There’s a Wall of Silence Miles Across*

When real or fictional sleuths investigate a murder, they often run up against what you might call a ‘wall of silence.’ In those cases, witnesses will answer questions as far as they go, but they often don’t add other important information they may have. For instance, a witness may tell the police the truth about where he was and what he was doing at the time of a murder, but not add in that he saw a person he knows at the murder scene. Sometimes the ‘wall of silence’ is put up because witnesses don’t want to believe that a particular person is guilty (‘I’ve known her for years! She couldn’t have done something like that.). Other times it’s self-protection (‘If I tell what I know, he’ll come after me. And if I’m wrong, everyone’ll hate me for spreading lies.’) Still other times it’s because the witness has something to hide and doesn’t want to be accused of the murder. Even when a group of people don’t explicitly agree to all keep quiet, that ‘wall of silence’ can be nearly impenetrable. A good sleuth can find out the truth anyway, but the way people have of covering up what they know is realistic, and it can add a layer of suspense to a novel.

In Agatha Christie’s  Murder on the Orient Express, Hercule Poirot is traveling to London on the Orient Express train. On the second night of the journey, fellow passenger Samuel Ratchett is stabbed. Poirot’s friend M. Bouc, a director of the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits, is also on the train and asks his friend to investigate the murder. Poirot agrees and gathers evidence from all of the passengers. He listens to what everyone says and compares their statements with each other and with what’s known about Ratchett and about the murder itself. In the end, he gets to the truth, but along the way, he has to contend with a ‘wall of silence.’ Everyone gives a statement, but Poirot learns that these people are not telling everything they know.

Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse faces a similar ‘wall of silence’ in The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn. Nicholas Quinn is named to Oxford’s Foreign Examinations Syndicate, the first Deaf person to be a part of that group. The Syndicate is responsible for overseeing exams taken in non-UK countries with a British education tradition, and membership is considered ‘a feather in the cap.’ Quinn was not a unanimous choice for the Syndicate, but he settles in and starts his work. Then one day he is murdered with a poisoned glass of sherry. Inspector Morse and Sergeant Lewis investigate the murder and soon find that more than one person could have wanted to kill Quinn. The various members of the Syndicate give statements and so on, but it’s soon clear that there are secrets among the Syndicate members that everyone’s covering up. So Morse has to get beneath the surface so to speak to find out the truth about Quinn’s death. What’s interesting in this case is that some of those secrets have little to do with the murder; they’re just embarrassing to Syndicate members.

Sometimes the ‘wall of silence’ isn’t planned or even co-ordinated. It’s just that the people involved decide not to share what they know. That’s what happens in Catherine O’Flynn’s What Was Lost. Ten-year-old Kate Meaney is a budding detective who’s just opened her own agency Falcon Investigations. She spends a lot of time at the newly-opened Green Oaks Shopping Center, where she believes she’s sure to find all sorts of criminal doings. Kate’s grandmother Ivy thinks the girl would be better off going away to school, so she arranges for Kate to sit the entrance exams at the exclusive Redspoon School. Kate doesn’t want to go but her friend Adrian Palmer persuades her, even promising to go with her to the school on test day. Kate and Adrian take the bus to Redspoon but Kate never returns. Not even a body is discovered. Everyone thinks that Palmer is responsible for Kate’s disappearance but he claims he is innocent. Still, he leaves town because he’s become an outcast. Twenty years later, his younger sister Lisa is working at a store in the mall when she befriends Kurt, a security guard who also works there. Kurt tells her of an odd thing he’s seen on the security cameras: a young girl with a backpack. Kurt’s description reminds Lisa of Kate, and each in a different way, the two slowly start to look into the past to find out what really happened when Kate disappeared. In this story, several people know at least parts of the truth about Kate, but for various reasons they don’t tell what they know. That ‘wall of silence’ is a big part of the reason for which it takes twenty years to learn what happened to Kate.

