>We’ll See How it Feels Goin’ Mobile*

>One of the major social changes of the last one hundred fifty years has been mobility. People travel and move now more than ever. And, with the increasing power of communications technology, even when people don’t travel physically, they’re better able than ever to communicate with others all over the world. Case in point: blogs. Crime investigation has gone “global,” too. Now, it’s not uncommon for investigators from different countries to work together to solve crimes. We see that development in crime fiction, too, and that makes a lot of sense; crime fiction is more effective when it’s authentic.

Several of Agatha Christie’s novels show the beginnings of this global approach to crime investigation. For instance, in Death in the Clouds (AKA Death in the Air), Madame Giselle, a well-known French moneylender, is on a flight from Paris to London. During the flight, she suddenly dies of what seems at first like heart failure. When the plane lands, an investigation into her death begins, and it soon becomes clear that Madame Giselle was poisoned. Hercule Poirot is on the same flight, so he works with Chief Inspector James “Jimmy” Japp to solve the crime. The only possible suspects are the other passengers on the flight, and they are not all English. So Poirot and Japp work with M. Fournier of the Sûreté and French attorney Maître Thibault to sift through the clues and find out which of the passengers is the killer. In the course of the investigation, Poirot also works with Canadian and Belgian sources who provide him with valuable information.

We also see some of this global approach to investigation in Ngaio Marsh’s work. In several of Marsh’s novels, Inspector Roderick Alleyn works with authorities in other countries to solve cases. For instance, in Died in the Wool, he works with New Zealand authorities to find out who killed MP Flossie Rubick. She goes out to a wool shed one day to practice a speech, and doesn’t return. Three weeks later, her body is found inside a bale of wool. When her nephew suspects that her death may have something to do with international espionage, he contacts Alleyn, who travels to New Zealand and investigates the case.

In Marsh’s Spinsters in Jeopardy, Alleyn is asked by MI5 and the Sûreté to investigate a drugs ring that they think is operating in the south of France. He decides to combine business with pleasure and bring his family on a holiday. While they’re en route, though, Alleyn and his wife, Agatha Troy, happen to look out of the train window and see what looks very much like a murder. Then, one of their fellow passengers suffers an attack of appendicitis, and needs emergency surgery. The only place where the train can stop is the same château where the murder (if it was a murder) occurred. As it happens, that’s the very place, too, where the drugs ring is supposed to be operating. So Alleyn and Troy, and later their son, get drawn into the drugs ring in a very different way from the way they’d planned, and Alleyn works with French authorities to stop the ring.

There’s an interesting example of that kind of global criminal investigation in Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö’s Roseanna. In that novel, the body of a young unidentified woman is dredged up from Lake Vättern. Stockholm detective Martin Beck and his team are called to Motala, where the woman’s body was discovered, to investigate the case. After a time, the woman is identified as Roseanna McGraw, from Lincoln, Nebraska. Once that identification is made, Beck and the team work with Detective Elmer Kafka of the Lincoln, Nebraska police. Together, they determine that Roseanna McGraw had been on a trip through the Scandinavian countries. She was taking a cruise in Sweden when she was killed. Now, Beck and his team also have to work with authorities from several other countries, since several of the passengers and crew members on that cruise are not Swedish. In the end, that kind of global view of a case is an important factor in finding out who Roseanna Mcgraw was and why she was killed (and of course, by whom). This novel was first published in 1967, and we can see the limits of the communication of the times. For example, in one instance, Beck has placed an international call to Kafka, and the two have a great deal of difficulty understanding each other, and not just because of the language difference. The long-distance telephone communications of the day were not nearly as advanced as they are now. Still, this is an interesting example of the kind of international co-operation that’s sometimes needed to solve crimes.

