I’m Not the Same As I Used to Be*

An interesting comment exchange has got me thinking about the way our reading tastes and the novels and series that appeal to us change over the years. In part of course our tastes change as we mature and develop. Our tastes also change as we read more and expose ourselves to different sub-genres and authors. Want to see how you’ve changed as a reader? Pick up a book you first read at least ten years ago. Do you still feel the same way about it? Are there any authors whose work you used to love but have now drifted away from reading? I’m not talking here about authors who’ve changed their style; we’ve all had the experience of reading a novel by an author who’s long since ceased to innovate or who’s changed her or his style. I’m really talking about an author whose work you feel differently about because you’ve changed. There may even be authors whose work you used to dislike but have come to really like.

Some people for instance started out by reading spy thrillers, and there’ve been a lot to love over the decades. For instance, Frederick Forsyth’s The Odessa File is the story of crime reporter Peter Miller, who happens to follow an ambulance to the scene of the death of Holocaust survivor Solomon Tauber, who’s committed suicide. Through Tauber’s diary entries and some of his own investigation Miller learns of an ultra-secret worldwide organization to re-establish the Nazis as a world power.

There’s also the work of John le Carré, like The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. In that novel, jaded and wearied British spy Alec Leamas is the leader of British Intelligence in East Berlin. When several of his agents are killed on his watch, it’s obvious that Leamas isn’t doing his job very well any more. Then, his best agent Karl Riemeck is murdered. Leamas is called back to London where he’s persuaded to take on just one more assignment: the murder of Hans Dieter Mundt, who organised the killings of Leamas’ agents.

Spy thrillers like these and the work or authors such as Robert Ludlum are past-paced and “high-octane” so it’s no wonder that they’ve sparked many people’s interest in crime fiction. Were spy thrillers your first introduction to crime fiction? Do you still love them as much as you did? Did you move on to more modern thriller authors such as Daniel Silva? Do you branch out into psychological thrillers such as those by Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine?

Other people (and I am one of them) started out with classic or Golden Age crime fiction. For instance, one of the first crime fiction novels I read was Agatha Christie’s Mrs. McGinty’s Dead. That’s the story of the murder of a seemingly inoffensive charwoman, allegedly by her lodger James Bentley. Superintendent Spence begins to believe that perhaps Bentley isn’t guilty, and asks Hercule Poirot to investigate. Poirot travels to the village of Broadhinny to look into the matter and finds that several of the villagers are keeping secrets and that Mrs. McGinty had found out more than it was safe for her to know about one of them.

If you started out with the classics, perhaps you began with Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes novels or stories. The Adventure of the Red-Headed League, for instance is the story of pawnbroker Jabez Wilson, who gets hired for a job that seems too good to be true: he’ll be paid to copy the Encyclopaedia Britannica. When his “dream job” disappears, Wilson visits Holmes to ask his help in unravelling the mystery.

If you started with the classics or Golden Age novels, do you still love them as much as you did? Do you still read Rex Stout, Margery Allingham, Patricia Wentworth or Ellery Queen as much as ever? Do you also read more modern authors such as Colin Dexter, Peter Lovesey or P.D. James who keep some of the classic traditions?

Lots of people began their mystery reading with books in the British or U.S. tradition, whatever the sub-genre, and have discovered translated crime fiction. For example, when Maj Sjöwall and  Per Wahlöö’s Martin Beck series was first translated in the mid-1960’s, many English-speaking crime fiction fans who’d been reading authors like Patricia Highsmith, Dick Francis or Ed McBain had a whole new series of novels to enjoy. The first in the Martin Beck series, Roseanna, is the story of the discovery of the body of an unknown woman who was murdered during a holiday cruise. She turns out to be twenty-seven-year-old Roseanna McGraw, an American who was on a tour of Sweden when she was murdered. Martin Beck and his team may not have had today’s technology, but they doggedly pursue the case and in the end, they find out who the murderer is.

There have been many other translated authors since then of course, from all over the world. Have you moved from work only in your own language to translated work? Have your feelings about “homegrown” crime fiction changed as you’ve read novels originally written in other languages?