In Gail Bowen’s A Killing Spring, Saskatchewan political scientist and academician Joanne Kilbourn gets involved in the investigation when a colleague Reed Gallagher is found murdered in a seedy rented room. Kilbourn’s acquainted with Gallagher’s wife Julia, so she comes along to help break the bad news. As the investigation slowly develops, Kilbourn learns that there could be several motives for Gallagher’s murder. One person who may know more than she’s saying is one of Gallagher’s students Kellee Savage. Kellee has her own mental/emotional issues, but some of what she says is quite lucid. Then Kellee disappears. She doesn’t come to class, doesn’t turn in assignments and doesn’t contact her professors. At first Kilbourn thinks that, like many students, Kellee is very stressed with upcoming exams and other work, and just took off for a bit. But gradually it becomes clear that something more is going on. As Kilbourn tries to find out the truth though, she meets with what seems like a ‘wall of silence’ from Kellee’s classmates. They all tell Kilbourn what they remember about the last time anyone saw Kellee, but they don’t tell everything they know. Kellee is later found dead and in the end, Kilbourn finds out who’s responsible for that death and for Reed Gallagher’s death, and how the two are connected. The ‘wall of silence’ doesn’t make it any easier though…

There’s a very tragic ‘wall of silence’ in Karin Fossum’s Calling Out For You (AKA The Indian Bride). Gunder Jormann makes the surprising decision to travel to Mumbai and find a wife there. He may not be the quickest thinker in the world, but he’s honest, a steady worker, and although he’s no longer a young man, he hasn’t fallen physically to pieces. So he is hopeful of finding a bride willing to marry him. He arrives in Mumbai and before long, he meets Poona Bai. The two take to each other and Poona agrees to marry him. Poona needs to do some things to finish up her life in India, so Gunder returns alone to his Norway village of Elvestad. He and Poona keep in close contact though, and he is very excited for her arrival. On the very day he’s supposed to meet Poona at the airport, Gunder’s sister Marie is involved in a car accident that leaves her in a coma. Gunder needs to stay with his sister, so he asks an acquaintance to meet Poona for him. The two miss each other though and Poona never arrives at Gunder’s home. The next morning, her murdered body is found in a nearby field and Inspector Konrad Sajer and his assistant Jacob Skarre investigate. As they slowly put together what, exactly, happened on the night of Poona’s arrival in Elvestad, it becomes clear that several people in the village have pieces of the puzzle. But they aren’t willing at first to say what they know. In fact when one witness Linda Carling does talk to the police, everyone else freezes her out, so to speak. In one case of course, the reason for the silence is that the person has committed murder. In another it’s because of not wanting to be implicated in the murder. But in other cases it’s because everyone has tacitly agreed not to point the finger at people they know. After all, these people have known each other for years, sometimes decades. It takes a long time for Sejer and Skarre to penetrate this ‘wall,’ but eventually they find out what people haven’t been telling them.

Detective Ella Marconi and her police partner Murray Shakespeare have to get past a ‘wall of silence’ in Katherine Howell’s Silent Fear. Paul Fowler and some friends are tossing a football around one hot day when Fowler suddenly falls over dead. At first it looks as though he died of heat exhaustion, but in a very short time it’s discovered that he was shot, execution style. Marconi and Shakespeare interview Fowler’s friends and his ex-wife Trina to find out who would have wanted to kill the victim. Everyone gives the detectives information, but as the two learn, they also keep some important things to themselves. In fact, in this case there’s an agreement among some of the witnesses to keep their mouths shut. And as it turns out, there’s a good reason for that. It turns out that Fowler took a very dangerous decision that cost him his life.

A lot of witnesses don’t keep things from the police just to be difficult. There’s often a self-protective kind of reason for conspiring, tacitly or overtly, in a ‘wall of silence.’ But for the sleuth, it just makes the case harder to investigate. Of course, a novel in which everyone told everything they knew would end fairly quickly wouldn’t it???

 

 
 

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from October Project’s Wall of Silence.

