fact, no-one really knew her well at all, including her house-mates. She was so shy that she almost never spoke up in class and certainly hadn’t attracted any attention. Because Janet Pisula was the kind of quiet, retiring person she was, it takes Rockford Police Chief Mario Balzic quite a while to find out enough about her background to discover why she would have been killed. In the end, he learns that she’d paid someone to do some “dirty work” for her at the cost of her life.

In Martin Clark’s The Legal Limit, we meet successful Patrick County, Virginia commonwealth attorney Mason Hunt. He and his brother Gates have in common that they were raised by a violent alcoholic father and a mother who tried her best but was frequently victimised herself. Gates tried to protect his brother as best he could, but both brothers were frequently abused. The two brothers make completely different kinds of choices: Mason takes every opportunity he can get, goes to college on a scholarship, and becomes a successful attorney; Gates, on the other hand, wastes his athletic ability and lives on petty drug dealing, his girlfriend’s Welfare check and money he gets from his mother. One afternoon, Gates Hunt gets into an argument with romantic rival Wayne Thompson. Wayne leaves after a shouting match, but later that night, the Hunt brothers encounter Thompson again. Before anyone really knows what’s happened, Gates Hunt has shot Thompson. Mason Hunt’s sense of filial loyalty leads him to do some “dirty work” for his brother; he covers up the shooting and life goes on for both brothers. Years later, Gates is arrested and convicted of cocaine trafficking. He begs his brother to get him out of prison but Mason refuses. When he learns of his brother’s decision, Gates accuses Mason of the long-ago shooting of Wayne Thompson and now, Mason faces an indictment for a murder he didn’t commit.

Sometimes, of course, sleuths have to do others’ “dirty work,” too. For instance, in Rhys Bowen’s Evanly Bodies, Constable Evan Evans is named to a new Major Incident Team, which is part of an initiative designed to get police from different geographic areas to work together. Evans’ team, under the leadership of DI Bragg, is called into action immediately when the body of Martin Rodgers is found. Then a second death occurs, and a third. Now, the team has to try to find out the link between the three victims. By chance, Evans discovers what that link is and sets up a plan to catch the killer. The only problem is, there are very good reasons to feel sympathy for the murderer, and when Evans discovers the real truth about the killings, the last thing he really wants is to imprison the culprit. But Bragg wants the case wrapped up in order to give the new initiative credibility. Besides, as Bragg points out, the team’s job is to catch criminals, not interpret the law. So Evans ends up having to do the “dirty work” of being a part of the arrest.

Walter Mosley’s A Red Death also involves some “dirty work.” Former airplane mechanic Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins has settled into a post-World War II life in the Watts neighbourhood of Los Angeles. All’s well until he gets a letter from the Internal Revenue Service claiming that he owes thousands of dollars in back taxes – money he can’t pay – and threatening jail unless he pays immediately. Rawlins assumes that he’ll end up in jail for a long time; then, he’s contacted by an FBI agent who offers him a deal. In exchange for taking care of Rawlins’ tax problems, the FBI wants Rawlins to help bring down someone they believe is a Communist. Rawlins isn’t comfortable with the idea, but he’s even less comfortable with the idea of going to jail. So he reluctantly agrees to “get close to” the FBI’s target. The better he gets to know the target, though, the more complicated the situation gets. Rawlins has a lot of sympathy for the man and feels that he’s betraying a friendship by continuing to spy on him. Besides, a few attempts on his own life, plus three other deaths, convinces Rawlins that he’s become a target himself. In the end, Rawlins figures out what’s really going on and who’s behind all of the events.

Having to do someone else’s “dirty work” can add a solid layer of suspense and interest to a novel. But what’s your view? Have you enjoyed novels that feature this theme? Which ones?

NOTE: The title of this post is a line from Steely Dan’s Dirty Work.

