We Are Detective, Come to Collect*

One of the ways in which crime fiction has evolved in the last sixty or seventy years has arguably been the increasing variety of PI sleuths. And perhaps this is just my opinion (so do feel free to differ with me if you do) but I think it’s a good thing. In real life, private investigators take all kinds of cases, from spouses who suspect their partners of cheating to pre-hiring background checks to investigators who work with attorneys on their cases. And it hardly need be said that today’s PIs come from all kinds of backgrounds.

‘Gentleman detectives’ such as Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes paved the way for the modern PI novel, which today ranges from the light (e.g. Alexander McCall Smith’s Mma. Precious Ramotswe series) to the noir (e.g.  Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther series). One post is hardly enough to do the modern PI novel justice, but let’s just take a quick look at the sub-genre.

Authors such as Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald and Mickey Spillane were at the forefront of the ‘hard boiled’ PI novel. In Macdonald’s The Drowning Pool for instance, Maude Slocum hires PI Lew Archer to find out who sent a slanderous letter to her husband James. The letter alleges that Maude’s been having an affair, and she is afraid that if James finds out, the marriage will end in divorce. Archer takes the case and begins his investigation. Right from the beginning he learns of the dysfunction in the Slocum family. James’ mother Olivia is quite wealthy and uses her financial power to manipulate the family. Maude and her mother-in-law have never been exactly friends, and Maude resents the fact that James is somewhat of a ‘mother’s boy.’ So when Olivia is found dead one day in her swimming pool, there’s every chance one of the family could be responsible. But then again, oil magnate Walter Kilbourne wanted to drill on the Slocum estate and Olivia was firmly set against the idea. So the murder could be the work of Kilbourne or one of his paid ‘associates.’ As Archer investigates, we get to see the seamier side of the way the wealthy live.

Anthony Bidulka’s PI sleuth Russell Quant also sometimes sees the not-so-very-nice side of ‘the beautiful life.’ In Tapas on the Ramblas for instance, wealthy business executive Charity Wiser believes that someone in her family is trying to kill her. She hires Quant to find out who it is and invites him on a family cruise to get to know the other members of the Wiser clan so he can ‘scope them out.’ As he does so, he discovers that just about everyone in the family had a motive for murder. It’s not just a matter of greed, either. There’s a lot of dysfunction in this family and the better Quant gets to know the family members, the more he uncovers about the undercurrents of resentment. Then, there are two attempts at murder and later, a death. In the end, Quant puts the pieces of the puzzle together but not before he comes close to being a victim himself.

We get an interesting look ‘behind the scenes’ of a PI firm in Julie Smith’s Talba Wallis series. Wallis lives and works in New Orleans, where she’s employed by E.V. Anthony Investigations. The firm does background checks on potential employees and at the beginning of Louisiana Bigshot, we learn that Wallis also investigates cheating spouses. In fact that’s what her friend Clayton Robineau (who goes by the name Babalu Maya) hires her to do. Babalu thinks that her fiancé Jason Wheelock has been unfaithful and wants Wallis to find out whether it’s true. At first Wallis doesn’t want to take the case; she would rather Babalu simply break up with Wheelock than learn all of the sordid details of any affair he’s having. But Babalu insists, so Wallis begins to investigate. She finds out that her friend was right and breaks the bad news. Shortly after that, Babalu is found dead, apparently a successful suicide. Wallis doesn’t think it was a suicide though, and neither does Jason Wheelock. So Wallis starts to look into the case more closely. She finds that Babalu’s family history and someone’s desperate need to protect a reputation are the keys to the murder.

Jill Edmondson’s Toronto PI Sasha Jackson doesn’t work for a firm; she’s set up in business for herself. And one of the very effective elements in this series is that we get to see what it’s like to try to build up one’s client base, take care of the bills and so on. And in Dead Light District we get an interesting perspective on why some people hire private detectives instead of going to the police. Candace Curtis owns a brothel which she staffs with only the best employees. The client list is carefully vetted too. It’s an illegal business though, so when one of her employees Mary Carmen Santamaria goes missing, she can’t call the police about it. So she hires Jackson to find out what happened to Mary Carmen. Jackson is uncomfortable about the case. For one thing, she’s not comfortable with the thought of young women who, as she sees it, are being exploited. For another, Mary Carmen could simply not want to be found. If so, why shouldn’t she be left in peace? But Curtis is persuasive and a fee is a fee, so Jackson begins her investigation. But this turns out to be much more than a missing person case. First an alleged pimp is stabbed to death in a hotel and then there’s another murder. Then Curtis becomes a target. Jackson finds that what started out being a case of a prostitute who’s disappeared has led her to the underside of Toronto’s sex trade.

