>A Few Suggestions for Safety…

>Most people don’t want to become murder victims. Fortunately, there’s a whole body of crime fiction that can serve as a handy guide to staying safe. It’s quite similar to the wisdom that should tell a character in a horror movie not to go down to the basement alone, answer a ringing telephone, or stay in a house alone for the week-end. So, in the interest of providing useful information to all, here are a few tips, straight from crime fiction, to avoiding becoming a murder victim.

Don’t get overly curious.

All too often, crime fiction characters become victims because they know more than they should know. That’s what happens to Celia Austin in Agatha Christie’s Hickory Dickory Dock (AKA Hickory Dickory Death). She’s a resident in a hostel for students who finds out much more than is good for her. She notices some strange goings-on at the hostel, and asks too many questions about them. In the end, her curiosity signs her death warrant, as the saying goes. Hercule Poirot’s been looking into the events at the hostel, anyway, so when Celia suddenly dies, he figures out quickly that her murder is connected with the other events at the hostel. In the end, he discovers that the hostel’s been used as a “front” for some very shady activities. Celia found out about them and paid the ultimate price.

Anne Johnson pays a similar price in Murder in Mesopotamia, in which Poirot investigates the murder of Louise Leidner, the wife of noted archeologist Eric Leidner. One afternoon, Louise Leidner is murdered in what seems like an impossible crime. No-one was seen near her room, and all of the members of the archeological team seem to be able to account for themselves during the time the murder was committed. Anne Johnson, Eric Leidner’s assistant, comes upon a discovery that gets her thinking – too much. She’s on the point of putting all of the pieces of the puzzle together when she, too, is murdered. Once he has all of the pieces of the puzzle, Poirot is able to draw the same conclusions that Miss Johnson did, and unmasks the murderer.

Be careful of the company you keep.

Getting mixed up with dangerous people is a sure way to risk being killed. That’s what happens to Wililam Decker in Mickey Spillane’s The Big Kill. Decker is a former con-man who’s especially good at safecracking. He’s been trying to “go straight,” for the sake of his toddler son. He’s desperate for money, though, so he gets mixed up with a dangerous criminal gang. One day, Decker walks into a seedy bar where Mike Hammer is having a drink. He hastily downs two drinks, leaves his soon with a tearful good-bye, and walks out of the bar – straight into the path of a car that runs him down. For good measure, the car’s occupants also shoot him. Hammer runs out of the bar in time to shoot one of the assailants, but the man dies before he can tell Hammer who’s behind the murder of William Decker. So Hammer decides to find out for himself. At first, it seems that Decker was killed because he’d bungled a job for the gang. In the end, though, Hammer finds that Decker was killed for a different reason. In a large part, it was because he was mixed up with some dangerous people.

So is David St. James in Sam Hilliard’s The Last Track. In that novel, fourteen-year-old Sean Jackson is staying at a Montana dude ranch when he sees St. James’ murder. Afraid that the killer will come after him, Jackson runs away, into the wilderness surrounding the ranch. Detective Lisbeth McCarthy calls in former Special Forces operative Mike Brody, who now runs an extreme adventure company. She asks him to try to find Sean before the killer does, and before Sean’s asthma takes too much of a toll on him. Brody has his own personal reasons for getting involved in finding missing persons, so he agrees to the job. In the end, Brody finds that David St. James’ murder is connected with a drugs gang that has no compunctions about killing. St. James was mixed up with some very dangerous and untrustworthy people, and paid the price for it.

Attraction can be fatal.

That’s what we find in Vivian Gilbert Zabel’s Midnight. Lieutenant Martin Rogers has lost the use of his legs due to a gunshot wound. While he’s trying to recover, Rogers spends quite a lot of time on the internet. There, he meets a woman he knows only as Midnight. The two strike up a friendship and before he knows it, Rogers is in love with Midnight, despite the fact that he knows very little about her. He soon figures out, though, that Midnight may not be what she seems, and he tells Assistant District Attorney Lisa Harris and two of his colleagues about his fears. They set up a “sting” operation to catch Midnight, but she proves more difficult to catch than anyone thought. Then, Rogers becomes a target himself as he and his team work to stop Midnight before anyone dies.

