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.

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 Another Statistic on a Sheet*

A lot of sleuthing is devoted to finding out the reasons for a victim’s murder, and that often involves slogging through records. And just about everyone leaves records of some kind. Some of them can be fascinating (e.g. old letters and diaries). Some of them take more perseverance (e.g. making sense of property transfers, powers of attorney, deeds, business and corporate documents). But any one of those documents could hold the key to a murder, so going through them is an important part of a murder investigation. That’s why it makes sense that we’d see plenty of record-searching in crime fiction. And as long as it’s not drawn-out so as to lose the reader’s interest, record-searching can add a realistic touch to a novel.

In Agatha Christie’s The Murder on the Links, for instance, Hercule Poirot gets a letter from Paul Renauld, who lives with his wife Eloise and son Jack in Merlinville-sur-Mer. Renauld’s letter says that his life is being threatened, and in it, he begs Poirot to come to France and investigate. Poirot and Hastings go to Merlinville but by the time they get there it’s too late; Renauld has been stabbed on the grounds of his own villa. Together with the French authorities, Poirot and Hastings investigate the murder. One thing about the murder that strikes Poirot is that it seems familiar in some way – as though it reminds him of another case. So he goes to Paris to look up old records. His search is rewarded when he comes across a case from years earlier. The older case has some of the hallmarks of this most recent case and that gives Poirot an important clue as to why anyone would want to murder Renauld. And in the end, it’s exactly that past that leads Poirot to the killer.

Records are also helpful in Arnaldur Indriðason’s Jar City. In that novel Reykjavík police detective Erlendur and his team are called in when the body of Holberg, a seemingly inoffensive elderly man who lived by himself, is discovered in his own home. At first there seems no motive for the murder. Holberg was well-enough liked at work, didn’t have quarrels with neighbours, and wasn’t involved with anyone. So at first it looks as though the murder was a robbery gone wrong. But some clues suggest that there was a very personal reason for this murder, and a little digging soon brings to light what that reason might have been. Police records show that Holberg was accused of rape years earlier. No charges were filed, but this little piece of information opens up a whole new angle in the investigation. Further digging reveals that there might have been more than one accusation against him. Other records, including business ownership records and hospital records, add pieces to this puzzle. And in the end, Erlendur and his team are able to find out who killed Holberg and why.

There’s a really effective use of records in Peter Temple’s Bad Debts, in which part time lawyer/part time investigator Jack Irish investigates the murder of Danny McKillop. McKillop was once one of Irish’s clients, so when he is murdered, Irish feels a particular sense of obligation to find out the truth. Irish soon suspects that McKillop’s murder is connected to a hit-and-run incident eight years earlier that ended in the death of activist Anne Jeppeson. McKillop was convicted of the incident, but Irish learns that he was probably innocent. So Irish works with journalist Linda Hilliard to find the real killer. To do that, they look through newspaper records and public records. They also make use of a data collection company to learn the truth about property ownership, sales and corporate connections in the area. And that information is what leads Irish to the murderer.

Family records turn out to be useful in Val McDermid’s The Grave Tattoo. Wordsworth scholar Jane Gresham has always believed that Wordsworth left behind at least one unpublished manuscript. If she’s right, then finding that manuscript could make her career. So when she hears of the discovery of an old set of remains in a Lake District bog, she’s eager to find out if those remains belong to Fletcher Christian, as many people think. If so it would mean that Christian didn’t die on Pitcairn Island, but made it back to his Lake District home. And if that’s true, it would make perfect sense that he’d tell his longtime friend Wordsworth what really happened on the H.M.S. Bounty and that Wordsworth would write about it. So Gresham travels to the Lake District, where she herself was brought up, and begins to ask questions. Her hunt for the unpublished manuscript leads her through all sorts of records of marriages, offspring and so on and she discovers that the truth about it may lie within one family. With help from fellow scholar Dan Seabourne Gresham uses those records to try to track down the manuscript. But then one of Gresham’s interviewees dies shortly after the interview. Then there’s another death. And another. The police begin to suspect that Gresham herself may be involved in the murders so in order to clear her name and find the manuscript, Gresham tries to find the killer.

