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.

The Alphabet in Crime Fiction: Execution-Style Murders

The Crime Fiction Alphabet meme is now one fifth of the way through our worrisome wanderings through the letters of the alphabet. I am, as always, grateful to Kerrie at Mysteries in Paradise for the exciting journey thus far. Today’s stop is the E Resort and Spa and quite frankly, I’m ready for a nice rest. While everyone else is checking email and ‘phoning home, I’ll share my contribution for this stop: execution-style murders. Crime fiction is full of examples of what happens when one falls afoul of the wrong people. Actually it’s probably better to stay away from certain kinds of people to begin with but it’s even better to avoid getting them angry enough to kill. Because they do.

Just ask Tony Aliso, a mediocre filmmaker of mediocre movies whose death is the subject of Michael Connelly’s Trunk Music. When Aliso’s body is discovered in the trunk of his Rolls Royce, it’s assumed that this was a Mafia ‘hit.’ The murder has all the hallmarks of a Mob kill and Aliso was living far beyond his legal means. But somehow, the LAPD doesn’t seem to be too eager to find out who the killer is even though it could mean bringing down a criminal organisation. The police department’s reluctance doesn’t stop Harry Bosch though. Bosch investigates Aliso’s personal and professional lives and soon finds a ‘money trail’ that leads to a shady Las Vegas casino – and to a reunion with his old flame Eleanor Wish, who is now a professional gambler. In the end, Bosch finds out who killed Aliso and why, and how the criminal organisation he’s after fits in with the rest of the case.

In Henry Chang’s Year of the Dog, NYPD detective Jack Yu is temporarily assigned to Manhattan’s Ninth Precinct to fill in for some colleagues who are taking time off at the end of the year. He returns to his usual Fifth Precinct though, when a gang war threatens to erupt. Yu’s old friend Tat ‘Lucky’ Louie has become a local Mob leader; his gang is called Ghost Legion. Tat and his gang are upset because lately, there’ve been several surprise raids on the local gangs. Tat suspects that incoming gangs from Hong Kong are tipping off police so that they can take over the local gangs’ territories. Tat wants Yu’s help to find out whether the Hong Kong gangs are behind the raids. Yu refuses and the conflict between the local mobs and the Hong Kong incomers forms an important element in this novel.

Tonino Benacquista’s Badfellas takes another kind of look at ‘execution-style’ murders. The Blake family, a supposedly normal American family, moves into a home in Cholong-sur-Avre, Normandy. They’ve moved to Normandy so that Frederick Blake can write a history of the Normandy invastion and it seems that the family soon settles in. Frederick’s wife Maggie devotes herself to charity work and their children devote themselves to television, the Internet, new friends and other adolescent obsessions. But the Blake family is not a normal family. They are really the Manzoni family and the father, Giovanni Manzoni, was a member of the New Jersey Mafia. He testified against the rest of the Mob so he and his family were placed in the US Federal Witness Protection Program. They’ve been relocated to Normandy and given new identities. The only problem is that before long, word gets back to the head of the New Jersey Mob that Giovanni Manzoni is alive and well. Now the ‘Blakes’ have to deal with the very real possibility that the Mob will find them, and will not exactly greet them kindly.

Of course, execution-style killings aren’t just Mob-related. For instance, Donna Leon’s Blood From a Stone begins with the execution-style shooting of an unknown Senegalese immigrant. He’s laying out his wares at an open-air market one morning when he is murdered. Commissario Guido Brunetti and Ispettore Lorenzo Villanello lead the investigation into the murder. Because the man was killed by professionals, no-one has seen anything really significant, so at first, there’s not much evidence. What’s more, the man wasn’t anyone of importance – just another illegal immigrant. So there’s not much public interest. But eventually Brunetti and Vianello trace the man to the room he rented, where they find a cache of diamonds. It turns out that this man’s execution had to do with ‘conflict diamonds’ and illegal arms trafficking.