Was I Right About You Girl or Was I Wrong?*

For fictional sleuths to be at all credible, they have to have some reasonable skill at ‘reading’ people. After all, a protagonist who had no ability to assess people wouldn’t be able to solve cases and wouldn’t really be believable. But at the same time, a sleuth who’s too entirely sure of her or his judgements about people is off-putting and more than likely to be wrong a lot of the time. Besides, that question of whether a sleuth has been right about a suspect/witness can add a lot of tension to a novel. So it’s no surprise that authors use that plot point.

For example, there’s an interesting scene in Agatha Christie’s Cards on the Table that addresses exactly that question. In that novel, the very eccentric Mr. Shaitana hosts an unusual dinner party to which he has invited eight guests. Four are sleuths in various capacities (including Hercule Poirot) and the other four are people Shaitana thinks have successfully committed murder without getting caught. On the night of the dinner party, Shaitana is stabbed during a session of after-dinner bridge. The only possible suspects are the four people Shaitana suspected had gotten away with murder. So the key is to figure out which one of them actually committed the crime. At one point one of the suspects confesses to the killing. This is so against Poirot’s estimation of that person’s character that he is completely set back and admits it. In the end, we do find out who really killed Shaitana and why, but this is a fascinating and tense ‘stop on the way.’

In Nicolas Freeling’s Double Barrel, Amsterdam Inspector Van der Valk is assigned to an odd case. In the small town of Zwinderren, someone has been sending terrible anonymous letters to various residents accusing them of all sorts of misconduct and threatening to reveal everything. In a conservative town like this, where everyone knows everyone, that’s a frightening prospect. In fact the letters have wreaked havoc on the town, causing two people to commit suicide and one to have a complete mental breakdown. Van der Valk and his wife Arlette are sent to Zwinderen in the guise of conducting a Ministry study; the idea is that once he earns the locals’ trust, Van der Valk will find the answers that the local police haven’t been able to discover. He and Arlette move into town and he begins the investigation. The most likely suspect is M. Besançon, a French Jew who survived the Holocaust and just wants to be left in peace. He’s a little eccentric though, and seems to know more than he says. He says he didn’t write the letters, and Van der Valk believes him – he really does. And yet there’s some interesting tension as the two men have their interviews. Is Van der Valk misjudging Besançon? The question of whether he’s read Besançon’s character accurately adds to the suspense in this story.

In Gail Bowen’s A Killing Spring, political scientist and academician Joanne Kilbourn gets involved when Reed Gallagher, head of the Department of Journalism is killed. Reed Gallagher is also the second husband of an acquaintance (‘though not what you’d call exactly a friend) of Kilbourn’s. So when he is found murdered in a seedy rooming house, Kilbourn is asked to help break the news to his widow.. As Kilbourn learns more about the case, she finds that there could be several motives for murder. In fact, the more Kilbourn learns about the victim’s complicated (and hardly blameless) life, the more possibilities there are. Then there’s an incident of anti-gay vandalism in the Journalism Department. During the police investigation, the members of that department have to temporarily share offices with other faculty members until their own are available again. Kilbourn ends up sharing her office with Ed Mariani, who will take over the Journalism Department now that Gallagher is dead. Tension builds as Kilbourn wonders about him. On the one hand, she’s always liked him, she trusts him as a colleague and she considers him a friend. On the other, he did have a motive for murder – more than one as it turns out. Kilbourn’s questions about Ed and her rising concerns about him add an interesting layer of suspense to this story.

Michael Connelly’s The Fifth Witness is the story of the murder of Mitchell Bondurant, who is a mortgage officer for WestLand National, an LA bank. Lisa Trammel is arrested for the crime and with good reason. She had formed a citizens action group and was picketing the bank as a way of protesting its foreclosure policies. What’s more, Bondurant was handling Trammel’s own mortgage, which was in foreclosure at the time of the murder. Trammel hires Mickey Haller to defend her; they already know each other since he was working on her mortgage problems with her. Haller begins to work on the case and uncovers some evidence that the bank might have been engaging in some fraudulent practices. He also finds out that Bondurant’s relationships within the bank might have led to his murder. Of course, a lawyer’s job is to represent the client’s interests, personal feelings aside, and Haller does that. But there is a solid layer of tension in this story that comes from Haller’s assessment of Lisa Trammel. On the one hand, she claims innocence, and there are several other possible killers. On the other, she’s not been entirely blame-free in the mortgage disaster that led to the foreclosure; she has her own mental issues, too. So perhaps Haller is wrong about her. That debate adds to the suspense in this novel.

