The Alphabet in Crime Fiction: Cars

Well, let’s C…I think the 2013 Crime Fiction Alphabet meme has reached – yes, it has reached – the third stop on our crime-ridden journey. Thanks as always to Kerrie at Mysteries in Paradise for being such an excellent tour guide. My contribution (appropriate, I think, for a journey) is cars.

We all know that cars can be very dangerous. That’s why there are laws against drink driving, mobile ‘phone use while driving, and speeding. It’s why we’re always told to buckle up and stay alert. But if you look at crime fiction, you also see that cars aren’t just deadly because of accidents. They can be very effective murder weapons.

Agatha Christie mentions car-related deaths a few times in her work. One incident is part of the plot of And Then There Were None (AKA Ten Little Indians). A group of people is invited for a stay at Indian Island, off the Devon Coast. For a variety of reasons they all accept. When they arrive, they’re a little surprised that their host has not yet made an appearance. Still, they settle in. That night after dinner, each guest is accused of being responsible for the death of at least one other person. Everyone is shocked at this accusation and at first there’s a round of denials. But then one of the guests Anthony Marston suddenly dies of what turns out to be poison. Later that night there’s another death. Now the guests begin to see that they’ve been lured to the island by a murderer. As one by one the guests die, the survivors try to discover who the murderer is and stay alive. And what was the death of which Anthony Marston was accused? A hit-and-run car crash that killed two children.

Mickey Spillane’s My Gun is Quick also features deadly use of a car. In that novel, PI Mike Hammer is in a coffee shop when he meets Nancy Sanford, a young woman down on her luck who’s turned to prostitution. Hammer gives her some money to try to help her escape ‘the life’ and it seems that she will be able to start over. A few days later, though, Hammer learns that Nancy has been killed in a hit-and-run incident. There is no evidence that she was murdered but Hammer doesn’t believe her death was an accident. So he begins to investigate. He discovers that Nancy was trapped in a major prostitution ring. Before she was killed, she was collecting evidence against the ring leaders in hopes that they would be arrested. Needless to say, Hammer takes it on himself to finish what Nancy Sandford started.

In Elizabeth George’s A Traitor to Memory, twenty-eight-year-old violin virtuoso Gideon Davies is terrified one night when he finds himself unable to play. He seeks out psychological help to try to figure out what is causing this block and starts digging into his past. In the meantime, his mother Eugenie faces a very ‘here and now’ danger. One night, she is killed in what looks like a hit-and-run accident. As Inspector Thomas Lynley and Sergeant Barbara Havers soon discover, this was no accident. Eugenie Davis’ death is related to her son’s inability to play, and both are related to a long-ago tragedy in which two-year-old Sonia, Gideon’s sister, was drowned. At the time of her death, her nanny Katja Wolff was imprisoned for the drowning and has recently been released. As the novel evolves we see how this too relates to the rest of the story.

Melbourne activist Anne Jeppeson finds out the hard way just how dangerous cars can be in Peter Temple’s Bad Debts. She is killed in a hit-and-run incident and Danny McKillop is arrested for it. There’s a lot of evidence against him, too. After serving eight years in prison, he’s released and one of the first things he does is contact the lawyer who defended him Jack Irish. Irish was, to put it mildly, not at his best at the time of the trial; he was using alcohol to ease the pain of his wife Isabel’s murder and did a poor job of defending McKillop. So when McKillop calls him, Irish feels a sense of obligation. But by the time he gets around to meeting with his former client it’s too late; McKillop has been murdered. Irish decides to find out why and by whom, and slowly he pieces together what happened. McKillop was framed for Anne Jeppeson’s murder and the truth about what happened to both victims is bound up with politics, greed and corruption.

And then there’s Phil Smedway, whose life and death are part of the plot of Catherine O’Flynn’s The News Where You Are. Smedway was a beloved regional TV presenter who ‘hit it big.’ He was also a mentor to his successor Frank Allcroft. Then one day Smedway was killed in a hit-and-run incident during his regular jog. Everyone, including the police, thinks that this was a tragic accident. But Allcroft begins to wonder when he is drawn to the place where Smedway died. The road at the site is straight and clear of obstacles, so it would have been easy for even a drunken driver to see and avoid Smedway. What’s more, it wasn’t raining or snowing the weather wasn’t a factor. Allcroft decides to start asking questions about Smedway and his death. As he slowly finds out the answers, he also learns quite a bit about Smedway’s life.

