Puzzle Pieces in the Ground*

By now you’ve probably heard of the discovery of the bones of England’s King Richard III in Leicester. And as it happens, today (or yesterday, depending on when you read this) would have been Mary Leakey’s 100^th birthday. So it seems like the perfect time to dig up some crime fiction that has archaeology as its focus. There’s a lot of it too and that makes sense. Archaeologists have added much to our knowledge of history, they’ve answered a lot of questions and they’ve given us a fascinating perspective on ourselves as a species.

Agatha Christie fans will know that she was married to an archaeologist, so several of her stories and novels have that science as a theme. I’m only going to mention one. In Murder in Mesopotamia, Hercule Poirot is returning home after a visit to the Middle East when he is asked to break his journey and investigate a murder. Louise Leidner, wife of prominent archaeologist Eric Leidner, has been found bludgeoned in her room. As Poirot gets to know the excavation team he discovers that there were several members of the team who had a good motive for murder. Besides the mystery itself, this novel gives readers a look at the way archaeologists go about what they do – or at least the way they did so at the time the novel was written. There’s information on digging, cleaning pottery and other finds and storing antiquities.

Peter Robinson’s A Dedicated Man is the story of the murder of Harry Steadman. Steadman is an archaeologist with Leeds University when an inheritance frees him to pursue his own goals. His passion is the set of Roman ruins in Yorkshire so he and his wife Emma move to that area. He begins to work on a large excavation project which he hopes will yield some fascinating material. When Steadman is murdered, DI Alan Banks and his team investigate the death. And there are several suspects too, including those who are opposed to a potentially valuable piece of land being set aside for an archaeological dig. As the novel moves along we learn something about the politics of getting permission to dig, starting the process and dealing with the egos involved.

Kathleen O’Neal Gear and W. Michael Gear’s Anasazi Mystery trilogy features archaeologist William ‘Dusty’ Stewart. As a young man, he was mentored by Dr. Dale Robertson and has learned from his role model not just the scientific elements of archaeology but also its nuances. Stewart has a real feel for the Sonoran desert in which this trilogy takes place and a real respect for the people who live there. In The Visitant, the first in this series, he and his dig team discover the remains of eight women who seem to have been murdered. Robertson convinces him to work with Dr. Maureen Cole, a forensic anthropologist, to find out who these women were and why they were buried where they were found. Cole and Stewart have very different approaches to going about their research, but they complement each other and in the end we learn what happened to the victims. Throughout this trilogy (The Summoning God and Bone Walker are the other novels), readers get an ‘inside look’ at what it’s like to live and work on a dig site. The life is not at all romanticised but it’s easy to see its appeal.

Jessica Mann’s Tamara Hoyland is an archaeologist who, in the course of the series that features her, also becomes an agent for British Intelligence. In Funeral Sites, the first in this series, she works with Rosamund Sholto, who travels to England to attend her sister Phoebe Britton’s funeral. Sholto soon begins to believe that Phoebe’s husband Aiden had something to do with her death. He is blindly ambitious as well as shady and Sholto wouldn’t put it past him to have committed murder. But Aiden Britton is also powerful and well-connected. So Sholto soon finds herself on the run as she tries to get the evidence she needs. She’s helped in this case by Hoyland, whose lover is a member of British Intelligence. When Hoyland proves herself if I may put it that way, she too is invited to join the intelligence community. This series strikes an interesting balance as Mann explores not just Hoyland’s skills as an archaeologist but also her skills as an intelligence agent. Hoyland has a solid enough reputation to use her archaeology credentials in her travels so her profession serves as a useful cover for her ‘other life.’