Some PIs don’t really think of themselves as PIs – at least not at first. Walter Mosley’s Ezekiel ‘Easy’ Rawlins doesn’t. In the first few novels, before he gets his PI license, he thinks of it as ‘doing favours.’ So does Lawrence Block’s Matthew Scudder. In fact in The Sins of the Fathers, he says,

 

‘Sometimes I do favors for people. They give me gifts.’

 

And yet in both of these cases the sleuths learn that the PI business can be, if not exactly lucrative, at least a source of income.

Today’s PIs are a very diverse group. There’s the wisecracking ‘world’s greatest detective’ Elvis Cole (courtesy of Robert Crais), the not-domestically-inclined Kinsey Millhone (courtesy of Sue Grafton) and lots of others too. And that variety has added to the sub-genre.

Now, you may be wondering why I’ve not mentioned one of the best known PI sleuths, Sara Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawski. I was saving this mention because today is (or yesterday was, depending on when you read this) Sara Paretsky’s birthday. So this post is in honour of what Ms. Paretsky has contributed to the crime fiction genre. V.I. Warshawski is one of the most popular PI sleuths in crime fiction. She’s a unique character with a strong commitment to social justice, a deep love of her home town (Chicago) and a true-blue sense of loyalty to her friends. She was one of the groundbreaking fictional female PIs and the novels featuring her have gained Ms. Paretsky a worldwide audience.

Happy Birthday Sara Paretsky and many more.

 

 
 

*NOTE:  The title of this post is a line from The Thompson Twins’ We Are Detective.

It’s a Losing Proposition But One You Can’t Refuse*

If you read enough crime fiction, you might wonder why so many people make agreements or get mixed up with people they would otherwise never consider. ‘Wouldn’t a person have more sense than that?’ you might ask. But sometimes people feel they have no choice but to make a ‘deal with the devil’ as the saying goes. And when a person feels caught between a rock and a hard place (yet another saying!), there sometimes feels no way out of this kind of arrangement. Those ‘deals with the devil’ certainly happen in real life, and they can add a suspenseful and intriguing layer to a crime novel. Here are just a few examples to show you what I mean.

In Agatha Christie’s Death in the Clouds (AKA Death in the Air) we meet Cecily Horbury. She is married to Stephen, Lord Horbury who is very anxious to protect both his family home and his family name. What Cecily hasn’t told her husband is that she’s gotten far too fond of gambling and is now in debt. Rather than ask her husband for yet more money (thereby generating some very awkward questions) she makes a ‘deal with the devil’ and borrows money from Madame Giselle, a French moneylender who uses private, potentially scandalous, information about her clients as ‘collateral’ for loans. At first all goes well. But then, Cecily begins to lose heavily at gambling and is unable to pay back what she owes. She gets out of her situation, or so she thinks, when Madame Giselle suddenly dies of what looks like heart failure while en route between Paris and London. But when it’s proven that she was poisoned, the police look among the passengers for the killer. Since Cecily was on the same flight, she becomes a prime suspect. Hercule Poirot, who was also on that flight, works with Chief Inspector Japp to find out who murdered Madame Giselle. It turns out that Cecily Horbury is only one of several suspects.