Oh, and lest you think that the only danger from cars comes from hit-and-run incidents, consider Ellery Queen’s The Dragon’s Teeth. In that novel, wealthy and eccentric Cadmus Cole hires Ellery Queen and Beau Rummell, who’ve just opened up a detective agency. Cole wants to find his only living relations. One is Margo Cole, who’s been living in Paris. The other is Kerrie Shawn, an aspiring actress who’s trying to make a success of herself in Hollywood. The two women are no sooner found than word comes that Cadmus Cole has died at sea. According to the provisions of Cole’s will, both Kerrie and Margo will have to move into Cole’s upstate New York mansion and live there in order to claim his considerable fortune. Not long after the young women move in, Kerrie is trapped in the mansion’s garage and is nearly killed by carbon monoxide poisoning from a running car engine. Later she’s accused when Margo is shot. Kerrie learns that not only is it dangerous to inherit a lot of money, it’s very dangerous to be around cars.

 

See? Cars may be necessary for a lot of people’s lives, but they do carry high risks. Buckle up and enjoy the ride!

 

Oh, and if you want to ride along with us as we continue our crime fiction journey, we’d love to have you. Check out the meme details right here!

I’m Just a Poor Soul in the Unemployment Line, My God, I’m Hardly Alive*

If you’ve ever been unemployed, you know the mix of fear and shame that being out of work can bring. There are of course people who don’t want to work. But the vast majority of people without jobs are not unemployed because they like it that way. On one level, the most basic of levels, unemployment threatens one’s security. Even for people who live in countries that have social ‘safety nets,’ unemployment means re-thinking every purchase. It means possibly having to leave one’s home. It means a struggle to provide the barest essentials. On another level there’s the whole matter of social perception. People who are unemployed, especially if it’s for more than a brief period, are often looked at with pity or worse, with hostility (i.e. ‘Why don’t you get off your lazy a*** and get a job!’). On yet another level there’s the deep sense of shame one feels when one doesn’t have work. After all, many people’s identities are tied up with what they do. I’ll bet when you meet someone for the first time, one of the questions that invariably get asked is, ‘What do you do for a living?’ So it’s not surprising that being unemployed deeply affects the way we act, the way we think and the way we look at the world. And it can drive people to all sorts of things they wouldn’t otherwise do. Little wonder then that unemployment is a thread that’s woven through a lot of crime fiction. Let me just give a few examples.

Agatha Christie’s Mrs. McGinty’s Dead is the story of Hercule Poirot’s investigation into the murder of a charwoman. Everyone in the village of Broadhinny thinks that Mrs. McGinty was murdered by her lodger James Bentley. And there is evidence against him. And yet, Superintendent Spence thinks Bentley may be innocent, so he asks Poirot to go to Broadhinny and look into the matter. One of the things that Poirot finds out quickly is that there’s a lot of local prejudice against Bentley. He had a job at an estate agent’s office but lost it and hasn’t been able to find another. That in itself is a major strike against him and it deeply affects his already shaky self-confidence. In fact, Bentley is so lacking in self-respect that he sees little point in re-investigating the case. Fortunately for him, Poirot doesn’t see things the same way and is able to find out the truth about Mrs. McGinty’s death.

In Mickey Spillane’s The Big Kill, we meet William Decker. He’s a former safecracker who’s decided to ‘go straight’ mostly for the sake of his son. But it’s hard to find a job and after all, one can’t feed a child on good intentions. So Decker takes a fateful decision. One day, Spillane’s sleuth Mike Hammer is in a seedy bar when Decker comes in with his son. He downs two drinks in quick succession, says goodbye to his son and leaves the bar. Seconds later he’s knocked down in what looks like a hit-and-run incident. Hammer dashes outside in time to see that this is no ordinary hit-and-run tragedy. The passenger in the car that struck Decker also shot him to make he was dead. Hammer takes in Decker’s son and determines to find out who’s behind the murder. It turns out that Decker was desperate for money and got mixed up with a local criminal gang. At first it looks as though members of that gang killed him as punishment for bungling a job. But the reality turns out to be quite different.