And no discussion of archaeology in crime fiction would be complete without a mention of Elly Griffiths’ Ruth Galloway. Galloway is a Head of Forensic Archaeology at the University of North Norfolk. Because of her background and skills, she is often called to the scene when a skeleton is discovered. That’s how she meets DCI Harry Nelson, the father of her daughter Kate. Their relationship and her role as Kate’s mother form important threads through this series. But so does the professional work she does. In The House at Sea’s End for instance, she works to discover the identity of six people whose remains are found when a piece of rock crumbles into the sea. The victims do not seem to be English. What’s more, they seem to have been there since the time of World War II. As Galloway is working on this mystery, another death occurs, this time the death of a man who was writing a story on the victims. Now it’s clear that someone is desperate to make sure that no-one finds out the truth about those victims.

I know that Josephine Tey’s Inspector Alan Grant is not an archaeologist. But as I’ve mentioned the new discovery of King Richard III’s body, I couldn’t leave out Tey’s The Daughter of Time. In that novel Grant goes on the trail of a very cold case. He is in hospital with a broken leg when he gets interested in a portrait of King Richard III. As he muses on the portrait it occurs to him that the king may not have been the murderer he was always thought to be. So Grant takes it upon himself to find out what really happened in the case of the Princes in the Tower.

I wish I were better schooled in archaeology but I’m not. It’s fascinating to read about though. Want more? Sure ya do. Check out this interesting post about archaeology in crime fiction by Bernadette at Reactions to Reading. Her top-notch blog is more than worth a prominent place on any crime fiction fan’s blog roll anyway.

 

On Another Note…

 

 

I can’t help but think that the news about King Richard III would have really interested the late and sorely-missed Maxine Clarke. She was a real fan of The Daughter of Time too so my guess is that she’d have appreciated this interest in the king. Somehow I hope she knows…

Maxine was an ardent supporter of crime fiction and an avid reader. She was also a friend. So I’m honoured to be a part of Petrona Remembered, an exciting new blog that celebrates her passion for crime fiction. Please visit Petrona Remembered and consider contributing to it. Honestly it’s quite simple to submit your post on your favourite crime fiction and crime fiction topics. Check out the blog and help us to keep alive her love of the genre. See ya there!

 
 
 

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from Jack Johnson’s Traffic in the Sky.

How Can You Just Walk Away From Me*

Most of us would like to think we’d step in to help if someone were in danger or worse. And yet, it’s not that simple. We’ve all read of cases where bystanders do nothing to try to save someone in peril and it’s easy to say that the bystanders should have done something. In some cases it’s true that bystanders are at least partly to blame when someone is hurt or killed. In other cases though, it’s more complicated than that. It’s another example really to show that snap judgements aren’t always accurate. A quick look at crime fiction shows that that sort of thing happens in stories just as it does in real life, and the picture can be just as complex in fiction.

For instance, in Agatha Christie’s Death in the Clouds (AKA Death in the Air), French moneylender Marie Morisot is en route from Paris to London when she suddenly dies. At first, her death is put down to heart failure. But it’s not long before it’s proven that she was poisoned. Hercule Poirot, who was on the same flight, works with Chief Inspector James ‘Jimmy’ Japp and Scotland Yard authorities to find out who the killer is. They already know that the only possible suspects are the other passengers on that flight, so they begin to look into each suspect’s background. And in the end, it’s that background and history that prove to be the key to the murder. What’s interesting here is that only one suspect is guilty (I think I can say that without spoiling the story). The other suspects are innocent. And yet, they do nothing to help the victim. It’s not that they’re cold or unfeeling. Several factors are at work here. First, no-one except the killer is aware that Madame Giselle, as she is known professionally, is in danger. And when she is actually poisoned, no-one can easily hear what’s going on. Air travel at the time Christie wrote this was louder than it is now, so it was harder to hear ambient noise. And the process of killing the victim doesn’t take long. So although you might wonder why in the world nobody stepped in to help, when you think about it, it wouldn’t have been easy to do so.