Of course, Roseanna was written before the advent of the Internet. Today, web sites, Email, electronic documents and faxes allow for easy communication and exchange of information. That’s how many international authorities keep in touch and work together. Of course, this doesn’t mean that this kind of global approach always works smoothly; sometimes it doesn’t at all. But it’s more instantaneous and efficient than ever. That’s what we find, for instance, in Yrsa Sigurðardóttir’s Last Rituals. Harald Guntlieb is a German student studying in Reykjavík. When he is found murdered and his body mutilated, the police arrest his former friend Hugi Thórisson. But Gunltieb’s family doesn’t believe that Thórisson is guilty. So they contact Reykjavík attorney Thóra Gudmundsdóttir and ask her to work with the family banker Matthew Reich to find out what really happened. Thóra is eager for a well-paid case, so she accepts. As she and Matthew look into Harald Guntlieb’s past, they make quite a lot of use of international sources of information. In fact, those sources prove extremely useful as the two sleuths figure out why Harald Guntlieb was really killed.

In Michael Ridpath’s Where the Shadows Lie, we meet Magnus Johnson, a Boston police officer who is also half-Icelandic. Johnson has valuable information on a large Boston-area drug-smuggling operation which puts his life in danger. So when Iceland’s police authorities ask for U.S. help with a new kind of crime wave, Johnson is a natural choice. He’s got his own reasons, too, for wanting to travel to Iceland. He lived there as a child, and he wants to look into the unsolved mystery of his father’s death. So he travels to Iceland to work with the local police. While he’s there, he gets involved in another murder mystery as he waits for his opportunity to testify against the Boston crime lords who’ve targeted him. In this novel, too, we see a global approach to dealing with crime and criminal investigation.

Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch has depended more than once on a global approach to solving crime. For instance, in The Black Ice, Bosch investigates a Mexican drug-smuggling operation and its relationship to the death of police officer Calexico “Cal” Moore. The operation seems to be based in the Mexican town where Moore grew up, so Bosch travels there. In the process of finding out what happened to Moore, and tracing the operation, Bosch works with some members of the Mexican State Judicial Police. It’s interesting in this novel to see how much this kind of global approach depends on mutual respect and the willingness to share information.

This is also apparent in Connelly’s 9 Dragons. In that story, Bosch is investigating the shooting death of a Chinese liquor store owner. The murder is possibly linked to a tong, a Chinese gang, so Bosch begins to go after the gang that he thinks is responsible for the killing. Then, Bosch finds out that his daughter Maddie, who lives in Hong Kong, has been kidnapped. Bosch is convinced that the kidnapping is related to his investigation of tong activity, so he flies immediately to Hong Kong to try to free Maddie. As he searches for his daughter, Bosch has to rely on the co-operation of several people in Hong Kong, including Sun Yee, a bodyguard, and the Hong Kong police, who are anxious to avoid a public scandal about the dangers to Americans living in Hong Kong.

There are a lot of other crime fiction novels where sleuths have to work with people from other countries and take a global approach to crime investigation. I’ve only had space to mention a few. Which ones have you enjoyed?

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from The Who’s Going Mobile.

>Wilkommen, Bienvenue, Welcome!*

> One of the pleasures of reading is that readers can get a sense of a place and group of people that they wouldn’t otherwise have gotten to know. For that reason, reading a well-written novel is, in a way, like going on a trip to another place. Some authors are natives of the places they write about; they share that sense of place and people in the way that one welcomes guests into one’s home. Other authors are not natives of the places they write about, although they might have lived in those places for quite some time. These authors convey a strong sense of place and people in the way that a friend might share a place: “I’ve found this wonderful place and fascinating people, and I want to share it with you.” Either approach can make for a well-written, compelling novel.

Agatha Christie conveys a sense of place in both ways. She was, of course, English, and in her novels that take place in England, there is a strong sense of that place and those people. For instance, in novels such as The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Sad Cypress, The Body in the Library and Dead Man’s Folly, Christie shares scenes of home life and draws characters that are intimate portrayals of life in the England that she knew. Everything from meals to idiomatic expressions are truly English, and we see her world from an “insider’s” perspective.

In novels such as Murder in Mesopotamia, Death on the Nile, and Appointment With Death , Christie takes a different perspective. Much of the action in those novels takes place outside of England, and in them, Christie shows us the places and people in a slightly different way. Christie spent time in the Middle East, and came to know that part of the world. That knowledge is evident in stories such as Murder in Mesopotamia, in which Hercule Poirot finds the killer of Louise Leidner, wife of a noted archeologist who’s on a dig in Iraq. Yet, there’s a different feel to these novels. In them, we see the world of the Middle East as a very welcome and enthusiastic tourist might. Christie provides vivid descriptions of places, customs and so on, and the reader is, if you will, taken along on an exciting journey. But the intimate sense of being an “insider” isn’t there, quite possibly because Christie wasn’t from the Middle East.