Robert Pollock’s Loophole takes a solid look at several levels on which unemployment can wreak havoc on a person. Stephen Booker is an architect who’s just lost his job. At first, he works hard to find another, but he’s unsuccessful and begins to sink into depression. Finally, he settles for the only thing that he can find: a job driving a cab at night. He doesn’t earn much money but his self-respect and his marriage are suffering and he’s desperate for whatever he can get. Booker’s cab driving puts him in touch with professional thief Mike Daniels, who’s busy planning a major heist. He and his team want to break into the City Savings Deposit Bank. When Daniels discovers that Booker is an architect by background, he decides that the team could really use Booker’s expertise to perfect their plan. At first Booker refuses. But his sense of self-respect and his dire financial straits finally convince him that he ought to go along with the gang and that’s what he does. On the day of the break-in, all is planned and ready until a major storm comes through and changes everything. Now, Booker, Daniels and the rest will have to fight the weather as well as look out for the police and security staff if they’re to get their haul.

Ruth Rendell’s Simisola takes a close look at the financial and social consequences of unemployment. Twenty-two-year-old Melanie Akande wants to find a job and get her adult life started, so she schedules an appointment at the local employment bureau. Shortly after that appointment she disappears. Her father, who’s a doctor, asks his patient Reg Wexford to look into the disappearance and after a few days, Wexford does so. He and his team are just beginning to ask questions when the body of Annette Bystock is discovered. It was with Bystock that Melanie Akande had her appointment so the investigation team starts to focus its attention on the employment bureau. As the team members interview the bureau’s employees and those who make use of the employment service, we see the effects of not having a job on everyone’s perceptions. For example, those who apply for help are given appointments and then made to wait, sometimes for hours, until someone actually sees them. And those who work at the bureau don’t all have what you could call compassionate attitudes. On the other hand, not all of the job applicants are hard-working people who have simply had a tragic piece of bad luck. In the meantime, Wexford’s son-in-law Neil has lost his job. He is hardly perfect, but we see in his response to being unemployed how frustrating, enervating and humiliating it can be to be jobless. Rendell doesn’t offer easy answers to the problem of unemployment, which is just as well; there aren’t any. But she does invite the reader to think about how being unemployed affects one’s sense of self-worth and one’s choices. She also invites readers to think about the effects of others’ perceptions of those who have no jobs.

There’s an unflinching look at that perception in Y.A. Erskine’s The Brotherhood. That novel’s main plot is the investigation into the murder of Tasmania police sergeant John White, who is stabbed when he and a colleague Lucy Howard are called to the scene of a break-in. The prime suspect for the crime is seventeen-year-old Darren Rowley, who comes from Glenorchy, a low-income suburb of Hobart. Police Commissioner Ron Chalmers is furious that one of his best men has been killed and is only too happy to write Darren Rowley off. As we learn more about Chalmers, we also learn his attitude towards those without jobs, especially those who live in places like Glenorchy. Here’s a bit of the way he compares the unemployed residents of Glenorchy with other people:

 

‘One generation of normal, sane, hardworking, decent, contributing human beings as opposed to two generations of dole-bludging, thieving, fighting pieces of trash.’

 

Chalmers’ attitude about the unemployed is extreme. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t shared by a lot of people.

That social perception of unemployment as a disgrace, combined with the sense of personal shame and of course, the fear of not being able to survive, makes having no job a very stressful situation.  Sadly, it happens to millions of people so it’s no surprise that crime writers explore the problem. I know I’ve only mentioned a few examples here. There are many more.

 

 

 

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from Styx’s Blue Collar Man (Long Nights). Readers who are kind enough to check this blog regularly may remember that I just used this song a few days ago. Usually I don’t do that, but this part of the song reflects the reality for a lot of people without jobs.

Oh, and She Never Gives Out and She Never Gives In*

A fascinating discussion at Mrs. Peabody Investigates (A blog you really need to follow if you’re a fan of crime fiction) has got me thinking about two trends in crime fiction. One of them (and this is what was discussed at the blog) is the increase in depictions of extreme violence against women in some crime fiction. I’ll get back to that shortly. The other trend is the increase we’ve seen in the last few decades of strong female protagonists. I’m most emphatically not saying the two trends are necessarily related. I find that duality really interesting though.

