There’s a Wall of Silence Miles Across*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 
 

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

There’s More to a Picture Than Meets the Eye*

An interesting post by crime writer and fellow blogger Elizabeth Spann Craig has got me thinking about fictional murderers. Elizabeth’s very well-taken point is that it’s important for an author to make the murderer a human being – someone who isn’t all bad. I’m sure we’ve all read books in which the killer is a ‘cardboard cut-out’ character who has no redeeming qualities and that doesn’t make for a good story. It’s much more engaging when the murderer is a normal human being – a person who kills not because it’s fun but because there seems little other choice. We may not condone what a murderer like that does, but we understand it. It’s a tricky balance to strike because at the same time, committing murder is a horrible crime and it’s important not to miminise that fact. That said though, when the murder is presented as a complete person, with good qualities as well as the fact of having killed, this invites readers to care what happens. In whodunit type novels it’s also an effective way to keep readers guessing who the killer is. If none of the characters are really all bad (or all good) it’s harder to pick out the murderer.

We’re invited to see the murderer as a full human being in Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile. Linnet Ridgeway Doyle has just gotten married, and she and her husband Simon choose a cruise of the Nile as a part of their honeymoon. On the second night of the cruise, Linnet is shot. The most obvious suspect is her former best friend Jacqueline ‘Jackie’ de Bellefort. Simon is Jacke’s former fiancé and since the marriage, Jackie’s been following the newlyweds wherever they go. She even threatened Linnet. But Jackie can’t have committed the murder and several witnesses can attest to that. Hercule Poirot is on the same cruise, as is Colonel Race; the two of them will have to look among the other passengers to find the killer. Throughout this novel we see the killer as a sympathetic character in a lot of ways. Even Poirot, who ‘does not approve of murder,’ feels sympathy for that person. In fact, during their final confrontation, the killer explains why and how everything happened. Here’s a bit of their exchange:

 

‘Don’t mind so much, Monsieur Poirot. About me, I mean. You do mind, don’t you?’
‘Yes…’’

 

That doesn’t stop Poirot from letting justice take its course, so to speak…

In Colin Dexter’s The Daughters of Cain, Inspector Morse and Sergeant Lewis investigate two murders.  First Felix McClure, former Ancient History don at Wolsey College, Oxford, is found stabbed in his home. Morse and Lewis begin work on this case by looking at the people in McClure’s life. One is his former scout Ted Brooks, whom McClurse suspected of dealing drugs on campus. Another is a prostitute Eleanor ‘Ellie’ Smith, who counted McClure among her clients. There are other possibilities too, but Brooks seems the most likely. Then, Brooks disappears and is later found murdered. Now the case takes on a whole new dimension. Morse and Lewis have to investigate all of the connections between the two victims and there are more than one. Throughout this novel, we follow the characters involved in this case and all of them are presented as complete human beings, with strong points as well as weak. That’s just as true for the murderer as it is for the other characters and when Morse figures out the truth about the case, we can see that all along, Dexter has invited readers to look at the killer as far more than a ‘cardboard cutout.’

In Catherine O’Flynn’s The News Where You Are, we meet TV presenter Frank Allcroft. He’s got a basically happy marriage, a terrific relationship with his eight-year-old daughter Mo, and a decent job. And yet he’s hit a sort of plateau in his life. As the story begins he’s trying to work out how to handle his sense of floundering, his family life and his complicated relationship with his mother, who’s in a care facility. He’s also dealing with his sense of loss over the death of Phil Smedway, his mentor and predecessor at the network. Partly as a way of dealing with that loss, Allcroft finds himself drawn to the place where Smedway died in a hit-and-run incident. The police think the death was a tragic accident, but as Allcroft reflects on it, he begins to wonder. The roadway where Smedway was hit is flat and straight, with plenty of room for even a drunken driver to veer out of the way of a pedestrian. What’s more, the weather was clear and dry when Smedway was killed. So Allcroft begins to look into the death. As his interest grows, he speaks to the various people in Smedway’s life and slowly puts together the pieces of what happened. Throughout the novel, O’Flynn ‘fleshes out’ the characters so that when we find out what really happened to Smedway, we can feel some sympathy for the person behind the death.