There’s a sort of similarity in Josephine Tey’s The Man in the Queue (AKA Killer in the Crowd), in which Scotland Yard inspector Alan Grant is given a most unusual case. Small-time bookmaker Albert Sorrell is one of a large group of people waiting at the Woofington Theatre to see a performance of Didn’t You Know?, a very popular play. The crowd is restless and when the doors finally open, everyone surges forward to take seats. In that rush forward, Sorrell is stabbed from behind and killed. The murder happens in front of dozens of witnesses, none of whom tries to prevent the murder or grab the killer. These people aren’t all heartless folks who refuse to help. For the most part, they’re quite absorbed in what they’re doing and not even aware that Sorrell’s been stabbed until the killer’s gotten away. And they remain self-absorbed as Grant begins to investigate. A few of them are more concerned about being dragged into an investigation than they are about finding the person who killed Sorrell. But most of them simply didn’t pay attention to what was going on until the victim was already dead. The killer chose a moment when everyone was concentrating on getting into the building.

Kate Atkinson’s One Good Turn is the story of a car accident in Edinburgh and the events that led up to it and follow from it. Paul Bradley is at the wheel of his silver Peugot when he comes close to hitting a pedestrian. He brakes suddenly to prevent that from happening and is hit from behind by a blue Honda. The two drivers get out of their cars and begin to argue. The Honda driver brandishes a baseball bat and begins to attack Bradley. The accident happens on a busy street at a busy time of day, so there are plenty of witnesses to what happens. But only one person, crime writer Martin Canning, does anything about it. Canning throws his computer case at the Honda driver and knocks him down, saving Bradley’s life. The police respond to the accident and the fight and Bradley is taken to hospital. Canning goes along out of a sense of obligation and thereby gets drawn into a web of theft, fraud and murder. As the novel moves on we learn about several of the witnesses to the accident and the argument. None of them is a thoroughly bad or uncaring person, so why don’t more people do something? In some cases it’s because the Honda driver looks threatening and people don’t want to be his next victim. In a few others, it’s lack of awareness of what was really going on. It’s an interesting case too of being people being ‘frozen on the spot’ and not able to act right away.

There’s a death witnessed by several people in Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza’s Alone in a Crowd, too. Dona Laura Sales Ribeiro makes a visit to Rio de Janeiro’s Twelfth Precinct and asks to see Inspector Espinosa. She is told he’s in a meeting and can’t be disturbed, so she agrees to come back a little later. Shortly after her visit to the police station, Dona Laura falls – or is pushed – under a bus. When Espinosa learns that the woman who wanted to talk to him has been killed, it doesn’t take much time for him to conclude that she was murdered. So he and his team trace her last days and weeks to find out who would have wanted to kill an inoffensive elderly woman. Dona Laura’s death is witnessed by people waiting for the bus and by people in the bus. So why doesn’t anybody do anything to prevent it? One reason is of course the physical danger. Most of us don’t want to be killed. Another reason is that it happens too quickly to give anyone time to react. And like most of us, the witnesses are minding their own business right before Dona Laura is killed. They aren’t paying much attention to her. So they don’t notice what happens until it’s too late.

Sometimes people don’t do anything to help someone in real danger because of the risk to themselves. They are very much afraid of what will happen if they step in. For instance, in Roger Smith’s Dust Devils, former journalist Robert Dell, his wife Rosie and their two children have gone out to a restaurant to celebrate Dell’s birthday. They’re taking a drive afterwards when they’re ambushed. Their Volvo is sent over a ridge, killing Rosie and the children. Dell survives and tries to flag down help. Another family passing by has witnessed what happened, and Dell tries to wave them over for help. But they drive right past although they’ve seen him. Why?

 

‘This was South Africa where Good Samaritans were gunpointed at fake accident scenes.’

 

Dell manages to survive and the police investigate the ambush. Then Dell finds himself accused of the murders of his family members. He knows he’s been framed, but no-one will believe him. His father Bobby Goodbread, from whom he’s been estranged for years, engineers his escape from prison and the two go in search of the real killer. Throughout this novel there are other points too where witnesses see things they could have prevented – but don’t. And it’s all for a very similar reason. Getting involved like that can get you killed.

