Tension Mounts in the City Tonight*

Yesterday I had the honour of having lunch with the terrific Rob Kitchin, who blogs at The View From the Blue House. Kitchin’s blog has great reviews of crime fiction novels, and is well worth a place on your blog roll if you’re a crime fiction fan. But Kitchin isn’t just a blogger – not by any means. Like me, he’s an academic. He’s also the author of The Rule Book and The White Gallows, both featuring his sleuth Detective Superintendent Colm McEvoy. Oh, and he’s the author of Killer Reels, a linked collection of short stories featuring the very creepy film buff Jimmy Kiley. And his standalone Stiffed, which he’s called ‘screwball noir,’ is due to be released this year. Check out The View From the Blue House for details about all of those books and about Kitchin’s many short stories and 100-word Drabbles.

One of the things we talked about was the way that authors use suspense and tension in their novels to engage the reader and to keep the reader turning pages. Some authors start their novels with lower levels of suspense, but gradually add it in as the novel goes on. For instance, Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None (AKA Ten Little Indians) is like that. The story starts, if you will, innocently enough. Ten people have been invited to Indian Island, off the Devon coast and for different reasons, each accepts. The story begins as they all travel to the island and although there are little hints of what’s to come, the tension hasn’t really set in yet. Then, when they arrive on the island and discover that their host hasn’t yet made an appearance, the tension begins. It builds after dinner that night, when each person is accused of having caused the death of at least one other person. Then, one of the guests suddenly dies of what turns out to be poison. Then there’s another death that night. One by one, the other guests also begin to die and it’s soon clear that they’ve been lured to the island and that one of them is the killer. The suspense continues to build as the survivors try to find out who the murderer is and avoid getting killed themselves.

Suspense builds gradually in Louise Penny’s A Rule Against Murder too. In that novel, Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec goes on an annual wedding anniversary trip with his wife Reine-Marie. They’re staying at Manoir Bellechasse and hoping for a relaxing getaway. Soon they meet several members of the Finney family, who are also staying at the lodge. There are Thomas and Sandra Finney, Thomas’ elderly parents, and his sisters Julia and Marianna and Marianna’s child. At first all seems to be going smoothly enough although it’s clear that the Finneys are not exactly a happy family. The suspense begins to build though when it becomes clear just how dysfunctional the family really is. Then there’s a murder. Of course the tension increases then, and even more so as more revelations come out about the family and as Gamache uncovers an unexpected connection to a character fans of this series already know.

Of course, not all authors choose to build the suspense in their stories slowly. Some choose to start with a high level of tension and more or less keep up the same pacing and tension throughout the novel. That’s the case with Megan Abbott’s Die a Little. The tension in that story is built early when Bill King marries Alice Steele. Alice is a former Hollywood dressmaker’s assistant who seems to settle quickly into life as a suburban housewife. But Bill’s sister Lora doesn’t care much for Alice. She tells herself it’s because there’s just something about Alice that doesn’t seem quite right. And indeed, she finds out things about Alice that suggest that Alice isn’t telling the truth about a lot of her life. But Lora has always had a close relationship with Bill and although she doesn’t admit it to herself at first, she’s also jealous of this new woman’s presence in her brother’s life. The suspense and pacing continue as Lora gradually gets drawn more and more into Alice’s world at the same time as she feels repelled by it. Then there’s a murder. What’s more, Alice may have had something to do with it. As Lora starts asking questions, she learns more than she wanted to admit about Alice and about herself.

T.J. Cooke’s Defending Elton also starts with a strong dose of suspense and keeps that level steady throughout the novel. An enigmatic young woman Sarena Gunasekera has been found dead at the bottom of a cliff at Beachy Head near Eastbourne. Evidence shows that she was stabbed and possibly raped, and then thrown over the cliff. The evidence also strongly suggests that Elton Spears is the murderer. Spears is a troubled young man with mental problems and deficiencies, so he can’t really participate in his own defence. And yet some things he says hint that he may not be guilty. And there is also the principle of British law that an accused person is innocent until proven guilty. Solicitor Jim Harwood has worked with Spears before and takes his case now, working with barrister Harry Douglas, who will defend the case in court. As the novel goes on, we learn bit by bit what Sarena’s history  was, how her story is tied up with that of crime boss Sammy Todd, and what really happened on the night she was murdered. The story is told from Harwood’s point of view, and through his narrative we learn that in this case, little is as it seems.

