Do You Know What I’m Saying?*

One of the ways in which an author makes a novel feel authentic is through the use of vocabulary. I’m not talking here about common dialect words (e.g. lorry/truck or petrol/gasoline); most readers are familiar with those sorts of vocabulary differences and even if there is a word one hasn’t seen before it’s usually easy to work out. There are some kinds of vocabulary though that aren’t so familiar. In those cases the writer is faced with a challenge. Does one stop in the middle of a story and explain a term? That clears the matter up but can interrupt the reader’s engagement. Does one provide a glossary? That’s awfully helpful but it does mean the reader has to look up the word. There are other approaches too that authors use, and any of them can work well, depending on the kind of story it is and the author’s way of writing.

Some authors do provide glossaries and that makes sense if one’s writing a story that includes a lot of words that the average reader might not understand. For instance, Tarquin Hall’s series featuring Delhi private investigator Vishwas ‘Vish’ Puri includes a lot of vocabulary that English-speaking readers might not know. There are expressions, words for different kinds of foods and so on. Those words add to the sense of place in the novels but not all of them are easy to work out from the context. Not having them there would detract from the story; it just wouldn’t seem as real. So Hall includes a glossary with his books so readers who don’t know particular words can find their meanings. It’s really helpful actually.

Rhys Bowen has written several crime fiction series. One of them, her Constable Evan Evans series, takes place in Llanfair, Wales. The setting and context of these novels are distinctly Welsh and so are many of the characters. This means that some of the vocabulary Bowen uses in the novels is Welsh too. For instance, in Evans to Betsy, Llanfair local Betsy Edwards gets drawn into a mystery when an American graduate student Emmy Court convinces her that she may have ‘second sight.’ She encourages Betsy to attend Sacred Grove, a New Age centre led by renowned psychic Randy Wunderlich. Betsy gets involved in Sacred Grove’s activities, which is how she comes to the attention of Constable Evans, who suspects that Sacred Grove is a scam operation. Then, a young girl Rebecca Riesen goes missing and her trail seems to lead to Sacred Grove. Evans is trying to trace Rebecca when Betsy has a dream in which she sees Randy Wunderlich dead in a cave. When her dream turns out to be all too real, Evans knows that this centre is more than just a scam operation. One evening Betsy comes over to visit Evans while he happens to be cooking dinner. Here’s a bit of their conversation:

 

‘‘You’re welcome to join me. I can’t eat a whole leg [of lamb] on my own.’
Evan stood back to let her in.
‘Lovely! Diolch yn fawr, Evan bach.’ She gave him a beaming smile as she came in. ‘Do you want me to lay the table?’’

 

At the end of this novel there’s a glossary that explains that Diolich yn fawr is Welsh for ‘thank you very much.’

Some authors prefer to explain vocabulary in the context of the story. For instance, Angela Savage’s series featuring PI Jayne Keeney takes place in Thailand. The series has a strong sense of place and context, which wouldn’t be the case if there were no use of Thai. So when it adds to the story Savage includes Thai words. But their definitions and explanations are woven into the narrative. For instance, in The Half Child, Jim Delbeck hires Keeney to look into the death of his daughter Maryanne, who jumped, was pushed, or fell from the roof of the Pattaya hotel where she was living. Keeney travels to Pattaya and goes undercover at the New Life Children’s Centre where Maryanne was volunteering. She’s hoping that by doing so she’ll find some clues as to how and why Maryanne died. Bit by bit Keeney learns that New Life may very be hiding some dark secrets. It’s very possible that Maryanne found out more than it was safe for her to know. Keeney also learns that Maryanne’s personal life was complicated too, and that could have led to her death. One of the people whose help Keeney seeks in this case is Police Major General Wichit, who owes her a favour. Here is Wichit’s response when Keeney asks him to act as a reference for her before she goes undercover:

 

‘Mai pen rai,’ Wichit said, the ubiquitous Thai phrase meaning ‘it doesn’t matter’, even when it did.’

 

In this way, Savage shares the meaning of mai pen rai with the reader without interrupting the flow of the story.

