Crime novel themes

The Chris Huhne / Vicky Pryce case raises some interesting questions about marriage, crime and morals.  Before the Married Woman’s Property Act of 1870, married women could not own property – after marriage, de facto everything belonged to their husbands.  It followed that they could not run up debts and some enterprising ladies wrought their revenge by exercising this loophole in the law!  Spinsters and widows could, however, hold wealth in their own right.  Wealthy male landowners and other magnates would sometimes devise ingenious trusts and make provisions in their wills for married daughters, so that their husbands could not get their hands on all the cash.  Even so, it does make you wonder why any woman of substance consented to marry! At the moment I’m reading Wylder’s Hand, by Sheridan Le Fanu, a mid-nineteenth century crime novel that tells how a beautiful heiress was unscrupulously passed around by several men in her extended family so that each could benefit from her wealth.

In the past, as The Taming of the Shrew illustrates, husbands were expected to be allowed to shape their wives’ views and opinions. Women, economically dependent and physically weaker in eras when even aristocrats would resort to physical force to subdue them, were always guilty if they lost their ‘virtue’.  Richardson’s Clarissa died after she was seduced; Hardy’s Tess killed her lover in what nowadays would be called a crime of passion and paid for it with her life.

Until our own times, women have mostly drawn the short straw – though not always. Some, like the Wife of Bath, have prevailed over men through sheer strength of character. However, I imagine that it is because women have habitually been the underdogs of matrimony that laws of ‘spousal privilege’ were conceived.  Ostensibly, these were meant to promote marital harmony, but it is also rather self-evidently true that wives, whether because of collusion or coercion, are unlikely to ‘shop’ their husbands.  If the court could not rely on their testimony, it was best not to ask for it in the first place.

Today, at least in countries where girls and boys receive a similar education, women have more or less gained equality of opportunity and, unless they are in abusive relationships, there is no question of their having to agree with their husbands’ opinions.  Some famous marriages have been built on successfully ‘agreeing to ‘disagree’: that of Denis and Edna Healey, for example.  Can a woman of formidable intellect who has a high-profile career in her own right really be coerced by her equally high-profile husband into breaking the law and compromising her own moral integrity because he asks her to?  I don’t have the answer to that.  Thinking of my own husband, I am convinced that he would not have asked in the first place.  But if he had ….?

My interest in Richard III was kindled when I was a young bookseller, because my boss was a member of the Richard III Society.  I’ve subsequently read several books about the Wars of the Roses and also visited Richard’s castle at Middleham.  That he had strong links with Yorkshire has increased his fascination for me.

Few English kings have inspired such intense posthumous opinion as Richard.  Henry VIII, Charles II and George III have all had their fierce supporters and detractors, but none has had vitriol heaped upon him as Richard has.  He could hardly have been as wicked as he was reputed to be; his shimmeringly evil reputation, much enhanced by the distorted character that Shakespeare created to please his Tudor mistress, even had the unintentional effect of giving him the same kind of glamour as Milton’s Satan.  Shakespeare was also responsible for exaggerating his physical deformities; unlike Dorian Gray three hundred years later, the fictional Richard’s evil soul was supposed to have been made manifest in an ugly face and twisted body.

The Richard III Society was founded to put the record straight, but, like almost all societies that support the memory of controversial historical and literary characters, it quickly became so partisan that some of its published ‘research’ stretched the facts.  Nevertheless, it is to one of its present-day members that we are indebted for the discovery of Richard’s remains under a car park in Leicester.  Amazingly, modern science, in particular miraculous DNA matching techniques, proves conclusively that the bones did belong to this last Plantagenet king.  I am sure that a great book will come out of the story of their discovery and testing (which, as last night’s Channel 4 programme showed, has been meticulous).

In the popular imagination, Richard’s worst act has always been his reputed murder of his two nephews, the so-called ‘princes in the tower’.  They were the heirs of Edward IV.  The elder of them, Edward V, was never crowned king, but the title was reserved for him, even so; the next King Edward was crowned Edward VI.  There is no proof that Richard killed the two princes.  It is known that they lived in the Tower of London for many months and gradually disappeared from view; first they were seen playing frequently, then infrequently, then not at all.  Although it is fairly certain that bones discovered in the tower in the late 1990s belonged to the princes, there is no conclusive proof of who murdered them.  Was it indeed Richard?  Or did the order come from Henry VII (the preferred candidate of the Richard III Society) after his accession?  Of course, I don’t know, though I’d rather like to think it was Henry myself, partly because Richard has always been such an underdog, partly because Henry was a cruel cold fish of a man.  He was certainly capable of killing them.