Certainly Oslo police inspector Konrad Sejer feels that way in Karin Fossum’s He Who Fears the Wolf. That novel begins with the murder of Halldis Horn, who’s found dead just outside her home. The victim lived in a rather remote area so there aren’t many witnesses. But the evidence seems to point to Errki Johrma, a mentally ill young man who sometimes stays in that area. Sejer wants to interview Johrma but by the time he gets to that point, Johrma has disappeared. Serer and his team try to track him down, but they are distracted by a bank robbery. The team learns that the bank robber has taken a hostage and run off, so in order to rescue the hostage, the team has to turn all attention to the robbery. In the end, these two cases turn out to be related and when we find out the truth behind what really happened to Halldis Horn, and what really happened during and right after the bank robbery, we learn that the killer is not a ‘cardboard cutout’ evil person. We may not condone what the killer did – it’s impossible to do that. But we can see that this is a person with good points who has nevertheless taken a life.

That’s also the case with Geoffrey McGeachin’s The Diggers Rest Hotel. Melbourne cop Charlie Berlin is sent to Wodonga to help the local police solve a series of robberies committed by a motorcycle gang. In the latest incident, which took place at a railroad station, the paymaster was wounded, so the police want this case solved. Berlin settles into the local hotel and begins to work on the case. Then the body of sixteen-year-old Jenny Lee is found in a local alley. Now Berlin has to divide his time between that case and the robberies. At first he thinks that the motorcycle gang that has been committing the robberies is responsible for Jenny Lee’s death, but he soon learns he’s wrong about that. When Berlin and journalist Rebecca Green discover the truth about both the robberies and Jenny Lee’s murder, we get a real sense that the ‘bad guys’ here are not all bad. In both cases it’s a matter of normal people with real personalities who have strengths as well as weaknesses – and who’ve committed crimes.

Wendy James’ Out of the Silence also tells the story of a complex – and sympathetic – person who has taken a life. In 1900, nineteen-year-old Maggie Heffernan was imprisoned for the drowning murder of her infant son. On the surface of it, it seems like a very heartless and cold thing to do, but as James shows us, Maggie Heffernan was not a heartless murderer. As we learn in this fictionalised retelling of these true events, Maggie was born and raised in rural Victoria. In the novel, she meets and falls in love with Jack Hardy, who seems to love her too. The couple secretly gets engaged and Hardy goes to New South Wales to earn his living. When Maggie learns that she’s pregnant, she writes to Jack to give him the news. He doesn’t respond but Maggie is facing the very real problem of where to go, since she knows her family won’t accept her. So she moves to Melbourne and finds a job, believing that Jack will respond to her when he can. Time goes by and Maggie gives birth to a son she names for his father. Meanwhile, she spends what time she can looking for Jack. When she finally finds him, he pretends not to know her and in fact, he says that Maggie is crazy. Completely distraught, Maggie goes looking for lodging and is turned away from six different places. That’s when the baby’s death occurs. As we learn about what happened to Maggie, it’s hard to see her as a one-sided cold-hearted murderer.

And that’s the thing about a well-told crime story. Of course murderers are guilty of taking lives, and that has to be acknowledged. But well-drawn murderers are also human beings with positive character traits and a motivation for the killing that we can believe. I know I’ve only touched on a few examples of this; which are your favourites?

 

 
 

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from Neil Young’s Hey, Hey, My, My (Into the Black).