James Lee Burke chooses to use context, rather than definition, to let readers know what unfamiliar words mean. In A Forning for Flamingos for instance, his sleuth Dave Robicheaux and his partner Lester Benoit are assigned to transport Tee Beau Latiolais and Jimmie Lee Boggs to Louisiana’s state penitentiary at Angola. Both men have been convicted of murder, but Tee Beau’s grandmother Tante Lemon claims that he’s innocent and was with her at the time of the murder. She wants Robicheaux to look into the case and clear Tee Beau’s name. Here’s a little of the conversation they have about it:

 

‘’I  told all them people, Mr. Dave. They ain’t listen to me. What for they gonna listen an old nigger woman worked Miz Hattie’s crib? That’s what they say. Old nigger putain lyin’ for Tee Beau.’
‘His lawyer’s going to appeal. There are a lot of things that can be done yet,’ I said. I kept waiting for the elevator doors to open.
‘They gonna electrocute that boy,’ she said.
‘Tante Lemon, I can’t do anything about it,’ I said. 

 

But Robicheaux is drawn into the case when Tee Beau and Boggs escape while en route to Angola, killing Lester Benoit and leaving Robicheaux for dead. If you’ll notice in this dialogue, Burke doesn’t stop to explain what putain means. It’s not hard given the context for the reader to work that out.

Sometimes, vocabulary is highly technical. For instance, both Aaron Elkins’  Gideon Oliver and Elly Griffiths’ Ruth Galloway are scientists. They use very technical terms in their work which makes sense. Those are specific terms that have particular meanings. However, not everyone understands what they mean. Both Elkins and Griffiths have chosen to explain those vocabulary words in the context of conversations that Oliver and Galloway have with others. For instance, in Griffiths’ The Janus Stone, Galloway is called in when a child’s skeleton is found beneath the remains of an old children’s home. Here is a bit of the conversation when Galloway and DCI Harry Nelson attend the autopsy conducted by pathologist Chris Stevenson:

 

‘‘Cause of death – decapitation?’ suggests Stevenson.
‘Poena post mortem,’ says Ruth shortly, turning to Nelson. ‘Mutilation after death. The head was cut off later.’’

 

Here, Griffith shares the meaning of the technical term within the context of the story.

There are other ways too in which authors define and explain vocabulary. It can be a challenge to do so without interrupting the flow of a story, but when the author does it well, the reader can get a deeper sense of a word or phrase and drawn further into a story.

What are your thoughts on this? Do you like having terminology explained? If you do, do you prefer glossaries, explanations, dialogue or something else? If you’re a writer how do you integrate vocabulary?

 

 
 

*NOTE: The title of this post is the title of a song written by Elvis Costello for singer/songwriter Wendy James.

Can’t You See I’m Smart?*

Research during the past few decades has shown us some fascinating things about the way we think and know. It used to be believed that intelligence could be measured on a single dimension. The assumption was that everyone had a certain amount of this one ‘thing’ called intelligence. But work by Howard Gardner and other researchers has changed all that. Gardner conceived of several different intelligences. According to this theory, there are several different ways of thinking and knowing; Gardner called them multiple intelligences. We each have some of each of the intelligences, but in each of us, at least one (and usually more than one) is particularly strong. Hold on – I’ll get to crime fiction in just a second.

Gardner’s ideas about multiple intelligences make a lot of intuitive sense if you think about it. Some people are naturally good at, say, art, music, athletics or languages. And research has supported his theory fairly consistently. We can even see these multiple intelligences woven all through crime fiction. If you look at the way various sleuths go about solving cases, you can see how different ways of thinking and knowing come through in the genre.

For instance, one of Gardner’s multiple intelligences is what he called logical-mathematical intelligence. People with a high degree of this kind of intelligence find it easy to recognise patterns and algorithms. They find numbers and codes and puzzles interesting and their skill is in deduction. Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes is like that. As Holmes fans know, he looks for patterns and focuses on deduction and logic.

There’s also what Gardner called visual-spatial intelligence. People with visual-spatial intelligence tend to be talented at art. They notice colour and design and respond to what they see. In a very obvious way we see that kind of intelligence in Ngaio Marsh’s Agatha Troy. She’s an artist who responds to what she sees and can create in several different media. For instance in both Final Curtain and Tied Up in Tinsel (and other novels too), Troy is commissioned to paint portraits. So she’s on the scene when murder happens at the homes where she’s staying. Although it’s technically her husband Roderick Alleyn who officially solves the cases, Troy’s skilled eyes are very helpful in finding clues. We see that especially in A Clutch of Constables in which she goes up against an international art forger known only as Jampot. Hercule Poirot also has this kind of intelligence. He’s quite observant about his visual surroundings and of course, fans know how important the appearance of his clothes and moustaches are to him.