A similar sort of debate adds a great deal to the suspense of Paddy Richardson’s Traces of Red. Wellington television journalist Rebecca Thorne is doing well professionally, but she’s reached a professional plateau. She knows, too, that there are ‘hungry’ young journalists eager to supplant her. What Thorne needs is the story of her career, and she thinks she finds it in the case of Connor Bligh. He’s been in prison for several years for the murder of his sister Angela Dickson, her husband Rowan and their son Sam. Only their daughter Katy survived because she wasn’t in the house at the time of the murder. Everyone’s always assumed that Bligh is guilty, but there are some clues that he might not have committed the crimes. If he is innocent this could be the story that Thorne is looking for, so she begins investigating. As a part of her investigation she gets the chance to talk with Bligh; she also gets his side of the story, so to speak, in the form of a long letter that he writes to her. As her investigation continues, Thorne finds herself getting very close to this story. Is Connor Bligh innocent? Is Thorne misjudging him? Has everyone else misjudged him? That question of whether Thorne has been right about Bligh is an important element in this novel.

Too much indecisiveness can be off-putting in a character, especially the protagonist. But sometimes that doubt – that question of whether you’ve been right about someone – can add an interesting layer of suspense to a novel. I know I’ve only mentioned a few cases here. Which ones have I missed out?

 

 
 

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from Jackson Browne’s Baby How Long.

The Alphabet in Crime Fiction: Jail

The Crime Fiction Alphabet has reached our tenth stop, and thanks to our tour guide Kerrie at Mysteries in Paradise, we’re having a lovely time. Today we’ve arrived at the historic frontier town of J City, which even has its own frontier jail. Everyone’s quite eager to have a look around the town, so while they’re getting ready, I’ll share my contribution for this stop:  jail . Trust me; there are a lot of crime-fictional deaths that occur there.

Now, jail isn’t generally a happy place. It’s not supposed to be a pleasure holiday. But it’s a different matter when someone dies in prison. Just ask Caroline Crale, whom we learn about in Agatha Christie’s Five Little Pigs (AKA Murder in Retrospect). One afternoon her husband Amyas is poisoned with coniine and she is arrested, tried and imprisoned for the crime. There’s plenty of motive, too, as Amyas is having an obvious affair with another woman. There’s even clear evidence that Caroline has coniine in her possession. She doesn’t defend herself very vigourously and a year later, she dies in jail. Sixteen years later, her daughter Carla Lemarchant hires Hercule Poirot to clear her mother’s name. Carla is convinced that her mother was innocent and wants to find out who her father’s killer was. Poirot agrees and interviews the five people who were ‘on the scene’ in the days up to and including the day of the murder. He also gets a written account of the events from each witness. Clues he finds in what he is told and what he reads put Poirot on the right trail. Fans of this novel will know that if Caroline had lived, she may or may not have been very helpful; it would be interesting to know what she would have ended up saying if Poirot had gotten to know her…

In Lawrence Block’s The Sins of the Father, Cale Hanniford’s twenty-four-year-old daughter Wendy is murdered. The police soon arrest her platonic roommate Richard Vanderpoel and with good reason. He was seen shortly after the murder with the victim’s blood on him and he can’t account for his time.  Hanniford also believes that Vanderpoel must be guilty, but he wants to know what led to the murder. He’s been estranged from Wendy and is interested in the kind of person she became, and especially why she was killed. So he approaches former NYPD cop Matthew Scudder to ask him to find out what he can. Scudder is reluctant; the police seem to have the case well in hand. But Hanniford persuades him to look into the matter. Scudder goes to the jail where Vanderpoel is being held and tries to talk to him but Vandepoel is either drugged or in a psychotic mental state, so he can’t be of much help. But some of the things he does say suggest that Wendy Hanniford’s death was not as straightforward as it seems. Shortly after their interview, Vanderpoel suddenly commits suicide. Now Scudder has to find other ways to look into what happened on the day of the murder, what led up to it and how it’s tied in with Vanderpoel’s death.