We see a similar distinction in Ngaio Marsh’s work. Novels such as Enter a Murderer take place in England. So Marsh conveys a sense of that place and those people. And, since Marsh’s first love was the theater, we also get a strong sense in this particular novel of English “theater people.” In the story, Arthur Surbonadier is infuriated when a role he’d coveted in the Unicorn Theatre’s production of The Rat and the Beaver is given to a rival, Felix Gardener. Just before the show is to begin, a drunken Surbonadier threatens Gardener. It’s Surbonadier, though, who’s murdered when a prop gun turns out to be all too real. Sir Roderick Alleyn, who’s attending the play, investigates the crime. While this novel gives us an intimate look at life in the theatre, it’s quite different from the intimate portrait Marsh gives us of her own New Zealand in novels such as Died in the Wool which take place there. In that novel, Flossie Rubrick, MP for a part of South Island, goes off on her husband’s sheep station to practice an important political speech and never returns. Weeks later, she’s found dead inside a bale of hay. A year later, her nephew asks Alleyn to investigate when it turns out that her death may be related to espionage. In this and her other novels set in New Zealand, Marsh gives readers an “insider’s” look at life in New Zealand.

To get a sense of the difference perspective can make, I invite you to compare the view of England that we get from Agatha Christie’s novels with the view that Marsh gives us in novels such as A Surfeit of Lampreys. We learn quite a bit from both authors, but from different points of view.

Tony Hillerman was a native of the American Southwest. Born and raised in Oklahoma, he lived there until his service in World War II. He later moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he lived and worked until his death. Hillerman’s mystery novels share an “insider’s” look at the Southwest with the reader. We get a strong sense of place in his Jim Chee/Joe Leaphorn novels, and it’s obvious from the portraits Hillerman paints that he’s a native of the area. What’s interesting, too, is the subtle differences between the ways Hillerman writes of the country in the Southwest, and the ways in which he writes of the Native Americans who live there. Hillerman himself was not Native American, although he attended a Native American school as a boy. So in some ways, Hillerman shares the life of, especially, the Navajos in the Southwest in a slightly less intimate way. Although we learn quite a lot about Navajo customs and lifestyles, we don’t get an “insider’s look” at being Navajo. Hillerman wasn’t a Navajo and didn’t pretend to be one. The same is true of Margaret Coel’s portrayal of Apache life in her Wind River series. Coel is a native of Coloardo, and writes of that area with the kind of intimate knowledge that a native of any area would have. Her portrayal of Apache life and customs is informed, respectful and fascinating, but subtly different, since Coel is not Apache and doesn’t pretend she is.

The work of Donna Leon and of Andrea Camilleri also gives a very interesting look at the difference between the perspective that a native of a place offers and the perspective of someone who isn’t from that place. In this case, the place is Italy. Leon is an American who’s lived in Venice for many years, and knows the city well. It’s obvious from her Guido Brunetti novels that she loves Venice and very much enjoys sharing her adopted home with readers. Her Commissario Brunetti and his wife Paola are proud to be Veneziano and as we follow them, we see why Leon loves the city as much as she clearly does. Each novel gives the reader the opportunity to explore different sections of the city and the surrounding area.

Andrea Camilleri is a native of Sicily and has lived in Italy all of his life. His Sicilian Commissario Salvo Montalbano lives and works in fictional Vigàta, which Camilleri is said to have modeled after his native Porto Empedocle. The Montalbano novels give us the “insider’s” view of Sicily. Camilleri shares a very personal look at the daily lives and lifestyles of his characters, especially of Montalbano. We see the different towns of Sicily from the perspective of the native, and it gives a slightly different cast to these novels from Leon’s perspective on Venice.

