Advice is Cheap, You Can Take it From Me*

In Agatha Christie’s Hickory Dickory Dock (AKA Hickory Dickory Death), one of the residents of the hostel where most of the action takes place asks another for a piece of advice. Here’s the response:
 

‘Of course I could give you advice…, though I don’t know why anyone ever wants advice. They never take it.’
 

That’s a good point, really. People are often free with advice, although it’s frequently not heeded. For that reason alone (because it’s human and natural), it’s easy to identify with advice-giving in a crime novel, especially when the sleuth is about to do something ill-advised. On the other hand, a sleuth who always gets advice and never listens to it stops being interesting. Quickly. And characters who mind other people’s business too much are annoying. That’s to say nothing of the way investigations work in real life (e.g. would a cop really take advice from an amateur? That would take some believing.). But when it’s done credibly, getting and sometimes even heeding advice can a sleuth more human.

For instance, Christie’s Ariadne Oliver is not one to do as she’s told as a rule. And her independence is part of what makes her appealing as a character. But we see a very believable example of her taking advice in Hallowe’en Party. Poirot travels to Woodleigh Common at Mrs. Oliver’s request to find out who murdered thirteen-year-old Joyce Reynolds. The girl is found drowned at a party not many hours after boasting that she once saw a murder. So it’s fairly clear that she was probably killed by someone who feels threatened. Poirot finds out the history of the area and discovers which incident Joyce could have seen. As he does so, he realises an important fact that shows him that one of the villagers is in real danger. So he tells Mrs. Oliver to take that person to her home in London for safety. Here’s a bit of the conversation Mrs. Oliver has about it with the friend she’s been visiting in the village:
 

‘Anyway, you needn’t run away today, need you?’
‘Yes, I need to, I’ve been told to,’ said Mrs. Oliver.
‘Who’s told you – your housekeeper?’
‘No,’ said Mrs. Oliver. ‘Somebody else. One of the few people I obey.’
 

It’s actually a very tense scene and it’s a good thing that Mrs. Oliver listens to Poirot’s advice. It makes sense that she would too given he’s the experienced private investigator and they’re friends.

It’s also believable that a cop would listen to another cop’s advice, especially if the two officers trust each other. And that’s what we see in the relationship between Håkan Nesser’s Inspector Van Veeteren and Intendant Münster. As the series featuring these sleuths begins, Van Veeteren is Münster’s boss, but as fans will know, he leaves the police force to take part ownership in a bookshop. And yet Münster is still grateful for his advice. In The Unlucky Lottery (AKA Münster’s Case), Münster and his team investigate the stabbing murder of Waldemar Leverkuhn. An obvious motive doesn’t come to light quickly but then the police find out that Leverkuhn and some of his friends went in together on a lottery ticket – and won. They’d gone out to celebrate just before Leverkuhn was killed, so the police now have a new angle on this case. But that’s not entirely satisfactory either. Münster is by no means incompetent, but he’s glad for the advice and input he gets when he tells Van Veeteren about the case. And when Van Veeteren lets Münster know he’s on the wrong track, Münster heeds his advice and looks elsewhere for the killer.

We see another example of a cop giving another cop advice in Louise Penny’s Still Life. That’s the story of former schoolteacher Jane Neal, who’s killed in what looks like a tragic hunting accident. Sûreté Inspector Armand Gamache and his team travel to the small town of Three Pines to do what they think will be perfunctory work on the case. But when Gamache begins to suspect that the victim was murdered, the team’s investigation stops being routine. Assigned to Gamache’s team for the first time is Agent Yvette Nichol. She turns out to be a poor choice for the team as she is arrogant, smug and unwilling to learn. Gamache’s second-in-command Jean-Guy Beauvoir advises Gamache to get rid of Nichol as quickly as he can. Gamache likes and trusts Beauvoir so although he’s the boss, he listens to what Beauvoir has to say. At first Gamache tries to coach and counsel Nichol, but when that’s unsuccessful, he follows Beauvoir’s advice and cuts Nichol from the team.