Laura Lippman’s The Sugar House begins with the arrest of Henry Dembrow for a ‘Jane Doe’ murder. The case is very clear-cut; he and the unidentified victim were sniffing glue in the back yard of the house where he and his sister Ruthie live. The victim tried to get into the house, Dembrow tried to stop her, and she fell backwards, hitting her head on concrete and dying. Henry is remanded to Hagerstown (Maryland) prison. A year later, he’s stabbed while in prison. His sister Ruthie wants to find out who killed Henry and why. So she hires journalist-turned-PI Tess Monaghan to get some answers. Ruthie believes that Henry was murdered because of the girl he’d accidentally killed, and that once the victim is identified, it’ll be easier to track down Henry’s murderer. Monaghan begins to ask questions and follows the trail to Persephone’s Place, a residential drug treatment facility where the unidentified girl might have spent time. That’s where she gets her first real clue as to the girl’s identity and background. In the end, and after another death, Monaghan finds out what really has been going on at the clinic, who the dead girl was, and why Henry Dembrow was murdered.

Gail Bowen’s A Colder Kind of Death begins when a prison inmate named Kevin Tarpley is shot while exercising in the prison yard. This death is especially meaningful for Saskatchewan political scientist and academic Joanne Kilbourn. First, Tarpley was in jail for the murder of her husband Ian. Second, Tarpley wrote her a letter full of religious references shortly before his murder. Then, Tarpley’s wife Maureen, who was with him on the night of Ian Kilbourn’s murder, is killed. Suspicion now falls on Kilbourn in part because of her husband’s death and in part because of some confrontations she’d had with Maureen. Kilbourn wants to clear her name and she wants to deal with her continuing grief over the loss of her husband. So she looks into both killings. She discovers that Tarpley was more complex than just an inmate who’d ‘found God.’ With help from prison chaplain Paschal Temple she learns that Tarpley wasn’t so much religiously observant as he was guilt-ridden over lies he said he told. This clue leads Kilbourn to believe that there’s something more to these two murders than it seems on the surface.

Håkan Nesser’s The Unlucky Lottery (AKA Münster’s Case) is the story of the murder of Waldemar Leverkuhn. He and his friends go in together on a lottery ticket and to everyone’s surprise, they win. They go out to celebrate their good fortune but not long after Leverkuhn returns home, he’s brutally murdered. Intendant Münster and his team investigate the killing and at first, there’s not much to go on really. Leverkuhn and his wife Marie-Louise lived quietly and didn’t seem to have any hidden enemies among their neighbours or friends. So the team looks more deeply into Leverkuhn’s family life. Then, unexpectedly, Marie-Louise confesses to the killing. She isn’t really clear about the motive but she insists that she’s guilty. So she’s jailed. Still, Münster and the other members of the team have serious questions about the case and keep looking for answers. Then Marie-Louise commits suicide in jail. Now quite certain that she was covering up for someone, the team continues to dig for the truth and in the end, we learn who really killed Waldemar Leverkuhn and why.