>Nowhere to Run to, Baby*

>As I’ve often mentioned on this blog, suspense is a crucial part of a good crime fiction novel. One way that authors can build that suspense is what I’ll call the “boxed in” phenomenon. If you’ve ever been trapped at an airport or waited on the tarmac for a long time, or if you’ve ever been snowed in overnight at a hotel, you know what I mean. That feeling of being unable to leave can add quite a lot of tension and suspense to a story. Of course, it’s tricky, too; in today’s world, with mobile ‘phones and wireless Internet, we could ask just how isolated people really are. That said, though, when it’s done well, that plot point can be very suspenseful.

Agatha Christie uses it quite effectively in some of her novels. For instance, in And Then There Were None (AKA Ten Little Indians), ten people receive invitations to Indian Island, off the Devon coast. For different reasons, each accepts the invitation. Everyone is shocked when, after dinner on the first night, each person present is accused of causing the death of at least one other person. Shortly after, one of the guests suddenly dies of what turns out to be poison. Late that night there’s another death. It’s soon clear that there’s a murderer on the island and as, one by one, other deaths occur, the survivors work frantically to stay alive and catch the killer. One thing that adds a lot to the suspense of this novel is that a storm cuts everyone off from the mainland. There’s no way to leave the island, and the storm has cut off communication as well. That feeling of being trapped adds an important layer of tension to the story.

There’s also that sense of claustrophobia – of being cooped up – in Christie’s Murder in Mesopotamia. In that novel, Nurse Amy Leatheran is hired by noted archaeologist Dr. Eric Leidner to look after his wife Louise. Mrs. Leidner’s been suffering from anxiety and Dr. Leidner believes that Nurse Leatheran may be able to ease his wife’s fears. All seems well at first, and Amy Leatheran moves into the expedition team’s house a few hours from Baghdad. She senses immediately a certain amount of tension among the team members but optimistically puts it down to the very natural conflicts that arise when a group of people are, as she puts it, cooped up together. Then one afternoon, Louise Leidner is murdered by a blow to the head. Hercule Poirot, who’s traveling in the area, is persuaded to look into the case, and he begins to ask questions. It’s soon apparent that nobody from the outside came into the house or onto the property on the day of the murder, so the only other possibility is that one of the expedition team members committed the murder. As the investigation goes on, the team gets more and more on edge, and that sense of “nowhere to run” adds suspense as Poirot searches for the killer. In the end, he discovers that the whole key the murder is in Mrs. Leidner’s personality, and in her past.

In Ellery Queen’s The King is Dead, Queen and his father, Inspector Richard Queen, are summoned to Bendigo Island, the private property of eccentric munitions tycoon “King” Bendigo. He’s been receiving threatening letters, and he wants the Queens to find out who’s responsible. With Bendigo on the island are his wife Karla, his brothers Judah and Abel and his staff and factory workers. Although the Queens have come to the island voluntarily, we still get the strong feeling of being “boxed in,” as both men some come face-to-face with Bendigo’s security team. Nevertheless, they settle in and begin to investigate. Then one night, Bendigo is in his hermetically-sealed private office when he’s shot. At first, there seems no way he could have been shot, since no weapon has been found in the office, the door remained sealed and the gun actually used to shoot Bendigo is later proved never to have been in the office. As the Queens search for answers about the letters and the shooting, there’s an increasing sense of being isolated. Finally, Queen deduces that the answer to the puzzles lies in the Bendigo brothers’ past. He makes a convincing argument about that tie-in and travels to the Bendidgo brothers’ hometown of Wrightsville. When he gets there, Queen finds out some unexpected things about their pasts, and gets the clues he needs to solve the mysteries.

In more recent years, mostly because of today’s communication technology, it’s harder than it was to create a believable “boxed-in” scenario. But several authors have done so. For instance, in Emma Lathen’s Going for the Gold, everyone’s gathered for the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, New York. Among the spectators is John Putnam Thatcher, vice-president for the Sloan Guaranty Bank. Thatcher’s there because his bank has the contract for Olympic Village and the surrounding area and he’s making sure that all goes smoothly. One afternoon, French ski-jumping star Yves Bisson is shot by a sniper in what looks at first like a terrorist attack. That explanation is soon ruled out and evidence is found that Bisson might have been involved in international counterfeiting. Thatcher’s exploring this possibility when a storm hits the area. The snow cuts the town and Olympic village off, makes travel impossible and more or less isolates everyone. That claustrophobia adds a lot of tension to the novel, especially as it frustrates the killer’s escape plan.