Readers can also believe that sleuths might heed their spouses’ advice and there are a lot of examples of that. Donna Leon’s Commissario Guido Brunetti, for instance, is married to Paola Falier, who is not only an educated professor of English, but also a genuine ‘blueblood.’ Brunetti values her input and benefits from it. For instance, in Blood From a Stone, he and Ispettore Vianello investigate the execution-style shooting of an unknown Senegalese immigrant. It takes some doing, but the detectives find out where the man lived and search his room. To their surprise, they discover a cache of diamonds that turn out to be ‘blood diamonds’ used to fund a military conflict Brunetti and Vianello also find that the diamonds are connected to an illegal arms trafficking ring. But in order to get all of the answers, Brunetti wants to know the diamonds’ origin. That’s where Paola’s advice is very helpful. She advises Brunetti of an expert he might contact about a small wooden head he finds among the dead man’s possessions.  Her view is that that information may help him locate the source of the diamonds. He takes her advice, although somewhat reluctantly, and is able to trace the diamonds.

It’s also quite believable that sleuths might listen to advice from friends. That’s what we see in Martin Edwards’ The Serpent Pool. DCi Hannah Scarlett and DCI Fern Larter are not just colleagues but also good friends. They find themselves working both ends of the same case when Scarlett re-opens the investigation into the six-year-old drowning death of Bethany Friend. That death was always put down to suicide, but Scarlett isn’t convinced. Larter and her team are working two recent murder cases that turn out to be related to the Bethany Friend case. So on a professional level, the two women give each other information and advice. But because they are also friends, Larter knows about Scarlett’s rocky relationship with her partner Marc Amos. She also knows – well, suspects – that Scarlett is attracted to Oxford historian Daniel Kind, who helps in this investigation. At the end of the novel, she gives Scarlett advice about that matter and it’s interesting to see that while Scarlett doesn’t immediately agree with her friend, what Larter says makes an impression.

Too often, crime fiction novels have scenes where someone tells the sleuth not to pursue a case or a particular suspect. And too often, sleuths take un-necessary risks because they don’t listen to advice. Sometimes it’s nice when a novel includes a believable use of advice. Well, I think authors ought to do that, anyway.

 

 
 

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from Billy Joel’s The Great Wall of China.

Pictures in My Mind*

One of the challenges authors face is how to convey the visual. It’s easy enough if one’s writing a graphic novel or children’s picture book but in other kinds of novels it can be difficult to give the reader mental images. For one thing, readers are often more engaged if they use their own imaginations to ‘colour in the drawing.’ What’s more, too much description tends to burden a novel and can pull the reader out of the story. But if the reader has no sense of the visual it can be harder to be drawn into the story. So authors have to strike a delicate balance when it comes to depicting the visual. Just a quick look at crime fiction should show you what I mean about striking that balance.

There’s interesting use of imagery in Agatha Christie’s Death in the Clouds (AKA Death in the Air).  That’s the story of the murder of Marie Morisot, a French moneylender who does business under the name of Madame Giselle. She’s poisoned while en route by air from Paris to London, and the only viable suspects are her fellow passengers. Hercule Poirot is on the same flight, so he works with Chief Inspector Japp to solve the crime. Two of the other passengers are London hairdresser’s assistant Jane Grey and dentist Norman Gale. At one point, the two have a cup of tea together and discuss the case:

 

‘They found a tea shop, and a disdainful waitress with a gloomy manner took their order with an air of doubt as of one who might say: ‘Don’t blame me if you’re disappointed. They say we serve teas here, but I never heard of it.’’

 

Can’t you just visualise the waitress and her facial expression? And Christie does this without overburdening the reader with a lot of description. There’s room for the imagination, but she leaves the reader in no doubt about the setting for the conversation these two characters have.

One of James Lee Burke’s many strengths as a writer is the way he conveys the Southern Louisiana setting for most of his Dave Robicheaux novels. Burke takes a different approach to Christie’s but that’s of course part of the pleasure of crime fiction – the variety. In The Tin Roof Blowdown, for instance, one of the plot threads is Robicheaux’s search for his old friend Jude Le Blanc, who has become a Roman Catholic priest. In the immediate aftermath of Katrina, Le Blanc disappears and is presumably shot while trying to save some of his parishioners. The boat Le Blanc was using turns up later, this time in the possession of a group of looters. So Robiceaux suspects a connection between the looters and his friend’s disappearance. And so it turns out to be although of course, it’s not the obvious connection you might make. Here is a bit of the description of the onset of Katrina:

 

‘A hard gust of wind blows down the long corridor of trees that line Bayou Teche, wrinkling the water like old skin, filling the air with the smell of old fish roe and leaves that have turned yellow and black in the shade. Katrina will make landfall somewhere around Lake Pontchartrain in the next seven hours.’ 