Helene Tursten’s Night Rounds is focused on a private facility, the Löwander Hospital. One night, there’s a blackout at the hospital during which one of the nurses Marianne Svärd is murdered. Then, another nurse Linda Svensson disappears. Her body is later discovered in the same place where, fifty years earlier, another nurse Tekla Olsson hung herself. Göteborg police inspector Irene Huss and her team investigate the happenings at the hospital. Part of the team’s task is to look through patient records, hospital ownership records, staff records and the like. And it’s in those records that they find an important clue as to what’s going on at the hospital.

Much of Stephen Booth’s Dying to Sin takes place at Pity Wood Farm in the Peak District. When two sets of female remains are found on the property, Hampshire police are called in to investigate. DS Diane Fry and DC Ben Cooper are assigned to look into the case. The farm had been owned for years by brothers Derek and Raymond Sutton. However, Derek Sutton has died, Raymond Sutton has moved to a nursing care facility and the property’s been sold to Manchester attorney Aaron Goodwin. So one task the members of the team have to face is finding out exactly who owned the property at the time of the young women’s deaths. That requires going through sales and property ownership records. Another task is to find out exactly who the young women were and what they were doing at the farm. That too requires going through records, this time reports of missing persons. It takes a lot of time but in the end, Fry and Cooper finds out who the young women were, what they were doing at the farm and why they were killed.

Financial records, police records, and historical records provide many of the answers to the mystery in Jørn Lier Horst’s Dregs. In that novel, Stavern, Norway police inspector William Wisting and his team investigate the bizarre discovery of left feet that wash up in various places. Wisting starts the identification process by trying to link the feet to anyone who might have gone missing. Records show that most of the people who went missing at the right time to be matches for the feet were residents at the same care home. And more records searches show that the relationships among the people who’d disappeared go back to the post-World War II era. That inter-connection among the missing people proves important. So does a financial angle that is discovered in a search of banking records. In the end it’s really those searches as much as anything else that helps Wisting and the team figure out what’s behind this case.

Record searches can be a thankless task. One may search for hours or longer and not find anything. But they are important to real-life investigations and they’re an important part of the authenticity of a crime novel.

 

 
 

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from Bob Seger’s Feel Like a Number.

You Gotta do it Till You’re Through it So You Better Get to it*

If you’ve ever been ill or away and then had to get back into your routine, you know how hard that can be. At the same time as it’s good to get back to work, it’s also difficult to get back into your daily life. And for detectives it’s even more of a challenge. Many of them deal with things that are awful to face even on the best of days, let alone when they’re getting back to work after some time away. But that resilience – that ability to get back into the routine after getting knocked down, so to speak – is a really useful trait if you’re a detective. The challenge of getting back to work can also add a layer of interest to a story.

Peter Temple introduces us to part-time lawyer/part-time investigator Jack Irish in Bad Debts. Irish is getting back to work after his wife Isabel was shot by one of his clients. His first response to losing his wife was to hide at the bottom of the bottle so to speak. But as Bad Debts begins, he’s stopped that instinctive response to life and now does occasional legal work as well as a sort of side business in finding people who would rather not be found, mostly to  get them to pay debts they owe. Life is slowly returning to stability for Irish until he gets a ‘phone message from a former client Danny McKillop. McKillop was imprisoned on charges that he killed Anne Jeppeson in a drink-driving hit-and-run incident. Now he’s been released and is desperate to talk to Irish. Irish doesn’t respond right away and by the time he follows up to see what McKillop wants, it’s too late; McKillop himself has been killed. Irish feels a sense of obligation to McKillop’s family. He was the attorney who defended McKillop in the original case and did an unprofessional job of it because of his drinking. So he decides to find out the truth behind both deaths. In this novel we see how at the same time as Irish is glad to have a purpose, he also finds it difficult sometimes to be back on the job.