There are also crime novels and series where tension and suspense are not really strongly featured. The interest in those novels comes instead from character development and sometimes atmosphere and setting. Alexander McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series featuring Mma. Precious Ramotswe is like that. In each of the novels, Mma. Ramotswe and her associate Mma. Grace Makutsi are hired to solve several cases. For instance, one client hires Mma. Ramotswe to find out whether his teenage daughter is secretly seeing a boyfriend. Another wants to know which of several young women would be the best candidate to win Botswana’s Miss Beauty and Integrity pageant. Other cases involve finding long-lost people and uncovering shady practices at a health clinic. In all of these cases, there is real interest as we follow the way Mma. Ramotswe and Mma. Makutsi go about finding answers. And as the series goes on, their characters and the characters of the people in their lives develop and evolve. There’s also a strong sense of the Botswana setting. Those are the features that hold the reader’s interest rather than a high level of action and suspense.

That’s also true in M.C. Beaton’s Hamish Macbeth series. Fans of this series know that Macbeth is the constable in the small Scottish town of Lochdubh. He’s got little ambition and would rather fish than do a lot of detecting. But he’s good at what he does, and he has a deep knowledge of the Highlands and its people and culture, having lived there all his life. These novels do feature murders, some of them not exactly pretty. But the real interest in the novels isn’t the suspense and tension of the cases, although of course, they are important. Rather, it’s the setting, the quirky characters and of course Macbeth himself.

Everyone’s different about the way they like their suspense. Some like it to start high and stay that way. Others prefer a different focus in their novels. And still others like the suspense to build gradually. What about you? How do you like your suspense? If you’re a writer, how do you use suspense to keep readers engaged?

 

Thanks, Rob, for a real treat of a meeting and conversation. Hey folks, do read Rob’s work. You won’t regret it.

 

 
 

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from King Prawn’s No Peace.

‘Cause Nothing’s Going Right and Everything’s a Mess*

For the past seventy years or so, noir has been an important part of the world of crime fiction. Today it’s considered a significant sub-genre; a quick glance at blogs, online and traditional literary magazines and of course, new crime fiction titles is all it takes to see that noir is a force to be reckoned with in the genre.  Noir fiction is by its nature bleak and sometimes very depressing. And noir deals with the ugly, the dirty and the unpleasant. So why do we read it? What is it about noir that appeals to readers? Of course, we choose what to read for a whole constellation of reasons. But here’s my thinking about what makes noir a part of so many people’s reading diets.

As I mentioned, noir is dirty and gritty and sometimes unpleasant. It turns over rocks and takes a look at what’s under them. And that’s just what some people like about it. Because it’s unflinching, noir addresses issues that aren’t as easy to address in other sub-genres. For example, Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me is the story of Central City, Texas deputy sheriff Lou Ford. Ford is well-enough liked, although no-one would exactly call him scintillating. But Ford is carrying a dark secret which comes out slowly as the novel moves on. First, local prostitute Joyce Lakeland is brutally beaten. Then there’s a murder. As we follow along in this investigation, we find out that Ford is not the nice, if a bit dull, guy that everyone thought he was. In fact, he himself refers to this as ‘the sickness.’ So on that level Thompson takes an unflinching look at mental illness. This novel also explores prostitution and domestic violence as well as the ugly reality of the effect of violence and murder on a small town. The story takes up difficult and challenging issues.