Most of us don’t want to believe that we’d turn away and do nothing if someone were in desperate need of help. And those who do step up and help are, in my mind, to be admired and respected. But sometimes the decision of whether and to what extent to get involved isn’t an easy one.

For another really interesting perspective on bystanders who witness a crime and don’t act, check out this terrific post by Les Blatt of Classic Mysteries. It deals with the 1964 real-life murder of Kitty Genovese, and the controversy her death raised. Go ‘head, check it out. Oh, and follow Les’ blog while you’re at it. It’s worthy of being on every crime fiction fan’s blog roll.

 

 
 

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from Phil Collins’ Against All Odds.

You Just Might Find You Get What You Need*

Have you ever been in a situation that started out badly, but ended up putting you right where you needed to be, either figuratively or literally (or both)? You know, like getting lost and stumbling onto a great restaurant you’d never known of before or having your flight delayed only to have one of your fellow passengers turn out to become a really valuable and helpful business contact? Part of dealing with life’s “curve balls” is having an optimistic attitude about them; part is the simple twists of luck or fate that can make things work out all for the best. I love when that happens to me in real life; it’s a tonic. It’s also interesting when it happens in crime fiction. It can be a nice “lift” in an otherwise sad story, and it can show an interesting side to a sleuth’s character (i.e. how does she or he cope with those bad situations?).

For example, in Agatha Christie’s The Mirror Crack’d From Side to Side (AKA The Mirror Crack’d), Miss Marple decides to take a walk one afternoon to look at the new council housing which has come to the village of St. Mary Meade. During her work, she stumbles and twists her ankle badly. At first it seems like a very bad situation and just a little scary for an elderly woman in a neighbourhood she doesn’t know. But Heather Badcock, who lives in the nearest house, comes to Miss Marple’s rescue and invites her inside for a cup of tea and a rest. Miss Marple turns that bad situation into a chance to indulge her interest in human nature and gets to know a bit about Heather Badcock and her husband Arthur. During that conversation, Heather tells Miss Marple something that turns out to be a clue later in the novel. It’s also through Heather that Miss Marple learns that famous actress Marina Gregg Rudd and her husband have bought Gossington Hall, the home of Colonel and Dolly Bantry (and the scene of plenty of the action in The Body in the Library). There’s to be a charity fête to celebrate the famous couple’s move to the area and all the locals attend, including Heather Badcock, who’s a particular fan of Marina Gregg Rudd. On the day of the big event Heather is poisoned by a cocktail originally meant for Marina, so at first the police assume that Marina was the intended victim. It turns out though that Heather was meant to be the victim the whole time and now Miss Marple works to find out who would have wanted to kill her and why.

Josephine Tey’s Inspector Alan Grant faces a bad situation in A Daughter of Time when he falls through a trap door while chasing after a criminal. One of his colleagues catches the criminal but Grant ends up in hospital with a broken leg. While he’s recuperating, Grant becomes obsessed with a reproduction portrait of England’s King Richard III. The portrait doesn’t strike Grant as the likeness of a horrible man, as Richard III was always made out to be. So Grant decides to find out the real truth about Richard III and the Princes in the Tower. He makes the best of that unfortunate and embarrassing situation to look into the case and comes to the conclusion that Richard III was quite likely framed, and not the evil killer he was assumed to be.