Some people have a great deal of linguistic intelligence. Novelists, poets, journalists and other writers often fall into this category. If you love words, play a lot of word games and notice the way people use language, you’ve got a solid dose of this kind of intelligence. For instance, John Dickson Carr’s Dr. Gideon Fell is a lexicographer. Words and languages are his specialty. That’s how he finds out the truth in, for instance, Hag’s Nook, where a cryptic poem turns out to be key to a murder. Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse has a dose of this kind of intelligence too. He does after all solve crossword puzzles with a pen and is a stickler for certain kinds of language use.

People with a lot of kinesthetic intelligence have a solid sense of where their bodies are in space. Actors, athletes, dancers, and people who can parallel park on the first try show this kind of intelligence. People with kinesthetic intelligence like to learn by doing and using their hands and bodies. For example, Helene Tursten’s DI Irene Huss has a share of kinesthetic intelligence. She is a former judo champion who uses the principles of judo to keep herself in shape as well as to clear her mind and cope with the stresses of her life as a cop. And interestingly, we several instances in this series where Huss gets bored and tired of paperwork and the other ‘desk routines’ that are part of a cop’s life. Although she’s hardly rash, Huss prefers to be out doing things to sitting at her desk. She also enjoys going for runs and exercising the family dog. All of those are hallmarks of kinesthetic intelligence and it serves Huss well.

Gardner also proposed interpersonal intelligence. People with interpersonal intelligence are skilled at interacting with others. I don’t mean that they are necessarily manipulators; rather, they work well with all kinds of people. And that is a critical skill for a sleuth. So, most fictional sleuths have at least some degree of it. G.K. Chesterton’s Father Paul Brown for instance is highly skilled at communicating with others, at forming bonds with them and understanding their perspectives. That’s how he learns as much as he does from suspects and witnesses. Karin Fossum’s Oslo police inspector Konrad Sejer is like that too. When he’s investigating a crime, one of his talents is the ability to see things from a variety of other perspectives and ‘get in people’s heads’ to understand why and how they do what they do. People tend to become comfortable talking with him and he often finds himself better able to get information through his interactions than he would through simply reading police reports.

There are also people with a lot of what Gardner called intrapersonal intelligence. Reflective people, people who keep journals and those who are really aware of themselves show this kind of intelligence. And being aware of one’s own reactions  – one’s sense of self – can be very useful for a sleuth. For example, James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux has a keen self-awareness. That self-knowledge and reflection have helped him cope with some of the traumas he’s had to face, especially his Vietnam-era experiences. For instance in A Morning For Flamingoes, Robicheaux agrees to go undercover as a ‘dirty’ cop to try to trap New Orleans crime boss Tony Cardo. Part of his assignment is to get close to Cardo but that proves increasingly difficult for Robicheaux as he becomes aware that he has sympathy for his target. Throughout this novel, Robicheaux keeps himself as grounded as he can by ‘checking in with himself.’

Another of the multiple intelligences people have is musical intelligence. Obviously singers, composers and musical artists have a healthy dose of this kind of intelligence. But it’s more than just being able to sing or play music on key. It’s also a sense of rhythm and a keen awareness of sound. If you like a soundtrack when you work, or if you find yourself singing or whistling when you weren’t aware of it, or if you can’t help walking in time to the music when you walk past a car with its radio on, you know what I mean. And if you don’t, just ask Jill Edmondson’s Toronto PI Sasha Jackson, who used to be a rock singer and still does occasional gigs. Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus has musical intelligence as well although he’s hardly a famous rocker. His music collection matters a lot to him and there are lots of scenes in the Rebus novels (including a really well-done scene in Exit Music) in which he gets or listens to music.