So does Roger Smith’s Dust Devils. Former journalist Robert Dell, his wife Rosie and their two children are taking a drive one afternoon when their car is ambushed not far from Cape Town and sent over an embankment. Dell survives but the other members of his family are killed. Soon he’s accused of the murder and imprisoned. He’s been framed, but at first he doesn’t know why or by whom. His father Bobby Goodbread engineers his escape and together the two go in search of the person who killed Dell’s wife and children and framed him. This novel addresses several difficult but very real issues that would be hard to treat honestly in another kind of novel. For instance, one of the themes in the story is the reality of race relations in modern South Africa. That’s a complex and sometimes unpleasant topic. So are corruption and nepotism, which are also treated in this novel.

In Gene Kerrigan’s The Rage, Dublin police detective Bob Tidey is part of the team that’s investigating the murder of Emmet Sweetman, a crooked banker who made a fortune during the ‘Celtic Tiger’ years. At the same time, Vincent Naylor, a young thug who’s recently gotten out of prison, is planning his own master stroke – an armoured car robbery. Drawn into both of these cases is Maura Cody, a former nun who has her own history. As Kerrigan tells the story of these three people, he also explores some unpleasant issues that it would be hard to do justice to without some grit. In the story behind Emmet Sweetman’s murder we see how greed and poor planning played roles in the Irish financial collapse of 2008 and how that collapse started a chain reaction of real misery. In the story of Maura Cody we learn of the wrenching horror of some of the abuses some Irish priests and nuns committed. This too is an ugly issue that would be hard to address in a different kind of novel.

But it’s not just the fact that noir explores difficult issues that makes it appealing. It does so in an honest way – no sugarcoating or glossing over the truth. And that realism resonates with a lot of readers. For example, Megan Abbott’s Die a Little is the story of Pasadena schoolteacher Lora King. She is devoted to her brother Bill, so she is quite concerned when he marries Alice Steele, a former Hollywood dressmaker’s assistant. For Bill’s sake Lora tries to get along with her new sister-in-law but bit by bit she discovers some unsettling things about Alice. The more she learns, the more Lora has to face the fact that at the same time as she’s repulsed by Alice’s seamy world, she’s also drawn to it. Then there’s a murder. Lora wants to find out just how involved Alice may have been in this killing so, telling herself she’s doing so to protect her brother, she begins to ask questions. As she slowly finds out the truth, readers get a very realistic picture of 1950’s Hollywood. Underneath the glitter there really was a lot of abuse, corruption and other ugliness and Abbott doesn’t gloss over that. Nor does she make light of what can happen when one person becomes obsessed with another person.

The tragedy of the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia cannot be overstated. Andrew Nette takes a very realistic look at the devastation left behind in Ghost Money. Madeline Avery hires Australian former cop Max Quinlan to find her brother Charles. His last known address is in Bangkok so Quinlan starts there. When he arrives he finds the body of Avery’s business partner Robert Lee. He also finds evidence that Lee has fled to Cambodia. So Quinlan’s next stop is Phnom Penh. There, he learns that Avery may have been involved in some shady business deals and could have made some very nasty people angry. As Quinlan traces Avery to northern Cambodia, he discovers the brutal reality of life in Cambodia. War, mistrust, greed, corruption and prejudice have all taken heavy tolls and Nette doesn’t sugarcoat any of it. But (and this is just my opinion, so feel free to differ with me if you do), not to be realistic about these issues would mean not doing them justice.

That sense of authenticity adds a layer of suspense to Karin Alvtegen’s work as well. In Betrayal, she looks at the ugly reality of lies. Eva Wirenström-Berg and her husband Henrik have been happy enough until Eva discovers that her husband has been unfaithful. Blaming him entirely for their marital problems, she makes a fateful choice that doesn’t seem like a problem at first. Then she finds out who Henrik’s lover is. That prompts Eva to a course of action that also has a tragic consequence. As things begin to spin out of control, Alvtegen shows us honestly what happens to a marriage when the people in it lie to each other and to themselves.