Of course, there’ve been crime novels that depict violence against women for quite some time. For instance, Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me, published in 1952, is the story of Central City, Texas deputy sheriff Lou Ford. Everyone thinks of Ford as a nice, competent lawman, even if he isn’t exactly an exciting person. Then a local prostitute Joyce Lakeland is brutally beaten. Then there’s a murder. As the investigation into these events goes along, it becomes increasingly clear that Ford is not the person everyone thinks he is. In fact, he’s battling with something he calls ‘the sickness.’ While this novel is not as extreme as some of today’s novels, it certainly is uncompromising.

So is Mickey Spillane’s treatment of women. In several of his Mike Hammer novels, women are the victims of all sorts of abuse. And in this ‘hardboiled’ category of noir crime fiction, that violence is not glossed over, even in Spillane’s earlier work. There are other examples too, especially among other ‘hardboiled’ novels, of plots that involve violence against women.

But what seems to be a much more common theme among today’s crime fiction novels is the deliberate targeting of female victims. I won’t – promise – list for you all of the novels in which there’s a series of brutal torture/murders of women. But if you pay attention to crime fiction, you know exactly what I mean. Those who’ve been involved in the discussion on Mrs. Peabody’s blog are right that there are many more of these kinds of plots than there used to be. And in many of those novels, the violence isn’t just extreme; it’s described in excruciating (and I mean that word) detail. I’m not a psychologist, so I don’t know what the reason is that books like this sell as well as they do. But if they didn’t sell my guess is that fewer of them would be written.

What’s interesting (or maybe it’s just my opinion) is that at the same time as we have this increase in the number of books that feature extreme violence against women, we also have the development of several very strong female protagonists. Again, there’ve been strong female characters in crime fiction for a long time. Dorothy Sayers’ Harriet Vane, Patricia Wentworth’s Maude Silver, Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple and Ngaio Marsh’s Agatha Troy are just a few examples of Golden Age female characters. And recent decades have added to that number. From Marcia Muller’s Sharon McCone to Helene Tursten’s Irene Huss to Adrian Hyland’s Emily Tempest, we’ve seen the number of strong female characters grow rapidly. Space doesn’t permit me to mention each one of them (I know, I know, fans of Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone and of Sara Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawski).

And even in novels that feature male protagonists, the female characters have gotten stronger and more self-sufficient. Donna Leon’s Guido Brunetti for instance is married to the very strong and independent Paola Falier. And Michael Connelly’s Mickey Haller was married to the formidable Maggie ‘McFierce’ McPherson, who can most definitely hold her own as a character. There are many other examples too; I’m sure you could give me more than I could ever offer to you.

It’s not just a matter of strength of character either. More and more, female characters have positions of high authority and power, too. Again, I won’t go on and on with a list of examples. Suffice it to say that in just about any sub-genre of crime fiction, there are women who are high-ranking police officers, bank presidents, well-known attorneys and so on.

And from what I read in reviews and on blogs, readers want it that way. They want female characters, whether or not they are protagonists, to be ‘fleshed out,’ to be strong, and to be interesting as people. If you look at the sales for authors such as Leon and Connelly, you know that people buy a lot of books in which women are portrayed as strong characters. What’s more, those authors don’t write a series of books in which killers target only beautiful young women and subject them to unspeakable horrors.

So why are we seeing these two simultaneous trends? I don’t know the precise reason. And it could very well be that the two trends have absolutely nothing to do with each other. I’m going out on a proverbial limb here, not being a psychologist or other expert who’s studied the role of women. One guess might be that different sorts of people buy those two different sorts of books. I don’t have access to marketing data, but I wonder whether people who buy books that feature extreme violence against women also buy books in which they play significant roles and are in fact, strong protagonists. Another guess might be that this dual trend says something about society’s view of women. That’s a complicated issue in and of itself of course. But books usually do have something to say about the society in which the authors live.

I honestly don’t have the answer, but I would love to hear your thoughts. Do you see this same dual trend? If you do, where do you think it comes from? Where do you see it going? If you’re a writer, do you think about the roles your female characters play?  Thanks, Mrs. P, for the inspiration.

 

 

 

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from Billy Joel’s She’s Always a Woman.