Gene Kerrigan’s The Rage features several cases that Dublin DS Bob Tidey and Detective Garda Rose Cheney investigate. One of them is the execution-style murder of banker Emmet Sweetman, who’s been shot in the entryway of his own home. As the detectives examine the victim’s life, they discover that he had been caught up in the ‘Celtic Tiger’ boom and had taken advantage of the sudden wealth that was available during those years. The seemingly inexhaustible supply of money fed Sweetman’s greed and his confidence so that he took increasingly risky decisions. When the financial situation in Ireland began to fall apart, so did many of the shady deals Sweetman had made. When he didn’t pay the money he owed, Sweetman made some very dangerous people very angry, and they sought their own sort of justice. It turns out that this case has a link to another case that Tidey and Cheney work on, a heist that goes terribly, tragically wrong.

And then there’s Andrew Nette’s Ghost Money. In that novel, Australian ex-cop Max Quinlan is hired by Madeleine Avery to find her brother Charles. His last-known whereabouts was Bangkok, so Quinlan travels there. When he gets to Avery’s apartment though, he discovers the body of Avery’s business partner Robert Lee. He also finds clues that suggest that Avery has gone to Cambodia. Quinlan continues his search in Phnom Penh, where he meets journalist’s assistant Heng Sarin. With Sarin’s help, Quinlan starts asking questions about Avery. Although most people aren’t willing to talk, the two sleuths do learn a few things. One is that Avery had been involved in some shady deals with the wrong people. That in itself put him in danger. What’s more, he claimed to know where there was a hidden cache of gold. That too made him the target of some people who are not afraid to kill for that much wealth. Quinlan and Sarin trace Avery to northern Cambodia, where the gold is supposedly hidden, if it even exists. The closer they get to the truth of that rumour, as well as the truth about Avery, the more in danger Quinlan and Sarin are. There are some very powerful people who are not at all concerned about having these two killed to keep the truth about the gold and about Avery secret. This novel also weaves in another ‘execution’ theme – the execution-style murders of millions of people that the Khmer Rouge saw as ‘enemies’ or ‘threats.’

So, you see? It’s important to be careful about the company you keep. The old saying is, ‘keep your friends close and your enemies closer.’ Especially if they have weapons. So…Shall we talk some business? I know a guy who knows a guy… 

 

So How Am I Doing?*

If you work outside the home, chances are that your job performance gets evaluated in some way. If you supervise other people, chances are you are expected as part of your job to assess the job performance of the people you supervise. It’s not a fun fact of life because assessing what others do isn’t easy. Trust me. It can add stress and tension to a work relationship, especially if one’s job is on the line.

In real life, performance appraisal is a part of most working adults’ lives. Sometimes that assessment comes in the form of official evaluations and sometimes, it’s more informal. And we see both kinds of assessment as threads running through crime fiction novels too. The tension that performance evaluations cause can add a solid layer, even a sub-plot, to a crime fiction novel. And it’s a realistic plot point.

In Agatha Christie’s Cat Among the Pigeons, we meet Honoria Bulstrode, headmistress of Meadowbank, an exclusive and highly regarded school for girls. As the summer term begins, she’s contemplating her retirement and wrestling with the difficult decision of who will take her place as headmistress. Most people assume that she will choose Eleanor Vansittart, her ‘second in command.’ Miss Vansittart is a logical choice too since she is a capable teacher and she’s made it clear that if she were headmistress, she would continue with the traditions Miss Bulstrode has established. But Miss Bulstrode isn’t entirely comfortable with selecting Miss Vansittart. There’s also Eileen Rich, a young, truly gifted and passionate teacher. Miss Rich has innovative ideas for how a girls’ school might be run, and Miss Bulstrode finds herself drawn to Miss Rich’s passion and her love of teaching. But Miss Rich is young. And then there’s Miss Chadwick, a brilliant mathematician and the school’s co-founder. She knows more about the school than just about anyone else, and is looking forward to serving as headmistress once Miss Bulstrode retires. But the problem is that Miss Chadwick is getting on in years and may not be able to manage the burden. Miss Bulstrode’s dilemma is pushed aside when Grace Springer, the new games mistress, is shot one night in the Sports Pavilion. Then there’s a kidnapping, and then, another death. When one of the pupils Julia Upjohn begins to put the pieces of the puzzle together, she visits Hercule Poirot, whom she’s heard of through a friend of her mother. Poirot agrees to look into the case and returns with Julia to Meadowbank, where he connects the events with a cache of stolen jewels and a revolution in a Middle Eastern state. Throughout this novel, Miss Bulstrode informally appraises the work and the mindsets of each of her top three candidates, and her decision serves not only as a sub-plot, but also as a key motivation behind one of the events in the story.