We get a similar sense of isolation and the claustrophobia that can bring in Yrsa Sigurðardóttir’s My Soul to Take. Reykjavík attorney Thóra Gudmundsdótti has been hired by Jónas Júlíusson, the new owner of a posh spa and resort. Jónas has hired Thóra to act for him in a lawsuit he’s filing against the former owners of the land where the spa is located. He claims that the area is haunted, and the owners never informed him about it. Thóra doesn’t believe in ghosts, but she does want the fee, and the all-expenses paid trip to the spa. Within a very short time of Thóra’s arrival at the spa, Birna Hálldorsdóttir, who’s also staying at the spa, is found murdered on the beach near the resort. When Jónas is suspected of the crime, Thóra is faced not only with her original commission, but also with defending her client against a charge of murder. What’s interesting about this novel is that the characters aren’t isolated in the classic sense (i.e. a storm that traps everyone, cutoff of power, etc.). And yet, with the murder investigation going on, the air of suspicion, the possibility that there might be another murder and the creeping question of whether or not the place is haunted, we do get a sense of isolation.

Ann Cleeves creates a sense of isolation in Blue Lightning. Detective Jimmy Perez plans a visit to his family’s home in Fair Isle to introduce his family to his fiancée Fran Hunter. Everyone knows it’ll be a little awkward, since outsiders to Fair Isle are not trusted. But then, the body of Angela Moore is found in the Fair Isle bird observatory. The tension rises and tempers flare as Jimmy begins to ask questions. Autumn storms have come, and Fair Isle is basically cut off from the outside world, so Jimmy and Fran are more or less on their own as they investigate Angela’s murder. Then, there’s another death. Now, with no way off the island, the two sleuths have to contend with not only the murder investigation but also the claustrophobia that the storm brings.

And then there’s Alex Scarrow’s Afterlight, in which Scarrow follows the lives of a community of people who’ve survived a global oil crash and the end of the kind of lives most of us take for granted. This rather isolated community, led by Jenny Sutherland, has managed to create a life on an oil rig off the coast of Norfolk. Since there is no communication as we commonly think of it, the group is cut off from any other survivors of the crash, but all’s well until they decide to rescue Valerie Latoc, who was discovered badly wounded in a nearby abandoned town. Including Latoc proves to have serious consequences for the group on the oil rig, as he slowly begins to play members off against one another. It’s an eerie look at what happens to a group of people when they are really cut off.

There are a lot of other examples of this “no-where to run” plot point. I’ve only had the space to mention a few. Which have you enjoyed?

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from Martha Reeves and the Vandellas’ Nowhere to Run.

>We Are The Champions, My Friends*

>Many people have a drive within them to win. They want to be the best – to win the prize. Why is winning so important? I’m not a psychologist, so I don’t have a research-based answer to that question. But sometimes it’s because the prize is very much worth having; that’s part of the reason so many people buy lottery tickets. Other times, it’s because a person is naturally competitive. Still other people simply enjoy the feeling of trying to excel, and they get a “rush” when they do. Whatever the reason, winning really is important to a lot of people. Of course, like anything else, the desire to win can overtake a person and lead to tragic consequences. We see that in real life and it’s there in crime fiction, too.