Noir is unvarnished, gritty and sometimes really ugly. But it looks at important issues that are hard to address in any other way. And it does so in an honest way. I know I haven’t mentioned all of the noir greats, but they’ve added to the genre. What do you think? Do you read noir? Why? What’s its appeal for you? If you write noir, what draws you to it?

 

 
 

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from Avril Lavigne’s I’m With You.

Coming Home After School, Flying My Bike Past the Gates of the Factories*

Sometimes it happens as early as eight or nine years old, and sometimes not until the mid-teen years. But there’s usually some point in life where we come of age – where we begin to see others’ perspectives and see the other people in our lives differently. We stop seeing life through the eyes of little children and begin to see it with more maturity. A lot of people think of ‘coming of age’ stories as being either ‘literary’ or perhaps YA stories but the fact is, coming of age plays a role in crime fiction too. And when it’s done well, we can get a real sense not just of the crime that’s featured in the plot, but also of the fundamental changes that happen to us as we start to cross that threshold.

We see that combination for instance in James W. Fuerst’s Huge. Twelve-year-old Eugene ‘Huge’ Smalls has his share of challenges. He has trouble making friends, he isn’t really good at controlling his anger and his relationships with his teachers are not exactly productive. And yet, he’s a brilliant boy. Huge’s real dream in life is to be a detective like Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe or Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade. Huge gets his chance when his grandmother hires him. She wants him to find out who defaced the sign at the retirement home where she lives. Huge agrees and immediately begins looking for suspects. Among them are several of the people he knows at school and as Huge considers each of them, we watch as he slowly begins to grow up. He learns more about them and himself than he imagined he would.

In Catherine O’Flynn’s What Was Lost, we meet ten-year-old Kate Meaney. Kate wants more than anything else to be a detective, and she’s even started her own agency Falcon Investigations. Kate doesn’t have a lot of friends, but that doesn’t bother her. She has her agency, her business partner Mickey the Monkey (a stuffed animal who rides along with her in her backpack) and she has Green Oaks Shopping Center, which has just opened. Kate suspects that Green Oaks will be a very good place to look for suspicious characters so she spends as much time there as she can. In some ways, Kate is very mature for her age but in a lot of ways, she’s still very much a child with a child’s imagination and a child’s refusal to see the dreariness of much of her Midlands town. Then her world changes. Her grandmother Ivy believes that Kate would be better off going away to school so she arranges for her to sit the entrance exams at the exclusive Redspoon school. Kate is reluctant to go but she’s finally persuaded by her friend Adrian Palmer, who even promises to go with her to the school. The two go to Redspoon but Kate never returns. Her body isn’t discovered but everyone suspects that Adrian is responsible for her disappearance. In fact, he leaves town swearing not to return. Twenty years later, we learn what really happened to Kate when Adrian’s sister Lisa and a Green Oaks security guard Kurt form an unlikely friendship and begin to look into the past.

Pablo De Santis’ The Paris Enigma introduces us to Sigmundo Salvatrio, the son of a Buenos Aires shoemaker. Salvatrio is enthralled with detection so he is overjoyed when he gets the opportunity to attend the exclusive Academy for Detectives run by world-famous sleuth Renato Craig. Craig is the co-founder of a group of other world-famous detectives known as The Twelve that is slated to do a presentation during the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris. However, shortly before he’s scheduled to leave Buenos Airies for the fair, Craig falls ill and cannot attend. He sends Salvatrio in his place and that’s when the boy’s coming of age really begins. One of the other members of the Twelve is murdered and Salvatrio works with the group’s other co-founder Viktor Arkazy to find out who the killer is. Then there is another murder and Salvatrio learns plenty of lessons about adult reality.