I Fire Up the Willing Engine*

Since most criminals don’t want to be caught, it’s always easiest for them if a murder looks like an accident or suicide. One popular kind of ‘accident’ in crime fiction is the hit-and-run that ends up killing someone. It makes sense too, since it can be difficult to find out (at least at first) who’s responsible for the death. It can also be hard to prove that the death is not accidental. And, to put it bluntly, a car can be a very effective murder weapon. So it should be no surprise that we see hit-and-run murders all through crime fiction.

For example, in Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None (AKA Ten Little Indians), ten people receive invitations to stay on Indian Island off the Devon coast. For different reasons they all accept. On the first night there, everyone is shocked when each one is accused of causing the death of at least one other person. One of these guests is young and reckless Anthony Marsden. He is accused of killing John and Lucy Combs, two young children who ran out of their cottage and into the street at the very moment he was driving too fast down their road. Not very long after these accusations Marsden dies of what turns out to be poison. Late that night, another person dies. Soon it becomes clear that the guests have been lured to the island and that someone is trying to kill each of them.

In Mickey Spillane’s My Gun is Quick, private investigator Mike Hammer meets a young woman Nancy Sanford in a coffee shop. They fall into conversation and she tells him her sad story. She’s a prostitute who right now doesn’t have the money to escape ‘the life.’ Hammer gives her some money, hoping that she’ll be able to start over. A few days later, he learns that she’s been killed in a hit-and-run incident not far from the coffee shop where they met. Hammer decides to investigate the death and discovers that Sanford was trapped in a major prostitution ring and that she’d been collecting evidence against those in charge. Her plan was to turn that evidence over to the authorities. Hammer goes up against the people Sanford’s evidence implicated to find out who killed her.

A hit-and-run incident turns out to be connected to a long-ago tragedy in Elizabeth George’s Traitor to Memory. Twenty-eight-year-old Gideon Davies is a world-class violinist with a highly promising musical career ahead of him. Then one night, he finds himself unable to play. Frightened at what’s happened, Davies seeks psychological help and bit by bit, he begins to unravel his own past. In the meantime Davies’ mother Eugenie is killed in what looks like a tragic hit-and-run traffic accident. But as Inspector Thomas Lynley and Sergeant Barbara Havers learn, Eugenie Davies’ death is more than it seems on the surface. That’s how they discover a terrible truth about the Davies family: twenty years earlier, Eugenie Davies’ two-year-old daughter Sonia was killed in a tragic drowning incident. Their nanny Katja Wolff was imprisoned as a result and has recently been released. As the book unfolds we learn how that drowning is related to Eugenie Davies’ death and her son’s musical difficulties.

Peter Temple’s Bad Debts features the hit-and-run death of Melbourne political activist Anne Jeppeson. At the time of the incident, Danny McKillop is arrested and jailed for the crime, and there’s evidence against him. That said though, his attorney Jack Irish is too lost in drinking and in grief over the loss of his wife Isabel to do a good job on McKillop’s behalf. Eight years later McKillop is released. He tries hard to contact Irish, who by then has drunk himself out of his full-time legal career and is now trying to rebuild his life. Irish doesn’t return McKillop’s calls at first but finally decides to meet with him. By the time he makes contact though, McKillop’s been murdered. Irish feels guilty about not doing a better job of defending McKillop and even worse that he didn’t contact his former client before it was too late. So he begins to investigate McKillop’s death. He finds that McKillop was framed for the killing of Anne Jeppeson, and that her death was not an accident

Although it isn’t really a hit-and-run, a car crash is the focus of Kate Atkinson’s One Good Turn. Paul Bradley suddenly brakes his silver Peugot in order to avoid hitting a pedestrian. But the driver of the blue Honda behind Bradley doesn’t stop in time and hits Bradley’s Peugot. The two drivers get out of their cars and begin arguing. Things escalate quickly and very soon, the Honda driver wields a baseball bat and tries to kill Bradley. That’s when mystery novelist Martin Canning, who’s witnessed the whole thing, gets involved. Although he’s never done a courageous or reckless thing in his life he throws his computer case at the Honda driver, knocking him down and saving Bradley’s life. Another eyewitness is former cop turned PI Jackson Brodie. Brodie sees how upset Canning is by the whole thing and gives Canning his card, asking him to call if he needs anything. Canning feels compelled to accompany Bradley to the hospital. Both men end up getting drawn into this case, which has multiple threads including murder and fraud. And all of those threads lead in one way or another to that car crash.