What’s Inside Your Mind?*

As we’ve come to understand the human mind a little more over the last hundred years, we’ve learned how much of a role psychology plays in the way we interact with others, behave, and react to life. And an interesting comment exchange with Sergio at Tipping My Fedora has got me to thinking about what an important role psychologists and psychology play in crime fiction. There are sleuths who are psychologists or psychiatrists and there are many novels now where characters who’ve been through trauma get mental/emotional help and support as well as whatever other medical help they may need. And that all makes a lot of sense; as psychology and the study of the mind have matured and become an important part of medicine, it’s logical they’d work their way into crime fiction too.

We see an example of psychology in action so to speak in Agatha Christie’s Appointment With Death. In that novel, Hercule Poirot is touring the Middle East. There, he encounters the Boynton family, a group of Americans who are on holiday. Family matriarch Mrs. Boynton is a mental sadist who’s had her family cowed for years, so when she dies of what seems to be heart failure, no-one feels any great sorrow. Colonel Carbury is in charge of investigating sudden deaths in that area and at first glance, it seems an easy case. The weather was hot and Mrs. Boynton was elderly and not in good health, so it all seems clear enough. But then Dr. Theodore Gerard, who was on the same tour as the Boynton family, suggests that something more might be going on. Gerard is a well-known psychologist who has noticed the severe dysfunction in the family. He suspects that Mrs. Boynton may have been murdered, and that psychology may be the key to the mystery. Colonel Carbury decides to pay attention to what Gerard has suggested and asks Poirot to look into the matter. As he investigates, we get an interesting look at the way our understanding of psychology was progressing at that time (the novel was published in 1938). It was quite Freudian in nature and it’s interesting to see how those views affect the way Gerard sees the case.

One of the areas in which psychology has developed in the last four or five decades has been in our understanding of the way children think. Child psychology is now a respected sub-discipline of psychology, and we see how professionals in that field work in the novels of Jonathan Kellerman. One of his two main protagonists is Alex Delaware, a former child psychologist and expert at working with young people who’ve suffered trauma. In Blood Work for instance, Delaware has testified in the case of the divorce of Richard and Darlene Moody. Richard Moody has some severe emotional problems which make him unable at the moment to look after his children. So the judge orders him to get psychiatric help and medication before he is allowed even supervised visits with his children. At first Delaware thinks that will be the end of the case. But then Moody decides to take his own approach to seeing his children and starts to stalk his ex-wife and children as well as Delaware. In the meantime, a former colleague Raoul Melendez-Lynch asks Delaware’s help on another case. He has diagnosed five-year-old Heywood ‘Woody’ Swopes with a form of lymphoma, but the parents have refused the chemotherapy regimen and other recommendations he’s made. They insist that holistic medicine will cure Woody and they won’t consent to treatment. Melendez-Lynch wants Delaware to work with the family, but instead, the parents suddenly pull their son from the hospital and disappear with him. Now, Delaware sets out to track the boy down before his condition worsens. He talks to his friend LAPD cop Milo Sturgis about it but Sturgis can’t do much. No real crime has been committed. So Delaware slowly puts together the pieces himself. In this novel, we see several sides of Delaware’s practice as a psychologist. He consults, testifies, works with children and their families and interacts with his colleagues.

Sometimes even the hardiest police sleuths can be pushed ‘over the edge’ and find themselves in need of professional mental help. Today that’s not seen as a cause for shame, and it shows up in a lot of crime fiction. For instance in Michael Connelly’s The Last Coyote, Harry Bosch has hit his limit you might say for a number of good reasons, and ends up pushing his supervisor through a window. For this he’s ordered off duty for an indefinite amount of time until he gets a psychiatric evaluation and some professional help. He is assigned to work with Dr. Carmen Hinojos to get to the root of his psychological ‘baggage’ and unwillingly goes to see her. While he’s off-duty, Bosch is eager for something to occupy him so he decides to look into an old case – the murder of Marjorie Lowe, a prostitute who was killed thirty years earlier and who happens to have been Bosch’s mother. As he works through this case, he also faces some of his own childhood sadness and we see through his meetings with Hinojos how psychology professionals can help their clients face things they don’t even admit exist.