 

This visual imagery places the reader unmistakeably in the setting, and raises the tension as it’s clear there is about to be a devastating storm.

In Stephen Booth’s Dying to Sin, DS Diane Fry and DC Ben Cooper investigate when two sets of remains are found on Pity Wood Farm near the village of Rakesdale in the Peak District of Derbyshire. The farm was the property of brothers Raymond and Derek Sutton, but Derek Sutton has died and his brother has had to move to a nursing care facility. Now the farm is the property of Manchester attorney Aaron Goodwin, but he has spent nearly no time there as of yet. So one thing Fry and Cooper have to do is find out who actually owned the property at the time the bodies were buried there, and how likely the owner would have been to know about the bodies. The remains belong to Orla Doyle and Nadezda Halak, very different young women from very different backgrounds. So another task the police face is finding out what these women were doing near the farm and why anyone would want to kill them. Here is Fry’s first impression of Pity Wood Farm:

 

‘She was confronted by a collection of ancient outbuildings leaning at various angles, their roofs sagging, doors hanging loosely on their hinges. By some curious law of physics, the doors all seemed to tilt at the opposite angle to the walls, as if they were leaning to compensate for a bend. Some doorways had been blocked up, windows were filled in, steps had been left going nowhere.’

 

This description gives the reader a real sense of how poverty-stricken and untended the farm is. It’s not a very pleasant place, but it’s in the history of the farm that Fry and Cooper find the clues to what happened to Orla Doyle and Nadezda Halak.

Håkan Nesser isn’t known for flowery descriptions, but he’s quite skilled at conveying visual images. For instance, in Woman With Birthmark, Inspector Van Veeteren and his team are called in when Ryszard Malik is murdered in his own home. The team is starting its investigation when there’s another murder. And then another. The deaths are all tied together by a past event, and Van Veeteren and his team will have to find out what the victims had in common if they’re to prevent a fourth murder. Here is the way Nesser describes a press conference in which Van Veeteren participates:

 

‘The conference room on the first floor was full to overflowing with journalists and reporters sitting, taking photographs, and trying to outdo one another in the art of asking biased and insinuating questions.
He had been press-ganged to accompany Hiller and sit behind a cheap, rectangular table overloaded with microphones, cords, and the obligatory bottles of soda water that for some unfathomable reason were present whenever high-ranking police officers made statements in front of cameras…’

 

The reader doesn’t need a lot of verbiage to build a strong visual image of what this press conference is like.

In Katherine Howell’s Violent Exposure, Sydney police detective Ella Marconi and her team investigate when Suzanne Crawford is murdered and her husband Connor goes missing. At first, it seems like a case of domestic violence that ended in death, but before long, it’s clear that the case is more complicated than that. For one thing, background checks on Connor Crawford show nothing, as though he never existed. And it comes out that he was keeping a secret from his wife that she was desperate to discover. Things get even more complex when Emil Page, a teenage volunteer at the nursery the Crawfords owned, also disappears. These events are all related and tied to the Crawfords’ past, and in the end, Marconi and her team find out what it is about the Crawfords that made them targets. Here’s a description of the murder weapon used to kill Suzanne Crawford:

 

‘It looked like a standard carving knife, about twenty centimetres long, with a stainless-steel blade and black plastic handle. Ella saw prints in the dry blood on the handle.
‘Beautiful,’ she said.’

 

Just from this short description one can get a strong visual image of the weapon without the need for Howell to use gory detail.

And that’s the thing about effective visual imagery. It conveys a lot to the reader without the need for a lot of verbiage or gratuitousness. Which authors do you think do a particularly effective job at conveying the visual? I know I’ve only mentioned a few here. If you’re a writer, how do you convey the visual?

