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.

Pictures in My Mind*

One of the challenges authors face is how to convey the visual. It’s easy enough if one’s writing a graphic novel or children’s picture book but in other kinds of novels it can be difficult to give the reader mental images. For one thing, readers are often more engaged if they use their own imaginations to ‘colour in the drawing.’ What’s more, too much description tends to burden a novel and can pull the reader out of the story. But if the reader has no sense of the visual it can be harder to be drawn into the story. So authors have to strike a delicate balance when it comes to depicting the visual. Just a quick look at crime fiction should show you what I mean about striking that balance.

There’s interesting use of imagery in Agatha Christie’s Death in the Clouds (AKA Death in the Air).  That’s the story of the murder of Marie Morisot, a French moneylender who does business under the name of Madame Giselle. She’s poisoned while en route by air from Paris to London, and the only viable suspects are her fellow passengers. Hercule Poirot is on the same flight, so he works with Chief Inspector Japp to solve the crime. Two of the other passengers are London hairdresser’s assistant Jane Grey and dentist Norman Gale. At one point, the two have a cup of tea together and discuss the case:

 

‘They found a tea shop, and a disdainful waitress with a gloomy manner took their order with an air of doubt as of one who might say: ‘Don’t blame me if you’re disappointed. They say we serve teas here, but I never heard of it.’’

 

Can’t you just visualise the waitress and her facial expression? And Christie does this without overburdening the reader with a lot of description. There’s room for the imagination, but she leaves the reader in no doubt about the setting for the conversation these two characters have.

One of James Lee Burke’s many strengths as a writer is the way he conveys the Southern Louisiana setting for most of his Dave Robicheaux novels. Burke takes a different approach to Christie’s but that’s of course part of the pleasure of crime fiction – the variety. In The Tin Roof Blowdown, for instance, one of the plot threads is Robicheaux’s search for his old friend Jude Le Blanc, who has become a Roman Catholic priest. In the immediate aftermath of Katrina, Le Blanc disappears and is presumably shot while trying to save some of his parishioners. The boat Le Blanc was using turns up later, this time in the possession of a group of looters. So Robiceaux suspects a connection between the looters and his friend’s disappearance. And so it turns out to be although of course, it’s not the obvious connection you might make. Here is a bit of the description of the onset of Katrina:

 

‘A hard gust of wind blows down the long corridor of trees that line Bayou Teche, wrinkling the water like old skin, filling the air with the smell of old fish roe and leaves that have turned yellow and black in the shade. Katrina will make landfall somewhere around Lake Pontchartrain in the next seven hours.’ 

 

This visual imagery places the reader unmistakeably in the setting, and raises the tension as it’s clear there is about to be a devastating storm.

In Stephen Booth’s Dying to Sin, DS Diane Fry and DC Ben Cooper investigate when two sets of remains are found on Pity Wood Farm near the village of Rakesdale in the Peak District of Derbyshire. The farm was the property of brothers Raymond and Derek Sutton, but Derek Sutton has died and his brother has had to move to a nursing care facility. Now the farm is the property of Manchester attorney Aaron Goodwin, but he has spent nearly no time there as of yet. So one thing Fry and Cooper have to do is find out who actually owned the property at the time the bodies were buried there, and how likely the owner would have been to know about the bodies. The remains belong to Orla Doyle and Nadezda Halak, very different young women from very different backgrounds. So another task the police face is finding out what these women were doing near the farm and why anyone would want to kill them. Here is Fry’s first impression of Pity Wood Farm:

 

‘She was confronted by a collection of ancient outbuildings leaning at various angles, their roofs sagging, doors hanging loosely on their hinges. By some curious law of physics, the doors all seemed to tilt at the opposite angle to the walls, as if they were leaning to compensate for a bend. Some doorways had been blocked up, windows were filled in, steps had been left going nowhere.’

 

This description gives the reader a real sense of how poverty-stricken and untended the farm is. It’s not a very pleasant place, but it’s in the history of the farm that Fry and Cooper find the clues to what happened to Orla Doyle and Nadezda Halak.