There’s also what you might call a fatal attraction in Ellery Queen’s The Fourth Side of the Triangle. In that novel, Sheila Grey, a famous designer, is having an affair with wealthy Ashton McKell, who lives in her apartment building. When McKell’s son, Dane, finds out his father’s having an affair, he resolves to meet the “other woman.” Before long, he’s fallen in love with her, too, and the two begin a relationship. Then, one night, Sheila Grey is shot. The case is given to Inspector Richard Queen, so his son gets involved, too. At first, it seems that Ashton McKell is guilty; however, he’s soon cleared. Then, first his wife, and then his son are suspected. In the end, Ellery Queen uses a cryptic set of clues that Sheila Grey used in her work to find out who really murdered her.

If you’re rich, be generous.

That’s a lesson that Charles Arundell tries to give his Aunt Emily in Agatha Christie’s Dumb Witness (AKA Poirot Loses a Client). Emily Arundell is a wealthy spinster whose relations are all desperate for money. One of them, her nephew Charles, warns Miss Arundell that if she doesn’t open the purse strings a bit, she’s liable to be killed. Miss Arundell brushes her nephew off, saying that she can take care of herself. Charles is proved right when Miss Arundell suddenly dies. At first, her death is put down to natural causes; she wasn’t in good health, anyway. But before she died, Miss Arundell sent a letter to Hercule Poirot, asking his help on a delicate matter that she never specified. By the time he and Hastings get to the town of Market Basing, Miss Arundell has died, but Poirot suspects that Miss Arundell did not die naturally. In the end, Poirot finds out which of Miss Arundell’s cash-strapped relations murdered her.

And then there’s Ngaio Marsh’s Gabriel “Uncle G” Lord Wutherwood, wealthy head of the Lamprey clan, the victim in A Surfeit of Lampreys. His younger brother, Lord Charles Lamprey, has an extremely irresponsible (and eccentric) family, and things have gotten to the point where the family is facing ruin. So Lord Charles asks his brother for financial help. Uncle G is tired of coming to the rescue, and refuses any more help. He and his brother have an argument, and shortly thereafter, Uncle G is murdered. Inspector Roderick Alleyn, who’s called in to investigate, has to sift through everyone’s alibi and find out which of Lord Wutherwood’s greedy family members killed him.

Be nice to people.

In crime fiction, it just doesn’t pay to be nasty to people. That’s the lesson that old Simeon Lee learns too late in Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot’s Christmas (AKA A Holiday for Murder and Murder for Christmas). Lee is an unpleasant tyrant who decides one Christmas to invite all of his relations to spend the holiday at the family home. No-one wants to accept the invitation, but no-one dares refuse it. On Christmas Eve, Lee is brutally murdered. Hercule Poirot is staying nearby at the home of a friend and agrees to look into the case. He finds that nearly every one of Lee’s relations had a good reason to want to kill him. As it turns out, Lee was killed out of revenge.

In Elizabeth Spann Craig’s Pretty is as Pretty Dies, we meet Parke Stockard, another unpleasant person who pays the price for her nastiness. Parke is a real estate developer who also contributes to the Bradley, North Carolina Bradley Bugle. She hasn’t been in Bradley very long, but she’s been there long enough to upset just about everyone with her high-handed arrogance, her greed and her tendency to use gossip she learns to her advantage. One morning, Myrtle Clover, a retired schoolteacher, goes to the local church to attend a meeting. When she gets there, she finds Parke’s body. Myrtle decides to find out what happened to Parke, if only to prove that she’s not ready to be put out to pasture just yet. She’s got lots of suspects to choose from, too, since Parke succeeded in alienating everyone in town. And in the end, Myrtle finds that Parke’s obnoxious personality led directly to her death.

Stay away from lonely, secluded places.