 

 
 

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

My Eyes Can Dimly See the Pattern of My Life*

Did you ever catch yourself in a pattern you hadn’t even been aware you had? We often have a patterned reaction to life because it’s easy, or it’s comfortable and familiar, or perhaps because it’s served an important purpose. And we get so accustomed to our patterns that we often aren’t even conscious that we have them. But sometimes our comfortable patterns don’t work any more. When that happens we have to learn to deal with life in new ways. And that can help us grow. It can also add some interest to fictional characters as they see that the same way they’ve always dealt with life doesn’t always work.

Sometimes of course, patterns of dealing with life can be dangerous. For instance, in Agatha Christie’s Murder in Mesopotamia we meet Louise Leidner. She’s the wife of prominent archaeologist Eric Leidner and she’s accompanied him on an important dig a few hours from Baghdad. The team hasn’t been at the site long when Louise begins to have what many people call irrational fears. She says that she hears hands tapping on windows and sees grotesque faces looking in at her. Her husband hires a nurse Amy Leatheran to look after his wife and she learns that Louise fears for her life. She’s been receiving threatening letters that seem to come from her first husband, who she thought was dead. Then one afternoon Louise is bludgeoned to death. Hercule Poirot is in the area and is persuaded to investigate. He’s soon faced with several questions about the murder. Was the victim really killed by her former husband? If not, were the letters a blind? Did she write them herself in order to create drama? As Poirot sorts the case out we learn that there were several patterns to Louise Leidner’s life. Her interactions with people followed those particular patterns and in part that’s what led to her death.

Robert B. Parker’s Jesse Stone has had his share of damage in his life. And one of the patterns he’s used to cope with it is that he stays at least somewhat withdrawn in relationships. In some ways that’s been a successful strategy for him. His way of distancing himself makes it easier to do the hard things that cops have to do. For instance, in Night Passage, the first in Parker’s Jesse Stone series, Stone is hired as the new police chief in Paradise, Massachusetts. He thinks it will be a good chance to start life over. Having lost both his job with the L.A.P.D. and his marriage, Stone is looking for a new beginning. But he soon finds that being a cop in Paradise is anything but an easy job. It turns out that Stone was hired because the town’s leaders thought he’d be easy to manipulate. When Stone uncovers what’s going on, he needs his ability to ‘step back’ and not trust anyone as he finds out the truth. On the other hand, that pattern isn’t so useful in his personal life. It’s part of the reason for the breakup of his marriage and as the series goes on, we see how more than once, Stone’s pattern of withdrawal gets in the way of really sustaining a strong relationship.

Kerry Greenwood’s Corinna Chapman has a negative relationship with her parents for several good reasons. While she’s not obsessive about it, she also has no interest whatsoever in any contact with them. As she sees it, she has a good life (she has her own bakery, a good relationship with her lover Daniel Cohen, and a good circle of friends). But it’s all no thanks to her parents. Then, in Devil’s Food, Chapman’s mother suddenly shows up in her life. Chapman’s father has disappeared and her mother wants Chapman’s help finding him. Chapman’s first reaction is to follow the pattern that has so far served her well: avoidance. But she soon learns that avoidance isn’t going to work this time as her mother intends to stay in the area until her father is found. What’s more, one of the other residents of the building where Chapman lives and works offers to take her mother in for the time being. With few other options Chapman grudgingly begins to help in the search for her father. Bit by bit she develops a sort of détente with her mother. She also learns what’s happened to her father. At the end of the story, Chapman isn’t exactly ‘best buddies’ with her mother but she’s been able to re-think the pattern of simply avoiding any contact at all cost.