Håkan Nesser isn’t known for flowery descriptions, but he’s quite skilled at conveying visual images. For instance, in Woman With Birthmark, Inspector Van Veeteren and his team are called in when Ryszard Malik is murdered in his own home. The team is starting its investigation when there’s another murder. And then another. The deaths are all tied together by a past event, and Van Veeteren and his team will have to find out what the victims had in common if they’re to prevent a fourth murder. Here is the way Nesser describes a press conference in which Van Veeteren participates:

 

‘The conference room on the first floor was full to overflowing with journalists and reporters sitting, taking photographs, and trying to outdo one another in the art of asking biased and insinuating questions.
He had been press-ganged to accompany Hiller and sit behind a cheap, rectangular table overloaded with microphones, cords, and the obligatory bottles of soda water that for some unfathomable reason were present whenever high-ranking police officers made statements in front of cameras…’

 

The reader doesn’t need a lot of verbiage to build a strong visual image of what this press conference is like.

In Katherine Howell’s Violent Exposure, Sydney police detective Ella Marconi and her team investigate when Suzanne Crawford is murdered and her husband Connor goes missing. At first, it seems like a case of domestic violence that ended in death, but before long, it’s clear that the case is more complicated than that. For one thing, background checks on Connor Crawford show nothing, as though he never existed. And it comes out that he was keeping a secret from his wife that she was desperate to discover. Things get even more complex when Emil Page, a teenage volunteer at the nursery the Crawfords owned, also disappears. These events are all related and tied to the Crawfords’ past, and in the end, Marconi and her team find out what it is about the Crawfords that made them targets. Here’s a description of the murder weapon used to kill Suzanne Crawford:

 

‘It looked like a standard carving knife, about twenty centimetres long, with a stainless-steel blade and black plastic handle. Ella saw prints in the dry blood on the handle.
‘Beautiful,’ she said.’

 

Just from this short description one can get a strong visual image of the weapon without the need for Howell to use gory detail.

And that’s the thing about effective visual imagery. It conveys a lot to the reader without the need for a lot of verbiage or gratuitousness. Which authors do you think do a particularly effective job at conveying the visual? I know I’ve only mentioned a few here. If you’re a writer, how do you convey the visual?

 

 
 

*NOTE:  The title of this post is the title of a song by Joy Division.

She’s Got a Way of Talkin’*

The way we speak is as individual as we ourselves are. Each of us has for instance words and phrases we like to use or a certain kind of verbal reaction. Those verbal ‘fingerprints’ help make us unique. Certainly that’s true in real life and those ‘fingerprints’ also add depth to fictional characters. I’m not talking here of accents or the use of dialect in writing. That’s a different matter (and also really interesting. Or maybe I just think that because of my background in linguistics…). Rather, I’m talking about those ways of speaking that are unique to an individual.

For instance, Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot is a firm believer in psychological approaches to crime solving. The expression he uses most frequently to describe the process of thinking through a case is using ‘the little grey cells’ of the brain. For example in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Poirot retires (or so he thinks) to the small village of King’s Abbot. When retired manufacturing tycoon Roger Ackroyd is stabbed, Ackroyd’s niece Flora asks Poirot to clear the name of her fiancé Ralph Paton, the prime suspect. So Poirot begins to ask questions. At one point he has a conversation with Inspector Raglan, who is the official investigator. They’re discussing approaches to investigation:

 

‘‘How exactly did you get to work if I may ask?’ [Poirot]
‘Certainly,’ said the inspector. ‘To begin with – method. That’s what I always say – method!’
‘Ah!’ cried the other. ‘That too is my watchword. Method, order and the little grey cells.’
‘The cells?’ said the inspector, staring.
‘The little grey cells of the brain,’ explained the Belgian.’

 

It is of course those little gray cells that help Poirot solve this case and that expression has become integrally associated with his character.

Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe has plenty of individual quirks that make him unique. Those extend to the verbal too. For example, when he’s exasperated, one of Wolfe’s verbal ‘fingerprints is the word pfui; it’s designed to express both contempt and impatience and usually does. In Not Quite Dead Enough for instance, Archie Goodwin returns from wartime service only to be drawn into a military case. He’s asked to persuade his former boss Nero Wolfe to investigate the supposed suicide of Captain Albert Cross. The death has to be investigated very quietly for political and national security reasons so the Powers That Be don’t want a high-profile case. At first Wolfe is reluctant but he agrees to take a look at the case. One aspect of the investigation is tracing Cross’ movements in the days and weeks before his death. At one point he discusses those activities with a group of Cross’ colleagues:

 

‘He sent a telegram to his fiancée in Boston that he would see her on Saturday. And then committed suicide? Pfui.’

 

As it turns out, Wolfe is justified in rejecting the suicide theory. Lawson’s been murdered and Wolfe and Goodwin find out what the reasons were.