Michael Robotham’s Joe O’Loughlin is a psychiatrist who is accustomed to working with people who have all sorts of mental illnesses and difficulties. In Lost (AKA The Drowning Man), for instance, he is faced with a particularly challenging case. O’Loughlin’s friend DI Vincent Ruiz has wakened in a hospital bed, his leg badly injured form a bullet wound. He has no memory of what happened to him or how he came to be rescued. The only facts that seem to be clear are that he was pulled out of the Thames after nearly drowning, and that he had been working a ‘cold case’ when he was injured. O’Loughlin works with Ruiz to help him put the pieces of his memory together. Little by little Ruiz begins to recall what happened. Seven-year-old Mickey Carlyle disappeared three years earlier and was assumed to have been killed by known paedophile Howard Wavell. In fact, Wavell’s in prison for the crime. But Ruiz thinks Wavell might be innocent and that Mickey may still be alive. He was pursuing leads on this case when he was injured and as soon as he recovers, he takes up the investigation again. In the end, after help from O’Loughlin, Ruiz finds out the truth about Mickey Carlyle.

Psychologist Sara Struel proves to be very helpful in Karin Fossum’s He Who Fears the Wolf. Oslo police inspector Konrad Sejer and his assistant Jacob Skarre are called in to investigate the murder of Halldis Horn, who’d lived by herself since her husband’s death. One very likely suspect is Errki Johrma, a young man with mental illness who is one of Struel’s patients. The police want to interview him, since he was seen in the area on the day of the murder. But he’s disappeared. As the police look for Johrma, Sejer gets help from Struel about the kind of person the young man is, what is causing his mental illness and whether he might be the killer. One of the interesting things about her role in this novel is that it allows us to see how mental health professionals have to balance their obligation to confidentiality with their obligation to protect society from potentially dangerous people (and to assist the police). It’s a delicate balance and Fossum addresses it here.  

In Camillla Grebe and Åsa Träff’s Some Kind of Peace, we meet Stockholm psychologist Siri Bergman. She shares a practice with a few colleagues and professionally at least, things are going well. However, she is struggling personally with grief over the death of her beloved husband Stefan and is emotionally fragile. One day she receives a strange letter that makes it clear she is being stalked. Then other eerie things happen and it seems that someone is trying to discredit her. What’s worse, whoever is stalking her has access to her private patient records. Then the body of one of her patients Sara Matteus is near Bergman’s home. There’s also a suicide note that suggests Bergman is responsible for the victim’s decision to kill herself. But it’s not long before the supposed suicide is shown to be murder. Bergman is briefly suspected, but soon enough it’s clear that she has an enemy who is getting more and more dangerous. Throughout this novel, along with the mystery and the investigation, we also see the day-to-day realities of psychologists’ professional lives.

Our knowledge of human psychology has improved dramatically in the last decades so it makes sense that we’d also see psychology playing an important role in crime fiction. I’ve only had space to touch on it briefly here. Which crime-fictional psychologists have made an impression on you?

Thanks, Sergio, for the inspiration. Now, may I suggest that you include Sergio’s fantastic Tipping My Fedora as one of your next blog stops? It’s a terrific resource for classic crime film and book reviews. While you’re there, I’m sure you’ll agree it’s well worth adding to your blog roll.

 

 
 

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from Handheld’s What’s Inside.

I Have My Own Life and I Am Stronger Than You Know*

Most authors tap their own life experiences and world views when they write. And that makes sense; tapping one’s own experiences has a way of adding authenticity to a story and it allows the author to write in a more natural way. But some authors have taken interesting risks by creating protagonists who don’t have much in common with the author at all. Giving an authentic voice to that kind of character can be a real challenge. Essentially, the author has to re-think her or his assumptions about everything when writing the character. It’s not easy to do, but there are some examples of authors who’ve done it very well.