For example, in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Silver Blaze, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson travel to King’s Pyland in Dartmoor to look into the mysterious disappearance of a famous race horse, Silver Blaze, and the death of Silver Blaze’s trainer John Straker. Silver Blaze has been abducted from the stables of his owner Colonel Ross just before the Wessex Cup, which Silver Blaze was an odds-on favourite to win. It seems clear at first that Straker was killed because he tried to prevent the abduction. The police believe that London bookmaker Fitzroy Simpson is guilty of both crimes, and that he committed them to “rig” the Wessex Cup. All is not as it seems, though, and Holmes soon discovers some unusual clues that point away from Simpson as the killer. In the end, Holmes finds Silver Blaze as well as the murderer of John Straker. On a side note, this story is also famous for the “curious incident of the dog in the night-time.” Holmes gets an important clue from the behaviour of Colonel Ross’ dog on the night of the abduction and murder:

“‘Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?’ [Colonel Ross]

‘To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.’ [Holmes]

‘The dog did nothing in the night-time.’

‘That was the curious incident,’ remarked Sherlock Holmes.

Agatha Christie’s short story Manx Gold also focuses on the desire to win. Fenella Mylecharane and Juan Faraker find out how tragic the urge to win can be. They’re engaged to be married and are planning their future when they hear of the death of their eccentric Uncle Myles, who lives on the Isle of Man. The two young people travel there to attend the funeral and hear the reading of the will. The will states that Uncle Myles had found buried treasure on the island, and provides clues to that treasure. Those clues are to be given to Fenella and Juan, as well as to two other potential heirs; the first person to successfully decipher the clues will win the treasure. The next morning, Fenella, Juan and the two other heirs, Dr. Fayll and Ewan Corjeag, are given the first clue. With that, all of the competitors begin a race to win the buried treasure. What’s interesting about this story is that Christie wrote it on commission in order to boost tourism to the Isle of Man. The story was printed in instalments and given to tourists. It contained cryptic clues to the location of four snuffboxes. Each box contained a Manx halfpenny with a hole through it, hung on a ribbon. Whoever found all four boxes was to take them to the local courthouse and claim the prize – 100 pounds. Ironically (since there is a winner in the story) no-one was able to claim the prize.

Dick Francis’ Whip Hand also deals with the strong desire to win. Former jockey Sid Halley has become a private investigator due to a career-ending injury. In one of the cases Halley investigates in this novel, he’s approached by Rosemary Caspar, whose husband George is an internationally famous horse trainer. She thinks that someone may be out to sabotage her husband, because all of a sudden, three-year-old horses that he’s trained are beginning to fail at the track, even though as two-year-olds, they were champions. Rosemary Caspar asks Halley to investigate to find out who’s’ behind the sabotage. At first, Halley isn’t sure anything unusual is going on but he takes the case and soon finds himself up against an opponent who will do anything to win.

The need to win also turns deadly in Emma Lathen’s Going for the Gold. That novel is focused on the 1980 Winter Olympics at Lake Placid, New York. Yves Bisson is the star member of the French ski jumping team and has high hopes of winning a gold medal. During a trial run, though, Bisson is fatally shot by a sniper. At first, everyone thinks his death is the work of terrorists. There’s no evidence for that, though, and soon enough, it’s clear that the killer is connected to the Olympics. Two of the prime suspects are Dick Noyes, an American ski jumper, and Gunther Euler, a German ski star. With Bisson out of the race, both of the other skiers have a better chance of winning medals themselves. Sloan Guaranty Bank Vice President John Putnam Thatcher is at Lake Placid, overseeing his bank’s operations in the area. He soon discovers that the motive for Bisson’s death was more complex than a simple wish to win, and is able to connect the murder to an international counterfeiting scheme.

Winning is an important motivator in Riley Adams’ (AKA Elizabeth Spann Craig) Delicious and Suspicious. Memphis, Tennessee is home to Aunt Pat’s Barbecue, one of the most popular restaurants in the area. Everyone’s excited when Aunt Pat’s is selected as a finalist for the title of Best Barbecue in Memphis. The winner will be chosen by the Cooking Channel’s food scout Rebecca Adrian, who travels to Memphis from New York to sample the food at Aunt Pat’s and at the other competing restaurants. Adrian visits Aunt Pat’s and is served a plate of the very best Aunt Pat’s can provide. A few hours later, she’s dead of poison. Since the last food Adrian ate was at Aunt Pat’s, the Taylor family and the restaurant staff come under suspicion, and word begins to spread that the food at Aunt Pat’s is dangerous. Lulu Taylor is determined to clear her family’s name and restore the restaurant’s reputation. So she investigates Adrian’s murder. There are plenty of suspects, too; Rebecca Adrian was an abrasive, malicious person who’d succeeded in angering just about everyone she met. In the end, Lulu Taylor puts the clues together and figures out who wanted to kill Rebecca Adrian and why.