Catherine O’Flynn’s The News Where You Are is the story of local television presenter Frank Allcroft. He’s happily married to his wife Andrea and the proud father of his eight-year-old daughter Mo, but he is struggling to deal with several changes and losses in his life. One of them is the sudden death of his mentor and predecessor at the network Phil Smethway. Allcroft and Smethway maintained their friendship after Smethway’s career took off and he went on to greater opportunities, so his death has truly upset Allcroft. Six months earlier, Smethway was killed in a hit-and-run incident while he was out jogging. The driver was never identified, but the death has been put down to tragic accident. Allcroft begins to have questions about his friend’s death though when he is drawn one day to the scene of the accident. It’s a straight road where a driver should easily have been able to see a pedestrian, and there’s plenty of room on that road so that the driver would have had plenty of space to avoid Smethway. Then Allcroft learns other things that suggest that Smethway’s death was not a simple matter of a drunken or reckless driver. As he slowly learns about Smethway’s last weeks and months, Allcroft also gets to the truth behind that hit-and-run incident.

The hit-and-run is all too tragically common in real life, and it can be an effective device in crime fiction, too. Which novels using this plot point have I forgotten to mention?

 

 

 

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from Rush’s Red Barchetta.

So Often Times it Happens That We Live Our Lives in Chains*

One of the many patterns we see in crime fiction is the character who’s in a bad situation and doesn’t simply leave it. It’s very tempting to yell, ‘Well, then, just don’t go back to him!’ or ‘Well, then, just leave your job if you hate it so much!’ But as we know, it’s not that simple. And it can add to the richness of a crime novel if the author acknowledges how difficult it can be. It can also invite the reader to engage more with a character if the author shows the complexities of that character’s situation.

In Mickey Spillane’s The Big Kill, for instance, Spillane’s sleuth Mike Hammer is in a seedy bar one day when William Decker and his toddler son come in. Decker quickly buys and downs two drinks. Then he says goodbye to his son and leaves the bar. Just as he’s leaving, he’s struck by a hit-and-run driver whose passenger then fires several gunshots just to be sure, or so it seems, that the job is done. Hammer runs outside but not quickly enough to catch those responsible for Decker’s murder. He takes in Decker’s son and resolves to find out who killed Decker. He discovers that Decker was a safecracker who’d been working with a local gang. He’d ‘gone straight’ for the sake of his son but then, at his wits’ end for money, returned to his old profession. At first it looks as though Decker was killed because he bungled a job he was doing for the gang. But as Hammer finds out, it’s not that simple. You might wonder why Decker would return to such a dangerous and illegal lifestyle, but in this case, having a son to take care of means that leaving that life is not the straightforward decision it seems to be.

M.C. Beaton’s Love, Lies and Liquor takes her sleuth PI Agatha Raisin to the run-down Paradise Hotel at the seedy seaside town of Snoth-on-Sea. Raisin’s ex-husband James Lacey has convinced her to take a holiday there and against her better judgement, she goes. Once there Raisin meets the very unpleasant Geraldine Jankers, her new husband, her son Wayne and his wife Chelsea, and a friend Cyril Hammond and his wife Dawn. One night Raisin gets into a quarrel with Geraldine Jankers. When Jankers is later found murdered, Raisin becomes a very plausible suspect. Partly in order to clear her name and partly because she’s intrigued, Raisin investigates the murder. One interesting suspect is Cyril Hammond. Through a course of events that occurs in the novel, he stands to inherit Jankers’ considerable wealth. As she looks into Hammond’s life, Raisin discovers a very ugly truth about him: he has been abusing his wife. Raisin confronts Dawn with what she knows and Dawn admits the truth. In fact, Raisin even convinces Dawn to leave her husband. But then, inexplicably to Raisin, Dawn goes back. On the surface of it, you could yell at Dawn for going back when she knows what awaits her (at least I wanted to). But Hammond is wealthy and ‘connected’ and Dawn has neither real marketable skills nor any real professional experience. She’s very much afraid of what will happen to her if she tries to make it alone so for her, the decision to leave and stay away is not as simple as it seems.