Whoever it was, the outpouring of emotion that this murderous act has generated is illogical.  Perhaps it is because they were children; perhaps because one of them was a king and kings were sacred.  Yet there can have been no king between William I and Richard III who did not commit murder, except, perhaps, Henry VI, who was himself murdered for the national good; and, although the Tudors themselves considered the murder of kings to be taboo, Shakespeare’s own queen, Elizabeth I, herself killed an anointed queen, Mary Queen of Scots.  I conclude that Richard’s infamy stuck because of the genius of Shakespeare himself.  The beauty and the irony of these famous lines have touched every generation since they were written in 1592:

Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that low’r’d upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.

The bones retrieved from the car park were of a slight and delicately-formed man; he did, indeed, suffer from scoliosis, but it probably only made one shoulder appear slightly higher than the other; otherwise, he may have cut an attractive, even a refined, figure.  I should never want to lose Shakespeare’s magnificent villain, but perhaps now that the real Richard has been found, he can co-exist with his alter ego.  There is surely room in our heritage for both of them.

Yesterday, making my first real foray from home since the snow came, I travelled by train to London.

I boarded at Wakefield Kirkgate, once a proud Victorian station of almost Downton Abbey proportions, now a sad and sinister derelict shell.  It is quite a frightening place, especially after dark, and has been the scene of various robberies and at least one violent rape.  However, it is also the station at which the magnificent Grand Central trains halt on their way to London King’s Cross.  It is therefore well worth press-ganging my husband into temporary service as bodyguard.  He waits on the platform with me so that, later, I can enjoy the luxury of the first class carriage, with coffee, biscuits, newspapers and wifi included, for the modest price of £60.

Perhaps because these trains are so luxurious, I began to think of Murder on the Orient Express, in which Agatha Christie skilfully shows that any of the passengers could have been capable of murder, before inviting the reader to identify who dunnit.  I had to invent both a victim and also a motive for each suspect when I began to scrutinise my fellow passengers to guess what their favoured modus operandi for murder might be.  Like Agatha Christie, I assumed that every one of them would be capable of the deed.

The man sitting diagonally opposite me was a businessman from Halifax.  I know this, because, in a loud voice, he was telling the man sitting directly opposite (evidently a very new buddy) about his various boardroom coups and how he spent the money that he made: Mr. Conspicuous Consumption with a county veneer; he’d kill, to prove that he could do it, and want to ensure that both murder and weapon were as ostentatious as possible; and he’d wriggle out of punishment afterwards.  An antique Purdey shotgun and a faked hunting accident would be his choice.

The new buddy, when he could get a word in, proved to be a genial and mellifluous Irishman: short cropped hair, John Lennon spec.s, shabby grey suit; one of the original sleeve buttons had evidently been lost and incongruously replaced with a bright pink one, slightly larger than the others.  Conspicuous Consumption should be wary of him if they leave the train together.  Mellifluous Irishman’d be capable of taking CC to a deserted spot, withdrawing a long, slender stiletto from one of the baggy inner pockets of that suit and thrusting it into CC’s heart, all the time keeping up the cheerful chatter about dead cert horses and racing greyhounds. Money would be his motive.  Afterwards, MI would slip away through the wet and silent streets and fling his stiletto into the canal.  The police would never track him down.

What about the Chinese Yummy Mummy, glamorously dressed to keep out the cold in champagne-coloured Rab jacket, fur-lined hood and aubergine leggings, her small feet shod in tiny suede boots?  She was accompanied by a little girl of five or six, a mini-version of herself.  Her immaculately made-up face had a wary, shut-in look.  Once married to a rich man, perhaps; now a single mum determined to preserve their former lifestyle for herself and the child.  If the rich man didn’t play ball, he would cop it before the divorce came through, while she was still legally the main beneficiary of his will.  She’d have to be careful, though; she wouldn’t want to upset the child and, for her, there would be a double imperative to avoid prison.  Poison would be CYM’s agent of choice, administered through some item of food delivered to defaulting rich husband when she was many miles from the scene.  The police would suspect her, but they’d never find the proof.