And then there are the differing views of Iceland that we get from the work of Yrsa Sigurðardóttir and the work of Michael Ridpath. Ridpath is British, and writes of Iceland in Where the Shadows Lie. In that novel, Boston police officer Magnus Johnson is sent to Iceland to work with the local police force in combating a new kind of dangerous crime that’s appeared in Iceland. Johnson’s trip to Iceland comes at a good time, since his life is in danger from Boston-area drug lords whose operations he knows about. Johnson is half-Icelandic, and lived in Iceland as a child, so he’s a natural choice, anyway, for this assignment. He’s not there long before a murder occurs, and he gets involved in the investigation. As he does, Ridpath shares Iceland with the reader just as a friend who was excited about a new place might. You might say the reader discovers Iceland as Johnson re-discovers it.

By contrast, Iceland is Yrsa Sigurðardóttir’s own country. So the portrait of Iceland that she shares in her Thóra Gudmundsdóttir series is an intimate, personal picture of life in that country. We see Iceland from the perspective of someone who’s always lived there and has an “insider’s” view. Icelandic daily life, customs and even the sense of humour are shared from the point of view of a native. In these novels, you might say that Yrsa Sigurðardóttir shares her home with the reader.Both the “insider’s” perspective and, if you will, the “tour guide” perspective can make for exciting and engaging crime fiction. So long as the story and characters are believable and well-drawn, you could say that a good crime fiction novel is a good crime fiction novel. But there are subtle differences between these two perspectives. Have you noticed this? Do you have a preference when you read? If you’re a crime fiction author, do you think that whether you’re a native of your setting makes a difference in your writing?Thanks very much to Maxine at Petrona for the inspiration for this post!

*NOTE: The title of this post is the first line of John Kander and Fred Ebb’s Wilkommen.
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>In The Blink Of An Eye..

>When a murder is investigated, the police or other detectives interview witnesses. One of the problems they face, both in real life and in crime fiction, is that murder can happen so quickly that witnesses sometimes don’t see things accurately. In what seems like the blink of an eye, everything changes and someone’s dead. It’s almost ironic how people’s lives are changed forever by something that happens within seconds. Murderers sometimes use this, too; not only does it give them the advantage that the victim’s unprepared, but also, it’s a good “cover” if the murderer can’t hide the body or kill the victim in some private place.

Agatha Christie makes the point about how quickly murder can happen in a few of her novels. For instance, in Death in the Clouds (AKA Death in the Air), Hercule Poirot investigates the murder of Madame Giselle, a well-known French moneylender who’s poisoned while en route from Paris to London on an airplane. At first, it looks as though Madame Giselle died of heart failure due to a wasp sting. Soon enough, though, it’s established that she was actually murdered by a poisoned thorn. The only possible suspects are Madame Giselle’s fellow passengers (including Poirot himself!), but no-one saw anyone firing a dart at the victim. Poirot discovers that several of the passengers on the plane might have had a reason for killing Madame Giselle; she used private information about her clients as “loan security,” and wasn’t afraid to make that private information public if her client didn’t pay her back. In the end, Poirot finds that the murderer committed the crime so quickly and unobtrusively that, even with a cabin full of witnesses, no-one saw what happened. The speed with which the murder was committed is part of what protects the murderer – at first.

The murderer also takes advantage of how quickly a crime can be committed in Christie’s Appointment With Death. That’s the story of the very dysfunctional Boynton family. Mrs. Boynton is a tyrant who’s kept her family cowed for years. Then the family takes a tour through the Middle East. On the tour, the members of the family are confronted by their isolation and entrapment, and, each in a different way, they resolve to free themselves. The family’s journey takes everyone to the ancient city of Petra. On the first afternoon after they arrive, Mrs. Boynton suddenly dies. At first, her death is put down to heart trouble. But Colonel Carbury, who’s in charge of the investigation, isn’t satisfied. So he asks Hercule Poirot, who’s also traveling in the Middle East, to investigate. Poirot agrees, and it’s not long before he finds that several people on the tour of Petra had a motive to kill Mrs. Boynton. As it turns out, Mrs. Boynton was killed so quickly that even though there’s an eyewitness, no-one knows at first who killed her. Again the fact that the murder happened quickly is part of what “hides” the murderer.