There are also readers who began by reading cosy mysteries. If you started out with cosies, perhaps you began with LIlian Jackson Braun’s Cat Who… series featuring newspaper columnist James “Qwill” Qwilleran. Much of that series takes place in Moose County, “400 miles north of nowhere” and follows the lives of Qwill, his two seal-point Siamese cats and the various “regulars” who live in the small town of Pickax. This was a very popular and enduring series actually; it lasted from 1966 until Braun’s death in 2011 (OK, there was an 18-year break between 1968 and 1986, but still!).

If your first mystery novels were cosies you might have begun with something like Joanne Fluke’s Hannah Swensen mysteries. Swensen is a former aspiring teacher of literature who returns to her Lake Eden, Minnesota home town after the death of her father and opens a bake shop The Cookie Jar. Fans of this series have followed the lives of Swensen, her love interests Mike and Norman, and the other residents of Lake Eden for thirteen years as I write this. These mysteries have the small-town setting, the amateur sleuth, the theme and the recipes that have become features of several cosy series over the years, so it’s easy to see why cosy fans would have started here.

If you’ve stayed with cosies, are you a fan of other cosy series such as M.C. Beaton’s Hamisch Macbeth series or Elizabeth Spann Craig’s Memphis Barbecue series? Perhaps you’ve branched out to “cosies with an edge” such as Kerry Greenwood’s Corinna Chapman series. Or maybe you’ve moved on to something completely different.

Sometimes it’s really interesting to look back at the way your crime fiction tastes have changed. If you’re a writer, it’s also interesting to think about theyou’re your changing tastes in crime fiction affect your writing. So thanks, Kathy D., for the food for thought.

 
 
 

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from Elton John’s My Elusive Drug.

I Remember Watchin’ You Once Upon a Time*

An excellent book review from Maxine at Petrona (a superb blog you really should follow closely if you don’t already) has got me thinking about what happens in crime fiction when characters from one novel come back in another. I’m not talking here of protagonists or “regulars” in a series. Rather, I mean individuals who are involved in a particular case who come back in a later novel. When it’s done well, that plot point can give readers a sense of closure; we learn what ended up happening to a character and that can be interesting. It also gives readers a sense of the continuity of a series and that can make the series that much more believable.

For example, in Agatha Christie’s Mrs. McGinty’s Dead, Hercule Poirot travels to the village of Broadhinny when Superintendent Spence asks him to investigate the murder of a charwoman. The evidence in the murder pointed to her unpleasant lodger James Bentley, but Spence has begun to believe that Bentley may be innocent. Poirot agrees to see what he can do and goes to Broadhinny where the murder took place. During his stay there, he lodges at Long Meadows, a Guest House run by Maureen and Johnnie Summerhayes. They’re friendly and interesting hosts, but ill-equipped and badly unprepared to run a Guest House. Among the many things Poirot has to cope with at the Summerhayes’ establishment is some of the worst cooking he’s ever encountered. For Poirot this is a true sacrifice. But he survives his stay and finds out who the killer of Mrs. McGinty really is. A few years later in Cat Among the Pigeons, Poirot solves the murder of Grace Springer, games mistress at Meadowbank, an exclusive girls’ school. Springer’s death turns out to be connected to a revolution in the Middle East, a cache of stolen jewels and a kidnapping. One of the pupils at the school is Julia Upjohn. She slowly puts some of the pieces of the puzzle together and decides to visit Poirot and ask him to investigate. She knows of Poirot because her mother is a great friend of Maureen Summerhayes During Julia’s first conversation with Poirot we learn that he did finally teach Maureen how to properly cook at least one thing  – an omelette.

In Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö’s The Laughing Policeman, Martin Beck and his team have their hands full trying to protect the American embassy in Stockholm when a demonstration by a group of anti-war protestors gets ugly. Everyone’s nerves are on edge and the police force is spread too thin. Then to make matters worse, a gunman kills eight people on a bus. One of the victims is Beck’s youngest colleague Ǻke Stenström. At first the murders look like the work of a crazed maniac. But bit by bit, Beck and his team learn that things aren’t as simple as that. At the time of his murder Stenström was working on the “cold case” of Teresa Camarão, a Portuguese woman who’d become a prostitute. That investigation plus the fact that not everyone on the bus was identified put the police on the right track and help them solve this case. One of the characters in this novel is Stenström’s fiancée Åsa Torell. She is grief-stricken by her fiancé’s murder, but that doesn’t mean she’s incapable of helping the police. She’s got the very strong feeling that something isn’t right about this case – that Stenström wasn’t just killed randomly. Her suspicions help fuel the investigation. Torell deals with her grief by becoming a police officer herself, and we see her again in other Martin Beck novels; in fact they have a very brief relationship. Several years later in The Terrorists, the Stenström case comes back to haunt both her and Beck. This time, the team has been assigned to protect a controversial American senator who’s planning a visit to Stockholm. At the same time, the team is investigating the murder of pornographic film-maker Walter Petrus (Valter Pettersson). They’re also involved in the trial of Rebecka Lind, who’s been accused of bank robbery – a robbery she says she didn’t commit. I don’t want to give away spoilers so I’ll just say that this book contains a clear connection to The Laughing Policeman.

Michael Connelly introduces us to L.A.P.D. cop Harry Bosch in The Black Echo. Bosch has recently been demoted from the elite Robbery/Homicide Division to the Hollywood Homicide division because of a shooting incident. He’d been after a serial killer nicknamed The Dollmaker and got important evidence from a prostitute Dixie McCall who’d escaped from that killer. Dixie’s evidence led Bosch to the man’s apartment where he killed The Dollmaker with what he feels was a clean shot. But because he didn’t have a warrant, and because the suspect didn’t turn out to have a weapon at hand, Bosch was investigated by the Internal Affairs Division (IAD) and demoted. The main focus of The Black Echo is the investigation of the murder of Billy Meadows, whose body is found stuffed into a drainpipe. At first that death looks like a junkie’s overdose, but Bosch and his partner Jerry Edgar find that it goes a lot deeper than that; it’s connected to a major bank robbery. The Dollmaker story is woven throughout this novel though and comes back later in The Concrete Blonde. In that novel, Bosch faces a major civil suit by the family of Norman Church, the man Bosch shot in the Dollmaker case. Church’s family claims that Bosch shot the wrong man so now Bosch has to defend his actions on that day. To make matters worse, a dead woman is found with all of the hallmarks of The Dollmaker’s distinctive “signature.” So Bosch also has to face the possibility that he could have been very, very wrong about Norman Church.

In The Cat Who Turned On and Off, Lillian Jackson Braun’s Jim “Qwill” Qwilleran is a features reporter for a big-city newspaper, the Daily Fluxion. He hears about a fascinating part of the city called Junktown and decides to write a feature about it. It’s full of unusual craft shops, antique shops and art galleries and Qwill becomes fascinated with the place. He soon learns that a few months earlier, Andrew “Andy” Glanz, a respected antique dealer and authority, was killed in what looked at the time like a tragic fall. But Qwill soon begins to wonder whether Glanz was murdered. So in the guise of writing a tribute feature about Glanz, he looks into the case. In the end, he’s able to prove that Glanz was murdered and finds out who the killer was. One of the antique dealers Qwill meets in The Cat Who Turned on and Off  is Amberina, one of three sisters who own and run an antique shop in Junktown. It’s not a spoiler to say that Amberina isn’t the killer; she and her sisters do figure into the story though.  A few years later, Qwill moves the small town of Pickax, “four hundred miles north of nowhere.” He’s settled into his life there as a columnist when he gets a call from Amberina. She tells him that the Casablanca, a beloved but decrepit old apartment building in Junktown, will soon be sold to developers unless it can be saved. She invites Qwilleran to spend some time at the Casablanca, hoping that he’ll help publicise the effort to save the building. The penthouse that Qwill takes belonged to artist Dianne Bessinger, who headed the committee to save the Casablanca. Bessinger was recently murdered and Qwill soon suspects that someone in the building was responsible. He discovers that some prominent people in the area wanted Bessinger dead, and slowly finds the connection between her death and the movement to sell the Casablanca.