In James Lee Burke’s A Morning For Flamingos, New Iberia police officer Dave Robicheaux and his partner Lester Benoit are assigned to transport two prisoners to the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. One of them, Jimmie Lee Boggs, manages to free himself and the other prisoner and they escape, killing Benoit and leaving Robicheaux for dead. Robicheaux survives though and spends the next few months healing. He gets well physically but he’s haunted by nightmares and by Benoit’s death. Then he gets a visit from Minos Dautrieve, a friend who now works on a special Presidential Task Force on drugs that is planning a major “sting” operation. Dautrieve wants Robicheaux to go undercover as a cop who’s “gone dirty” and get close to New Orleans crime boss Tony Cardo. At first Robicheaux refuses. It’s a bad situation and he’s barely getting himself together anyway from nearly being killed. But then Dautrieve tells Robicheaux that this operation could also get him Jimmie Lee Boggs. Now Robicheaux sees that this situation could turn out after all, and agrees to the assignment. As he gets closer to Cardo though, Robicheaux realises that this “sting” operation isn’t nearly as clear-cut as it had seemed.

Kerry Greenwood’s Corinna Chapman also finds that a situation that starts out badly ends up with her being where she needs to be, both literally and figuratively. Chapman is a former accountant who came to the conclusion that she’s just not interested in accountancy any more. It has no meaning for her. Along with that, her marriage has ended. And although Chapman is refreshingly free of wallowing or ruminating about her problems, she doesn’t have a close relationship with her parents either. Finding herself at loose ends, Chapman takes an apartment in Insula, a Roman-style building in Melbourne. She opens a bakery which is what she’s always loved doing, and starts again. She and the other residents of Insula form a kind of family and they all take care of each other. Her business is successful too. Chapman’s situation, which started out badly, has put her exactly where she needs to be. And even though Chapman is hardly what you would call an enthusiastic sleuth, at least at first, her willingness to ask questions and help those who need it make her new situation that much better in the end.

Jussi Adler-Olsen’s Mercy (AKA The Keeper of Lost Causes) gives us an excellent example of a bad situation turning out to be a good thing. Copenhagen detective Carl Mørck is recovering from an injury he got in a line-of-duty shooting. He’s still dealing with the trauma of what happened, not least because one of his colleagues was killed in the incident. He’s been struggling too, so much that his colleagues find him impossible to work with any more. There’s been a lot of political and media pressure lately to solve crimes, especially “cold cases,” so Mørck is “promoted” to the head of Department Q, a newly-organised department set up to investigate “cases of special interest.” Everyone, including Mørck, knows that this is really a thinly-disguised attempt to get rid of him, but this bad situation actually places Mørck exactly where he needs to be. Once he realises that, he turns the situation to his advantage quite cleverly. He uses the leverage he has to get office space and an assistant Hafez al-Assad. And despite the fact that everyone expects him to do nothing, Mørck gets to work. The first case he and Assad investigate is the five-year-old disappearance of “rising star” politician Merete Lynggaard, who was believed drowned in a ferry accident. Mørck makes his new situation work for him and he and Assad slowly uncover the truth about Lynggaard’s disappearance.

Sometimes a situation that looks bad or at least unpleasant on the surface ends up being, in an odd way, the best thing that could have happened. It takes the right attitude and, let’s be honest, the right circumstances, but it does happen.

 

 
 

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from the Rolling Stones’ You Can’t Always Get What You Want.

It’s the Same Old Story But it’s Told a Different Way*

First, thanks to all of you for voting in my poll.  I really appreciate your interest in what I write here; it means a lot to me. You voted that you wanted to read and talk some more about some of crime fiction’s trends and possible future directions, so here goes .  I find the topic of what’s happening in crime fiction really fascinating and I’m glad you do, too. Crime fiction has evolved and continues to evolve; if it didn’t it would become far too stale to win and keep fans. Here are a few more of my ideas on some of the changes crime fiction has gone through in the last years.

 

Motives For Murder

In classic and Golden Age crime fiction, motives for murder tended to be extrinsic. Murderers in those novels kill for gain, out of fear or anger, or sometimes for revenge or love. For example, in Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson investigate two deaths. Enoch Drebber and Joseph Stangerson are American visitors to London, staying at a rooming house. Drebber is murdered and at first it seems as though his landlady’s son Arthur Charpentier is the culprit. Charpentier’s innocent, though, and the police have to look elsewhere for the criminal. Then, Stangerson is murdered. Holmes finds out who the killer is and what the motive is. In this case, it’s revenge for an old sin.