Mickey Spillane’s The Big Kill also has an example of a killing that happens “in the blink of an eye.” That’s the story of William Decker, a con-man who’s trying to “go straight.” One day, he walks into a bar where Spillane’s sleuth, Mike Hammer, is having a drink. Oddly enough, he brings his toddler son into the bar with him. After two quick drinks, Decker leaves the bar and, before Hammer even really knows what’s happened, Decker’s been shot by a drive-by killer. Hammer runs out of the bar, but he only has time enough to get a shot off at one of the people in the car before the car runs Decker down and then speeds away. It turns out that Decker’s financial desperation forced him to get mixed up with an unsavory gang and agree to do a break-in job. At first, it’s thought that he was murdered because he bungled the job. In the end, though, Hammer finds out that Decker was killed for quite a different reason.

In Marian Babson’s Untimely Guest, we meet Eleanor and Kevin, who are members of a large, dysfunctional Irish Catholic family. The matriarch of the family, known only as Mam, is an oppressive tyrant who lives in the family home and is taken care of by her daughter, Veronica. Her two sons, Patrick and Kevin, have married “outside of the faith,” but otherwise are often under Mam’s thumb, so to speak. Mam’s two other daughters, Bridget “Bridie” and DeeDee, are not. DeeDee has scandalized Mam by divorcing her husband, Terence, and getting engaged to another man, James. Bridie has left the convent Mam had wanted her to join, and has returned to the family village after a ten-year absence. When DeeDee and James also return to the family home, all the ingredients are there for a serious family dispute, and it soon happens. One night, after a particularly heated argument, James and Terence both go upstairs in the family home. Soon, everyone hears a loud thump and rushes upstairs. So almost all of the family members are there when DeeDee falls down the stairs to her death. At first, everyone thinks the death was a horrible accident. But James insists that DeeDee was murdered. The trouble is, her fall down the stairs happened so quickly that no-one really saw what happened. Slowly, though, Eleanor and Carmel, especially, begin to suspect that perhaps James is right. At the end of the book, and after a climactic scene, the murderer confesses and we really know for sure who pushed DeeDee down the stairs.

Michael Ridpath’s The Predator also focuses on a murder that happens in what seems like the blink of an eye. Chris Szczypiorski and Lenka Nemeckova become friends when they meet at a training program for Wall Street’s Bloomfield Weiss. They form a bond with some of the other trainees, and the group becomes very close-knit. One night, after a drunken celebration on a boat ends in tragedy, the group covers the incident up. Everyone moves on, and Chris and Lenka form a fund management company. Ten years later, Lenka is visiting Chris while she’s on a business trip to Prague. In fact, they’re together when Lenka is brutally attacked and killed. Chris is there, but the attack happens so fast that he’s helpless to protect his friend. Chris resolves to find out who killed Lenka, but in doing that, he’s putting himself in danger, because as he finds out, the attack on Lenka is related to the tragic boat trip of ten years earlier.

Commissario Guido Brunetti and Ispettore Lorenzo Vianello investigate the murder of an illegal Senegalese immigrant in Donna Leon’s Blood From a Stone. The dead man is one of thousands of illegal immigrants, the vu comprá, who sell their wares on the streets. One day, the victim is at his accustomed place when, before anyone really sees anything, he’s shot. There’s a crowd of people around, but the murder has happened so fast that no-one really noticed very much. So at first, Brunetti and Vianello don’t have much information to help them find the murderer. Eventually, though, they’re able to trace the dead man to the room he lived in, and they find a cache of stolen diamonds there. That’s when the two men realize that this murder was not a random shooting. One of the interesting things in this novel is Brunetti’s initial conversations with people who were in the area at the time of the shooting. It’s a fascinating glimpse at the way witnesses can simply not see what happened because everything can happen so quickly.

Martin Clark’s The Legal Limit also shows us how quickly murder can change everyone’s life. Mason and Gates Hunt are the sons of an abusive alcoholic. Beyond that, they have nearly nothing in common. Mason makes the most of his opportunities and becomes a lawyer. Gates, on the other hand, trades on his looks and high school athleticism. He lives on his girlfriend’s Welfare money and on money his mother gives him. One day, Gates Hunt has an argument with Wayne Thompson, his rival for his girlfriend. Thompson leaves, but later, the Hunt brothers encounter Thompson again. Gates and Thompson get into an angry argument and, too quickly for Mason to stop him, Gates pulls out a gun and shoots Thompson. Out of a sense of family duty, Mason helps his brother cover up the crime and life goes on for the Hunt brothers. Then, years later, Gates Hunt is convicted of cocaine trafficking. He pleads with his brother, now a successful commonwealth attorney, to get him out of jail, but Mason refuses. That’s when Gates Hunt blackmails his brother, claiming that he’ll accuse Mason of the shooting of Wayne Thompson if Mason doesn’t help him. Mason still refuses and the family is torn apart when Mason is indicted for murder on Gates’ testimony. Now, Mason will have to work to clear his name and keep Gates from doing any further harm to the family.