In Stephen Booth’s Dying to Sin, DS Diane Fry and DC Ben Cooper of the Derbyshire police investigate when an old corpse turns up on Pity Wood Farm near the village of Rakedale. Until recently the farm was owned by brothers Raymond and Derek Sutton; in fact, they owned the farm at the time the body was buried there so one of the team’s tasks is to interview them. Derek Sutton has died but Raymond lives in a nursing home. He is a firm believer in old-style Biblical religion and his conversation often includes references to religion and the Bible. For instance, early in the novel, the detectives have just interviewed Sutton:

 

‘Raymond Sutton stood to one side of the window and watched the police officers get into their car at the end of the drive.
Quietly, he muttered a sentence to himself.
‘And they answered and said unto him, Where, Lord?’
As the car passed out of sight, he let the curtain drop. He turned back to face the room, looked around him for a moment, and finished the quotation.
‘And he said unto them,
Wheresoever the body is, there will the eagles be gathered.’’

 

As he explains, what he says comes from the Gospel of Saint Luke. His verbal identity if you want to put it that way is related to his deep religious convictions. When another body is discovered on the farm, it looks very likely that Raymond Sutton could be the killer. And his strong religious views could provide a motive. In the end though, the killings have less to do with the Bible and more to do with the background of Pity Wood Farm.

Kerry Greenwood’s Corinna Chapman lives and works in a Melbourne building called Insula. She and the other residents of the building have formed a strong community and frequently help each other. One of those residents is Miriam Kaplan, who goes by her Wicca name Meroe. Meroe is deeply spiritual and is determined to use her knowledge of herbal remedies for good. She is a skilled healer who notices immediately when there is unbalance and stress in an environment. Meroe’s spirituality is part of what’s behind some of the phrases she uses frequently. One of her best-known is her greeting, ‘Blessed be.’ That’s very often the first thing she says for instance when she walks into a room. Meroe is certainly not the only person to use this expression as it’s a Wicca greeting. But in this series it gives her character an added distinction.

The use of an individual verbal ‘fingerprint’ plays an important role in Wendy James’ The Mistake. Jodie Evans Garrow has what everyone thinks of as a successful life: an attorney husband, two healthy children and a nice home in a nice area. But everything falls apart when a secret from her past comes out. When Jodie’s daughter Hannah is taken to a Sydney hospital, it turns out to be the same hospital where years earlier, she had given birth to another child. One of the nurses at the hospital remembers Jodie and asks about the child. Jodie claims she gave the baby up for adoption but as the nurse soon discovers, there are no official records. Soon some disturbing questions are raised: What happened to the baby? Why did Jodie never tell anyone about the birth? Did she somehow have something to do with the baby’s disappearance? Before long Jodie becomes a social pariah. The only bright spot as you might say is that she re-connects with an old friend from childhood Bridget ‘Bridie’ Sullivan. Jodie is invited one night to a book club meeting that Bridie also attends. At first Jodie doesn’t recognise her old friend but Bridie knows her. The one thing that finally clinches Jodie’s recognition is Bridie’s use of a pet expression ‘true story.’ She used it all the time when the women were young and Jodie remembers it.  The book club meeting turns out to be disastrous but it does result in a reunion between the two friends. Bridie is the only person who doesn’t judge Jodie and who wants to know what really happened and Jodie comes to depend on her as the case threatens to engulf her.

Our individual words and phrases can be quite distinctive and in fiction they can give a character added personality. I’m thinking for instance of Craig Johnson’s Henry Standing Bear, who doesn’t use contractions. There are other examples too. Do you notice those expressions? If you’re a writer, do you plan the unique expressions your characters use?

 
 
 

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

In The Spotlight: Stephen Booth’s Dying to Sin

Hello, All,

Welcome to another edition of In The Spotlight. Some crime novels and series have a particularly strong sense of atmosphere. In those novels readers get caught up in the setting and the ‘feeling’ of the novel just as much as they do in the crime story itself. To show you what I mean, let’s take a close look at an atmospheric crime story. Today let’s turn the spotlight on Stephen Booth’s Dying to Sin, the eighth of (thus far) twelve novels in his series featuring DS Diane Fry and DC Ben Cooper of the Derbyshire police.

The novel begins a week before Christmas at Pity Wood Farm near the village of Rakedale. Temporary worker Jamie Ward is digging a trench for a new wall footing when he makes the gruesome discovery of a buried human skeleton. Cooper and Fry and their team, and the forensics team, are called in and begin to investigate. It’s not long before a second skeleton is also found and the investigation moves into high gear. It turns out that the remains belong to two unidentified women (and no, before you start wondering, these are not victims of a crazed serial killer who likes to prey on young women).