In Paddy Richardson’s Hunting Blind, beginning psychiatrist Stephanie Anderson has to re-think several patterns in her life. When she was fourteen, her younger sister Gemma was abducted. No trace of the child was ever found despite a massive hunt. Gemma’s loss devastated the family and is partly responsible for Anderson’s pattern of withdrawing from people – of not allowing herself to get close to them. In a lot of ways she’s aware of that pattern but for her it’s been a useful coping technique. She’s able to work with her patients because she doesn’t allow herself to get close. She can’t really face her own pain and sense of loss at Gemma’s disappearance so withdrawing helps her get through life without hurting too much or drowning herself in alcohol. For Anderson it’s not a bad pattern although it has cost her at least one serious relationship. Then she begins to work with a new patient Elizabeth Clark. Clark is still suffering the trauma of losing her own younger sister Gracie, who was, like Anderson’s sister, abducted. When Anderson hears Clark’s story she decides to lay her old ghosts to rest and find out who was responsible for both abductions. To do that she has to take several emotional risks and face the difficulty of getting close to some of the members of her family again as well as getting closer to Clark than professional ethics would normally dictate. But Anderson has found that her pattern of staying removed from people simply won’t work any more. As she slowly finds out the truth about what happened to her sister, she also learns some new ways of dealing with life.

Håkan Nesser’s Intendant Münster has a pattern of relying on his boss Inspector Van Veeteren. That pattern makes sense for a lot of reasons. After all, Van Veeteren is the boss. Besides, he has real intuition for detection and an awful lot of skill. Münster is neither stupid nor lacking in insight. But he’s fallen into a pattern of discussing cases with his boss, getting Van Veeteren’s views, insights and so on and going from there. But then Münster has to re-think his patterns, at least to some extent. Van Veeteren leaves the police force and becomes an owner of a bookshop, which is something he’s wanted to do for a long time. So in The Unlucky Lottery (AKA Münster’s Fall/ Münster’s Case), Münster has to take on the murder of Waldemar Leverkuhn himself. He certainly works with a team, and as I say, he’s no mental slouch. But it’s obvious that he has gotten used to depending on Van Veeteren. And what’s interesting is that Van Veeteren has gotten used to it and to detection too. A few times during this novel he and Münster discuss the case, and he gives Münster some valuable perspective.

And then there’s Julie Smith’s Louisiana Bighot which features New Orleans PI Talba Wallis. Wallis works for E.V. Anthony Investigations when she’s not writing poetry and doing readings. When Wallis is hired to find out whether her friend Babalu Maya’s fiancé Jason is cheating, Wallis has no idea that this case is going to lead to murder, corruption and more. When Wallis doesn’t want to deal with something difficult, even she admits that she ‘turtles,’ or goes into her proverbial shell. She avoids unpleasant confrontations if she can and drags her feet as the saying goes. And she tends to freeze up emotionally when she can’t avoid a confrontation. We see that for instance when she has to tell Babalu that Jason has been unfaithful. We see it again when Babalu is murdered and Jason is accused of the crime. It’s a lot more complicated though than a case of an angry fiancé who kills the woman he’s supposedly going to marry. Throughout the novel, as Wallis deals with the various threads of this case, she has to force herself not to rely on ‘turtling’ to get her through. But as we learn a little about her backstory, we also see why she has that pattern. It’s not an irrational way to deal with life, but it doesn’t work in this case.

And that’s the thing about a lot of the patterns we develop. It’s not that they’re necessarily bad or wrong. They may in fact be very useful. But sometimes, our comfortable familiar patterns don’t serve our purpose. And that’s when we find out what we’re capable of learning.

 

 

 

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

 

And These Are the People I Work With*

If you work outside the home, chances are that you have co-workers. Since you can’t always choose co-workers, it’s a very lucky thing when you have friendly co-workers you can depend on. On the other hand co-workers can also turn out to be the bane of one’s existence. Either way, they often have a valuable perspective so when there is a murder, detectives usually talk to the victim’s co-workers. The way someone’s perceived at work can give a lot of insight into that person’s personality, habits and even state of mind. So it makes a lot of sense that co-workers’ views and behaviour play a role in crime fiction too.

For instance, in Agatha Christie’s Mrs. McGinty’s Dead, Hercule Poirot re-opens the investigation in to the death of a charwoman. Everyone is convinced that she was killed by her lodger James Bentley but Superintendent Spence, who did the original investigation, has begun to suspect that Bentley might be innocent. So he asks Poirot to look into the case. One of the first things Poirot does as a part of this investigation is to talk to Bentley’s co-workers at Breather & Scuttle, the realtor’s office where he’d been employed before he was let go. From Bentley’s former boss Poirot learns that Bentley wasn’t unpleasant, but he simply didn’t produce enough results to keep his job. This makes Poirot wonder whether Bentley would have had the faith in himself and audacity to carry off a murder. Then one of Bentley’s co-workers Maude Williams give Poirot surprising insights into the kind of person Bentley is. This is also extremely helpful in giving Poirot perspective on the man. In the end in fact Williams proves to be useful in solving the case.