Agatha Christie created several protagonists who had different voices to her own. One of them is Captain Arthur Hastings (and I’ll bet you thought I was going to mention Hercule Poirot!). Hastings has in common with Christie an English background and wartime experience. But they are quite different, not least in terms of their genders. And it’s interesting to see how Christie goes about giving Hastings his unique voice. We see it for instance in The Murder on the Links. Hastings is returning by train to London after a business trip when he meets a mysterious young woman who is a fellow passenger. The woman, who refers to herself only as ‘Cinderella,’ turns out to play an unexpected role in the case that soon preoccupies Hastings and Poirot. Paul Renauld writes to Poirot to ask his help, and Poirot and Hastings travel to Renauld’s home in France in response. When they get there they find that Renauld has been stabbed. Poirot investigates and discovers that this stabbing is related to Renauld’s hidden past. Throughout the novel, we see Hastings’ interactions with ‘Cinderella’ as well as with other characters. His voice strikes the reader as authentic and his reactions are believable, despite the fact that he has little in common really with his creator.

The same is true of Christopher Boone, whom we meet in Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Christopher is a fifteen-year-old boy with autism. When he discovers that a neighbour’s dog has been killed, he decides to be a detective just like Sherlock Holmes and find out who is responsible. In the process of investigating, he finds out not just the truth about the dog, but also some truths about his own life. Haddon has had experience working with people with disabilities and Christopher’s character shows that knowledge. But Christopher’s voice is quite different to Haddon’s. This story is told from Christopher’s point of view, so we get an authentic look at the way a person with autism might see the world and might process a series of events. Haddon took a risk in writing Christopher’s voice and it paid off (at least in my opinion, so do feel free to differ with me if you don’t agree). The voice is very believable and that’s part of what makes this novel work.

Alan Bradley’s Flavia de Luce has a voice that’s very different to her creator’s voice. While Bradley has said that he has some things in common with his protagonist, the two really are different. Besides the obvious gender difference, Flavia is English and Bradley is Canadian. Flavia is interested in chemistry and Bradley’s professional background was in electrical engineering and technology. And of course, Flavia is a child while Bradley isn’t. And yet, Bradley has created an authentic voice for Flavia. For instance, in A Red Herring Without Mustard, she attends a church fête where there are several attractions, including fortune-telling. Flavia has her fortune told, but the experience ends in disaster. Afterwards, she feels a sense of obligation to the Gypsy who told her fortune. When the Gypsy tells her that she and her husband were once forced off the property of Flavia’s own home Buckshaw, here is Flavia’s reaction:

 

‘And that was when it came to me. Before I could change my mind I had blurted out the words.
‘You can come back to Buckshaw. Stay as long as you like. It will be all right…I promise.’
Even as I said it I knew there would be a great flaming row with Father, but somehow that didn’t matter.’

 

In this we see a very eleven-year-old response. Flavia is bright and observant, but like any eleven-year-old, she hasn’t thought out the consequences of what she’s offering. And when the Gypsy is later found murdered, she uses that same enthusiasm to find out who the killer is.

Karin Fossum and her sleuth, Oslo police inspector Konrad Sejer, both live and work in Norway. But beyond that, they are quite different. Fossum is a poet as well as a novelist, but she has had other work experience too, including hospital work and working as a home aid caregiver. Her creation though is a cop. That’s been his life’s work. In other ways too, they are different. They have different perceptions of life just by dint of their being different sexes. And yet Sejer has a distinctive voice that doesn’t seem forced at all. He is a widower whose process of grieving his wife Elise seems natural, as does his relationship with psychiatrist Sara Struel, which begins in He Who Fears the Wolf and evolves as a story arc. He is believable as a middle-aged male cop and doesn’t strike the reader (well, at least this reader) as a female civilian’s perception of what a male cop would be like.