In my own Publish or Perish and B-Very Flat, there are several characters who are driven by a desire to win. In Publish or Perish, graduate student Rose Shelton is determined to win a coveted fellowship. When she loses the competition to Nick Merrill, she resolves to do anything necessary to take the fellowship away from him; this makes her one of several attractive suspects when Merrill is murdered. In B-Very Flat, we meet gifted violinist Michelle Park. She’s preparing for an important music competition for which her chief rival is fellow student Serena Brinkman. When Serena is murdered on the night of the competition, Michelle becomes an important suspect.

Many of us are motivated by the desire to win and we do all sorts of things because of it – even enter competitions to win copies of books…which brings me to a very important announcement. Thanks to all of you who entered the competition to win a signed copy of B-Very Flat. I’m so glad you enjoyed the “Do You Know Your Victims” quiz. If you’ll recall, I mentioned that all of the novels in that quiz have something in common. So what’s the answer? What do they have in common? The answer is……All of them have been featured on In The Spotlight. Did you guess correctly?

And now, without further ado, here’s the (sort of) live drawing of the names of the two winners of signed copies of B-Very Flat. Congratulations!!! I’ll be in touch with both of you very soon.

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from Queen’s We Will Rock You/We Are the Champions.

>You Live Your Life Like a Canary in a Coal Mine*

>Long ago, before the advent of modern ventilation systems, miners used to bring a canary with them down into the shafts. As long as the canary kept singing, the miners knew the air was safe. If the canary died, the miners knew they had only a short time to evacuate the mine before the air was too poisonous for them. The canary in the coal mine was both a warning and a sign of things to come. Wise miners paid close attention to the canary and acted immediately if the canary indicated the air was dangerous. Today, we use the expression “canary in a coal mine” metaphorically, but it expresses a very similar meaning: it’s a warning sign or a harbinger of the future. In crime fiction, the “canary in a coal mine” – whether it’s an event or a character – can be really successful at building suspense and at providing foreshadowing.

For instance, in Agatha Christie’s The ABC Murders, sweetshop owner Alice Ascher becomes a “canary in a coal mine” when she is murdered very late one afternoon while she’s working in her shop. At first, her husband Franz is suspected, and that’s logical. The two were on bad terms and he’s even threatened her life. The only reason he’s not immediately arrested and tried for the crime is that Hercule Poirot has received a cryptic warning of the murder – a warning Ascher would not have sent. Poirot is aware of the significance of that warning, and you could even say he understands that Ascher’s death is a warning. He says to Captain Hastings,

“This is the beginning.”

His words are prophetic, as he and Hastings are soon involved in the investigation of what looks very much like the work of a serial killer. It’s not until three more deaths occur that Poirot puts all the pieces together and is able to stop the murderer.

In Christie’s Hickory Dickory Dock (AKA Hickory Dickory Death), a resident of a hostel for students becomes the “canary in a coal mine.” Several items have been taken from residents of the hostel, and Mrs. Hubbarad, who manages the hostel, is concerned about them. She tells her sister, Felicity Lemon, about the thefts, and Miss Lemon asks her employer, Hercule Poirot, to investigate. To Poirot, the items stolen are interesting in that all of them are unusual (e.g. one item is a set of lightbulbs; another is one of a pair of shoes). Two days after Poirot’s first visit to the hostel, Celia Austin, a resident there, dies of what looks at first to be suicide. Soon enough, it’s clear that she was murdered. Now, Poirot works with Inspector Sharpe and his team to find out what’s behind the thefts and the murder. In the end, Poirot discovers that Celia’s death was only the proverbial “tip of the iceberg” of what’s been going on at the hostel.