Gain is the motive for the poisoning murder of Emily Inglethorp in Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles. In that novel, the victim has a large fortune to leave and several relations who would be only too glad to have it. Hercule Poirot and Captain Hastings work together to find out which one of the people in Emily Inglethorp’s life was desperate enough to kill. Lots of other Golden Age novels and stories are also built around motives of gain, fear, revenge, or some other extrinsic motive, and even today, lots of novels feature that kind of motive. Mine do.

But in the last hundred years or so, we’ve learned quite a lot about the way the human mind works. Beginning with the work of people like Sigmund Freud, we’ve begun to learn more and more about psychology. That knowledge has found its way into crime fiction. Today’s crime fiction features quite a number of psychological motives for murder. For example, Ruth Rendell’s A Judgement in Stone begins this way:

 

“Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she could not read or write.

 

This is a novel about, among other things, the effect of “being on the outside.” It explores psychology in a way that early crime fiction didn’t. So does 13 Steps Down, another of Rendell’s standalones. Rendell’s certainly not the only one to explore psychology in her novels. Martin Edwards does the same with his Lake District series featuring DCI Hannah Scarlett and Oxford historian Daniel Kind. Many other authors do, too.

Today we even see novels that explore mental illness such as bi-polar disorder, depression and PTSD. I see this trend continuing as we learn more and more about the way the human mind works. In a way, that adds an interesting dimension to the genre. On the other hand, our interest in psychology has also been part of the motivation behind the proliferation of serial killers in today’s crime fiction. Some of them work quite well, but it’s very, very difficult to do that successfully.

 

Grittiness

Early crime fiction and a lot of Golden Age crime fiction tends to be almost clean-scrubbed in its depiction of life. Of course there are exceptions but as a rule, the detective fiction of the time is fairly sanitised. For example, in Dorothy Sayers’ Strong Poison, mystery novelist Harriet Vane is tried for the murder of her former lover Philip Boyes. She’s got a motive, too, since they’d quarreled shortly before his murder, and since she had arsenic, the murder weapon, in her possession. Lord Peter Wimsey attends the trial and, smitten by Vane, determines to clear her name. He gets his chance when the jury cannot agree on a verdict and Vane is granted a new trial. Wimsey interacts with several people in this novel as he searches for the real killer, including people who don’t live in very reputable parts of town. And yet, we don’t get dark, seamy descriptions of life there. Nor are we given a real description of what life in prison was probably like for a woman at the time this novel was written.

With the advent of the “hardboiled” genre from authors such as Raymond Chandler and later, John D. MacDonald, we begin to see grittier descriptions of neighbourhoods and people. For example, we get a very uncompromising look at Glasgow in Denise Mina’s Garnethill trilogy. We get also get a very harsh, uncompromising and gritty look at Melbourne in Peter Temple’s Jack Irish series. Those series have lots of differences, but what they have in common is that the author does not take pains to “scrub up” the setting, the people, the motive for murder, or much of anything else. We even see this grittiness in some lighter novels, although it’s less marked. In Marth Grimes’ The Anodyne Necklace, for instance, some of the action takes place in London, but it’s hardly the London that the tourists see. Inspector Richard Jury and his friend Melrose Plant visit some very seedy homes and pubs, and Grimes doesn’t mince words in describing them, although it’s also fair to say that she also doesn’t get as gritty as descriptions we see in some other series.

 

Explicitness

Along with the increased grittiness we see in more recent crime fiction, there’s also a lot more explicitness. Perhaps this trend started as readers wanted crime fiction that was more realistic.