There are a lot of other novels too – far more than there is space for here – where characters and cases from earlier novels come back for what you might call resolution in later novels. In fact, I’ll bet you could think of many more than I could. It’s got to be done carefully, so as not to bore regular readers nor exclude new readers (or give away spoilers). But when it is done well, this strategy can tie a series together, offer closure and “flesh out” characters. Do you find that this plot theme works for you? If you’re a writer, do any of your characters from one novel re-appear in a later one?

 

 
 

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from the Foo Fighers’ Resolve.

Soldiers Are Cutting Us Down*

If you’ve ever been involved in a protest against something, then you know that they are sometimes very intense and emotional experiences. Protests have led to important positive changes in society. They’ve also led to looting and killing. Some protests have ended tragically when they were brutally suppressed, too. There is often strong emotion and passion on both sides of a protest, so it’s not surprising that protests turn up in a lot of crime fiction.

Agatha Christie’s novels don’t in general focus on organised protests and the passion that can engender them. But there is a hint of the issue in One, Two, Buckle My Shoe (AKA The Patriotic Murders and An Overdose of Death). In that novel we meet successful and powerful banker Alistair Blunt. He gets drawn into a murder investigation when his dentist Henry Morley is shot in his surgery. Since Blunt is a powerful man with enemies, it’s thought that he was the intended victim. In fact, one of the suspects in Morley’s murder is Howard Raikes, an activist in a group that’s dedicated to overthrowing the current banking and government systems. Things look even worse for Raikes a little later in the novel when a friend of his, another activist, shoots at Blunt. But Poirot begins to believe that Morley’s death may not have been part of an attack on Blunt, so he looks more closely in the matter. In the end, Poirot finds out who shot Morley and how it is related to two other deaths that occur in the novel.

Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahllöö’s The Laughing Policeman starts with a violent anti-Vietnam protest at the American Embassy in Stockholm. There’s been a campaign of letters, anti-war demonstrations and more, so Martin Beck and his team have been kept busy trying to protect the embassy and its staff. Things get even worse when the protests begin to turn ugly. The police do their best to keep the demonstrators back, while the demonstrators are just as determined to have their way. It’s just when the police are proverbially stretched to the thinnest that there’s a tragedy on a Stockholm bus. Officers Kant and Kristiansson find out that a gunman has shot eight people on the bus, including Åke Stenström, a police officer. Beck and his team begin to investigate and soon discover that the gunman “hid” Åke Stenström’s death among those of the other passengers. Later they learn that the police officer’s death is related to a “cold case” he was investigating, the murder of Teresa Camarão, a “well born” Portuguese woman who’d become a prostitute. The protest here isn’t the main plot of the story, but it adds a strong layer of tension and a solid sense of atmosphere to the novel.

In John Alexander Graham’s The Involvement of Arnold Wechsler, Hewes College President Winthrop Dohrn invites Classics Professor Arnold Wechsler to his office for a private visit. Wechsler doesn’t want to go; he prefers to keep his head low, as the saying goes, and do his job. But such an invitation is really a “command performance,” so he accepts it. It turns out that Dohrn has an unusual request; he’s gotten word that Wechsler’s brother David, who was a student at Hewes until he dropped out, has returned to the area. David Wechsler may be involved in subversive activities and Dohrn wants to keep the peace on his campus. So he asks Wechsler to contact his brother and find out the truth about David’s activities. Wechsler is estranged from his brother so he has no interest in getting involved, but he wants to keep his job so he reluctantly agrees. It’s not long before Wechsler himself begins to wonder whether Dohrn might be right. David is a co-leader of The Student Liberation Committee (SLA), a radical student protest group that’s made appearances on campus. Then, some drugs are stolen from a local hospital. That’s followed by a kidnapping and later by the bombing of the Dohrn home and the resultant death of Dohrn himself. If David is to be cleared of suspicion of these events, he and his brother will have to work together to find out who has manipulated the protest group to achieve a fatal set of goals.