Alan Bradley’s Flavia de Luce is also at the crossroads between childhood and adolescence. On the one hand, she’s very knowledgeable about chemistry, quite observant and intelligent. On the other hand she’s still got a child’s way of looking at life in some ways. She’s got two older sisters who are the bane of her existence and a father to whom she’s devoted. She’s at the same time both savvy and imaginative. For instance, in A Red Herring Without Mustard, she has an encounter with a Gypsy who starts to tell her fortune. Flavia begins to think that the Gypsy may have been able to connect with her mother Harriet, who died when Flavia was a baby. Here’s a bit of their conversation:

 

‘‘Tell me about the woman you saw on the mountain,’ I said. ‘The one I shall become.’…
‘Cross my palm with silver,’ she demanded, sticking out a grubby hand.
‘But I gave you a shilling,’ I said. “That’s what it says on the board outside.
‘Messages from the Third Circle cost extra,’ she wheezed. ‘They drain my batteries.’
I almost laughed out loud. Who did this old hag think she was? But still, she seemed to have spotted Harriet beyond the veil, and I couldn’t let skepticism spoil even half a chance of having a few words with my dead mother.’

 

It’s that mix of childhood and a more mature outlook that makes Flavia an interesting sleuth and in this case, she puts her skills to work when the Gypsy who seems to know so much about her life is found murdered.

Megan Abbott’s The End of Everything is the story of the tragic coming of age of thirteen-year-old Lizzie Hood. She is best friends with Evie Verver and the two girls tell each other all their secrets. Everything changes when Evie doesn’t come home from school one afternoon. At first, no-one worries that much about her absence but as evening wears on and she still hasn’t come home, her parents get worried. They and later the police ask Lizze for all of the information she has. As Evie’s best friend, she may know something Evie never told her family. But Lizzie doesn’t remember much and isn’t able to be of any help.  But she is desperate to find her best friend so she decides to do her own investigation to try to get some answers. As she does so, she learns that a lot of the childlike beliefs she had about Evie may very well not have been accurate. And as she really confronts the tragedy of Evie’s disappearance, Lizzie has to look at things with a different and painfully more mature perspective.

William Kent Krueger’s Ordinary Grace tells of one terrible summer in the life of Frank Drum. In the summer of 1961, Frank Drum is thirteen years old and mostly occupied with playing baseball, going to the local river and finding adventure where he can. His best friend is his younger brother Jake, although as the book begins he isn’t usually willing to admit it. The summer begins to pall when a boy Frank and Jake knew is killed on a local railroad track. Everyone thinks at first that it was an accident, but it might not have been so accidental. There are other deaths too. But the most tragic event, and the pivotal event for Frank Drum, is when there is a murder in his own family. Now he has to grow up quickly and look in a different way at people he’s always known. Little by little he learns the truth about what happened as he and Jake find some evidence, listen in on conversations and so on. As Frank begins to make sense of the events around him, we see how he starts by thinking in a fairly childish way but matures as the summer goes on.

Not all of these novels are what most people think of ‘typical’ crime fiction novels (as though there were such a thing). But they all have an interesting mix of the coming-of-age theme and of course, crime. It’s not easy to tell a story through the eyes of a young person coming of age but when it works well the result can be a really innovative perspective.

 

 
 

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

Tell Me What the Papers Say*

As we all know, there’s at least as much real crime out there as there is fictional crime. And writers can’t help but be influenced by those crime stories. After all, crime writers follow the news like a lot of other people, and sometimes those true crime stories can be fascinating enough that they catch the writer’s interest. Something about them gets the writer thinking.

For example, the 1888-1891 Whitechapel murders – the so-called ‘Jack the Ripper’ murders – have caught the imagination of lots of writers. These eleven murders of women have never been officially solved although there has been a lot of speculation about who ‘Jack the Ripper’ was. Possibly because the murders weren’t neatly solved, and because there was so much interest in them at the time, those killings have inspired many novels; I’ll just mention a few. In R. Barri Flowers’ historical thriller Dark Streets of Whitechapel, Dr. Jack Lewiston has been captured New York and arrested for the ‘Jack the Ripper’ crimes. But before he can be brought to trial, Lewiston escapes to London. Former New York City detective Henry Marboro comes out of retirement and travels to London to try to track Lewiston down before he can claim more victims.