In early crime fiction and much Golden Age crime fiction, for instance, there are essentially no mentions, other than in oblique terms, of physical intimacy. Certainly there aren’t graphic descriptions of it. There are also essentially no explicit, graphic depictions of violence, including murder. For example, in Josephine Tey’s The Man in the Queue, an unknown man is stabbed while waiting with a group of other people to see a play. We know the man’s been murdered, but we don’t get every gory detail. And in Dorothy Sayers’ Strong Poison, we know perfectly well that Harriet Vane and Philip Boyes had an intimate relationship. Yet the details of it are not described.

With the advent of noir and other “hardboiled” crime fiction, we begin to see more descriptions of violence. Certainly the violence in Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man is more explicit than it is in Tey’s work. We also begin to see more explicit description of physical intimacy in this kind of crime fiction than in earlier crime fiction.

In some of today’s crime fiction, both violence and physical intimacy are described in sometimes very graphic detail. And even crime fiction that doesn’t dwell on those scenes sometimes includes them. For instance, we see both in Deon Meyer’s Blood Safari. That particular novel works well because neither the violence nor the intimacy overtakes the plot. And that’s perhaps the key. Including explicitness doesn’t have to ruin a novel; in fact sometimes it falls out naturally from the plot. It’s when those scenes are gratuitous that they take away from a novel.

What’s ironic is that these scenes, and the treatment of formerly taboo topics such as rape, are increasingly common while at the same time, certain things such as pejorative terms and “isms,” which used to be perfectly acceptable in crime fiction, no longer are. Those developments give an interesting perspective on how our views of what is and isn’t acceptable have changed.

Will this trend towards explicitness and the treatment of very taboo topics continue? In the short run they probably will, as books with this theme sell well. I am hopeful that in the long run, it’ll be the quality of the plot and characters rather than explicitness that people will want. People may in fact become bored with books that offer nothing but relentless explicitness and those books will stop selling. In closing, let me just share what Agatha Christie had to say about this same topic back in the mid-1930’s. In Death on the Nile, we meet once-popular novelist Salome Otterbourne who’s has increasingly lost her audience, mostly because of the themes of her books. She and her daughter Rosalie are taking a cruise of the Nile when the real-life murders of fellow passenger Linette Ridgeway Doyle and other characters prove far more gripping than anything Otterbourne’s written:  Here’s what Rosalie Otterbourne says about her mother’s declining sales:

 

“People are tired of all that cheap sex stuff… ”

 

What do you think? Do you see changes in motives for murder, realism/grittiness and more explicitness? Where do you see the genre heading from here?

 

 
 

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from Bon Jovi’s The More Things Change.

Why Do We Never Get an Answer*

It seems to be human nature that we want things to make sense. We want things to fall into place. You can call it a sense of gestalt or a sense of closure; whatever it actually is, we seem to want the pieces of things to fit together. That may be a part of the reason that unsolved mysteries and murders capture people’s attention the way they do. Even if there’s an official explanation for something, if there are lingering questions, people want the answers. We certainly see that in real life; there are plenty of unsolved murders that have made the news. We also see that urge to tie up loose ends and get answers in crime fiction.

For example, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes is faced with an interesting unsolved mystery in The Musgrave Ritual. In that story, Holmes tells Watson about a very early case – a case brought to him by a university friend Reginald Musgrave. Some odd things had been happening at the Musgrave family home of Hurlstone, and Musgrave wanted answers. His butler Brunton and one of the maids, Rachel Howells, inexplicably disappeared. Nothing in the house was missing, so theft wasn’t the reason for their leaving. The only unusual thing that had happened before the disappearance was that Musgrave had caught Brunton going through some family papers. One of those papers was part of a seemingly meaningless series of questions and answers that was part of a family ritual. There wasn’t any logical explanation for what’s happened and that’s exactly why Musgrave wanted this mystery solved. As Holmes tells Watson, once he saw the questions and answers and visited Hurlstone himself, he was able to put the pieces of this mystery together.