Naturalist intelligence is actually pretty self-explanatory. People who are attuned to nature and its rhythms and who just ‘fit in’ in natural environments have a lot of naturalist intelligence. Garden enthusiasts, park rangers, those who are comfortable with animals and those who simply like to be outdoors are examples of those with naturalist intelligence. There’s a lot of it in crime fiction too. Tony Hillerman’s Jim Chee, Adrian Hyland’s Emily Tempest, and Nevada Barr’s Anna Pigeon are all examples of people who learn from and use nature as they solve crimes. So does Arthur Upfield’s Napoleon ‘Bony’ Bonaparte. These sleuths can tell much from weather patterns, animal activity, ground marks and other natural phenomena. In fact, they often find clues where others can’t.

Finally there’s what Gardner called existential intelligence, the most recent of his proposals. The big questions – the ‘why’ questions – appeal to people with a lot of existential intelligence. Philosophers and members of the clergy often wrestle with these larger questions. And sometimes getting philosophical can be helpful to a sleuth. It is to Alexander McCall Smith’s Isabel Dalhousie, who is the editor of Review of Applied Ethics. She doesn’t go out looking for physical clues, and she doesn’t search for patterns. Rather, she looks at the larger motivations people have, and considers the larger issues of morality.

You may be thinking, ‘But don’t all these sleuths also have other intelligences?’ They do indeed. That’s the thing about multiple intelligences. We’ve all got all of the intelligences to some degree. And what’s most interesting is that we can develop the ones we choose to develop.

Interested in taking a look at your own intelligences? Try this Multiple Intelligences Survey. It’s got 40 questions and took me about 10 minutes or so to complete.  By no means is it definite – it’s just one look at the way we learn and know. If you’re a writer, what intelligences does your protagonist have?

 
 
 

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from The Undertones’ Smarter Than You.

I Admire You so Much*

Writers put a lot of themselves into their work so it means a great deal when people like what they write and say so. Praise from fellow writers has a special meaning because fellow writers truly understand what it’s like to create a story. And when that praise comes from a fellow writer whose work you also admire? That’s happened to me once and without gushing I’ll have to content myself with saying, ‘Wow!’  That’s why I was really interested when about a month and a half ago I had a suggestion from Bryan at The Vagrant Mood about doing a post on authors and the work they admire. Before I go on, I should tell you that The Vagrant Mood is a blog well worth following for commentary on books, poetry and writing in general. G’head – give it a try.

Bryan’s well-taken point was that it’s very interesting to learn about authors’ favourite writers. It shows something about both the author and the writers whose work s/he admires. For example, Agatha Christie was said to be a great admirer of Elizabeth Daly’s novels. Of course there are differences between the two writers’ characters, styles and so on. However, Daly’s Henry Gamadge is, like Christie’s own Miss Marple, an amateur sleuth. Daly’s plots are different to Christie’s but the plotting is one of the main elements in Daly’s work, just as it is in Christie’s. It’s not difficult to see why Christie liked Daly’s work.

Christie fans will know that she was also a fan of P.G. Wodehouse’s novels. In fact, Hallowe’en Party is dedicated

 

‘To P. G. Wodehouse–whose books and stories have brightened my life for many years. Also, to show my pleasure in his having been kind enough to tell me he enjoyed my books.’

 

The dedication also shows that this admiration was mutual.

Tony Hillerman’s novels featuring Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee have won millions of fans. But HIllerman himself had a list of authors whose work he admired. For example, he was a fan of Margaret Coel, whose Vicky Holden/Father John O’Malley series takes place on Wyoming’s Wind River Reservation. Like Hillerman, Coel has great respect for the indigenous people who feature in her novels (in Coel’s case it’s the Arapaho people). And it’s easy to see why Hillerman admired Coel’s skilled depiction of the land on which this series takes place. Readers get an authentic sense of context and setting in these novels.

A great number of people are fans of Michael Connelly’s work (I’m one of them). And it shouldn’t be surprising that his admirers include some well-known authors who are talented in their own right. For instance, Connelly and Robert Crais are mutual admirers They’ve even had their sleuths pay ‘visits’ to each other’s series. Crais’ PI sleuth Elvis Cole has a cameo appearance in Connelly’s Lost Light and in turn, Harry Bosch ‘stops in’ in Crais’ The Last Detective.

Another famous fan of Michael Connelly’s work is James Lee Burke, who calls Connelly,

 

‘…one of the best.’

 

Burke is also, by the way, a fan of James M. Cain and Dennis Lehane. He’s also said that Elizabeth George

 

‘…writes some really nice prose.’