Pity Wood Farm was owned for many years by brothers Raymond and Derek Sutton, so one angle that Cooper and Fry explore is the history of the Sutton family. Derek Sutton has died but Raymond Sutton is alive and in a nursing care home and it’s he who sold the farm to its current owner. Sutton claims not to know anything about the remains found on the farm and in fact, forensics evidence suggests that the bodies were buried after Sutton sold the farm.

The new owner of Pity Wood farm is Manchester attorney Aaron Goodwin, who has bought the land for development. He, too, claims not to know anything about the bodies. He isn’t personally connected with the land or the farm and has no history in the area, so although Cooper and Fry don’t discount him they can’t really prove that he had anything to do with the deaths.

Finally there’s a break in the case. One of the women is identified as Nadezda Halak, a Slovakian who’d come to England to find work. Once Cooper and Fry have a name to start with, they can slowly piece together the story of what was going on at Pity Wood Farm and how Nadezda got there in the first place. And that puts them on the right path to find out who the other victim was. She is identified as Orla Doyle, originally from Ireland, who’d also come to England for work. Those threads gradually tie in with what the background of Pity Wood Farm and in the end, Cooper and Fry find out the truth about both young women’s deaths and a later, related murder.

As I mentioned, this novel has a strong element of atmosphere. Pity Wood Farm itself is a run-down property partly in ruins. It’s in an economically depressed part of Derbyshire in which farmers can no longer make a living and many small villages no longer have even a post office. Rakedale itself is practically a cloistered community, sharply divided between people who’ve always lived there and incomers. So the detectives have their work cut out for them as the saying goes. Most of the residents do not want to tell what they know about Pity Wood Farm, and especially not to the police. Life here is quite different to life in the larger towns and cities and we get a strong sense of the bleakness of the area. That part of Derbyshire also has a long tradition of mining and in this novel we get a feeling for that aspect of the area’s history too. Some of the novel for instance takes place at Magpie Mine, a former lead mine.

Because this is a very rural area, a lot of traditions, superstitions and old beliefs still linger in ways that they don’t (at least not obviously) in the cities. And Booth weaves those beliefs through the novel. He also integrates an element of strict Victorian religion, too in the character of Raymond Sutton. Those elements of religion, superstitions and ancient beliefs add to the atmosphere and the sense of place and history, especially as we learn the history of some of them. But readers who do not like supernatural or religious solutions in their crime fiction need not worry. The deaths of Orla Doyle and Nadezda Halak have a very earthly explanation.

This is a police procedural, so readers follow along as Cooper and Fry interview the very close-mouthed residents of Rakedale, make sense of forensic evidence and put the pieces of the puzzle together. We also get a look at police politics. In one sub-plot, a new detective superintendent DI Hazel Branagh is taking over Cooper and Fry’s division. That’ll mean a review of what everyone is doing and as the novel moves along we share both sleuths’ anxiety about what this change will mean for their jobs.

The characters of Ben Cooper and Diane Fry are also important elements in this novel. Cooper isn’t exactly a local but he wasn’t brought up far away from Rakedale, so he has a much better understanding of the people and the way they think than does his partner. And several times in the novel it’s that knowledge and intuition that moves the case along. Fry is smart, observant and in many ways tough. She’s hardly perfect; she’s brusque, impatient and not always respectful of local ways. She can be sarcastic, too. But she has a skill at making sense of the various threads of the case. The two detectives complement each other and although there are things they don’t like about each other, they also respect one another’s skills (not that Fry is really willing to admit that).

Although there are ‘action’ scenes in this novel, the overall pace is in keeping with the setting. So readers who prefer their novels to move along at a fast pace throughout will be disappointed. The suspense lies not so much in the action as in the setting, the atmosphere and the uncovering of what’s been happening at Pity Wood Farm. Even the weather adds to that suspense. For much of the time it’s raining – that cold autumn rain that can chill you right to the bone as you might say.

Dying to Sin is a police procedural with a believable mystery, an eerie and bleak atmosphere and doses of history. But what’s your view? Have you read Dying to Sin? If you have, what elements do you see in it?

 

 
 

Coming Up On In The Spotlight

 

Monday 29 October/Tuesday 30 October – Blood and Groom – Jill Edmondson

Monday 5 November/Tuesday 6 November – Executive Privilege – Phillip Margolin

Monday 12 November/Tuesday 13 November – The Paris Lawyer – Sylvie Granotier