That’s also true of Dick Francis’ Sid Halley, a former jockey whose left hand was permanently injured in a racing accident. After he recovers enough physically to work again, he spends two years working at a detective agency. But he really comes back to work in Odds Against. In that novel, Halley’s ex-father-in-law Charles Roland hires him to uncover a plot to take over the Seabury Racecourse, which Roland owns. Halley finds it difficult to get back to life around racecourses. He’s insecure, especially because of his injury, and he’s been away from the scene for a few years. But he finds the resilience he needs to search out the truth about the racecourse plot. He also discovers a new career for himself as a racetrack investigator.

Gail Bowen introduces us to her sleuth, political science expert and academic Joanne Kilbourn, in Deadly Appearances. Kilbourn and her family are coping with the loss of her husband Ian, who was murdered when he stopped to help a young couple who were having car trouble. Since that time the family has stuck together but of course, it hasn’t been easy. When Kilbourn’s friend Androu ‘Andy’ Boychuk is poisoned during an important political speech he’s making, Kilbourn decides to face her grief by writing a biography of him.  As she finds out more about Boychuk’s past, she also gets to the truth about who killed Boychuk and why. And that gets Kilbourn into a great deal of danger. So as the next novel Murder at the Mendel begins, Kilbourn is getting back to work, this time in a guest teaching position in Saskatoon. There, she finds that an old friend Sally Love is having a show of her controversial art at the Mendell Gallery. Kilbourn wants to renew their friendship but it turns out to be difficult. Then, local gallery owner Clea Poole is murdered, and Sally is a likely suspect. Kilbourn is still dealing with her own setbacks, but she finds the resilience she needs to help Sally – and to deal with the truth about the history of their friendship.

In Martin Edwards’ The Coffin Trail, we meet DCI Hannah Scarlett who has to get back to work after a case she was investigating falls apart. She’s been made the scapegoat for everything that went wrong with the case and after a brief break, is re-assigned to avoid a public-relations disaster. Although it’s ‘sold’ as a ‘fresh challenge,’ Scarlett knows that being assigned to head the Cumbria Constabulary’s Cold Case Review Team is s demotion. Still she takes up her new job and gets back to work. Scarlett and her new team are soon involved in the investigation of the deaths of Gabrielle Anders, a somewhat enigmatic beauty who’d recently moved to the Lake District, and Barrie Gilpin, the autistic young man who was said to have killed Anders. With help from Oxford historian Daniel Kind, who’s recently moved back to the Lake District himself, Scarlett and her team find out the truth about the Anders and Gilpin deaths. Then later, in The Arsenic Labyrinth, Scarlett has to get back to work again after a serious personal loss that she suffers in the previous novel The Cipher Garden. Scarlett finds it difficult at times to get ‘back in the game’ as the saying goes, but also finds the resilience she needs.

So does Jussi Adler-Olsen’s Carl Mørck, whom we first meet in Mercy (AKA The Keeper of Lost Causes). As that novel begins, Mørck is recovering from a scene-of-crime incident in which he was gravely wounded, one of his colleagues was murdered and another was left with paralysis. At first, Mørck has little interest in getting back to work. He’s hardly maudlin about it but he is still suffering from the trauma of what happened. In fact, he is so difficult to work with that he’s ‘promoted’ to the newly-created Department Q, which is charged with investigating cases ‘of special interest.’ Despite Mørck’s lack of interest in doing much of any work, he’s soon drawn to the case of the disappearance of Merete Lynggaard, a promising politician who disappeared five years earlier. Everyone’s always thought she drowned in a tragic ferry accident. But there are hints that she may actually still be alive. So Mørck and his assistant Hafez al-Assad work together to find out what really happened to Lynggaard and where she is now, if she is indeed still alive.