We also see the manipulation of a protest group in Peter Robinson’s A Necessary End. DCI Alan Banks is none too happy when an anti-nuclear group plans a protest in Eastvale. Even the most peaceful protest causes a lot of extra work and stress and this one doesn’t seem as though it’s going to be peaceful. Sure enough, the protest goes off as planned and it does indeed turn very ugly. Locals, demonstrators and the police all get involved in the mêlée, and when the proverbial dust clears, Banks learns that PC Edwin Gill has been stabbed during the arrests of some of the demonstrators. The first suspects are members of the protest group, and that’s the angle that Banks’ boss Richard “Dirty Dick” Burgess wants Banks to take. But Banks isn’t sure it’s that simple. It soon comes out that Gill was a thug who abused his authority more than once. So there are several locals who could have had a good motive to kill him. And Burgess seems to have an obsession with “getting” the protest group that Banks can’t understand. So he works his own way and in end, finds out who killed Gill and why.

And then there’s Ruth Rendell’s Road Rage. That’s the story of a protest against the construction of a new roadway around Kingsmarkham. The plan is that part of the road will pass through Framhurst Great Wood near the town, and that’s part of what’s got people upset about it. Even Inspector Reg Wexford is unhappy at the destruction of the forest, and his wife Dora is part of a group of locals that have protested to the local authorities against the planned construction. Several protest groups come into town to try to stop the construction, and soon, things turn from bad to worse. One of the groups takes a group of hostages, among them Dora Wexford. Then there’s a murder. Now Wexford and his team have to try to free the hostages, solve the murder and do their best to prevent any more deaths. In the end, we see how this situation – a protest against road construction – is manipulated to someone’s advantage.

Donna Leon’s Through a Glass Darkly begins with a protest against Venice-area glass-blowing factories. One of the leading demonstrators is Marco Ribetti, an environmental activist and a friend of Ispettore Lorenzo Vianello. Ribetti is arrested and asks Vianello for help, and Vianello agrees. He and Commissario Guido Brunetti get Ribetti freed but soon find themselves investigating a murder in the same area. Ribetti’s father-in-law Giovanni de Cal owns one of the glass-blowing factories, many of which have been suspected of illegally disposing of toxic waste. When de Cal’s night watchman Giorgio Tassini is killed after his own protests against the dumping, de Cal becomes a suspect.

Protests and demonstrations have been used for a long time to express public opinion and to try to make change. Lots of times they are peaceful, but sometimes they erupt into violence and worse. There is a delicate balance between the right to express one’s views and petition for change, and the interest in keeping order and preventing looting. Both sides in these events need to stay focused and avoid letting tempers rule. But that doesn’t always happen…

 

 

In Memoriam…

 

This post is dedicated to the memories of Jeffrey Miller, Allison Krause, William Schroeder and Sandra Scheuer, who were shot on 4 May 1970 during a protest against the Vietnam War at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio.

 

 
 

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from Crosby Stills, Nash & Young’s Ohio.

I Got a Nikon Camera, I Love to Take a Photograph*

Photographs are often a really important part of people’s memories. Even those who aren’t particularly visually oriented have photographs of family, friends and sometimes work colleagues. ‘Photos help us think of people and preserve our memories in ways that just thoughts don’t always accomplish. Look around your home and you’ll see what I mean. Photography is also a beautiful art form, and lot of people keep ‘photos or get prints of them for their artistic appeal. Photographs can communicate, too; there’s a reason for that old saying that a picture is worth a thousand words. And for the fictional or real detective, photographs can be important clues, just because they can be so full of information and meaning.