Walter Mosley’s A Red Death is the story of a ‘deal with the devil’ between Ezekiel ‘Easy’ Rawlins and the FBI. Rawlins gets a letter from Internal Revenue Service (IRS) agent Reginald Lawrence stating that he owes thousands of dollars in back taxes to the government. The letter threatens Rawlins with jail if he doesn’t pay what he owes. Just when Rawlins thinks he has no option but to serve time in prison, a way out appears. He is contacted by FBI agent Darryl Craxton, who offers to make Rawlins’ tax problems go away if he’ll do something in return. Craxton wants to bring down suspected communist Chaim Wenzler (this novel takes place during the ‘Red Scare’ era of the early 1950s). His plan is for Rawlins to get close to Wenzler by volunteering at the First African Baptist Church where Wenzler also volunteers. Then, Rawlins will be in a position to gather the information the FBI needs to get Wenzler. Rawlins has no desire to get involved in what he sees as a very ‘dirty’ game. But he also sees no other option. So he reluctantly agrees to the arrangement. He begins to do volunteer work and slowly builds a relationship with Wenzler. In the process he finds that he actually likes his target and doesn’t want to sacrifice him. Now he’s torn between the arrangement that he know he can’t break and his growing liking for Wenzler. That’s when two murders are committed at the church and Rawlins finds that he’s a suspect. Not only does he have to resolve his dilemma, but also, he has to try to clear his name and find out who the killer is before he’s arrested.

In James Lee Burke’s A Morning For Flamingos, New Iberia police officer Dave Robicheaux is recovering from a line-of-duty incident in which he was shot by a prisoner Jimmie Lee Boggs. His partner Lester Benoit was killed in the same incident. Just when he’s beginning to really heal, Robicheaux gets a visit from an old friend Minos Dautrieve, who now works for a US government anti-drug task force. This task force wants to bring down New Orleans drug smuggler and crime boss Tony Cardo and Dautrieve wants Robicheaux’s help. The plan is that Robicheaux will go undercover as a cop who’s ‘gone dirty’ and get as close to Cardo as he can. Then he’ll be in a position to give information to the government. Robicheaux is not interested in being a government ‘tool.’ Besides, he doesn’t trust that he’ll be protected if something goes wrong. But Dautrieve sweetens the proverbial pot with an irresistible (to Robicheaux) offer. This arrangement will allow Robicheaux to go after Jimmie Lee Boggs, who’s been associating with Cardo’s people. Robicheaux finally agrees and puts the plan in action. It’s not long though before he finds Cardo a much more complicated and even sympathetic character than he thought. He also finds that he was right about the government’s trustworthiness when it comes to protecting him. Now he has to stay alive, catch Boggs, and do the best he can to keep his ‘handlers’ satisfied without giving Cardo away.

Charles ‘Chaz’ Perrone makes his own kind of ‘deal with the devil’ in Carl Hiaasen’s Skinny Dip. Or perhaps he’s the ‘devil…’  Perrone is a marine biologist (at least nominally) but isn’t exactly getting wealthy. Then he gets an offer from Samuel Johnson ‘Red’  Hammernut, who owns a large commercial farm in Florida’s Everglades. Hammernut’s company is guilty of polluting the Everglades with toxic waste, but he has no desire to face off against environmentalists or the government. So he hires Perrone to make sure that the mandatory water samples drawn near the Hammernut farm show no pollution. Perrone is happy to comply since he has very little conscience and is eager for the money he’ll get. Then his wife Joey begins to suspect what he’s doing. In order to keep Joey from going to the authorities, Perrone takes her on a cruise of the Everglades and pushes her overboard. The only hitch to his plan is that Joey doesn’t die. She survives and finds a way to strike back at her husband by making him believe that someone saw him try to kill her. As Perrone becomes more and more unstable, Hammernut begins to trust him less and less. Now Perrone has the police, an angry Hammernut and a vengeful not-dead wife on his hands…

Robert Crais’ Lullaby Town introduces us to famous Hollywood director Peter Alan Nelson. Nelson has decided that he wants to track down his ex-wife Karen Shipley, who left him several years earlier and seems to have disappeared. With her she took their son Toby who’s now twelve. Nelson wants a relationship with his son and hires PI Elvis Cole to find the boy and his mother. Cole is reluctant; after all, Karen may have had very good reasons for not wanting to be found. But in the end he agrees and tracks Karen to a quiet Connecticut town where she is vice-president of a local bank. Before long, Cole is threatened by some very nasty thugs who want him to leave Karen Shipley alone. When he confronts her, she tells him her story: as a newly single mother, she had very little money, but she wanted to make a life for herself and Toby. So she made a ‘deal with the devil’ and agreed to co-operate with the Mafia in a money laundering scheme. Now she can’t get free of them. Together with his partner Joe Pike, Cole tracks down the Mafiosos who are threatening him (and Karen) and plans a way to stop them. In the process, he also re-unites Nelson with his son.