 

For her part, Goerge has said that she is an admirer of the work of John Fowles.

As I said, Connelly has millions of admirers. He also has his favourites. Among them are Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald and it’s not hard to see the connection. Like Connelly, both authors show Los Angeles at its best and its seamy, gritty worst. They also feature essentially good characters caught up in a sometimes corrupt system.

Ruth Rendell also has won millions of fans both under her own name and as Barbara Vine. She in turn has her own favourites. For instance, she is a fan of Iris Murdoch’s work. She’s also said that P.D. James’ Adam Dalgliesh is

 

‘…the most intelligent detective in contemporary fiction.’  

 

Rendell is also said to greatly admire Charles Dickens. Granted Dickens isn’t usually considered to be a crime fiction writer. But his novels do address questions of crime, law and order and justice.

For her part, P.D. James has said that she’s been very much influenced by the work of Dorothy Sayers, among other authors. And she has been a profound influence herself on many writers.

Any talented author will tell you that part of good writing is lots of reading. So it makes a great deal of sense that the best crime writers would have a list of authors whose work they admire. And it’s a truly special thing when the admiration is mutual.

Now it’s your turn. Do you see the influence of certain writers on the work of others? If you’re a writer, which authors do you admire? Do they influence your work?

Thanks, Bryan, for the excellent suggestion!

 

 
 

*NOTE: The title of this post is the title of a song by Rivers Cuomo.

 

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.

When the Jazzman’s Testifyin’, a Faithless Man Believes*

There’s something about jazz and jazz clubs. If you like good jazz as I do then you know what I mean without me having to explain it. Jazz, when it’s done right, is full of feeling and emotion (of course, I suppose all music is when it’s done well). A lot of jazz is improvised and adapted, too, so each jazz artist has her or his own take on the music. Jazz has been associated for a long time with fun and good times; it’s an uninhibited genre. But it’s also been associated with grief and sadness. There’s something a little dark about jazz – something that goes beneath the surface. It’s a complex form of music that for many people strikes a particular chord. And because of the kind of music it is, I’m not at all surprised that you see it in crime fiction. To me (or perhaps this is just my opinion, in which case feel free to disagree if you do) jazz music would be a nicely-matched soundtrack to a lot of crime fiction novels.

When jazz first made the transition from its roots in the U.S. Black community into the mainstream, many people were suspicious of it. It was – is – unique and therefore unfamiliar and seemed, well, dangerous. You see that kind of feeling about jazz in some Golden Age crime fiction like Dorothy Sayers’ The Unpleasantness at the Bellonna Club. In that novel, Lord Peter Wimsey investigates two deaths. One is the death of one his fellow club members General Fentiman. Fentiman’s wealthy sister Lady Dormer also dies. And therein is the hitch. According to Lady Dormer’s will, if she dies first, her fortune passes to Fentiman’s grandson. If the general dies first, the fortune passes to Lady Dormer’s distant cousin Anne Dorland. So the timing of the two deaths matters greatly. When it’s discovered that General Fentiman was poisoned, Wimsey and his friend Inspector Parker have to find out not only who poisoned the general, but also who died first: the general or his sister. At one point, Wimsey is talking with Fentiman’s grandson George and his wife. George has this to say about the effect of jazz and the jazz culture:

 

‘In the old days, heaps of unmarried women were companions, and… they had a much better time than they had now, with all this jazzing and short skirts…the modern girl hasn’t a scrap of decent feeling or sentiment about her.’ 

 

It’s clear in this novel that there’s real suspicion of ‘the jazz life.’

Of course, times have changed and today jazz isn’t considered the ‘dangerous’ kind of music that it once was. But it still runs through crime fiction. In James Lee Burke’s Dixie City Jam, for instance, New Iberia cop Dave Robicheaux needs to raise money to help his business partner Batist, who’s been arrested for murdering a drug dealer. Robicheaux decides to raise the money through a finder’s fee for recovering a World War II-era submarine that’s sunk not far from New Iberia. The real trouble begins when Robicheaux’s search gets the attention of Will Buchalter, a neo-Nazi who doesn’t want the secrets buried with that sub to come to light. Buchalter begins to target Robicheaux’s wife Bootise, so Robicheaux tries to track him down. The only problem is that Buchalter is notoriously elusive. In fact, the only real clue to he has is that Buchalter is an avid collector of rare jazz recordings. So Robicheaux looks for answers among New Orleans’ group of music lovers, musical artists and jazz dealers as he searches for Buchalter. In this novel, jazz is not only part of the context for this plot thread, but it’s also, you might say, part of the key to finding Buchalter.