Michael Connelly’s Angels Flight takes another sort of look at performance reviews. In that novel, LAPD detective Harry Bosch investigates the murder of prominent attorney Howard Elias. Elias was well-known for litigating suits against the LAPD and he was about to do the same again. Michael Harris was arrested and convicted for the rape and murder or twelve-year-old Stacey Kincaid. But Harris has claimed that he is innocent and that his confession was, to put it mildly, coerced. Elias had agreed to take Harris’ case and was preparing for the trial when he was killed, so Bosch soon finds himself investigating not just Elias’ murder but also Stacey Kincaid’s. In the process, he reviews the files on the Kincaid case and on Harris’ arrest. This informal performance assessment shows Bosch that there was mishandling of evidence, mistreatment of Harris and other police misconduct. That information leads Bosch to re-open the Kincaid case and in the end, he finds out how that case is related to Elias’ murder.

P.D. James’ Death of an Expert Witness is the story of the murder of Dr. Edwin Lorrimer, one of the senior staff at Hoggatt’s Laboratory in East Anglia. The laboratory provides forensic and other tests in cases of un-natural death, so it’s used by both sides in murder cases. One night, Lorrimer is working late on a recently-opened case when he is bludgeoned. Commander Adam Dalgliesh and DI John Massingham are called to the scene and begin their investigation. Hoggatt’s has strict security procedures and there is no evidence of a break-in. So it’s most likely that either the killer is a staff member at the laboratory, or that Lorrimer was well-acquainted with his killer and let that person in. So Dalgliesh and Massingham pay close attention to what they learn both about Lorrimer’s personal life and about his professional relationships with the staff members. It turns out that several of the staff had reasons to heartily dislike the victim. He was unpleasant and arrogant. He wasn’t much nicer in his personal life either, although Dalgliesh does uncover a surprising side to Lorrimer’s character. One of the main suspects in the case is Clifford Bradley, a biologist who’s struggled in his job. He is neither stupid nor lazy, but he is insecure and he lacks confidence. Lorrimer’s rudeness and overbearing demeanour made Bradley’s life miserable and in fact, Lorrimer wrote a very negative performance review for Bradley shortly before his murder. And it turns out that Lorrimer’s got a history of writing brutal performance reviews. I don’t think it’s spoiling this novel to say that his poor review makes Bradley a very likely suspect.

In Peter Lovesey’s  The Last Detective: Introducing Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond, Peter Diamond and his team investigate the murder of Geraldine ‘Gerry’ Jackman, whose body is found in Chew Valley Lake. Although the victim was a famous television actress, Diamond and his assistant John Wigfull believe the murder might have been more personal in nature, so they begin with her husband Professor Greg Jackman. His alibi seems to hold up for the most part, so the team looks elsewhere too. It turns out that Gerry Jackman was involved in drugs use, so there are several candidate suspects among her ‘business associates.’ There are other suspects too, including Dana Didrikson. Didrikson and Greg Jackman had met accidentally and become friends, although they were not lovers. But it comes up that she had a confrontation with Gerry Jackman shortly before her death. What’s more, there’s physical evidence against her. So she’s arrested and held over for trial. At one point, Diamond has a confrontation with Didrikson’s twelve-year-old son Matthew. When Matthew lies about the confrontation, Diamond’s performance in the case is reviewed and he is removed from it. We learn too that he’s already on proverbially thin ice because of a confrontation in an earlier case. Those poor reviews have haunted Diamond and as we see, they play a role in the way the case unfolds.