Lonely roads, abandoned warehouses and other secluded spots have a way of attracting bodies. I mentioned this in a recent post, so I won’t belabor it here. But it would have been helpful if Jake Goldstein and Frank Douglas, whom we meet in Mark Richard Zubro’s Another Dead Teenager, had learned that lesson. Goldstein and Douglas are star high school athletes, well-liked at school, and from well-off families. They seem to be living “the teenage dream.” One day, both boys are found brutally murdered. Goldstein’s body is found in an abandoned warehouse, and Douglas’ body is found in an empty parking garage. At first, there seems no reason for the murders. Soon enough, though Detectives Paul Turner and Buck Fenwick discover some unusual things about the boys that leads them to wonder how much the boys are hiding. Then, another brutal murder occurs, and it’s soon clear that there’s a serial killer at work. Now, Turner and Fenwick have to work “against the clock” to find the killer before there’s another death. Hopefully, these suggestions will prove useful. Of course, if everyone took precautions, there wouldn’t be as many fictional murders. Then where would crime novelists be? ; )

Do you have any additions to this handy guide?

My thanks to Maxine at Petrona for the inspiration for this post : ).

>Breaking Barriers

>One of the interesting things about crime fiction novels is the way they reflect society’s changing attitudes and values. If you look at the evolution of the mystery novel, you can see how those attitudes have changed over time. That’s why, for instance, today’s crime fiction addresses certain social issues in increasingly honest and forthright ways. It’s also one reason for which there’s such a diversity of different kinds of sleuths, each of whom has a unique approach to solving crimes. Those differences among sleuths add fascinating layers of interest to their stories.

In the early days of crime fiction, most sleuths were white men. They varied, of course, to some extent. Most, such as Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey, Ngaio Marsh’s Sir Roderick Alleyn and Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot were “gentleman detectives.” There were some female sleuths; Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple and Prudence “Tuppence” Beresford, and Dorothy Sayers’ Harriet Vane are some examples. But in the main, sleuths were arguably, “of a type.”

The “hardboiled” crime fiction novel paved the way for the working-class detective. Many of those “hardboiled heroes” didn’t come from privileged backgrounds, and they didn’t confine themselves to “upper class” cases. Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer is just one example of the “hardboiled” sleuth who added an important new dimension to crime fiction. Hammer frequently investigates cases that involve people from lower social classes. For example, in My Gun is Quick, he investigates the death of a prostitute. In The Big Kill, he finds out who killed a down-and-out con man who’s trying to “go straight. “

The class barrier is, of course, not the only one that’s been broken by fictional sleuths; the race barrier has also been broken. Beginning (at least in the U.S.) with John Edward Bruce’s The Black Sleuth, sleuths of color have become an increasingly important factor in crime fiction. The Black Sleuth is the story of Sadipe Okukenu, a Yoruba from West Africa, who travels to the U.S. state of Maine to continue his formal education. In the United States, Okukenu encounters the institutionalized prejudice of the times (this novel was written in serial form between 1907 and 1909), and in fact, Bruce used that treatment as a platform for social critique. Later, Okukenu becomes a detective for the International Detective Agency. He’s recruited to trace the whereabouts of a valuable stolen diamond, which he follows from the U.S. to Europe, and back to Africa. This story was never finished, so we don’t know what the outcome is. But The Black Sleuth arguably helped pave the way for today’s black sleuths, such as Walter Mosley’s Ezekial “Easy” Rawlins and Alexander McCall Smith’s Precious Ramotswe. There are, of course, numerous other very popular fictional sleuths who aren’t white; there isn’t room in this one blog post for me to mention them all. But it is interesting to see how the concept of who gets to be a sleuth has broadened.

That concept also now includes strong female characters as sleuths, and these sleuths also bring a unique perspective to the genre. Even during the Golden Age of crime fiction, some mystery authors wrote about female sleuths. Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple and Tuppence Beresford and Dorothy Sayers’ Harriet Vane are three examples. We might argue that these authors were ahead of their times in that regard, because there was still a great deal of institutionalized sexism while they were writing. Today, of course, the female sleuth is a force to be reckoned with in crime fiction. A lot has been written about this evolution in crime fiction, so I won’t rehash it here. Just a few examples should serve to make my point. Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone and Martin Edwards’ DCI Hannah Scarlett are very different, of course, but they’re both strong, smart characters who haven’t stopped being what people call feminine because of that. That balance, between powerful characterization and femininity, can be difficult to achieve, but these authors do. So do many others, including Alexander McCall Smith, whose Precious Ramotswe is very strong, yet she’s traditionally feminine in many ways.