Shona MacLean (who now writes her series as S.G. MacLean) has created a sleuth who’s quite different to her in her Alexander Seaton series. Like MacLean, Seaton is Scottish, but there the resemblance ends. MacLean studied history; Seaton studied religion. MacLean lives in 21^st Century Scotland, but Seaton lives in the Scotland of the 17^th Century. And of course, there’s the gender difference. To MacLean’s credit though, Seaton’s voice is quite authentic. He inhabits his world just as naturally as we inhabit ours, and he sees the world in a believable way. His voice is very real too as he meets, gets to know, woos and marries Sarah Forbes.

And then there’s Adrian Hyland’s Emily Tempest. She is very different to her creator, being not just female but half-Aborigine. What’s more, her home is Australia’s Northern Territories, a very different environment to Hyland’s own Melbourne. He began by writing,

 

‘…a young whitefella who, whatever I did to him, always seemed to be too much like me’

 

Feedback from a manuscript assessment place caused him to re-think his story:

 

‘So I pulled the whitefella out altogether and Emily stepped forward. That forced me into a plot and some structure.’

 

Hyland took a risk in creating Emily, but fans of this series (of whom I am one) can tell you that Emily’s character is rich, authentic and certainly has a distinctive voice.

And that’s the thing about talented authors. They can create characters who have completely different voices and make those characters just as real as they themselves are. What are your thoughts on this? If you’re writer, have you written characters who have completely different voices to your own?

 

 
 

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from Stevie Nicks’ Leather and Lace.

It’s Funny How We Feel So Much But We Cannot Say a Word*

One of the more difficult things for an author to do is to show not tell the way people grieve. And of course that’s particularly relevant to crime fiction because in most crime fiction people are murdered. Other people mourn their loss. But the thing is, everyone grieves differently, so one thing an author has to do is decide how a particular character will grieve. What’s more, grief is a tricky thing to depict without being melodramatic about it. And yet it can be done effectively and when it is, the depiction of grief can add depth to a character and realism to a novel.

Agatha Christie offers an interesting portrait of grief in The Hollow (AKA Murder After Hours). In that novel, Harley Street specialist Dr. John Christow and his wife Gerda are invited to spend a weekend at the country home of Sir Henry and Lady Lucy Angkatell. Also among the house party are Midge Hardcastle, David Angkatell, Edward Angkatell and Henrietta Savernake, all family relations. Hercule Poirot has taken a getaway cottage not far from Angkatell’s home and is invited for lunch on the Sunday. When he arrives, he sees what he first thinks is a tableau set up for his ‘enjoyment:’ John Christow is lying dead by the pool and the killer is standing near the body, holding the gun. Poirot is disappointed and annoyed at this ‘humour’ until he sees that the scene is quite real. He works with Inspector Grange and his team to find out who shot Christow and why. Henrietta Savernake has a special reason to grieve Christow’s passing, but she doesn’t sit and cry into a handkerchief. She is a sculptor and it’s through her art that she expresses herself:

 

‘‘I cannot grieve for my dead. Instead, I must take my grief and make it into a figure of alabaster.’
Exhibit No. 58. ‘Grief.’ Alabaster. Miss Henrietta Savernake…
She said under her breath:
‘John, forgive me, forgive me, for what I can’t help doing.’’

 

This depiction is (at least in my opinion) more powerful than a lot of description of tears would be.

In Karin Fossum’s Don’t Look Back, Oslo police inspector Konrad Sejer and his assistant Jacob Skarre investigate the murder of fifteen-year-old Annie Holland. Her body is found by a local tarn and the evidence shows that she was not raped before being killed. What’s more, there is convincing evidence that she probably knew and trusted her killer. So the police concentrate their efforts on the people in Annie’s life. Her parents, her half-sister’s father, her boyfriend and the people she knew at school all fall ‘under the microscope.’ So do the other residents in the village, since she was a popular babysitter and knew just about everyone in town. Slowly, Sejer and Skarre find out what exactly led to Annie’s murder. In the meantime, her father Eddie has to deal with his intense grief over the loss of his daughter. Fossum paints an especially haunting portrait of this in one scene when Eddie visits a crematorium to find out what arrangements can be made for Annie after her funeral. He has a very moving discussion with the superintendent of the facility, and Fossum uses that to show the depth of Eddie’s grief without getting particularly wordy about it.