Several seats behind me, an elderly woman wearing a long red coat (which she had not removed, though the carriage was well-heated) lay alternately dozing and looking round her with shrewd blue eyes.  She had a mannish face and thick grey hair cut in a cropped, no-nonsense hairstyle; it was relieved from being a short-back-and-sides only by the crimped quiff swept back from her forehead.  Mrs. Well-Upholstered Lady.  She was a past mistress at her art.  She’d had a long and eventful life: plotting her murders carefully; moving all obstacles as she continued on her relentless journey.  She would have brooked no opposition along the way, whether it had come from troublesome lovers in her youth, her timid but irritating husband in middle age, or, more recently, the ancient aunt of whom she had been quite fond, but who’d already lived far too long when she’d begun to dissipate Mrs. W-UL’s inheritance on nursing home fees.  A different MO every time for her: one of the lovers had been dispatched after she’d tampered with the brakes on his car; the husband had died from carbon monoxide poisoning from a faulty gas fire – she’d happened to be away at the time; she’d visited the aunt in the nursing-home every day, tenderly administering food and medicine, increasing the dose just a little bit on each occasion.  Hers were all ‘perfect’ crimes: never suspected; never investigated.

According to my imaginings so far, every one of my train murderers would have got off scot free.  Although in my novels not all the perpetrators pay the penalty, some are always caught.  Otherwise, that all’s-right-with-the-world denouement of which I’ve previously written could not be achieved;  so, I’ll have to re-visit.  Which of the train murderers might be apprehended, and by whom?  I’d put my money on CC and CYM: he, because he wouldn’t be able to resist boasting of his plans; she, because she’s a nervous novice who’s never committed a crime before (she is overheard on her mobile, spilling her heart out to a friend).  MI and Mrs. W-UL?  Too fly by far.

And who would catch CC and CYM? The guy serving the free coffees, of course: a detective in disguise all along.  They made a fatal mistake: they should have travelled standard class.

My journey to London with Grand Central passed very quickly…

Snow hound, snow bound

Have you noticed how often, both in real life and in fiction, the evidence of a murder or some other crime is discovered by a ‘man walking his dog’?  I first spotted this as a child when the World Cup trophy (also known as the Jules Rimet Trophy) was stolen after the 1966 London World Cup final and later found in a garden in Northwood by a dog named Pickles.  It was subsequently stolen again in 1983, this time for good, probably because there were no intelligent dogs near the sports complex in which it was being displayed in Rio de Janeiro!

In 2008, I was stranded for some hours at Chicago Airport and was fascinated to see the sniffer dogs at work there.  One, a beagle, unerringly insisted on returning to a little old lady who was evidently carrying some banned substance in her large holdall.  She was led away, while the dog returned to the main concourse, exuberant; dogs love to work and to feel that their work is valued.

Many years ago I dog-sat for some friends.  I took the visiting dog – an Irish setter – for a walk.  He was fine until we reached an old, disused railway track, when he refused to go any further.  He started to growl and his hackles rose.  I don’t know what unspeakable horror or danger might have lurked in that isolated plot of scrubby wasteland, but I took his advice; I didn’t stay to find out!

Many newspaper stories describe how bodies or clues have been detected by early-morning dog-walkers.   Such a discovery, this time of the body of the murdered landscape gardener Jo Yeates near a Bristol golf course by a couple walking their dogs, offers a recent, tragic example.

Some crime writers frequently feature dogs in their work: dogs appear in several Ruth Rendell novels, including The Monster in the Box, in which the villain, Targus, excites Inspector Wexford’s suspicion by not being accompanied by the dog from whom he is usually inseparable.  David Benioff endears us to the hero of his offbeat humorous thriller The 25^th Hour by having him rescue an injured and abandoned pit bull terrier (which bites him, but he perseveres with it) in the early pages of the novel.  This dog, which he names Doyle, subsequently becomes integral to the plot.  (This is a brilliant novel which I’m just reading; I shall review it shortly.)  I have recently also had the privilege of reading an early draft of Scarecrow, by Matthew Pritchard, which will be published by Salt in August 2013.  The hero of this book, a lone journalist, relies on a dog to give him the company and friendship that he seems unable to obtain from humans.  (This writer is one to watch, by the way.)

I have a dog myself.  He doesn’t feature in my novels – yet.  As you may already know from a previous post, he is an English pointer with a very highly-developed sense of smell.  He can locate a pheasant from 500 yards or any bitch on heat within a radius of three miles.  He, too, likes to work.  Although he is normally very gentle-natured, he can be fierce if he thinks that his people are threatened.  He wouldn’t make the best of security dogs, because he is too fond of his creature comforts (fire, Aga, bean-bag) and I don’t know how good he would be at helping to solve a crime.  I suspect that that would depend on whether he were in work or play mode at the time, but if the villain were a poacher with pockets stuffed with game birds, he’d be brilliant.

At the moment, he is very excited about the weather, and definitely wants to play (See image!).  If there are mysteries or unseen horrors concealed beneath the snow, he may be too busy enjoying himself to find them!