In Dorothy Sayers’ Murder Must Advertise, copywriter Victor Dean has a fatal fall down a staircase at work. His employer, Pym’s Publicity Ltd. is an advertising agency that counts among its clients some top companies and the management of Pym’s wants to keep things that way so discretion and respectability are very important. Dean left behind an unfinished letter in which he claimed that someone in the firm has been using the company’s resources for illegal purposes. That letter raises the possibility that Dean was murdered. Instead of calling the police in (which might bring unwelcome attention to this utterly respectable place), Pym’s hires Lord Peter Wimsey to go undercover at the company and find out whether Dean’s allegations are correct. Wimsey does so and in the course of his investigation, he gets to know Dean’s co-workers. From them he gets a perspective on the victim. He also finds out that Dean was right about the company’s resources. Someone who works at Pym’s has been using the company’s advertising to arrange meetings between a drugs ring and local drugs dealers. Dean found out who that person is and was taking advantage of that through blackmail. Because he’s undercover as Dean’s replacement, Wimsey gets to hear some very interesting unguarded remarks and conversations as he goes about finding out the truth about Dean’s death and catching the person responsible for it. 

Peter Robinson’s A Dedicated Man  is the story of former academic Harry Steadman, who used an inheritance to move with his wife Emma to Yorkshire to indulge his passion for excavating the Roman ruins in the area. When Steadman is found murdered, DI Alan Banks and his team investigate. Before he and his wife moved to Yorkshire, Steadman was a member of the faculty at Leeds University, so Banks travels there and gets to know some of Steadman’s former co-workers. They provide some interesting insights into Steadman, his reputation and his character. They also give Banks an important clue as to Steadman’s killer.

In Håkan Nesser’s Mind’s Eye, Inspector Van Veeteren and his team investigate the murder of Eva Ringmar, whose body is found in her bathtub. Her husband Jurgen Mitter is the most likely suspect; they had been known to quarrel and what’s more, he was very drunk on the night of the murder and doesn’t remember much of anything. So although he claims he is innocent, he really can’t provide an account of himself nor any other plausible suspects. In fact, he’s convicted of the murder and remanded to a mental institution since he cannot remember what happened. When Mitter himself is killed Van Veeteren knows for certain that Mitter was telling the truth. He and his team begin to dig more deeply into both victims’ pasts to find out who the killer is. And part of that is a set of interviews with co-workers at the school where both taught and where they met. After all, people at the school knew them both and could have had a motive for murder. From those interviews, Van Veeteren gets an interesting perspective on both people; he also gets an interesting clue about who the killer is.

In Katherine Howell’s Silent Fear, Sydney police detective Ella Marconi and her team investigate the death of Paul Fowler. At first it seems that Fowler collapsed, possibly due to the heat, during a casual football game with a few friends. But when it’s found that he was shot, Marconi and her team begin to look into the death more carefully. The team learns that Fowler had been managing a carpet franchise called Carpet Planet until a few weeks before his death. So one of the avenues they explore is his reputation at work and his reasons for either quitting or being fired. Marconi and her police partner Murray Shakespeare interview Fowler’s employees as well as the franchise owner and discover that something had happened a few months before his death that changed Fowler’s disposition and that shortly after that, he’d left abruptly. Although no-one at work really knows what happened, that’s enough for the team to dig a little deeper. As it turns out, Fowler had taken a decision that got him into deeper trouble than he ever could have imagined and ended up costing him his life.