And then there’s Thomas Enger’s Pierced. Oslo journalist Hennig Juule is haunted and physically scarred by a fire that killed his ten-year-old son Jonas. He gets a call one day from real estate speculator Tore Pulli, who is in jail for the murder of Joachim ‘Jock’ Brolenius. Pulli says that he was framed for the murder. He also says that he knows who burned Juule’s flat and therefore, killed his son. He’s willing to trade what he knows for Juule’s help in finding out who really killed Brolenius. Juule himself has only fuzzy memories of the time before, during and immediately after the fire and he’s desperate for any information he can get. So he agrees to look into Pulli’s case. On the one hand, Pulli is not exactly an upstanding trustworthy person. So he could very well be lying just to get out of prison. On the other, since Pulli is a former enforcer, there could be any number of people who might want him to take the blame for their crimes. Then, suddenly, Tore Pulli dies during a TV interview that’s being recorded. Juule becomes certain that his own tragic past is liked with Pulli’s death, so he searches for the truth about what happened to Pulli as much to answer his own questions as for any other reason.  

As you can see, jail is not the safest place for people to be. It’s a pretty unpleasant and tension-filled place anyway, so it makes sense that jail deaths would figure an awful lot in crime fiction. Now, how about we go visit that beautifully reconstructed jail they’ve put up in this town? 

We’ve Been Through Some Things Together*

The university experience involves a lot more than just going to class and studying for exams. During people’s years at school, they often form very strong bonds with a group of other students and become close friends. Those friendships may start as bonds of convenience, forged because of proximity, but they can last a lifetime. It makes sense too, especially for young people who go away to university rather than live at home. There’s something special about the bonds we form with university friends; if you’ve been to college or university, you probably know what I mean. Those are the people you turn to for advice, for coffee, for lecture notes, for a study group, for beer money and for music, among other things. And all sometimes at two o’clock in the morning. So it’s no wonder that we see those kinds of friendships come up in crime fiction.

In Agatha Christie’s Hickory Dickory Death, Hercule Poirot gets involved in the lives of several university students. His ever-efficient secretary Miss Lemon asks him to investigate a series of odd occurrences at a hostel managed by her sister Mrs. Hubbard. For one thing, some unusual things have gone missing, and there seems no logical explanation. Intrigued, Poirot visits the hostel where he makes the acquaintance of several of the young people. While he’s there, one of the residents Celia Austin admits that she’s responsible for most of the thefts. At first it looks as though the matter has been settled. But then, two nights later, Celia is poisoned. Now that it’s clear that something more than simple petty theft is going on, Poirot works with Inspector Sharpe to find out what has been going on at the hostel. In this novel, we get a look at some of the ins and outs of the relationships among the young people. Some of them are friends; some are most emphatically not. One couple even pairs up in the end. It’s a really interesting portrait of the kind of bonds that can form during those years.

We see a bit of the long-term friendships that can evolve from university bonds in Dorothy Sayers’ Gaudy Night. Mystery novelist Harriet Vane receives an invitation to attend the Gaudy Dinner and festivities at her alma mater Shrewsbury College, Oxford. At first she’s unwilling to go. She’s recently gotten some public notoriety (Sayers fans will remember these events from Strong Poison) and isn’t sure how she’ll be received. But this letter comes from an old friend Mary Stokes, with whom Harriet became very close while she was at school. Mary very much wants to see her old friend again, and this is what finally persuades Harriet to attend. She goes back to Shrewsbury and is happily surprised at the warm reception she gets. And that’s what I mean about college friends; the real ones welcome us, even after a long time, without judging. The Gaudy Day celebrations go off well and Harriet returns to her home, glad that she attended. Then a few months later she receives a letter from the Dean of the College. It seems some vandalism and other troubling events have been going on at the school, and the Dean would like the matter resolved and the person responsible stopped without involving the police. Harriet agrees and travels back to Shrewsbury under the guise of doing research for one of her novels. In the end, and after being attacked herself, she finds out that these incidents have to do with an old grudge someone has held.

The relationships among a group of friends play a major role in Yrsa Sigurðardóttir’s Last Rituals.  Reykjavík attorney Thóra Gudmundsdóttir gets a call from Amelia Guntlieb, whose son Harald has been found murdered on the campus of the university at Reykjavík, where he was studying. The police are convinced that Harald’s friend Hugi Thórisson is the murderer and in fact, he’s been arrested for the crime. But Amelia doesn’t think that Hugi Thórisson killed her son.  She wants Thóra to investigate the murder and clear Hugi’s name. Thóra agrees and works with the Guntlieb’s family banker Matthew Reich to find out who the killer is. Her starting point is the group of people with whom Harald spent most of his time – his student friends. During her interviews with them we can see that they’ve formed a very tight bond that’s important to them. Without spoiling the story I think I can say that that bond has a lot to do with one of the important aspects of this investigation.