There’s a truly heartbreaking example of a ‘deal with the devil’ in Mark Douglas-Home’s The Sea Detective. As the novel begins, we meet Preeti and Basanti, two teens from India’s Bedia group. They are both attractive and their families are financially desperate. So the two girls become part of the dhanda – India’s sex trade. The plan is that they’ll work as prostitutes, saving their money and sending everything they can back to their families. When they’ve gotten their families financially secure, the girls will leave the trade. This ‘deal with the devil’ comes at a devastating cost when the girls are spirited off to Scotland. The people who paid their families turn out to be abusive and worse. The two girls are separated and when Basanti manages to escape from the place where she’s being held, she tries to find Preeti. Her frantic search leads her to the home of Caladh ‘Cal’ McGill, an Edinburgh Ph.D. student in oceanography. McGill has his own worries. For one thing he’s in trouble with the authorities for his way of calling attention to climate change. For another, he’s trying to solve the mystery of his grandfather’s disappearance on a sea voyage many years earlier. The two stories are woven together when Basanti learns that McGill may hold the key to her finding out what happened to her friend. She’s proven to be right when he uses his knowledge of oceanography and his connections in the field to track down the people who brought the girls to Scotland, and find out what happened to Preeti.

‘Deals with the devil’ may seem like bad ideas. And objectively speaking, it’s easy to say that one shouldn’t make them. But for people in certain cases those kinds of arrangements may seem to be the only way out of a terrible situation. And they can make for compelling plot points in crime fiction.

 

 
 

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from Glenn Frey’s Smuggler’s Blues.

When the Jazzman’s Testifyin’, a Faithless Man Believes*

There’s something about jazz and jazz clubs. If you like good jazz as I do then you know what I mean without me having to explain it. Jazz, when it’s done right, is full of feeling and emotion (of course, I suppose all music is when it’s done well). A lot of jazz is improvised and adapted, too, so each jazz artist has her or his own take on the music. Jazz has been associated for a long time with fun and good times; it’s an uninhibited genre. But it’s also been associated with grief and sadness. There’s something a little dark about jazz – something that goes beneath the surface. It’s a complex form of music that for many people strikes a particular chord. And because of the kind of music it is, I’m not at all surprised that you see it in crime fiction. To me (or perhaps this is just my opinion, in which case feel free to disagree if you do) jazz music would be a nicely-matched soundtrack to a lot of crime fiction novels.

When jazz first made the transition from its roots in the U.S. Black community into the mainstream, many people were suspicious of it. It was – is – unique and therefore unfamiliar and seemed, well, dangerous. You see that kind of feeling about jazz in some Golden Age crime fiction like Dorothy Sayers’ The Unpleasantness at the Bellonna Club. In that novel, Lord Peter Wimsey investigates two deaths. One is the death of one his fellow club members General Fentiman. Fentiman’s wealthy sister Lady Dormer also dies. And therein is the hitch. According to Lady Dormer’s will, if she dies first, her fortune passes to Fentiman’s grandson. If the general dies first, the fortune passes to Lady Dormer’s distant cousin Anne Dorland. So the timing of the two deaths matters greatly. When it’s discovered that General Fentiman was poisoned, Wimsey and his friend Inspector Parker have to find out not only who poisoned the general, but also who died first: the general or his sister. At one point, Wimsey is talking with Fentiman’s grandson George and his wife. George has this to say about the effect of jazz and the jazz culture:

 

‘In the old days, heaps of unmarried women were companions, and… they had a much better time than they had now, with all this jazzing and short skirts…the modern girl hasn’t a scrap of decent feeling or sentiment about her.’ 

 

It’s clear in this novel that there’s real suspicion of ‘the jazz life.’