Co-workers turn out to be crucial to finding out who killed TV celebrity Jaynee ‘JayJay’ Johnson in Lynda Wilcox’s Strictly Murder. Verity Long is the assistant to well-known mystery novelist Kathleen ‘KD’ Davenport. Usually she does research for fictional murders but she gets involved in a real one when she goes house-hunting and discovers Johnson’s body in a supposedly empty prospective home. Long falls under some suspicion since she’s the one who found the body. But even after she’s cleared, she continues to ask questions. One of the first places she goes for answers is the television studio where Johnson worked. There, she learns that Johnson was hardly the beloved-by-all personality she appeared to be. Little by little, Long follows up on the leads she gets at the studio and finds out more about Johnson’s personal life. It turns out that what Long learns from Johnson’s co-workers is instrumental in solving the case.

It’s surprising how much co-workers know about each other. For detectives, co-worker interviews can be a proverbial gold mine when it comes to learning about a victim. And for a writer, there’s lots of potential for personality conflicts and character development. Kind of makes you think about your work-mates in a different way doesn’t it?

 
 
 

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from Blur’s Yuko and Hiro.

One Step Up and Two Steps Back*

There are some criminal investigations that move along in a straightforward way. They may not go very quickly but they move along. Others though are hampered by all sorts of snags and challenges. In those investigations it’s very often a case of ‘two steps forward and one step back.’ In crime fiction, either sort of investigation can make for a good story depending on how it’s handled. Straightforward investigations can have a solid pace and plenty of suspense. But investigations that are hampered can be realistic and those hurdles to overcome can add conflict and interest to a novel.

For instance, in Agatha Christie’s The A.B.C. Murders, Hercule Poirot gets drawn into the investigation of a series of murders that begins with the killing of an elderly shopkeeper Alice Ascher. The victim’s husband is the most likely suspect. The two had been estranged for a long time and he had a well-known habit of trying to get money from her. But when the second victim, twenty-three-year-old Betty Barnard, is found, the case doesn’t seem so simple. And then there’s another murder. And another. Before each murder Poirot gets a cryptic note warning him of when and where the next murder will be. But even that doesn’t help the investigation at first. None of the murders gives Poirot or the police much in the way of clues so the investigation stalls. Matters aren’t helped by the fact that all of the murders occur during the summer holiday season when there are crowds of tourists that make it easy for the murderer to disappear amongst them. Finally there’s a break in the case and Poirot finds out who the murderer is and what the motive is. But not before the case is stalled several times.

Some investigations are hampered by powerful players who don’t want the case solved. We see that for instance in Michael Connelly’s Angels Flight. In that novel, Harry Bosch investigates the murder of Howard Elias, a prominent attorney who’s gone up against the L.A.P.D. in several cases. Elias recently took on the case of Michael Harris, who was convicted of the rape and murder of twelve-year-old Stacey Kincaid. Harris has since said that the police coerced (and that’s putting it kindly) his confession and that he’s not guilty. Before Elias can present Harris’ case at trial though, he’s found shot. The more closely Bosch looks into the Elias shooting, the clearer it is that Michael Harris was telling the truth; he did not kill Stacey Kincaid. So now Bosch has to find out not only who shot Howard Elias but who Stacey’s real killer is. To do that, Bosch has to go up against the powerful L.A.P.D. top brass, who don’t want stories of their mishandling of the case being made public. Bosch is also hampered by some highly-placed people who don’t want the truth about Stacey Kincaid’s murder to come out. But he doesn’t let those ‘backward steps’ stop him and in the end, he learns who’s behind both killings.

In James Craig’s Never Apologise, Never Explain, London police inspector John Carlyle and his assistant Joe Szyskowski are called to the scene of the murder of Agatha Mills. The victim, who lived quietly with her husband Henry, wasn’t wealthy or powerful. With a lack of other kinds of motives, the police focus on Henry Mills as the most likely suspect. He insists he’s innocent though and that Agatha had political enemies. At first the police don’t believe him but then Carlyle gets a very important clue that shows Mills was telling the truth. So Caryle and Szyskowski look into the matter more deeply. They find that Agatha Mills’ murder is tied up with international relations and politics so that finding out the truth will be very difficult. And some important and highly-connected people do not want the facts about the murder to come out. So the detectives face all sorts of setbacks as they work their way to the truth.