And then there’s Martin Edwards’ The Cipher Garden. In that novel, DCI Hannah Scarlett and her Cold Case Review team have re-opened the ten-year-old case of the murder of landscaper Warren Howe. At the time of the murder, everyone suspected his wife Tina of the crime, and she had strong motive; Howe was adulterous and abusive. But the police couldn’t get the evidence they needed to pursue the case against her, so it went ‘cold.’ Now, anonymous notes have suggested that Tina really was guilty. It turns out that Howe worked for the same landscaping company that made the unusual garden attached to the cottage where Oxford historian Daniel Kind lives. He’s curious about its shape, so from his angle, he looks into the case too. While this is going on, Scarlett is also faced with the task of doing up annual appraisals for her staff. Here’s what she thinks of the job:

 

‘Everyone had to pay lip service to the benefits of performance management but in private, everyone ridiculed the whole process. How could you guarantee a level playing field, consistency and an absence of favouritism and score-settling across the whole county? The whole exercise was a time-consuming waste of energy that everyone except the people who mattered thought would be better devoted to real police work.’ 

 

I don’t think anyone believes that the police shouldn’t be held accountable for what they do, but it’s hard not to feel sympathy for Scarlett’s point of view.

Whether we like them or not, performance appraisals are a part of life for most people who work outside the home. The plot point is realistic and sometimes quite tension-filled, so it fits right in I think with crime fiction. What do you think?

 
 
 

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from Anna Waronker’s How Am I Doing?

But the Press Let the Story Leak*

Today is (or yesterday was, depending on when you read this) World Press Freedom Day. Now, normally I don’t keep track of every observance like this, but this one is an important one. People depend on their news to be accurate, and they depend on journalists to help ensure the transparency of what government and corporations do. So it’s important that the media be free to report on stories. At the same time, I think most of us would agree that there are good reasons for certain limits to press access. For instance, it wouldn’t be appropriate for the press to report on certain matters of national security (of course, we could debate on what belongs in that category; I’m speaking in generalities here). Most people would also agree that we have a right to a certain amount of privacy and the media should not violate that privacy. ‘Freedom of the press’ is a crucial concept, but it gets complicated when put into practice. And that’s what makes this kind of issue so interesting and such an appropriate plot point/theme for crime fiction.

Agatha Christie’s novels don’t generally paint journalists in a very positive light. I don’t know for sure but I wouldn’t be surprised if that has something to do with what she went through with the press during and after her famous 11-day absence during December of 1926. In Death in the Clouds (AKA Death in the Air), for instance, London hairdresser’s assistant Jane Grey is returning from a rare holiday at Le Pinet when one of her fellow airline passengers suddenly dies of what looks at first like a toxic reaction to a wasp sting. But it’s soon proven that this was murder. And it’s not surprising; the victim is Marie Morisot AKA Madame Giselle, a well-known French moneylender who used information she found out about her clients as ‘collateral’ for loans. The only possible suspects are the other passengers so although she’s not seriously suspected, Jane comes in for her share of questioning. That’s how she meets Hercule Poirot, who was on the same flight and who is helping Chief Inspector Japp with the case. At one point, Jane is having tea with fellow passenger Norman Gale when a reporter interrupts them, asking for a story. Both of them refuse him, but the reporter unscrupulously writes a story about them anyway.

Wendy James’ The Mistake also takes a look at, among other things, the way the press treats a major news story. Jodie Evans Garrow has what most people would say is pretty much the perfect life. She’s in an enduring marriage to Angus, a successful lawyer and up-and-coming politician. She has two healthy children and she herself is in good health. Everything changes when Jodie’s daughter Hannah is involved in an accident and ends up in the same hospital where, years earlier, Jodie gave birth to another child – a girl she’s never told anyone even existed. When one of the hospital nurses remembers Jodie and asks her about her daughter, Jodie says she gave the baby up for adoption. But the zealous nurse can find no official adoption records. She feels compelled to report what she’s found and the media soon gets wind of a big story. What happened to this successful woman’s baby? If the baby is alive, where is she? If not, did Jodie have something to do with the baby’s death? Very soon, the media makes the lives of Jodie and her family members miserable. Certainly the stories fan public sentiment against Jodie and that makes her situation that much worse. In the end, we find out what really happened after Jodie gave birth; we also see exactly what damage the press can do to a family.