For instance, in Agatha Christie’s Mrs. McGinty’s Dead, Superintendent Spence asks Hercule Poirot to revisit a case that seems as good as closed. A charwoman was murdered in her home and all of the evidence points to her lodger James Bentley. In fact it was Spence himself who collected that evidence. But he’s begun to think that perhaps James Bentley was innocent. Spence is now assigned to another case so he asks Poirot to investigate. Poirot agrees and travels to the village of Broadhinny where the murder took place. One of the first real clues in the case comes when Poirot learns that shortly before Mrs. McGinty’s death, The Sunday Companion, a newspaper she read, ran a story on women connected with famous crimes. The story included ‘photos of the women, and it’s not long before Poirot discovers that those ‘photos are an important clue in this mystery. In the end, that’s one way in which he connects the real killer with the crime.

Photographs are also essential in Maj Sjøwall and Per Wahløø’s Roseanna. In that novel, Stockholm detective Martin Beck and his team are called in when the body of an unidentified young woman is found in Lake Vättern. No-one reported the death and no-one has reported a missing person either. So at first there’s very little the police can use. But the word does get around and finally the woman is identified as twenty-seven-year-old Roseanna McGraw, an American who was taking a tour of Sweden when she was killed. The question is of course who killed the victim and why. A close examination of her background doesn’t get the team very far although we do learn that she was a “free spirit” who enjoyed experimenting with life. Beck and the team learn that she was probably killed during a cruise she was taking, so they begin to focus on everyone who was also on that cruise. That in itself is a very difficult task, and the team gets nearly no-where at first. Then there’s a major break. One of the other passengers has kept photographs of the cruise. When Beck sees them it gives him a very important idea that turns out to be key to finding out who killed Roseanna McGraw.

In Peter Temple’s Bad Debts, sometime-attorney and private investigator Jack Irish gets a telephone message from a former client Danny McKillop. A few years earlier, Irish had unsuccessfully defended McKillop in a drink driving case, and McKillop’s just recently gotten out of prison. Irish doesn’t return the call at first and McKillop leaves another more urgent message. McKillop is afraid for his life and pleads with Irish to meet with him. By the time Irish gets that message though, it’s too late. McKillop’s been murdered. Irish feels guilty enough about the poor job he did of representing McKillop in the first place; at the time he was coping with his wife’s murder by staying drunk most of the time. And the fact that he didn’t respond to McKillop’s message in time to save him makes Irish feel even guiltier. So, he begins to ask questions about who would have killed Danny McKillop and why. The truth about McKillop’s murder lies in the drink driving incident that sent him to prison in the first place. The victim in that incident was political activist Anne Jeppeson, who was managing a protest against the closing of a public housing estate in Melbourne’s Yarrabank section. Further digging into the case leads Irish to suspect that McKillop was framed and someone else actually killed Jeppeson. When Irish begins to look into Jeppeson’s life and activities he finds that more than one person had a reason to want her dead. In the end, it’s a set of photographs that clearly and unmistakeably connects Jeppeson’s real murderer (and Danny McKillop’s too) to the crimes.

Megan Abbott’s Die a Little is the story of Pasadena schoolteacher Lora King. When her brother Bill falls in love with former Hollywood dressmaker Alice Steele, Lora finds the situation unsettling. At first she puts her feelings down to jealousy since she and her brother have always been very close. And after all, Alice isn’t a rude malicious person. But as time goes by, Lora begins to have her doubts about her new sister-in-law. For one thing, little clues tell Lora that Alice isn’t honest about her past. For another, Alice seems to have a secret life that Lora finds at once disturbing and appealing. One of Alice’s “old friends” is press agent Mike Standish, a somewhat enigmatic character in his own right. Lora finds him fascinating, though and they begin to date. One day she finds among Mike’s things a very compromising photograph of Alice and Lois Slattery, another of Alice’s friends. The ‘photo makes it clear that there’s a lot about Alice (and Mike) that Lora doesn’t know and that Bill doesn’t know. There’s a fascinating conflict here as Lora is at the same time repelled by and drawn to Alice’s world. Then there’s a death that turns out to be murder. Lora doesn’t know if Alice is involved but she comes to believe that Alice at the very least knows more about it than she is saying. If Alice is a murderer then Bill could be at risk. That’s what Lora tells herself as she begins to look into the death to find out who in Alice’s world could be a murderer.