Of course, times have changed and today jazz isn’t considered the ‘dangerous’ kind of music that it once was. But it still runs through crime fiction. In James Lee Burke’s Dixie City Jam, for instance, New Iberia cop Dave Robicheaux needs to raise money to help his business partner Batist, who’s been arrested for murdering a drug dealer. Robicheaux decides to raise the money through a finder’s fee for recovering a World War II-era submarine that’s sunk not far from New Iberia. The real trouble begins when Robicheaux’s search gets the attention of Will Buchalter, a neo-Nazi who doesn’t want the secrets buried with that sub to come to light. Buchalter begins to target Robicheaux’s wife Bootise, so Robicheaux tries to track him down. The only problem is that Buchalter is notoriously elusive. In fact, the only real clue to he has is that Buchalter is an avid collector of rare jazz recordings. So Robicheaux looks for answers among New Orleans’ group of music lovers, musical artists and jazz dealers as he searches for Buchalter. In this novel, jazz is not only part of the context for this plot thread, but it’s also, you might say, part of the key to finding Buchalter.

Walter Mosley’s Ezekiel ‘Easy’ Rawlins series takes place in 1950’s Watts, Los Angeles which, as we learn in White Butterfly, was once a well-known jazz district. Here’s how Rawlins describes the area:

 

‘The women, in the late forties and even into the early fifties, were all beautiful; young and old, in satins, silks and furs…They’d come in and listen to Coltrane, Monk, Holiday and all the rest, drinking shot for shot with their men.
It was a bold and flashy time. But by that evening [1956] all the shine had rubbed off to expose the base metal below. The sidewalks had broken, sporting hardy weeds in their cracks. Some clubs were still there but they were quieter now. The jazzmen had found new arenas.’
 

It’s in that context that Rawlins is ‘persuaded’ to go looking for a killer. Three young women Bonita Edwards, Willa Scott and Juliette LeRoi have been murdered. But since they were all Black, not much attention has been paid to their deaths. When Robin Garnett, who calls herself Cyndi Starr, is killed though, things change. She was White and the media starts to pay attention. The police know that they won’t get the truth if they try to investigate in Watts themselves. So they coerce Rawlins into doing so. He starts to ask questions and follows the girls’ trails through the seedy clubs and bars of the area. One of his stops is a visit to Lips McGee, a talented jazz trumpeter at the end of his career. During his heyday McGee was at the top of the scene, but he’s now living in Hollywood Row, a building that like its residents has seen much better times. It turns out McGee knew Robin Garnett and gives Rawlins valuable help in finding out where and how she lived. Rawlins manages to track down the person he thinks killed the women – and then discovers that someone else might have killed Robin and ‘disguised’ her murder to look like the work of the other killer.

Nevada Barr’s Burn has a strong dose of jazz. In that novel, National Park Service Ranger Anna Pigeon visits her friend Geneva, who’s now a singer at the New Orleans Jazz National Historic Park. She soon begins to suspect that Geneva’s tenant Jordan may be involved in New Orleans’ child trafficking trade. At the same time, Seattle chemist Clare Sullivan also goes to New Orleans, but for a very different reason. She is suspected of the arson murder of her husband and two children.  But she is convinced that her children are still alive and have been taken to New Orleans. She goes on a desperate search for her children at the same time as Pigeon is looking for what may lie beneath Jordan’s exterior. While jazz music isn’t the key to pulling together the threads of this story, it serves as a really effective backdrop for the novel.

Even when jazz and jazz clubs aren’t featured in a crime novel, they are still sometimes woven in more subtly. For instance fans of Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch will know that he is a jazz lover. In many of the novels featuring him, Bosch listens to all sorts of jazz. In fact you could say that jazz cements the bond between him and Sylvia Moore, whom he meets in The Black Ice. In that novel Bosch investigates the death of her husband Calexico ‘Cal.’ In the process of that investigation he has several conversations with Sylvia and they develop a relationship. And at the very end of the novel, Bosch asks her:

 

‘You like jazz? The saxophone?’…
‘Especially the solos,’ she said. ‘The ones that are lonely and sad. I love those.’

 

That’s when Bosch invites her for a New Year’s Eve date at the Catalina, where jazz great Frank Morgan will be playing. Sadly, Morgan died in 2007 and Connelly actually dedicates The Brass Verdict, which was written that year and published in 2008,in part to Morgan’s memory. And on an interesting note, we learn in that novel that Bosch’s half-brother Mickey Haller is acquainted with Morgan.