And yet, as we see in Peter Temple’s Bad Debts, journalists play important roles in exposing corruption, graft and more. In that novel, sometime-attorney Jack Irish gets several telephone messages from a former client Danny McKillop, who’s recently been released from prison. McKillop was convicted of the drink-driving killing of Melbourne activist Anne Jeppeson and now he wants to talk to Irish about the case. But by the time Irish tries to return McKillop’s calls it’s too late; McKillop has been murdered. Irish knows that he didn’t do a good job of defending McKillop and that, plus his guilt over not returning the telephone calls sooner, pushes Irish to start asking questions about his former client’s death. As he begins to look into the matter he meets journalist Linda Hillier, who works for Pacific Rim News. Hillier gets interested in the story because it’s looking quite possible that McKillop was not guilty of Anne Jeppeson’s murder and was framed. If that’s true then someone else committed both killings. Hillier uses her contacts and journalistic skills to help find out who the murderer is. The trail leads to some highly-placed people and a case of greed and corruption that Jeppeson was trying to fight.

Paddy Richardson’s Traces of Red also brings up several issues of freedom of the press, its limits and the effects on people of a big story. Rebecca Thorne is a Wellington TV journalist whose Saturday Night is very well-regarded. But she’s reached a professional plateau, and she’s getting concerned. Saturday Night’s ratings are slipping and what’s worse, there are younger ‘hungry’ journalists out there who are all too eager to take Thorne’s place. So Thorne is looking for the story that will cement her place at the top of New Zealand television journalism. She thinks she finds that story in the case of Connor Bligh, who’s in Rimutaka Prison for the murders of his sister Angela Dickson, her husband Rowan and their son Sam. The only survivor of that attack was their daughter Katy, who wasn’t at home at the time of the killings. During the initial investigation and trial, everyone assumed that Bligh was guilty and most people still do. But there are little hints that he may be innocent. If he is, then this story could be just what Thorne needs. So she begins to investigate. In the process of her search for answers, she gets very close to the story – too close, really. And we see in the way she goes about it how all-consuming the search for a story can be. As Thorne interviews friends, colleagues, neighbours, and finally Katy Dickson herself, we also see how devastating it can be to have something this painful raked up.

There are also of course plenty of fictional sleuths who are journalists. I’m thinking for instance of Michael Connelly’s Jack McEvoy and Liza Marklund’s Annika Bengtzon. Of course, since they’re the protagonists we see the question of exactly what ‘counts’ as journalistic limits from their perspectives. But even so, they remind us of how important it is that the press be free to investigate stories. That said though, I think crime fiction also reminds us that with that freedom comes an important set of responsibilities, including accuracy, the protection of people’s privacy (especially the most vulnerable), and professional behaviour.

What do you think of this balance? Which stories have you enjoyed that treat these themes?

 

 
 

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from Paul Simon’s Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard.

All I Wanna Do is Have Some Fun*

It’s not easy to write a novel. Any writer will tell you that creating characters, developing the plot, providing closure and all of the other elements of storytelling can be challenging. And that’s not to mention things like editing and revising. But don’t let any writer (including this one) fool you into thinking there’s no enjoyment in it. There are some scenes, characters and events that are fun, or at least enjoyable to write. And that enjoyment can definitely come through in a story.

For instance, of all of the books and plays she wrote, Agatha Christie is said to have most enjoyed writing Crooked House. As she put it,

 

‘Writing Crooked House was pure pleasure…’

 

It’s clear from the novel too that she took special enjoyment in creating the story. In this novel, wealthy patriarch Aristide Leonides and his much-younger wife Brenda live with several members of their family in Three Gables, the family home. When Leonides’ grand-daughter Sophie returns to Three Gables after World War II, she finds that her grandfather has been poisoned with his own eye drops. Sophie’s fiancé Charles Hayward knows that she will not marry him until the matter of who killed Leonides is settled. So Hayward is strongly motivated to do some sleuthing. As he gets to know the various members of the family, he discovers that several of them had a good reason to want Leonides dead. This novel (in my opinion, so do feel free to differ with me if you do) has all of the ingredients that made Christie’s work so well-regarded. It’s easy to see how much she enjoyed writing it.