A photograph turns out to be a very important piece of evidence in Arnaldur Indriðason’s Jar City. Inspector Erlendur and his team are called to the scene when the body of an elderly man named Holberg is discovered by a neighbour. At first it looks as though it might be a case of a burglary gone wrong. But two pieces of evidence suggest that’s not the case. One is a cryptic photograph.  As Erlendur and the team dig into the case further, they find out that Holberg had been accused of rape, although he was never arrested or convicted. And it’s quite possible that he raped more than one woman. The team looks into these accusations and rumours and finds that Holberg’s life was a lot darker than it seemed on the surface. When they discover the truth about Holberg’s life, they also learn the meaning of the photograph and how it connects Holberg with his killer.

There are other novels, too, in which a photograph provides an important clue. There are even sleuths such as Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander and Michael Palmer’s Thea Sperelakis who have what’s sometimes called photographic memories, so that they can remember what they’ve seen as well as if they’d taken a ‘photo of it. Even for sleuths who can’t do that, there’s real value sometimes in ‘photos. They tell a lot about a person, they can provide important clues and they give a lot of information at once.

 

 
 

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from Paul Simon’s Kodachrome.

Oh and There We Were All in One Place, A Generation Lost in Space*

Part of crime fiction’s appeal is that it shows us who we are as a people (and who we have been and might yet be). Crime fiction holds up a mirror that can be both interesting and sometimes instructive. We see that quite a bit when crime fiction explores major social issues and events. And one of the great social upheavals in recent history was the set of social and political changes that took place during the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. From dress to views of social roles to speech and a lot more, societies all over the world were profoundly affected when the “Baby Boomers” reached the teen and young adult years. So I thought it might be interesting to take a quick look at what crime fiction has had to say about those years. Mind, this is by no means an exhaustive look; there’s simply no room in one blog post to do that. But here are just a few examples of crime fiction that take a look at that era.

Agatha Christie’s novels span the years from the 1920’s to the 1970’s, and some of them explore this era of change. For instance, in Third Girl, Hercule Poirot gets a visit from Norma Restarick, a young woman who thinks she “may have” committed a murder. When he gently presses her for more information the young woman leaves without giving her name, saying that he’s “too old.” Needless to say, Poirot is put out by this and has a conversation with his friend detective novelist Ariadne Oliver about it. As it happens, Oliver has met Norma Restarick and she and Poirot work together to find out whether the young woman could have committed a murder. Then, Norma Restarick disappears. Now the two sleuths have the added task of finding her before harm comes to her, which seems more and more likely as the novel goes on. In the end, they discover what the truth is behind Norma Restarick’s claims and her disappearance. Throughout this novel, Christie explores the “mod” culture including its fashions, its fascination with drugs and the art that was created at the time. Through the eyes of Poirot and Oliver, who are from a different era, we see how the young people, the new views and so on are perceived by others and it’s a very interesting portrait of a society that has changed dramatically.

Student unrest and radicalism was a major part of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, and several stories explore that theme, too. For instance, in John Alexander Graham’s The Involvement of Arnold Wechsler, we meet Classics Professor Arnold Wechsler, who teaches at Hewes College, a small New England school. As with many schools at that time, students have been agitating for change, and the atmosphere has gotten tense. Wechsler has been avoiding the issues of student demands and politics. Instead, he’s trying to negotiate the perilous politics of getting tenure when his life is complicated by a summons to the office of College President Winthrop Dohrm. Dohrm has discovered that Wechsler’s brother David has come to Hewes College, supposedly to connect with a radical student group on campus. Dohrm wants Wechsler to contact his brother and find out if David is involved in any subversive activities or has plans to do so. That’s the last thing Wechsler wants, as he and his brother are estranged. But he also wants tenure. So he agrees to Dohrm’s request. Then, a series of frightening events occurs. A supply of drugs is stolen from a local hospital. Then, Dohrm’s grand-daughter Nancy is abducted and a ransom note is sent with David Wechsler’s initials. Then, Dohrm himself is killed when a bomb destroys the family home. As Wechsler tries to find out what’s behind all of these events and how involved David is, we get a close look at student radicalism of the era. We also get a look at the social divide between those young people and what they called “The Establishment.”