And then there’s Stockholm attorney Rebecka Martinsson, whom we first meet in Åsa Larsson’s Sun Storm (AKA The Savage Altar). Martinsson returns to her home town of Kiruna when a former friend is accused of murder and asks for her help. Finding out who the real murderer is takes a serious toll on Martinsson but she gets back to work after a fashion in The Blood Spilt. In that novel, Martinsson works with police detectives Anna-Maria Mella and Sven-Erik Stålnacke to find out who murdered local priest Mildred Nilsson. The events at the end of that novel set Martinsson back even further so to speak, so she takes some time away. Then, at the beginning of The Black Path, Martinsson returns to work again and gets involved in the investigation of the murder of Inna Watrang, Head of Information at Kellis Mining. Although returning to work is difficult for her, Martinsson is pleased to slowly feel her life become a little more stable.

It’s never easy to get started working again after a time away. That’s especially true if the time away was spent coping with illness or trauma. But most detectives do get back to work again, and that balance between wanting to be back in a routine and needing to deal with whatever takes one away from the routine can add real interest to a story.

 

 
 

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from Elvis Costello’s Welcome to the Working Week.

I Got My Own Way of Talkin’*

An interesting comment exchange with Australian author Angela Savage has got me thinking about dialects and accents. Before I go any further, let me encourage you to check out Savage’s books Behind the Night Bazaar and The Half Child. Both are believable and engaging mysteries in a deftly-drawn Thai setting and feature the likeable PI Jayne Keeney. Seriously, I recommend them.

Now, on to the whole question of dialect and accent. Here’s the challenge for the author when it comes to dialogue. On the one hand, we all know that people speak differently. Even people who speak the same language may very well speak different dialects of it depending on all sorts of factors (age group, education ethnic background, socioeconomic class and region being just a few of them). So if an author wants to create a believable character that character has to speak in a believable way. For instance, most Americans wouldn’t use the expression car park to describe a large area where people put their cars while they shop. It’s not an Americanism; Americans would be more likely to say parking lot. There are a lot of other examples of this kind of variation too. For instance, do you put your groceries in a shopping cart, a buggy, a wagon or a trolley? The main point here is that authors who want their characters to sound authentic need to be aware of the way people from a given background speak.

The same goes for syntactic patterns and other aspects of the way we speak. And if the author doesn’t match the characters’ voices to the setting and to the characters’ backgrounds, readers find the story less believable. It can be jarring.

On the other hand, putting too much emphasis on dialect can distract the reader, especially if it’s hard to understand what a character is saying. That’s even more the case if characters use a language that is foreign to the reader. What’s worse, using dialect without handling it carefully can have the effect of being condescending and can stereotype characters. Honestly it’s not easy to address this question of using accents and dialect in writing. I work on that one myself. But it can be done deftly.

For example, Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot is Belgian by birth and his first language is Belgian French. Once in a while he uses French expressions, but not to any great extent. And what’s more interesting is that Christie writes his dialogue without using stereotypical indicators of accent (e.g. zee for the). For example, in Cards on the Table, Poirot and three other sleuths (including Christie’s fictional detective novelist Ariadne Oliver) are invited to a dinner party hosted by the very eccentric Mr. Shaitana. Also invited are four people whom Mr. Shaitana hints have all gotten away with murder. When Shaitana is later stabbed by one of his guests, Poirot and the other sleuths look into the case. At one point, Poirot is talking to Superintendent Battle, who was also at the dinner:

 

‘‘Any ideas, Monsieur Poirot? As to motive? Anything of that kind?’…
‘Yes, I have something to say on that score. Tell me – Monsieur Shaitana, he did not give you any hint of what kind of party you were coming to tonight?’…
A bell whirred in the distance and a knocker was plied.
‘That’s our people,’ said Superintendent Battle. ‘I’ll go and let ‘em in. We’ll have your story presently. Must get on with the routine work.’’

 

If you look at this exchange you can see the difference in language background, class and occupation between the two men. But Christie doesn’t overdo it and she tells us about the characters through a little deft use of speech patterns such as syntactic structure.