In Michael Connolly’s The Lincoln Lawyer, we are introduced to attorney Mickey Haller, who works out of his automobile and travels to visit his clients. In this case, the client is Hollywood playboy and real estate dealer Louis Roulet, who’s been arrested for rape and murder. On the surface of it, the case looks clear-cut, but the more Haller digs into it, the more possibility there is that, as unlikeable as he is, Roulet is not guilty. Connelly has said that he enjoyed writing Haller’s two ex-wives. One is deputy district attorney Maggie ‘McFierce’ McPherson. The other is Lorna Taylor, who works as Haller’s assistant. According to Connelly, the fact that these two women still like Haller, maybe even love him, shows that he’s got some redeeming qualities. And it’s clear that Haller respects them too. The marriages may not have been successful, but the relationships have, and it’s obvious from the way Connelly has developed these characters that he likes them.

In Patricia Stoltey’s The Desert Hedge Murders, retired circuit court judge Sylvia Thorn is reluctantly persuaded to go on a sightseeing/gambling trip with her mother Kristina’s travel group the Florida Flippers. The group has plans to visit Laughlin, Nevada, and all goes well enough at first. Then, the dead body of an unknown man is found in the bathtub of the hotel room shared by two of the Flippers. Shortly afterwards, another member of the group disappears and is later found dead in an abandoned gold mine. Partly to protect her mother and the rest of the Flippers, Thorn looks into the case and together with her brother Willie, she finds out how the two deaths are connected and what’s behind them. In one scene in the novel, Thorn, her mother and the Flippers have arrived at the Oatman Hotel in Oatman, a famous ghost town near the gold mine. They’re getting off the tour bus from Laughlin when Thorn suddenly finds herself surrounded by a group of the burros that make Oatman their home. She has another encounter with the burros later in the novel. No, the burros don’t attack, and they don’t have anything to do with the murders, but they add to the story, and I’m pretty certain it was fun to write about them.

In Anthony Bidulka’s Flight of Aquavit, Saskatoon PI Russell Quant gets a new client Daniel Guest. Guest is being blackmailed because of some secret relationships he’s had with other men. He hires Quant to find and stop the blackmailer and Quant begins to look into the case. The trail leads to New York, where Quant crosses paths with another PI Jane Cross, who lives and works in Regina. Neither is particularly enamoured of the other but as it turns out, the cases they are working on are related. So like it or not, Quant has to interact with Cross. In the end, and after a murder, Quant works out who blackmailed his client, who killed the murder victim and how Jane Cross fits in. Here is what Bidulka had to say about Jane Cross:

 

‘I enjoyed writing her character, especially as a foil for Russell.’

 

And that’s clear from the novels in which she appears. Cross is smart, interesting and absolutely unafraid. The interactions between her and Quant are sometimes tense and unpleasant, but they are engaging and sometimes really witty.

And then there’s Angela Savage’s The Half Child. That’s the second in her series featuring  PI Jayne Keeney, who lives and works in Bangkok. In that novel, Keeney investigates the death of Maryanne Delbeck, who jumped (or fell, or was pushed) from the roof of the Pattaya hotel where she was living. The official police report is that Maryanne was suffering from depression and committed suicide. But her father doesn’t believe it and wants Keeney to look into the matter. Keeney travels to Pattaya and goes undercover at the orphanage/child care home where Maryanne volunteered to try to get some answers. Along with finding out what really happened to Maryanne, Keeney also finds out some very ugly truths about the child care facility. In her personal life, Keeney has begun a relationship with Rajiv Patel, who manages his uncle’s Bangkok bookshop. Throughout this case, Patel proves to be very helpful, so much so that Keeney re-thinks her relationship with him as well as her view of her work. At the end of this novel, Patel finds a way to surprise Keeney. That scene is not just fun, it’s moving, too, and I have it on very good authority that it was

 

‘…great fun to write…’

 

And that’s clear when one reads it.

Part of the reason that writers keep doing what they do is that despite the challenges, it can be a lot of fun. And when an author enjoys particular characters, scenes and so on, that comes through clearly in the story. Do you see that too? Can you tell when an author is enjoying himself or herself? If you’re a writer, which scenes or characters have you had the most fun writing?

 
 
 

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from Sheryl Crow’s All I Wanna Do.