Sleuths’ personal lives have also become much more diverse as time has gone by. There are, of course, more traditional sleuths, such as Louise Penny’s Armand Gamache and Caroline Graham’s Tom Barnaby, who are married. There are also gay sleuths, such as Richard Stevenson’s Donald Strachey series. Strachey is an openly gay private detective who lives and works in Albany, New York. While he often investigates murders within the gay community, he doesn’t always. For instance, in Tongue Tied, Strachey investigates the murder of a far-right radio “shock jock” who’s outspoken in his anti-gay views. Strachey is often assisted by his partner, Timothy J. Callahan, who’s a more strait-laced character. Callahan’s an attorney for the State of New York, and his connections are sometimes very helpful to Strachey.

Mark Richard Zubro has also created a gay sleuth, Paul Turner. Turner is a Chicago police officer with two teen-age children, one of whom has spina bifida. His partner, Buck Fenwick, is not gay. In Another Dead Teenager, Turner and Fenwick investigate the high-profile murders of Jay Goldstein and Frank Douglas, two teenage sons of powerful Chicago families. Because of the victims’ status, Turner and Fenwick are under a great deal of pressure to find the killer as soon as possible. At first, no-one can imagine what would have motivated the killings. Both boys were well-liked, successful high-school athletes. They weren’t involved in drugs, gangs or any other activities that would have made them enemies. As the pressure on Turner and Fenwick increases, they look deeper into the connections between the victims, and find out that their deaths are connected to an old secret that the killer has kept for a long time.

Another kind of diversity in sleuths has been sleuths with disabilities. We usually think of disabilities as being debilitating and making it difficult, if not impossible, to function, let alone take on the many challenges of sleuthing. But there are several sleuths who haven’t let having a disability get in the way of their investigations. One such sleuth is Michael Collins’ Dan Fortune, who lost an arm in an accident while he was looting a ship that was docked at New York. After he recovered, Fortune served in the Merchant Marines and then became a private detective. Since he can’t really get involved in physical fights, Fortune tends to use his wits, rather than strength, to get out of difficult situations and to get answers. Dick Francis’ jockey-turned-racetrack investigator Sid Halley has a similar disability. He permanently lost the use of his left hand after a fall, when a horse stepped full on it. Later, the hand had to be amputated. While he struggles to deal with this loss, it doesn’t stop him from investigating racetrack crimes.

Vivian Gilbert Zabel’s Midnight Hours also features a sleuth with a disability. Lieutenant Martin Rogers has lost the use of his legs as the result of a gunshot. While he’s trying to recover, he spends a lot of time on the Internet, and soon meets a woman who goes by the name of Midnight. She and Martin strike up a relationship and he soon falls in love with her, despite the fact that she’s extremely reticent about herself. Rogers begins to suspect that Midnight may not be what she seems, and he tells two of his colleagues and Assistant District Attorney Lisa Harris about his concerns. Soon, they’ve connected Midnight to a group of suspicious deaths, and they set up a “sting” operation to catch the killer. As it turns out, Midnight is much more elusive than anyone thought, and now Rogers himself is in real danger as the team tries to stop the killer before anyone else dies.

One very interesting sleuth with a disability is Michael Palmer’s Dr. Thea Sperelakis, the sleuth in his The Second Opinion. Sperelakis returns to her native Boston from her work with Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières) when her father is gravely injured by a hit-and-run driver and left in a coma. Thea Sperelakis and her brother, Dmitri, become convinced that their father was deliberately targeted, and they start to investigate what really happened. Their other two siblings are eager to have their father’s life support cut off, so Thea has to work quickly to find out what was behind the crash. As a cover, she takes a position at the prestigious institute her father founded, and begins to find out its secrets. What’s interesting is that Thea Sperelakis has Asperger’s Syndrome. While that complicates her ability to form and maintain social relationships, she has a near photographic memory and a precise eye for almost un-noticeable details. She also has a brilliant medical mind, and uses these skills as she investigates.

In modern crime fiction, nearly anyone can be a sleuth. Today, that includes people from just about any background, of either sex, in just about any personal situation. As more and more social barriers have been broken in real life, this has been reflected in crime fiction. That evolution has resulted in an incredible diversity of sleuths and unique approaches to crime-solving and that benefits the genre. What changes have you seen in the kind of sleuth who populates crime fiction? What changes do you see coming next?