Stan Jones’ White Sky, Black Ice introduces readers to Alaska State Trooper Nathan Active. Active is Inupiat, but was raised by a white adoptive family in Anchorage so as this novel begins, he’s just getting used to his people’s ways after being re-assigned to Chukchi. Shortly after he begins his duties, the body of George Clinton is found outside a local bar. At first it looks as though he committed suicide. But some little hints suggest otherwise, and city police chief Jim Silver points them out to Active. So Active begins to look into the matter a little more deeply. One of the first visits he pays is to George’s parents. There’s a haunting scene during that visit when George’s father Daniel tells Active a little about his son and answers some of Active’s questions. What’s particularly effective about this scene is that there are no histrionics:

 

‘Clinton stopped talking and picked at the edges of a triangular chip in the Formica…’I never think he use that old Winchester for…for this.’

Clinton stopped talking again and Active saw that now there were tears on his cheeks. Active closed his notebook and left.’

 

Silver’s idea that George Clinton might have been murdered proves to be correct and in the end Active ties that death to another suspicious death.

In Gail Bowen’s A Colder Kind of Death, political science expert and academic Joanne Kilbourn is shocked to hear that Kevin Tarpley, who was convicted of murdering Kilbourn’s husband Ian, has himself been killed. It seems he was in the prison yard exercising when he was murdered. Then, Tarpley’s wife Maureen, who was with him when Ian Kilbourn was killed, is also murdered. Kilbourn of course has a strong motive and comes in for her share of suspicion. So, partly for this reason but as much as anything to deal with her grief, Kilbourn decides to look into the murders. To do that she’ll need to go back to the time when her husband was murdered and that’s of course very difficult for her. Here’s a snippet of a scene during which she’s looking at TV footage of Kevin Tarpley’s trial:

 

‘Spectators hurried into the courthouse. I recognized some of them…Then Howard Dowhanuik with his arm protectively draped around the shoulders of the woman beside him. As they started up the steps, the woman shook off his arm and turned to face the camera. Her mouth was slack and her eyes were as blank as a newborn’s. I shuddered. The woman with the unseeing eyes was me. Angus [Kilbourn’s son] was right. I had been a zombie.’

 

Kilbourn doesn’t handle her grief through melodramatic displays, nor does Bowen depict it that way. That restraint makes the grief that much more powerful.

Sometimes, grief makes for bitter anger, and we see that in crime fiction too. For instance, in Paddy Richardson’s Traces of Red, TV journalist Rebecca Thorne hears of a story that could cement her position at the top of New Zealand’s TV journalism hierarchy. Connor Bligh has been in prison for several years for the murder of his sister Angela Dickson, her husband Rowan and their son Sam. Only their then-thirteen-year-old daughter Katy survived, because she wasn’t home at the time of the killings. Everyone’s always assumed that Bligh is guilty but little hints suggest that he may be innocent. If he is, then this is a major story. So Thorne begins to investigate. As she does so, she gets very much closer to the story than is wise. She also re-opens Katy’s old wounds and she finds out just how bitter and angry Katy really is. At one point, Katy tells her exactly what she thinks of the case being raked up again:

 

‘What about Mum? What about Dad and Sam? You spread all this bull**** around and they can’t even defend themselves. You’d do anything, wouldn’t you? You’d make up anything just to get your name up there.’

 

In the end, we find out the truth about the murders and we see just how lost, alone and angry Katy’s grief has made her.

It isn’t easy to depict the way people feel when they cope with loss. It’s a tricky balance and isn’t always successful. But when it is, it can be haunting and very effective.

 

 
 

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from Sarah McLachlan’s I Will Remember You.