Jazz is a unique music form with a rich history. It’s got all sorts of depths, shadow and light (or maybe that’s just my view). I’m glad it’s threaded through crime fiction; they go together somehow. Or maybe that’s just my view, too…

 
 

In Memoriam…
 

 
This post is dedicated to the memory of the great Dave Brubeck, a legendary jazz pianist who passed away today at the age of 91. He will be missed.

 

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from Carole King’s Jazzman.

Don’t You Know That This Hand Washes That One Too*

In real life, things don’t always get done strictly ‘by the book. Lots of things get done more informally. So, many people find a network of friends and acquaintances to be extremely useful, especially when it comes to getting around ‘red tape.’ For example, you might have a friend who works for a technology company come over and fix your laptop. The next time your friend needs a ride to the airport or someone to mind her children while she goes to a meeting, you return the courtesy. Both of you have saved time and money and been spared annoyance. For real or fictional detectives, being ‘plugged in’ to a network of exchanging courtesies like that can be invaluable. That’s especially true if one’s a private investigator without the force of law to compel people to part with information. And that sort of network is particularly valuable in cases where it’s too dangerous, too expensive or too chaotic to go through ‘official’ channels to get things done. There are even situations where the only way to get anything done is to use one’s network. That’s certainly the case in real life, and we see it all through crime fiction, too.

For example, in Agatha Christie’s The Mystery of the Blue Train, we meet M. Demetrius Papopolous, a dealer in valuable gems who lives and works in Paris. There is little about the jewel trade that he doesn’t know or hasn’t heard. Hercule Poirot finds his acquaintance with Papopolous to be extremely useful when he investigates the murder of wealthy Ruth Van Aldin Kettering, who is murdered while she is aboard the famous Blue Train. The victim had with her a very valuable ruby necklace that included the famous ‘Heart of Fire’ ruby. The necklace has since been stolen and Poirot believes that if he can find out more about the necklace he’ll find out more about the murder. So he visits M. Papopolous, for whom he did a very important favour sixteen years earlier. When Papopolous is reminded of what he owes Poirot, he is willing to provide him with useful information about where the necklace came from, how it was acquired and what might have happened to it since it was stolen.

Lawrence Block’s Matthew Scudder often finds that quid pro quo is a very useful approach to take when he solves cases. He’s a former cop who still knows people on the force. And he still has connections that he made while he was a cop. Scudder has no problem calling on those relationships to get things done and get information. In fact, in the early Scudder novels especially, that’s how he thinks of his job as a PI. As he tells his client Cale Hanniford in The Sins of the Fathers,

 

‘Sometimes I do favors for people. They give me gifts.’ 

 

In that novel, Scudder agrees to find out about the life of Hanniford’s twenty-four-year-old daughter Wendy, who was recently murdered. The two had been estranged for some time and Hanniford wants to know what became of his daughter and what led up to her death. Scudder agrees and starts asking questions. Throughout this novel Scudder makes use of his network and of a few well-placed financial ‘inducements’ to get the job done.

That’s how Walter Mosley’s Ezekiel ‘Easy’ Rawlins works too. In the first novels that feature him, he’s not a licensed PI. Instead, he is given money informally. For instance, in Devil in a Blue Dress, Rawlins’ friend, a bar owner nicknamed Joppy, introduces him to DeWitt Albright. Albright wants to find Daphne Monet, who’s recently disappeared. He doesn’t want the police involved, but he does want her found. Rawlins needs the money desperately because he’s just been laid off from the aircraft manufacturing plant where he worked. So when Joppy introduces him to Albright, Rawlins is willing to listen to what Albright has to say. He takes the job and begins his search for the missing woman. He doesn’t know it at first, but his search will get him involved in blackmail, theft and murder. It also begins his unofficial career as PI. Throughout this and the other novels featuring him, Rawlins makes use of his network. He does things for people; they return the courtesy. He gets involved in cases through that network too.