We see a kind of related situation in Martin Clark’s The Legal Limit. In that novel we meet Sadie Grace Hunt. She and her husband Curt live in rural Patrick County, Virginia, where they raise their sons Mason and Gates. Curt Hunt hasn’t had it easy financially, and he tends to drink too much. What’s worse, he abuses his sons physically and his wife more emotionally and verbally. Both Mason and Gates are deeply affected by the abuse they suffer and it later leads to tragedy when Gates Hunt murders a romantic rival during a heated quarrel. Mason is persuaded to help cover up what his brother has done. That decision comes back to haunt him when Gates is imprisoned on a drugs charge and begs his brother, now a prosecuting attorney, to help him get out of prison. Their conflict tears the family apart and raises several questions about family loyalty, among other things. Sadie Grace Hunt is fully aware of what her husband is like and she is appalled at her husband’s treatment of his family. But she doesn’t leave. Part of the reason for that is financial; where would she go and how would she feed two sons? Part of the reason is her commitment to what she sees as her family obligations. While it’s easy to blame someone like Sadie Grace for not leaving, it’s a very complex situation, and Clark doesn’t reduce it to ‘black and white.’

Andrea Camilleri doesn’t reduce complex situations to ‘black and white’ either. For instance, in The Wings of the Sphinx, Inspector Salvo Montalbano investigates the murder of an unknown girl with a distinctive tattoo. Her body is discovered near a local landfill and at first, no-one claims to know her. But later she is identified as a foreigner who came to Italy with a group of other young woman under the premise that the group sponsoring them would find jobs and security for them. Things haven’t turned out that way though and without giving spoilers, I can say that the women have gotten themselves into a very difficult and dangerous situation. So why didn’t any of them leave the area?  Why did they stay? They’re not portrayed as stupid; in fact, quite the contrary. But leaving that kind of situation is complicated. Without plenty of money, they can’t return home or even go to another part of the country. Without connections it’s hard to get legal work. So although you might argue that the women should just leave, it’s more complex than that and it’s to Camilleri’s credit that the story acknowledges that fact.

That’s also true in Betty Webb’s Desert Wives. Esther Corbett has left a Utah polygamous group called Purity. She hires private investigator Lena Jones to go to Purity and rescue her daughter Rebecca from the group and Jones and her partner Jimmy Sisiwan successfully find Rebecca and return her to her mother. But in the meantime, Purity’s leader Solomon Royal has been shot and there’s some very strong circumstantial evidence against Esther. When Esther is arrested for the murder, she begs Jones to find out who Royal’s killer is so that Rebecca won’t be forcibly returned to her father Abel, who is still a loyal member of Purity. Jones agrees and goes undercover at Purity to find out who murdered its leader. While she’s there Jones discovers some appalling truths about Purity including domestic violence, forced marriage and child abuse. Jones finds it very hard to believe at first that the women of Purity would simply stay there and tolerate what’s been happening. But the more she learns about their situation, the better she understands why they can’t just leave. First, Purity is an isolated compound, so leaving is physically very difficult. Then too, Purity’s women have very little money and no independent means of transportation. Most have little if any education. Further, local and regional authorities do little or nothing about the abuses at Purity although they are aware of them. And finally, many of Purity’s members have been raised to believe that that’s ‘the way things should be.’ One very clear message in this book is that changing the situation at Purity is not as easy as one would wish.

That’s the message in Angela Savage’s Behind the Night Bazaar too. Australian ex-pat Jayne Keeney lives and works in Bangkok, but occasionally goes north to Chiang Mai to visit her friend Didier ‘Didi’ de Montpasse. One night during one of Keeney’s visits, de Montpasse’s partner Nou is murdered. The police begin to investigate and almost before Keeney knows it, de Montpasse has been shot. The official explanation for that killing is that de Montpasse murdered his partner and threatened the police when they came to arrest him. But Keeney is certain that’s not true. So in order to clear her friend’s name, she begins to investigate. What she finds is that those two deaths are connected to corruption, child abuse and sex trafficking. One of the debates raised in this novel has to do with how we stop the practice of child trafficking, and one question is, why do parents from rural villages continue to allow their children to be sold into the sex trade? Why don’t they simply stop doing it? But as Savage points out, the question is much more complicated than that and entails more far-reaching issues than it seems on the surface.

And that’s the thing about people who seem locked in bad situations. Very often (‘though certainly not all the time), simply leaving those situations is not as easy as it seems on the surface. And exploring those complex issues can make for a realistic and rich crime novel.

 

 
 

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from the Eagles’ Already Gone.