In Ellery Queen’s The Origin of Evil, we meet nineteen-year-old Lauren Hill, whose father, successful businessman Leander Hill, has recently died. Lauren believes that his death was not an accident, and asks Ellery Queen, who’s staying at a house in the area, to investigate. Queen’s unwilling at first, but soon, he finds the puzzle of Hill’s death intriguing. Before he died, Leander Hill received several odd “gifts.” One of them was the macabre “present” of a dead dog. His business partner Roger Priam also received several cryptic packages. That dog turns out to be the “canary in a coal mine,” as we discover when Queen begins to investigate. What Queen finds is that the packages are warnings of what’s to come, and that Leander Hill’s death is related to his past.

In Emma Lathan’s Murder to Go, several customers of Chicken Tonight, a fast-food franchising company, become “canaries in a coal mine” when they fall ill after eating one of the company’s new recipes. One customer actually dies of poisoning. Lathen’s sleuth John Putnam Thatcher, vice-president of the Sloan Guaranty Bank, gets involved in this case because his bank is planning to broker a merger between Chicken Tonight and Southeastern Insurance. Thatcher discovers that several people involved in the merger may have had reasons for not wanting it to go through. When it looks as though the poisonings may scuttle the merger, it becomes clear that much more is going on than a simple case of a disastrous accident at a restaurant.

Many of Robin Cook’s medical thrillers involve his sleuth(s) investigating a mysterious set of deaths or illnesses. Many of those involve people you could consider “canaries in a coal mine.” One of the clearest examples of this is in one of Cook’s early novels, Fever. Dr. Charles Martel is a brilliant cancer researcher is pulled from the study he’s been doing for the Weinburger Institute to work on a new treatment drug called Canceran. Martel isn’t convinced of the drug’s efficacy, but the Institute is depending on Canceran to put it on solid financial footing. Martel determines to continue his own research in secret. That turns out to be a wise idea when Martel discovers that his fourteen-year-old daughter Michelle has been diagnosed with acute myeloblastic leukemia. In his search for answers about her leukemia, Martel discovers that Michelle is a “canary in a coal mine.” A local company has been dumping highly toxic waste into a river not far from the Martel home, and Michelle’s leukemia can be traced directly to that toxic waste. Now, Martel is up against not only his daughter’s illness, but also a very large, well-funded and determined company.

Michael Crichton’s Airframe has another interesting example of “canaries in a coal mine.” In that novel, TransPacific Airways Flight 545 is en route from Hong Kong to Denver when a terrible mishap causes an emergency landing at Los Angeles’ LAX airport. Many of the passengers are injured, some severely. Three are dead. Casey Singleton, a vice-president for Norton Aircraft, learns that those passengers are “canaries in a coal mine” when she investigates the disaster. Since Singleton’s company manufactured the plane, her first step is to look into the plane’s construction as well as manufacturing procedures. With help from veteran Norton employee Amos Peters, Singleton discovers that much more was going on than just a tragic manufacturing error.

Donna Leon’s Through A Glass, Darkly also includes a character whom you might call a “canary in a coal mine.” In that novel, Giorgio Tassini works nights at Giovanni De Cal’s glass-blowing factory. He’s upset because he believes that De Cal’s and other similar factories are illegally dumping toxic waste into the water supply. In fact, he believes that his own daughter has been affected by this waste. She’s got multiple special needs that Tassini blames on the illegal dumping. His belief that she’s a “canary in a coal mine” spurs him on to protesting the factories – and causes his murder. Commissario Guido Brunetti and Ispettore Lorenzo Vianello investigate Tassini’s death. They find that his murder is related to what Tassini has found about the glass-blowing industry’s practices.

The “canary in a coal mine” can be an effective strategy to build tension and suspense, add interest and get the sleuth involved in an investigation. Which novels have you enjoyed that use this plot point?

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from The Police’s Canary in a Coal Mine