And then there’s Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther, who lives and works in World War II and post-World War II Germany. In that atmosphere it’s very hard to get things done in the usual ‘official’ way. And even if one can, most people don’t want to call attention to themselves that way. So Gunther has found that using his network, plus a few well-placed ‘gratuities,’ is essential to finding answers. In March Violets for instance, he’s hired by Hermann Six to track down a missing diamond necklace. The necklace belonged to Six’s daughter Grete, who was recently shot along with her husband Paul. Their home was burned in an effort to disguise the murders, but Six knows that they were killed deliberately. Gunther takes the job and begins to ask questions about the disappearance of the necklace as well as the two deaths. But for a number of reasons, it’s hard to get the information he wants through the usual channels. He doesn’t want to run afoul of the Nazi authorities, of whom he is no fan. He also knows that because the two victims were wealthy and well-connected, people aren’t going to be likely to say much. Finally, the people who are most likely to know about the missing necklace are probably involved in illegal trading of gems. They’re not exactly likely to boast about that. So Gunther makes extensive use of his network to find out the truth. And where his network isn’t helpful, he uses financial incentives. It’s a very pragmatic and for Gunther, a very effective way to get things done.

Police investigators aren’t supposed to pay for information (although of course, that practice goes on). But they can and do develop all sorts of useful networks of relationships that help them cut through the ‘red tape’ and help them get the job done. For instance, Donna Leon’s Commissario Guido Brunetti often finds that a telephone call to a journalist acquaintance or to a family friend proves much more useful than official witness statements. And he often gets valuable help from Signorina Elettra Zorzi, his boss’ assistant. Signorina Elettra has a vast network of friends, acquaintances, former boyfriends and so on all over Venice and in other parts of Italy too. For her, finding out even the most confidential information is usually only a matter of a few telephone calls or a lunch date. Both she and Brunetti know that there’s so much ‘red tape’ and often corruption involved in going through ‘official’ channels that there isn’t much chance of getting the job done that way. So they depend on their networks.

In Angela Savage’s Behind the Night Bazaar, PI Jayne Keeney, who lives and works in Bangkok, finds that a little informal networking is very helpful in her search for the murderer of her friend Didier ‘Didi’ de Montpasse and his partner Nou. The official explanation is that Did murdered Nou and was then killed himself during an armed standoff with police. But Keeney is sure that’s just a cover for what really happened. So she begins to ask questions about the murders. She finds that there’s a connection between the killings and the Thai sex trade and child trafficking trade. But the ‘players’ in this trade are wealthy and powerful, and they’re protected by local authorities. So there aren’t many people who are willing to help Keeney openly. But she finds that a few well-placed financial ‘gifts’ and the use of her network are very useful in finding the information she wants.

Those informal, sometimes cash-fueled networks can be key to solving a case. So smart sleuths know that it pays to be helpful and grant favours when they can, and get ‘plugged in’ to a solid informal network. The time will come when they’ll need that network.

 

 
 

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from John Kander and Fred Ebb’s When You’re Good to Mama.

We Know Where We’re Going, We Know Where We’re From*

Among other things, crime fiction allows us to experience other cultures, or to look at our own through different eyes. And one way authors do that is through creating expatriate (ex-pat) characters. When someone from one culture lives and works in another, there’s a fascinating ‘meeting of minds’ if you want to call it that, and that can add a very interesting perspective to a novel. Well-drawn ex-pat characters don’t necessarily give up their own culture or language, but they do learn the ways of the new culture and that adds to their perspective and to the reader’s.

For instance, Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot is an ex-pat Belgian. One could argue that because he left Belgium as a refugee he is, strictly speaking, not an ex-pat as he didn’t leave his country voluntarily. But I include him here because he provides an interesting look at what it’s like to be from one country but live and work in another. In many ways he is quite distinct from the English people among whom he lives. Besides the language difference (he’s had to learn English and sometimes needs to learn a new idiom or two), there are also cultural differences. Just as an example, although Poriot is familiar with the custom of tea, he’s never really made it his own habit. There are other English customs too, such as shaking hands rather than embracing, that he’s had to get used to and he’s never really lost his own Belgian way of life. In a way, you could argue that Poirot allowed Christie to hold up a mirror to her own culture.