In Agatha Christie’s Mrs. McGinty’s Dead, Hercule Poirot gets involved in an interesting case of the murder of a charwoman. On the surface of it, it looks as though the case has been solved. Mrs. McGinty’s unpleasant lodger James Bentley has been arrested for, charged with and convicted of the crime. In fact, he’s due for execution. But Superintendent Spence still has some questions; he thinks Bentley may not be guilty. So he brings the case to Poirot, since he’s now assigned to another case. Certainly neither Spence nor Poirot wants an innocent man to be executed. But it’s also those lingering questions that draw Poirot’s attention. So he travels to the village of Broadhinny, where the victim lived, to find answers. In the course of his investigation, Poirot discovers that Mrs. McGinty’s murder has to do with a set of cases from long ago. In a few of those cases, there was an official explanation for what happened, but there are still some lingering questions and doubts. That thread forms an interesting sub-plot to this novel.

That need for answers and logical explanations is also part of what motivates Josephine Tey’s Inspector Alan Grant and Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse when they get into very similar situations. In Tey’s The Daughter of Time, Grant’s in hospital because of a broken leg. In Dexter’s The Wench is Dead, Morse is in hospital because of an ulcer. In each case, the inspector gets interested in an old case. For Grant, a reproduction of a portrait of Richard III of England gets him interested in the old case of the Princes in the Tower. Was the king really the horrible murderer he was made out to be? For Morse, it’s a book about the 1859 discovery of the body of Joanna Franks in one of Oxford’s canals. Two men were found guilty of Franks’ murder and duly hung, but Morse isn’t sure they were guilty. Neither detective is assigned to look for answers, but both have lingering questions and for each detective, the official explanation leaves too many unresolved “loose ends.” That’s a big part of what drives these investigations.

Lingering questions and the need to find answers are also motivators for Stephanie Anderson in Paddy Richardson’s Hunting Blind. Anderson is a fledgling psychiatrist who’s haunted by the seventeen-year-old disappearance of her little sister Gemma. Gemma Anderson vanished one day when the Anderson family was at a school picnic at a local lake. The police made a thorough investigation and everyone searched diligently, but Gemma was never found; her body wasn’t even discovered. Finally it was decided that she must have drowned in the lake. But Stephanie Anderson has never really been satisfied with that answer. When one of her patients tells an eerily similar story of a disappearance in her own family, Anderson comes to believe that the same person might have been responsible. So she takes up the case of her sister’s disappearance, despite a lot of family pressure to just let it go.

Jussi Adler-Olsen’s Carl Mørck is also motivated by lingering questions and doubts about a case. In Mercy (AKA The Keeper of Lost Causes), Mørck is recovering from a serious wound and he’s finding it difficult to get back to work. In fact, he’s so difficult to work with that he’s moved to a new department, Department Q, that’s assigned to investigate cases of “special interest.” At first he’s perfectly content to simply do nothing. His interest gets piqued, though, when his assistant Hafez al-Assad calls his attention to the five-year-old disappearance of up-and-coming politician Merete Lynggard. The official explanation for her disappearance is that she drowned in a terrible accident during a ferry ride. But Mørck isn’t satisfied with that explanation; it leaves too many questions unanswered. So he begins to take an interest in the case and starts talking to the people involved. In fact, you could argue that it’s in part those unanswered questions and the fact that this mystery still seems unsolved that slowly pulls Mørck back into daily life.

It’s a fascinating aspect of human nature that we want things to make sense.  We want logical explanations for things, and we want answers. That desire motivates at least some of what we do in real life, and it’s a strong theme in crime fiction, too. It’s part of why sleuths investigate even when they’re not assigned to do so and have no personal reasons to ask questions. To me (so feel free to disagree if you do) it’s another example of the way crime fiction can show us what we’re like.

 

 
 

*NOTE:  The title of this post is a line from the Moody Blues’ Question.