There’s a similar theme in Reginald Hill’s An Advancement of Learning, which was written at about the same time. In that novel, Superintendent Andy Dalziel and Sergeant Peter Pascoe are sent to Holm Coultram College to investigate the five-year-old death of former president Alison Girling. She was believed to have died in a freak avalanche during a holiday, but when her body is found on the school grounds, it’s clear that she was murdered. To complicate matters, there’s a radical student group on campus led in part by Franny Roote. The group has made several demands and does its best to interfere with the normal teaching and learning routine of campus. Dalziel, of course, has no patience with the group, which makes the members all the angrier, but they do respect his “presence,” and it’s interesting to see how they interact with Dalziel as the novel moves along. In the end, Dalziel and Pascoe find out who killed Alison Girling and why, and as they do, we get a very interesting look at a radicalised campus.

We also see some exploration of this era in Michael Crichton’s A Case of Need, which he wrote under the name of Jeffery Hudson. Dr. Albert Lee, a well-known obstetrician at Boston’s Memorial Hospital, has his world shattered when he is accused of murder. According to the accusation, he performed an illegal abortion (the book was written in 1968) on Karen Randall, who later died of complications from the surgery. Lee claims that he did not perform the abortion. Yet, he’s arrested and charged. He asks his friend pathologist Dr. John Berry to look into the matter and help clear his name. Berry agrees, but his investigation is soon complicated in several ways. First, he’s not entirely sure that Lee did not perform the abortion. Second, Karen Randall was the daughter of J.D. Randall, one of the most powerful surgeons at the hospital, and Randall has absolutely no desire for any scandal on his family. Third, as Berry begins to dig a little deeper, he finds that Karen Randall had a very different private life from her public persona. This was the era of sexual exploration and drug use, and Karen was involved in both of those. She’s made some friends and acquaintances who are not interested in the truth about their world coming out. Nonetheless, Berry persists and in the end, finds out what really happened to Karen Randall. One of the themes in this novel is the “generation gap” of the times, and the difficulty that Karen’s “blueblood” family has accepting the new order of things. The novel also explores other controversial questions of the day, such as drug use and whether abortion should be legal. It’s an interesting look at that era.

Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahllöö’s The Laughing Policeman includes a look at one of the most controversial issues of this era; the Vietnam War. The war ignited a firestorm of controversy all over the world, and a protest against the war provides the backdrop to this novel. The American Embassy in Stockholm has been the target of anti-war demonstrations, a letter campaign and more, so many of the police are diverted from their usual duties to help protect the embassy. Then, the demonstration begins to get ugly, and even more police are needed. On the same night as the police are busy trying to keep back the demonstrators, Officers Kant and Kristiansson get word of a tragedy on a Stockholm bus. They learn that a gunman has murdered eight people, including Åke Stenström, one of their own. The gunman has picked the perfect time to commit murder, a time when the police are busy battling demonstrators. Martin Beck and his team begin to investigate and soon find deduce that the gunman has “hidden” Stenström’s murder amongst the other deaths to call attention away from it. As they slowly piece together Stenström’s last days, the team learns that he was investigating a “cold case” – the murder of Teresa Camarão, a “well born” Portuguese woman who’d become a prostitute. When the police put that piece together with the fact that not all of the victims of the bus shooting have been identified, they are able to find the key to the mystery. The mystery really isn’t about the Vietnam War, but the protests against it and the “feel” of 1960’s Stockholm provide a vivid background to the story.

Of course there are a lot of other crime novels that take place during this era and highlight the attitudes, upheavals, clothes, drugs and culture of the times. Want to dig out your bell-bottoms, light up your lava lamps, get out those love beads and think of some other examples??? .

 

 
 

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from Don McLean’s American Pie. Thanks to Bernadette at Reactions to Reading (a superb blog you should follow – really!) for the post title that inspired this…

Oh, and for you young readers, that large thing in the middle of the ‘photo is called an album. We listened to those before there were cassettes, CD’s and MP3′s… .