Here’s an example of what you might call class differences in speech that comes from Martin Edwards’ All the Lonely People. In this story, Liverpool attorney Harry Devlin is shocked when his ex-wife Liz shows up at his home. He’s hopeful at first that this means she wants to put their relationship back together. But she tells him it’s because she’s run away from her lover Mick Coghlin and needs a place to stay for a short time. When Liz is murdered, Devlin becomes a suspect. In part to clear his name, he starts to investigate the murder. He finds that Liz had been mixed up with some seedy people, one of whom was Joe Rourke, with whom she’d recently taken up.  Devlin wonders if Rourke might be involved in Liz’s murder so he interviews (among other people) Rourke’s former lover Jane Brogan. Here’s just a bit of their conversation:

 

‘‘When did you find out that Joe was seeing my wife?’
She considered. ‘Fortnight ago, three weeks maybe.’ With a harsh laugh she said, ‘Caught him good and proper, didn’t I?’
‘How?’
‘Found her photograph in the pocket of his jeans. I was only after a few bob to pay off the ‘leccy bill before they cut us off…’
‘What did you do, Jane?’
‘Took the money, didn’t I, what else?’’

 

You can tell just from this snippet that although Devlin isn’t from an upper-class background, he’s educated. Jane Brogan on the other hand is not. And what’s particularly interesting is that Edwards doesn’t paint her character in a stereotyped or condescending way. She’s doing the best she can in a very bad situation, but she is neither stupid nor an object of pity.

The point here is that integrating dialect in subtle ways can be a very effective way of showing not telling about characters and distinguishing them from each other. So long as it isn’t self-conscious or condescending, dialect can be an effective tool.

What about accents? Everyone knows that regional accents vary greatly and writing accents can be a challenge. But again, it wouldn’t be realistic if characters had no accent. In real life, they do. Some authors (Edwards is one of them) simply mention the accent without demonstrating it. Since the Harry Devlin series takes place mostly in Liverpool, many of the characters have what’s called a Scouse accent – the accent and dialect of Merseyside and the Liverpool area. But Edwards doesn’t go into detail writing that accent. Instead, he simply mentions it.

So does Peter Temple. In Bad Debts for instance, we meet sometimes-lawyer Jack Irish, who investigates the murder of a former client Danny McKillop. McKillop had been sent to prison on charges of drink driving that led to the death of local activist Anne Jeppeson. When McKillop is released he tries desperately to reach Irish but before Irish can meet with him, McKillop himself is murdered. One of the links in this case may be a charity organisation called the Safe Hands Foundation. Here’s just a bit of Irish’s encounter with the ‘doorman’ at Safe Hands:

 

‘Then he wanted my driver’s licence.
‘I’m not trying to cash a cheque here, sonny,’ I said. ‘Just phone the man.’
Tight little smile. ‘The body corporate lays down the security procedures.’ Flat Queensland voice. Pause. ‘Sir.’
‘This isn’t Pentridge,’ I said. ‘Didn’t they retrain you for this job? Just phone.’’
 

Here Irish makes clear just with a few words what the ‘doorman’s’ background is. Readers can also tell that this is a distinctly Australian conversation. It’s subtle and not condescending but it’s real.

Some crime novels involve code switching, or changing from one language to another. Angela Savage’s Jayne Keeney for instance speaks Thai as well as her own Australian English. And in Helene Tursten’s The Glass Devil, the Swedish-speaking Violent Crimes Unit of the Göteborg police investigate a murder with a London connection. So a few of the Swedish-speaking characters code-switch to English. Tursten addresses that in a matter-of-fact way by simply mentioning the switch without writing different accents and in my opinion (so do feel free to disagree with me if you do), that’s an effective way to handle it.

The question of how to make one’s characters authentic through accent and dialect isn’t an easy one to answer. It seems though that subtle uses of grammar and expression rather than, say, a lot of spelling changes can do the job effectively. More important is the character him or herself. If characters are drawn well and have at least some depth to them, the author can use that depth to avoid stereotyping or condescension because of accent or dialect.

What’s your view on this? Do you get strong feelings about characters based on their accents or dialects? If you’re a writer, how do you handle this question?

 
 
 

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from Johnny Cash’s Southern Accents.