Marie Belloc Lowndes’ The Lodger is also based on the Whitechapel murders. In this story, we meet Robert and Ellen Bunting, highly respectable middle-class Londoners who let rooms. They’re particular about the people they admit, but they are also facing financial difficulties. So when a man calling himself Mr. Sleuth agrees to pay in advance for one of the rooms, Mrs. Bunting is more than willing to have him lodge there. Besides, he speaks and acts like ‘a gentleman.’ All goes well enough at the beginning but soon, the Buntings begin to get an eerie feeling about Mr. Sleuth. After a time Ellen Bunting begins to suspect that he might be a mysterious and vicious killer known as The Avenger, who’s been making headlines in all of the newspapers. The more time goes by, the creepier Mr. Sleuth seems and the more danger the Buntings feel. But at the same time, Mr. Sleuth hasn’t threatened them and they desperately need the money he pays them. Part of the suspense in this novel comes from the dilemma of whether the Buntings will report what they suspect to the police (and give up that rent), or whether they’ll keep quiet.

And then there’s Glynis Smy’s Ripper, My Love, which tells the story of Kitty Harper, a seamstress who lives and works in Whitechapel at the time of the ‘Jack the Ripper’ murders. This novel’s been called romantic suspense and it is in the sense that the novel follows Kitty’s life and the way she deals with three young men who are vying for her. But at the same time there’s a strong thread of crime and danger as the Whitechapel murders are seen from Kitty’s perspective – and the murderer may be closer to her than anyone knows. There are dozens and dozens of other novels that refer to, are inspired by or are retellings of the Whitechapel murders.

Another murder that has generated a lot of interest (and inspired other crime writers) is what’s often called the Crippen case. American homeopathic physician Hawley Harvey Crippen was hanged in 1910 for the murder of his wife Cora. There was significant evidence against him too. A torso which could have been hers was found buried in his basement. He’d purchased hyoscine, a quantity of which was found with the remains. He had a new love, too, Ethel ‘Le Neve’ Neave and in fact, they were captured as they landed in America after leaving England together. There was other evidence too that Crippen had killed his wife. Although the verdict against Crippen has been disputed in the last few years, most people at the time thought him guilty. The story made a sensation and has influenced more than one crime writer. For instance, Agatha Christie’s Mrs. McGinty’s Dead is the story of the murder of a charwoman whom everyone thinks was killed by her lodger James Bentley. Superintendent Spence doesn’t think so though and asks Hercule Poirot to look into the case. Poirot agrees and travels to the village of Broadhinny to do so. He finds that Mrs. McGinty had learned more than it was safe for her to know about one of the ‘nice’ people who live in the village; that’s why she was killed. One of the clues in this case is a story about four old murders, one of which is the murder of a woman by her husband. Like Crippen, this ‘Craig case’ features a body found in a basement and a man who was hanged for the crime while his lover left the country.

Martin Edwards’ Dancing For the Hangman is a fictionalised account of the Crippen case told from Crippen’s own point of view. The story begins just after Crippen is convicted for murder, and follows his thoughts as he awaits execution. Interspersed with reports and newspaper stories of the time, the novel tells of Crippen’s life in America, his move to London and his marriage to Cora. It then details how Crippen met Ethel Le Neve and tells the story of their plans to go to America together. In this novel, Edwards gives an alternative account of what exactly happened to Cora and why.

One of the most famous novels based on true crime is Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. That novel is a re-telling of the 1959 murders of Kansas farmer Herb Clutter, his wife Bonnie Mae and his children Nancy Mae and Kenyon. Richard Hickock and Perry Smith were arrested, tried and convicted of the crimes. The motive for the murders was money; Hickock and Smith had been in prison before the Clutter murders and heard from a fellow inmate that Herb Clutter had a lot of money at his farm. That wasn’t true but it didn’t stop Hickock and Smith from committing four murders and then going ‘on the run’ until the end of that year when they were caught. Capote’s novel tells the story of the victims’ lives, the relationship between Hickock and Smith and the devastating effects of the Clutter murders on the community. You could call this ‘untrue crime,’ as it is fiction but tells the story of a real crime.