It’s easy to forget how quickly someone can take a life, and how easy it is for witnesses to be mistaken because of that. But crime fiction is full of examples of how fast a murder can happen; which novels have you enjoyed?

>Murder on the Road

>Almost all of us travel at least sometimes. We may travel for business, to take a holiday or to celebrate a special occasion. Traveling can be exciting and fun, but it can often be fraught with perils such as long lines at airports, lost luggage, bad driving directions and hotels that only seem nice on the outside and in travel brochures. I’m sure that all of you could recount horror stories of disastrous trips you’ve taken. I know I can. Because traveling is such a common experience, it’s also a very natural context for crime fiction. We can all identify with the traveler. The context of traveling also allows an interesting new twist to a series as well as a very convenient juxtaposition of characters. When everyone’s traveling, there’s much less need to rely on contrived coincidence.

Agatha Christie used the traveling context many times in her novels. In fact, there are so many that I’ll just mention a few of them. In Death on the Nile, beautiful, wealthy Linnet Ridgeway Doyle is on a honeymoon cruise up the Nile. Traveling on the same boat are several other characters, including Hercule Poirot, who’s taking a holiday of his own. On the second night out, Linnet is shot. At once, suspicion falls on her friend Jacqueline De Bellefort, who certainly has good reason for the murder; Linnet’s just married Jacqueline’s former fiancé, with whom Jacqueline is still in love. The problem is, Jacqueline’s got an unimpeachable alibi for the murder. As is so often the case in Christie’s novels, nothing is really as it seems, as Poirot quickly finds when he begins to investigate the case.

In Evil Under the Sun (in which, by the way, there’s a reference to Death on the Nile), beautiful and notorious Arlena Stuart Marshall is on a holiday at the Jolly Roger Hotel off the Devon Coast. With her are her husband, Kenneth, and her stepdaughter, Linda. Late one morning, Arlena is strangled and the local police begin to investigate. As it happens, Hercule Poirot is staying at the same hotel and gets involved in the case. As he sifts through the various lies and alibis that the other guests offer, Poirot finds that Arlena’s death isn’t the crime passionel that it seems on the surface; it’s been coldly planned.

Miss Marple gets involved in a “traveling” case in At Bertram’s Hotel. In that novel, Miss Marple is taking a holiday in London, and has chosen to stay in the sophisticated, traditional Bertram’s Hotel. Strange events soon begin to happen at the hotel. First, another guest, the admittedly absent-minded Canon Pennyfeather, is knocked out late one night after he returns to the hotel from the airport after realizing he left for the airport on the wrong day. He wakes up in a house some distance from the hotel, only to find out later that someone looking very much like him was seen at a train robbery that occurred while he was blacked out. Then another guest, Elvira Blake, is almost a shooting victim while returning to the hotel. The killer tries again, this time murdering Michael Gorman, another guest. Later, there’s another death. As Miss Marple unravels the mystery, she finds out that the shootings and the train robbery are connected.

In M.C. Beaton’s Love, Lies and Liquor, Geraldine Jankers is on her honeymoon with her fourth husband, Fred. With the couple are Geraldine’s son, Wayne and his wife, Chelsea, and Geraldine’s friend Cyril and his wife, Dawn. They’ve chosen the inappropriately-named Palace Hotel at Snoth-on-Sea, a run-down shadow of its former genteel self. Late one night, Geraldine is found strangled on the beach. The police have the perfect suspect – Agatha Raisin, Beaton’s sleuth. Agatha’s there with her ex-husband, James Lacey, who persuaded her to come on what she thought would be a romantic getaway. On the evening of the murder, Agatha had gotten into an argument with the Jankers family, and James had gotten the better of Wayne in a fight. As if that’s not enough, Geraldine Jankers was strangled with Agatha’s scarf. Agatha and James are able to prove that she’s innocent of murder, but Agatha’s gotten interested in the case and decides to investigate it with the help of her team, Patrick Mulligan and Harry Beam. It turns out that Geraldine Jankers associated with some dangerous and unsavory people, and Agatha and her team run into danger more than once as they work to solve the case.