A photograph of a lovely snowman in Nottingham by Elaine Aldred (@EMAldred) caught my eye today, but it was rather her accompanying tweet, ‘Before he melts’, that touched my sense of symbolism: the deep human sadness arising from an awareness of the transience of a super creation like this or of beauty, or youth, or goodness – the positive things of life that fade like Burns’ ‘rainbow’s lovely form, evanishing amid the storm.’

Such is the way of my mental processes that I leaped from this idea to the spectacular icicles I saw this morning, which will also melt, and thence to a story powerful in its icy symbolism, Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen, which had me spellbound as a child; it tells of the love of two innocent children, a boy and a girl, blasted by evil in the form of the wicked troll’s transforming mirror (which turns beauty into ugliness), a sliver of which penetrates to the heart of the boy, Kay, and turns it to ice.  This is truly a touch of Danish blanc, as the frozen foliage of their winter window panes, the crystals of falling snow and  the person of the Snow Queen herself, who captures Kay and spirits him away to her ice hall in Lapland, are all, of course, brilliantly white and sparkling; to him, the Snow Queen is the image of perfection, but to the reader the embodiment of an evil cold and calculating: when Kay is with her, he can think only of the multiplication table and fractions and cannot remember The Lord’s Prayer.

Does Danish noir descend from this?  I like to think so, for if ever there were a culture steeped in the vexatious transformation of conventional symbols, it’s Denmark’s.  There is a powerful magic in the non-stereotypical and, although The Snow Queen presents the standard opposition of good and evil, there are various characters who are decidedly not clichéd, such as the little robber girl and the raven, who prove, unexpectedly, to be forces for good in helping the girl, Gerda, to find Kay again.  It also presents a stalwart heroine (though her strength is, simply, her innocent purity) who never gives up her quest.  Does Gerda prefigure Sarah Lund?  (Sarah’s isolation – though it is mental, rather than Gerda’s, which is geographical – from others and her single-minded determination to overcome evil are both very similar to Gerda’s.)  Unconsciously, perhaps, on the part of The Killing‘s author, she does!

The fact is, we love the symbolism of a good story and, especially, of one that challenges our perceptions, whether it is by Hans Christian Andersen or a modern storyteller.  I’m of the view that Søren Sveistrup has the complex traditional fictional culture of his nation firmly embedded in him, though his talent no doubt derives from immersion in other sources as well.

Let us not be sad:  The cold beauty of the icicles and the frozen magnificence of that snowman will eventually succumb to warmth, but are now captured by camera for us to see again at any time; though we are told that The Killing has come to an end, the boxed sets are there for us; the Snow Queen, thanks to fabulous storytelling, is a character who will also live on in the printed word.

As for symbolism, see whatever you fancy!

Yesterday, I learned belatedly of the death of someone to whom I was once close.  Although I had not seen him for many years, I felt sad about the conversations that will now never take place and the questions that will now never be asked or answered.

Death is one of the stocks-in-trade of crime writers.  Do we write about it carelessly or frivolously?  I don’t think so.  Murder stories tend to begin with one or more innocent deaths that have to be avenged – usually, but not always, according to the law – in order to restore the moral balance and demonstrate to the reader that all is right with the world again.  Often the perpetrator dies or is killed; a good writer will shape this death into a kind of catharsis, so that the survivors can ‘move on’.

Real life is messier.  Humans are creatures governed by memory.  An individual’s ‘life’ therefore neither begins with his or her birth, nor ends with his or her death.

When I was a child, I listened to a radio programme in which was interviewed a very old lady whose great aunt had once met Jane Austen.  The great aunt had recounted to her the conversation that had taken place and she was repeating it for the benefit of listeners in the 1960s.  It had therefore been passed on at just one remove from an author whose life had ended in 1817.  Why are we fascinated by such things?  I think it is because we like to believe that we are part of a continuum that is greater than one person.  It is more modest than a quest for immortality, but contains a strong element of the desire to survive for some time in memory.

As a baby, I was held by each of my great-grandmothers, both of whom were born in the 1870s.  Both died before I started school, but I have hazy memories of them.  I hope that, in my turn, I shall be remembered by my as-yet-unborn grandchildren, who, by the law of averages, are likely to live into the twenty-second century.  This represents almost a quarter of a millennium of ‘immortality’.  Can we ask for more?

Rest in peace, John.