In Gail Bowen’s A Killing Spring, her sleuth Joanne Kilbourn investigates a murder that deeply affects the university where she teaches. Reed Gallagher, who’s Head of the School of Journalism, is murdered and his body discovered in a seedy apartment in an even seedier neighbourhood. Kilbourn is drawn into the mystery when Inspector Alex Kequahtooway from the Regina Police Force calls her with the news. She and Alex are already friends (you can follow up on that story in A Colder Kind of Death), and he wants someone to be with him to break the news to the victim’s widow Julie. Kilbourn already knows Julie (although you could hardly call them friends), so she agrees to go along. The police and Kilbourn look into Gallagher’s relationships with his wife, his colleagues, his friends and his students to find out who would have wanted to kill him. One thing that Kilbourn discovers is a possible connection between the murder and the odd behavior of one of Gallagher’s students Kellee Savage. She has her own personal issues but after the murder, her behaviour becomes increasingly erratic. Then one night after a trip to a bar with some of her classmates, Kellee disappears. When she’s later found dead Kilbourn knows she’ll have to find out the truth about that night and about Kellee from those friends. As she interviews them, we get a look at the kinds of relationships and friendships that develop among classmates. Her college friends are not the most important characters in this novel but they do play an important role in her share of the story.

There are also lots of crime novels in which we see connections among former university friends, even years after they’re no longer in school together. That’s what happens in Kishwar Desai’s Witness the Night, in which social worker Simran Singh gets drawn into the case of fourteen-year-old Durga Atwal, who apparently killed thirteen members of her family before setting her house on fire. There are signs though that Durga was raped and bound, so it’s quite possible that someone else might have been responsible. Simran’s old university friend Amarjit is now Inspector General for the state of Punjab, and he wants Simran to work with Durga and try to get her to talk about what happened on that awful night. It’s not long before Simran discovers that the wealthy and well-connected ‘respectable’ Atwal family was hiding some ugly secrets. Simran’s friendship with Amarjit is not the reason for the murders. But it plays an important role in her involvement with the case, and it’s a good example of the way university friendships can endure.

 

I’m fortunate enough to have a group of very good friends from university. I know that if I ever showed up at any of their doors at two in the morning and in need, they would take me in, no questions asked. Even after all these years. This post is dedicated to them.

 

 
 

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line Neil Young’s Long May You Run.

The Alphabet in Crime Fiction: Drowning

The Crime Fiction Alphabet meme continues on our treacherous journey through the alphabet. I’m pleased to say that thus far, we’ve had no casualties – yet. That’s thanks to our tour leader Kerrie at Mysteries in Paradise, who’s seen to all the arrangements.

Today we’ve arrived at the Hotel D. It’s quite a hotel, with its own fitness center, steam room and pool. That last is actually maybe not such a good thing, as my contribution for today’s stop is drowning.

The thing about drowning is that it can look deceptively like an accident. And it doesn’t really require a lot of specialised knowledge or weaponry. So it’s not surprising that there are a lot of cases of drowning in crime fiction.

Several of Agatha Christie’s works involve drowning. That’s what happens in for instance Hallowe’en Party. Thirteen-year-old Joyce Reynolds is with a group of young people who are helping to prepare for a Hallowe’en party. She boasts that she’s seen a murder and although just about everyone hushes her up she insists that it’s true. That evening Joyce is drowned in a bucket of water used for a bobbing-for-apples game. Christie’s fictional detective story author Ariadne Oliver was at both the preparations for the party and the party itself, and she is convinced that Joyce was killed because she really did witness a murder and the murderer wanted to keep her quiet. Mrs. Oliver asks Hercule Poirot to visit the village of Woodleigh Common and investigate. He agrees and starts to ask questions. Then there’s another murder. Poirot discovers that both murders are related to some events in the town’s past and a murder that occurred a few years earlier.