Of course, there are lots of other things that can set an investigation back. For instance, sometimes key witnesses or other people involved in a case simply won’t tell what they know. There are a lot of reasons that might happen. When it does it can set a case back. For instance, Karin Fossum’s When the Devil Holds the Candle sees Oslo Inspector Konrad Sejer investigating the disappearance of Andreas Winther. He hasn’t been home for a few days and his mother Runi has gotten concerned about him. At first the police don’t do much because it’s not that uncommon for a young man to go off for a few days without telling his mother about it. But when more time goes by with no sign of Andreas, Sejer begins to ask questions. Winther was last seen with his friend Sivert “Zipp” Skorpe, and from the moment Sejer meets Zipp, he’s sure that the boy knows more than he’s saying. But none of his efforts to get Zipp to talk are successful. Zipp has his own reasons for not telling everything he knows (and no; without spoilers I can tell you that Zipp did not kill Winther). The case is set back in this novel by the fact that people who could tell Sejer what he wants to know – won’t.

Sometimes an investigation is set back because the police follow up on the wrong leads, either because they’ve been lied to or because they don’t make the right deductions from the evidence. It takes skill to do that well; if it’s not handled deftly the investigator can look inept. But it does happen. For instance in Ian Rankin’s Exit Music, Inspector John Rebus and his  team investigate what looks like a mugging gone wrong. Russian dissident poet Alexander Todorov has been killed and his body found in a very bad section of Edinburgh. But Rebus doesn’t think it’s quite as simple as a case of mugging. Then there’s another murder that may be related, so Rebus continues to ask questions. It turns out that Todorov had attracted the attention of some powerful Russian businessmen, émigrés to Edinburgh, who didn’t like his politics. It also turns out that those people might have been closely associated with Rebus’ old nemesis ‘Big Ger’ Cafferty, a local crime boss. Following up on those possibilities leads Rebus in exactly the wrong direction – and sets the case back – until he finally gets the clue he needs to put him on the right path.

We also see that sort of plot device – following up on wrong leads – in several of Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse stories. Very often Morse makes brilliant deductions about the cases he works, but they don’t always lead him in the right direction at first. In my opinion (so feel free to disagree if you do), Dexter handles those (mis)leads quite effectively. It’s hard to have the sleuth follow the wrong path without making that sleuth look bumbling.

There are also cases in which the investigation is set back when the prime suspect becomes a victim. That’s actually a common plot point in crime fiction so it has to be handled carefully or it becomes cliché. But when it’s done well it can be effective. For instance in Håkan Nesser’s Mind’s Eye, Inspector Van Veeteren and his team investigate the death of Eva Ringmar, whose body is found in her bathtub. Her husband Jurgen Mitter is the chief suspect. Not only had they had difficulties recently, but he was very drunk on the night of the murder and can’t account for himself. In fact he doesn’t remember much at all about that night. So nobody believes he’s innocent. In fact he’s tried for and convicted of the murder. But even at the trial Van Veeteren wonders whether Mitter might be telling the truth. Because Mitter remembers nothing about his wife’s murder, he’s placed in a mental institution instead of a conventional prison. Then he’s murdered himself. Now the case, which seemed to have been solved, takes on a completely new cast and Van Veeteren and his team have to start all over. They find the key to both murders in Eva Ringmar’s past.

There’s an innovative approach to integrating ‘one step back’ into an investigation in Gail Bowen’s Deadly Appearances, in which political science expert and academic Joanne Kilbourn investigates the murder of her friend rising political star Androu ‘Andy’ Boychuk. Boychuk is poisoned during a public speech and at first there are no strong leads, although the murder happened in full view of the audience. As a way of dealing with her grief Kilbourn decides to write a biography of Boychuk. In the process of learning about his life she finds that there was a side to her friend that no-one knew. And it turns out that the key to the murder is in Boychuk’s past. Not long after the investigation begins, Kilbourn contracts a mysterious illness that leaves her weakened and unable to eat very much. Although there are times when she feels better, the illness begins to take its toll and more than once she has to make up lost ground as the saying goes.

Having a case go ‘one step back’ is realistic and can add to the tension in a story. It can also be tiresome if it’s done too often or not effectively. What about you? Do you think this kind of plot point works? If you’re a writer, do you use this as a way to add tension and suspense to your stories?

 

 
 

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from Bruce Springsteen’s One Step Up.