Walter Mosley’s Ezekiel ‘Easy’ Rawlins series takes place in 1950’s Watts, Los Angeles which, as we learn in White Butterfly, was once a well-known jazz district. Here’s how Rawlins describes the area:

 

‘The women, in the late forties and even into the early fifties, were all beautiful; young and old, in satins, silks and furs…They’d come in and listen to Coltrane, Monk, Holiday and all the rest, drinking shot for shot with their men.
It was a bold and flashy time. But by that evening [1956] all the shine had rubbed off to expose the base metal below. The sidewalks had broken, sporting hardy weeds in their cracks. Some clubs were still there but they were quieter now. The jazzmen had found new arenas.’
 

It’s in that context that Rawlins is ‘persuaded’ to go looking for a killer. Three young women Bonita Edwards, Willa Scott and Juliette LeRoi have been murdered. But since they were all Black, not much attention has been paid to their deaths. When Robin Garnett, who calls herself Cyndi Starr, is killed though, things change. She was White and the media starts to pay attention. The police know that they won’t get the truth if they try to investigate in Watts themselves. So they coerce Rawlins into doing so. He starts to ask questions and follows the girls’ trails through the seedy clubs and bars of the area. One of his stops is a visit to Lips McGee, a talented jazz trumpeter at the end of his career. During his heyday McGee was at the top of the scene, but he’s now living in Hollywood Row, a building that like its residents has seen much better times. It turns out McGee knew Robin Garnett and gives Rawlins valuable help in finding out where and how she lived. Rawlins manages to track down the person he thinks killed the women – and then discovers that someone else might have killed Robin and ‘disguised’ her murder to look like the work of the other killer.

Nevada Barr’s Burn has a strong dose of jazz. In that novel, National Park Service Ranger Anna Pigeon visits her friend Geneva, who’s now a singer at the New Orleans Jazz National Historic Park. She soon begins to suspect that Geneva’s tenant Jordan may be involved in New Orleans’ child trafficking trade. At the same time, Seattle chemist Clare Sullivan also goes to New Orleans, but for a very different reason. She is suspected of the arson murder of her husband and two children.  But she is convinced that her children are still alive and have been taken to New Orleans. She goes on a desperate search for her children at the same time as Pigeon is looking for what may lie beneath Jordan’s exterior. While jazz music isn’t the key to pulling together the threads of this story, it serves as a really effective backdrop for the novel.

Even when jazz and jazz clubs aren’t featured in a crime novel, they are still sometimes woven in more subtly. For instance fans of Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch will know that he is a jazz lover. In many of the novels featuring him, Bosch listens to all sorts of jazz. In fact you could say that jazz cements the bond between him and Sylvia Moore, whom he meets in The Black Ice. In that novel Bosch investigates the death of her husband Calexico ‘Cal.’ In the process of that investigation he has several conversations with Sylvia and they develop a relationship. And at the very end of the novel, Bosch asks her:

 

‘You like jazz? The saxophone?’…
‘Especially the solos,’ she said. ‘The ones that are lonely and sad. I love those.’

 

That’s when Bosch invites her for a New Year’s Eve date at the Catalina, where jazz great Frank Morgan will be playing. Sadly, Morgan died in 2007 and Connelly actually dedicates The Brass Verdict, which was written that year and published in 2008,in part to Morgan’s memory. And on an interesting note, we learn in that novel that Bosch’s half-brother Mickey Haller is acquainted with Morgan.

Jazz is a unique music form with a rich history. It’s got all sorts of depths, shadow and light (or maybe that’s just my view). I’m glad it’s threaded through crime fiction; they go together somehow. Or maybe that’s just my view, too…

 
 

In Memoriam…
 

 
This post is dedicated to the memory of the great Dave Brubeck, a legendary jazz pianist who passed away today at the age of 91. He will be missed.

 

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from Carole King’s Jazzman.