Travel is also the context in Lilian Jackson Braun’s The Cat Who Wasn’t There, in which a group of residents of Pickax, a small community in the North Central United States, embarks on a tour of Scotland. The tour’s leader, Irma Hasselrich, has planned and organized everything, and the tour begins with high hopes. One night, Irma dies suddenly of what looks like heart failure at first. It’s not surprising, either, since she wasn’t young or in very good health. Still, Jim Qwilleran, former investigative reporter, and Braun’s sleuth, begins to have suspicions about Irma’s death when the tour’s bus driver disappears, along with some stolen jewels. When the tourists return to Pickax, Qwilleran does some investigating, and finds out that Irma’s death is rooted in her past and her associations.

Of course, not all traveling is for pleasure. Business travel can be interrupted by murder, too, and that’s what happens in John Alexander Graham’s Something in the Air. Columbia University professor Jake Landau is traveling to New York from Boston. With him is his friend and attorney, Martin Ross. The two of them have been in negotiations with the attorney for Landau’s ex-wife and are now returning to New York. During the flight, a bomb explodes on the plane, and Ross is killed. Landau wants to know who’s behind the bombing, but when he starts asking questions, no-one seems interested in helping him to get answers. So he sets off on his own investigation. What he finds out is that the bombing is connected to a powerful drug ring, and that his own life is now in danger.

Michael Ridpath’s The Predator is also centered on a business trip. Chris Szczypiorski and Lenka Nemeckova first meet during a training program at Wall-Street’s Bloomfield Weiss. All of these trainees are chosen for their competitiveness and their skill, even thought several of them have what might be called borderline-psychotic personality profiles. During the training, Chris and Lenka also bond with the other trainees, and the group becomes very close. One night during a boat party, a drunken celebration ends tragically, and the group ends up covering up what happened. Ten years after the training, Chris and Lenka have formed their own fund management company, and all seems well. Then, one day, Lenka is murdered while she’s on a business trip to Prague, and Chris is helpless to save her. Then, other members of the group of trainees also begin to die and it becomes clear that Chris will be a target himself if he doesn’t stop the killer.

Death during a business trip is also featured in Thomas Scortia and Frank Robinson’s The Nightmare Factor. A deadly influenza-type virus has struck a group of attendees at a convention of the Veterans of American Wars. Dr. Calvin Doohan of the World Health Organization is called in to investigate the deaths, and before long, he’s confronted with more deaths, including that of a friend. Doohan resolves to get to the bottom of the deaths, little realizing that they’ve been carefully planned. He also doesn’t realize that he’s very likely going to be the next victim.

In my own Dying to See You, Craig Peterson, an up-and-coming professor of criminal law, is killed while he and large group of colleagues are attending a meeting of the Criminology Educators Association in San Diego. One of the attendees, Dr. Joel Williams, is a friend of the victim and, in fact, was working with him on a research project at the time of the death. For that reason, among others, Williams is intent on finding out who killed Peterson, and works with the local police to solve the crime.

There are many other novels in which a murder occurs while the victim is “on the road.” This kind of plot allows the writer to gather a group of people together who otherwise might not meet. It also allows changes of scenery and characters for regular series. There’s also an interesting layer of suspense, since there’s often pressure to solve the crime as soon as possible. On the other hand, travel, like any other device, can be overused. If it’s not natural and integral to the plot, it can seem contrived. What do you think? Do you enjoy novels that feature “murder on the road?” Which are your favorites?

On Another Note…
MEA CULPA
In my 8 December edition of FYI, I made a reference to author Hal White’s excellent website that contains lots of interesting resources on “locked room mysteries.” Unfortunately, I posted his name as Hal Smith. My apologies to Hal; he deserves better from me. Please do visit his site if you’re interested in unusual murders and impossible crimes.