In Walter Mosley’s A Red Death, we meet ex-pat Chaim Wenzler, a former member of the Polish Resistance who’s since moved to the United States. Wenzler has become the object of FBI interest because he is believed to be a communist. At the time this novel takes place (the early 1950’s), being a communist in the United States is a very serious matter so if the allegations about Wenzler are true, then FBI Agent Darryl Craxton wants to bring him down. Craxton gets the opportunity to get close to Wenzler through then-amateur private investigator Ezekiel ‘Easy’ Rawlins. Rawlins is in deep tax trouble, so Craxton offers him a deal: if he agrees to get close to Wenzler, Craxton will make his tax problems go away. Rawlins agrees and starts volunteering at the First African Baptist Church, where Wenzler too has been volunteering. The two men get to know each other and before long Rawlins finds himself liking Wenzler and increasingly reluctant to give him up to the FBI. Then there’s a series of murders for which Rawlins is framed and it looks as though someone has begun to target him. Now he has to clear his name by solving the murders and walk a very thin line between giving enough information about Wenzler to the FBI without giving too much away.

Alexander McCall Smith introduces us to American ex-pat Andrea Curtin in Tears of the Giraffe. Curtin and her husband lived in Botswana for a few years as a part of her husband’s job. Their son Michael fell in love with Botswana while the family was there and decided to remain when his parents returned to the United States. He joined an eco-commune and all seemed well enough until he disappeared. The official explanation for his disappearance is an attack by wild animals. But his mother Andrea has never quite believed that and wants closure. She’s moved back to Botswana where she’s decided to remain. She hires Mma. Precious Ramotswe to help her find out the truth about her son’s disappearance so she can move on with her life. Mma. Ramotswe takes the case and goes to the eco-commune where the young man lived. Bit by bit she finds out what
happened to him and is able to give his mother the answers she needs.

Dicey Deere created a four-novel series featuring American ex-pat Torrey Tunet, who now lives in Ballynagh Ireland when she’s not ‘on the road’ as part of her job. Tunet is a language specialist and interpreter who often travels, but she always returns to her ‘base’ in Ballynagh. Through her
eyes we get to see the interesting, sometimes quirky local characters and the unique customs and culture of the area. Tunet has respect for the local ways, too; it’s obvious that Deere doesn’t fall into the trap of the ‘fish-out-of-water who annoys everyone’ kind of character.

P.D. Martin’s Sophie Anderson is an ex-pat Australian who now lives and works in the U.S. as an FBI agent. She started her career with the Victoria police force but fell in love with the idea of being an FBI profiler after she took a course offered by the agency. She makes an excellent profiler too; not only does she have the training and skills, but she also has an added ‘plus.’ Anderson has psychic dreams – visions, if you want to call them that – that allow her to ‘get into the heads’ of the killers she pursues. Although she isn’t always comfortable with that ability, she does learn to channel it and make use of it as she investigates.

Vicki Delany’s Constable Moonlight ‘Molly” Smith is purely Canadian. But her parents aren’t. Lucy ‘Lucky’ and Andy Smith are former hippies and ex-pat Americans who moved to Canada when Andy was drafted for service in the Vietnam War. Andy had real doubts about leaving the U.S. at the time they moved but Lucky strongly believed that the war was wrong, so they made the move. Since then they’ve settled there comfortably and now run an adventure tour company and store. Although neither is ashamed of having come from the U.S., they’ve more or less embraced the local way of doing things.

And then there’s Angela Savage’s Jayne Keeney. She’s an ex-pat Australian PI who now lives and works in Bangkok. Although in many ways she’s purely Aussie (if there is one way to be purely Aussie), but she has also learned quite a lot about the different culture, language and way of life in her new home. She speaks fluent Thai, understands and follows the local customs and has begun to appreciate the complexity of life there. In Behind the Night Bazaar and The Half-Child, Keeney’s ability to move between her own culture and her adopted culture proves to be very useful as she solves cases.

And that’s the interesting thing about ex-pat characters. We get to see, through their eyes, what a different culture is like. There’s also a terrific opportunity for a complex, ‘fleshed out’ character if she or he is from one culture but has had to get accustomed to living and working in a different one. I’ve only had space here to mention a few examples; which ones do you like?

 

 

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from Bob Marley’s Exodus.