So does James Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia. That novel’s focus is the still-unsolved murder of Elizabeth Short, who was killed in Los Angeles in 1947. LAPD detectives Dwight ‘Bucky’ Bleichert and Lee Blanchard are on a stakeout when they discover Short’s body. The case starts to overwhelm the LAPD and becomes a media sensation. Bleichert becomes more and more obsessed with the case, especially when he meets the enigmatic Madeleine Sprague, who closely resembles the victim, and begins to have an affair with her. Blanchard too is obsessed with Elizabeth Short, in large part because his sister was also murdered. This case takes a heavy toll on both officers as they get more and more deeply involved in finding out who Elizabeth Short really was, what her life was like and why she died. Ellroy presents a fictional solution to the case but the real focus in this novel is on the way the murder case affects the cops who investigate it.

There are many other novels that are based on real crimes. For example, there’s Megan Abbott’s Bury Me Deep, which is based on the 1933 ‘trunk murders’ in which Winnie Ruth Judd was found guilty of murdering two of her friends. Abbott looks at the relationships and history that might have been behind those murders. Some crimes just take hold of the imagination and it can be fascinating to explore different aspects of them. And unlike journalists, novelists can create their own versions of how a crime might have happened and that can make for an absorbing story. In fact, that’s how Lynda Wilcox’s fictional crime writer Kathleen ‘KD’ Davenport gets her inspiration. As we learn in Strictly Murder, KD’s assistant Verity Long researches old cases and KD uses those as the basis for her novels. It’s not hard to see how they might inspire her.

But what do you think? Do you enjoy reading true-crime books or ‘untrue crime’ stories? If you’re a writer, do you use real crime for inspiration?

 

 
 

*NOTE: The title of this post is the title of an Elton John/Bernie Taupin song.

Now Those Memories Come Back to Haunt Me*

For better or worse most of us have childhood memories. Sometimes those memories come into stronger focus as we mature, so that we have a clearer picture of what we really remember. But sometimes that doesn’t happen. After all children can’t always accurately interpret what they experience, and they don’t always have “the big picture” the way adults do. But it’s surprising how often their memories can be trusted. And that’s what makes childhood memories such an interesting topic in crime fiction. How reliable are they? How do they motivate the adult who has those memories? They’re fascinating questions and a quick look at crime fiction shows us how effective they can be as plot tools.

Agatha Christie addresses this topic in more than one of her stories; I’ll just mention one. In Sleeping Murder, newlyweds Gwenda and Giles Reed are looking for a house. Gwenda soon finds one in Dilmouth to which she is oddly drawn. She and Giles take possession and at first all goes well enough. Then Gwenda begins to have an unsettling sense of déjà vu about the house although she doesn’t remember ever living there. What’s worse, she has visions of a dead woman lying in the house’s main hallway. She begins to seriously question her mental health and willingly accepts an invitation from her cousin Raymond West and his family to take a break from her life and visit them. Gwenda is also distantly related to West’s aunt Jane Marple, and tells Miss Marple her story. At first Miss Marple suggests that Gwenda should “let sleeping murders lie.” But after Gwenda has a bizarre reaction to a theatre performance one night, Miss Marple comes to believe that something terrible must have happened in the Reeds’ home. So she and Gwenda investigate. It turns out that Gwenda actually did live in the house when she was a little child and witnessed the murder of the woman she keeps seeing in her visions. Her childhood memories were more accurate than anyone wanted to believe. Miss Marple helps her find out who the woman was and who killed her.