Minette Walters’ The Breaker tells the story of the murder of Kate Sumner, whose body is discovered on a beach near Chapman’s Pool in Dorsetshire. Forensics reports show that she was choked, drugged and then drowned. Shortly after her body is discovered, her toddler daughter Hannah is discovered wandering around a nearby town. PC Nick Ingram works with WPC Sandra Griffiths, DI John Galbraith and Superintendent Carpenter to find out who killed Kate Sumner and how Hannah got to the village. Their search for answers leads them to three main suspects: Kate’s husband William; Stephen Harding, an actor with whom Kate had flirted several times; and Harding’s roommate Tony Bridges. This murder turns out to be related to be much more psychological in nature than anything else.

DCI Hannah Scarlett and her Cold Case Review team investigate a case of drowning in Martin Edwards’ The Serpent Pool. Six years earlier Bethany Friend was drowned in the Lake District’s Serpent Pool. At the time, the case was put down as a suicide. But Scarlett has never quite believed that explanation. So she and her team re-open the case. At the same time, Scarlett’s friend and co-worker Fern Larter and her team are investigating two more recent murders. The two compare notes and it’s not long before they determine that the three murderers are related. And so they turn out to be. With help from Oxford historian Daniel Kind, Scarlett and Larter find out who killed all three victims and what the motive was.

Gail Bowen’s The Wandering Souls Murders also includes a drowning. Political scientist and academician Joanne Kilbourn gets involved in a case of multiple murders when her daughter Mieka discovers the body of a young girl in a trash bin. The police are just beginning to look into that case when there’s another death. Christy Sinclair is the former girlfriend of Kilbourn’s son Peter. When the two broke up, Kilbourn was only too happy to see Christy go. Then, she suddenly comes back into Peter’s life, going so far as to say they’re back together. One night she drowns in what looks like a tragic boating accident. But her death was quite deliberate. Kilbourn discovers that both deaths are related to a secret from Christy’s past and to some dark truths about some of the characters.

There’s a tragic case of drowning in Wendy James’ Out of the Silence, which is based on true incidents. Born and raised in Victoria, nineteen-year-old Maggie Heffernan was imprisoned in 1900 for the drowning death of her baby son Jacky. The novel is a fictional portrayal of Maggie’s life, her meeting with Jack Hardy, their brief affair and the resulting pregnancy. By the time Maggie realises that she’s pregnant, Jack has left for New South Wales to find work. Jack doesn’t respond when Maggie writes to tell him about her pregnancy, and she knows that her family won’t accept her. So she moves to Melbourne to find work and hopefully trace Jack. She gives birth and after a time, she finally traces Jack. When she does, he claims that she’s crazy and won’t have anything to do with her. With nowhere to go, Maggie searches through Melbourne for a place to stay and is turned away from six different lodging houses. That’s when Jacky’s death occurs. Through diaries, letters and news items, we read of Maggie’s experiences, the trial, and the efforts to free her once she is imprisoned.

And then there’s Domingo Villar’s Death on a Galician Shore. In that novel Vigo police detective Leo Caldas and his team investigate the mysterious drowning death of a local fisherman Justo Castelo. The evidence suggests that he committed suicide but there are just a few hints that suggest otherwise. So Caldas and his assistant Rafael Estevez dig deeper into the case. As they do so, they get to know about Castelo’s background they learn that his death could very well have to do with a 1996 tragedy in which he and two fellow fishermen were the only survivors of a boat tragedy that claimed the life of their captain Antonio Sousa. Bit by bit, Caldas and Estevez find out how Castelo’s drowning is related to the 1996 Sousa drowning.

See what I mean? Drowning happens a lot in crime fiction. Well, now; I’ve finished unpacking. What about a swim?