Monday November 26^th 2012 saw new anti-stalking laws brought into force in England and Wales: six months in prison and/or a fine to a maximum of £5,000 for conviction for this offence.  I am astonished that it has taken so long to achieve this here; we certainly seem to have lagged behind other countries.  Fictional representations of potentially lethal stalking immediately spring to mind.  Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love (1997) and the Clint Eastwood film Play Misty for Me (1971) are two examples that made me think about the psychology of stalking; there are, of course, others – the element of the stalker in Thomas Harris’ Red Dragon (1981), for example, was something which struck me when I read it as a proof copy – and, though the murder rate for the victims of stalkers is in reality quite low, all of these fictional stories have a tremendous psychological interest.

Obsession of one kind or another afflicts many people and manifests itself in many ways; stalking is one which is particularly frightening and sinister, as victims are unable to defend themselves from the invasion of their privacy and from the fear and threat of harm.  Newspapers here referred this week to the 2005 murder by a stalker of Clare Bernal in the Harvey Nichols Knightsbridge store  –  the welcome new laws have been a long time coming.  I hope that they will prove effective in keeping the behaviour and the crime firmly in fiction.

If, with William Golding, you see the reality of human vice behind a civilised veneer, then you might be willing to consider that there is something of the criminal in all of us.  Yesterday, I wrote of Margaret Yorke, who was a diligent researcher for her novels, and it occurred to me that there is amongst the body of crime writers a fine skill set for the execution of the perfect crime.  We devote time and effort to convince our readers and ponder with microscopic care the ways by which our character/s will do the deed and cover the traces.  Put some of us together and we should be a formidable force for naughtiness.  Are we criminals manqués?

Some of the best crime fiction does present the fine line between crook and cop and demonstrate that there is not a lot to choose between them.  Perhaps we are fascinated by the depiction of what is in fact our own potential for doing wrong.  Do we then go on to create a parallel universe in which we vicariously enjoy being very wicked?

I’m beginning to feel quite uncomfortable.  It’s all very well holding the mirror up to nature, but when the face in the mirror is my own…

Beauty bought out of captivity

Crimes stir feelings in all of us and, of course, provide the writer with a fertile creative soil in which to grow a fictional crop.  As someone who has to admit to being enthralled by the psychology of the perpetrator of crime, I join the ranks of those who pursue every detail of real crime to try to discover the mentality which could explain ‘why’…  So what kind of crime touches me most?  Not necessarily the most grisly; not the most brutal.  I am likely to be fascinated by something which may seem to most to be quite venial.  It’s also true that I find my interest stirred by offences against victims who cannot understand what is happening to them: the mentally infirm, children, animals.  I heard yesterday of the rescue after six years of two golden eagles, imported as eaglets without legal paperwork and kept in a small garden shed with no windows; in six years, they never flew and never left the shed.  Though I am not a bird fanatic, I find myself stirred by the power and majesty of a bird which I have seen flying free on Mull and which Tennyson memorably compared to a thunderbolt in its stoop.  Because the ‘owner’ of these two birds put shelter over their heads and fed them appropriately, he was not prosecuted.  I’m delighted to learn that both birds were bought by a specialist falconer, who has transformed their lives, training and flying them and bonding with them; but what of the man who kept them?  What was it in him that wanted to keep eagles in the first place if he had no intention of training them and why did he commit them to a life of imprisonment?  Will he do the same again? Is his a similar mindset to that of the egg-robber who keeps his wild birds’ eggs in secret to fulfil some inner personal need?   What most grabs your interest in crime?

I have been interested to read quite a number of recent Twitter posts which confirm a powerful hatred of fireworks and of Bonfire Night.  I enjoyed these two: “When I’m rich, I’m going to buy ALL the fireworks on sale on Merseyside and bury them” and “I refuse to endorse 400-year-old celebration of anti-Catholic bigotry.”  Personally, I have mixed feelings; the problem is that Bonfire Night and Hallowe’en have blended into a fortnight’s slow-release firework fest, combining the best of the visual extravaganza with the worst of the mischief.  However, I remember that, when I was growing up in Spalding, in the East of England, Bonfire Night and Mischief Night were rolled into one on November 5^th and children blacked their faces with soot on a cork or dressed up as ghosts and took their guy around the neighbourhood to demand (with appropriate chants) their treats; owners of pets knew that there would be only a couple of days of potential danger for their animals and the whole thing seemed to be blessed with innocent fun and excitement.  I have not forgotten that my imagination was always inspired by the occasion, for there lay behind it all a sense of the macabre and of lurking threat, which was real enough in the time of James 1^st and still finds its way in various forms into the work of crime novelists.  I rather like Bonfire Night… and a plot to blow up Parliament is the stuff of fancy!