Childhood memories also play a role in Camilla Läckberg’s The Ice Princess. Biographer (later crime writer) Erica Falck returns to her home in Fjällbacka after the death of her parents. She’s settling in and beginning to clear out her parents’ things when a neighbour discovers the body of Falck’s former friend Alexandra “Alex” Wijkner. Falck is saddened and shocked and immediately notifies the police. She and Alex were the closest of friends when they were girls but Alex ended the friendship twenty-five years ago and Falck has never really known why. She decides to write a biography of Alex Wijkner both as a way to memorialise her and deal with the grief and as a way to get to know the woman her friend became. In the course of asking her questions Falck discovers that she really didn’t know her friend as well as she had thought. There were things going on in Alex’s life that she never told anyone and it’s those secrets that led to her death. We learn in this novel that Falck’s childhood memories lack some substance because there were some dark secrets that she only finds out as she investigates her former friend’s murder.

There’s also the case of unreliable childhood memories in Megan Abbott’s The End of Everything. This story is told from the viewpoint of Lizzie Hood, who takes readers back to when she was thirteen. At that time, Lizzie is best friends with her next-door-neighbour Evie Verver. They share everything and tell each other everything. Then one terrible afternoon, Evie doesn’t come home from school. As the evening drags on her family gets more and more concerned and that night they ask for Lizzie’s help. After all, Evie tells Lizzie everything and may have given her some clue. Lizzie doesn’t remember much about the day but she is desperate to find out what happened to her best friend, so she begins to do some of her own searching for answers. As she slowly uncovers bits and pieces of Evie’s life Lizzie realises that her memories and assumptions about Evie may not be accurate at all.

Paddy Richardson‘s Hunting Blind and Traces of Red both include the powerful effect of childhood memories. In Hunting Blind fledgling psychiatrist Stephanie Anderson relives a terrible memory when she begins to work with a client Elizabeth Clark. Clark has serious emotional scars that stem from the abduction years earlier of her little sister Gracie. Seventeen years before meeting Clark, Anderson’s own four-year-old sister Gemma was abducted and never found. The eerie similarities between the two cases prompt Anderson to try to lay her own ghosts to rest and find out who abducted her sister and Gracie Clark. To do that she relies partly on her own memory of the day but her memory isn’t complete. She was only fourteen when Gemma disappeared and there were things about the case that she didn’t understand. As Anderson slowly follows the trail of the person who was responsible, little pieces of the past slowly start making sense and we can see how her memories have played a role in her life – and in the solution of the mystery. In Traces of Red, television journalist Rebecca Thorne decides to pursue what she hopes will be the story that will make her career. Connor Bligh is in prison for the murders of his sister Angela Dickson, her husband Rowan and their son Sam. Only their daughter Katy, then thirteen, survived. Little hints have arisen that suggest that Bligh may not be guilty and Thorne wants to look into the case. The more she investigates, the more personally interested Thorne gets in this story and that means she can’t be as objective as she tells herself she can be. Is Connor Bligh guilty? The real solution to the mystery hinges on the reliability of everyone’s memory including that of Katy Dickson. In fact the accuracy of her memory plays an important role in the novel.

And then there’s Sylvie Granotier’s The Paris Lawyer. Catherine Monsigny is a young Paris attorney who’s just beginning to try to build her reputation. She’s excited to get a case that may very well be a breakthrough for her. Myriam Villetreix has been arrested for the poisoning murder of her much-older husband Gaston. She claims that she is innocent and that her husband’s family has set her up. There is plenty of circumstantial evidence though that suggests that Myriam is the murderer. Monsigny hopes that if she can get an acquittal in the Villetreix case, she’ll burnish her reputation and start to make her name, so she travels to Guéret to begin work on the case. What she doesn’t know at first is that Guéret is not far from where a tragic event happened in her own life. When Monsigny was three years old, her mother Violet was murdered. Catherine was there but she only has a few memories of that awful day. They’ve always haunted her though and she wants to know who killed her mother and why. Little by little, as she works the case of Myriam Villetreix, Monsigny also starts to ask questions about her mother’s death. In the end, the pieces she’s always had in her own memory begin to fit with what she learns as an adult and we discover the truth about Violet Monsigny’s death.

Childhood memories can be striking in their accuracy while at the same time hazy and unreliable. That’s what makes them such fascinating plot points for crime fiction novels. Which are your favourites that use this element?

 

 
 

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