Category Archives: Crime

Last Night at Villa Lucia by Simon McCleave

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What could be more appealing than a murder mystery set in an elegant villa high on a hill overlooking the Tuscan countryside? Prolific crime novelist Simon McCleave’s Last Night at Villa Lucia feels like a vacation from the first page.

A few flies in the ointment—or in this case, vodka—soon appear. The middle-aged woman who owns Villa Lucia has a significant drinking problem, once controlled with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous, but now seriously relapsed. This, and the death that follows, is all foreshadowed in an unnecessary prologue, lifted from a place well into the story. Chapter One rewinds to two days earlier with the arrival of a new set of guests—the overbearing, deeply entitled Harry Collard, his mousy wife Zoe, and their handsome nineteen-year-old son, Charlie.

When the family arrives at the villa, they find their hostess, Cerys, who’s divorced, and her luscious daughter Lowri, about Charlie’s age. One plot point boldly forecasts itself from the moment Harry meets Lowri.

So. At least until the police arrive, you have two couples (one dad absent, but very “present” in the minds of his ex-wife and daughter). Two young adults. And, rounding out the cast, the two people who keep the place humming—Lucia De Nardi, the maid, who grew up in the villa before her uncle lost possession of it, a sore point for sure, and her husband, Lorenzo, who has a sketchy past and takes care of the pool and the gardens.

You see some of the English husbands’ arrogant behavior, in real time, in flashback, and in what the women say about them. This story might fail the Bechdel test—which checks whether a book or movie “features at least two female characters who have a conversation about something other than a man.” (Thanks, Wikipedia.) Granted, Cerys and Zoe do occasionally talk about fashion or food.

You know from the prologue that someone ends up in the infinity pool, and they aren’t swimming. That death occurs, about two days into the Collards’ stay, and by then you probably have a favored candidate for drowning and a universe of potential motives.

McCleave effectively conveys the enervating heat, the villa’s isolation, and the effects of too much alcohol, so that the arrival of the sober Policia di Stato Detective Franco Saachi is a relief. Naturally, the villa occupants don’t tell him everything. At least not right off. In a postscript, McCleave tells readers that his intentions for this book were to explore toxic masculinity, alcoholism, and abusive relationships. He achieved this goal, with a few caveats. Making both husbands so very toxic doesn’t give the narrative much nuance. It was good to see Cerys and Zoe open up to each other, and good for them, too. Cerys’s preoccupation with alcohol became a bit redundant, but it was probably an accurate way to portray this particular addiction. McCleave does give his characters some grace at the book’s end, as a reward—to you and them—for suffering through their travails. Meanwhile, you can enjoy the spectacular setting.

Looking for a Weekend Movie?

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Here are brief takes on four films we’ve seen lately. All have good points. The one I enjoyed most is first.

The Cowboy and the Queen
You may have seen previous coverage of horse whisperer Monty Roberts. Now you see him in a reflective mood, looking back over the shape of his career. Son of an abusive dad, he was determined not to follow that path (trailer). By watching horses in the wild, he began to understand how they communicated, and he adopted their approach in his training. “Breaking horses,” he says, amounts to breaking their spirit; they’re abused until they give up. He doesn’t do it that way. So, where does the Queen come in? We’re talking about Elizabeth II, late monarch of Britain, who read articles about Roberts and wanted him to coach some of her equerries in his methods. Like most traditional U.S. horsemen, they were skeptical. They relied on using their aggressive techniques for a week or two until the horse would accept a saddle and, ultimately, a rider. Roberts could achieve this in less than twenty minutes. The Queen comes across beautifully, and so does the cowboy! A real feel-good film. For a fictional take on humane horse-training, there’s the wonderful 2018 film, The Rider.

The Critic
You can’t fault Ian McKellan’s portrayal of an odious 1930s theater critic for a dying London newspaper (trailer). He delights in skewering the shows and performers he reviews, and, although at first I found him a nice contrast to the starchy newspaper publisher, when he roped an ambitious female lead into his manipulative schemes, I gave up on him. The performances are all good, but he’s no hero.
Rotten Tomatoes Critics’ Rating: 47%; Audiences: 73%.

Between the Temples
Ben Gottlieb (Jason Schwartzman) is the nebbishy cantor of a synagogue with a transparently ambitious rabbi (trailer). Through stress and anxiety, he’s lost his voice and is near suicide. Coming to his rescue (in more ways than one) is Mrs. Kessler (Carol Kane), his elementary school choral teacher. No one in their families is sure what the relationship is, exactly, they just know they don’t like it. Some good jokes, some outlandish family behavior. A pleasant film with a few slow spots.
Rotten Tomatoes Critics’ Rating: 85%; Audiences: 41%.

Skincare
This thriller loosely inspired by a true story, centers on a Hollywood entrepreneur who has developed her own line of facial products, using European (fancy!) ingredients (trailer). Her struggling business faces an existential crisis when a competitor moves in across the street. Violence ensues (nothing too graphic). Entertaining, and Elizabeth Banks is perfect as the increasingly frantic beauty maven. Coincidentally, I recently read a short piece about her in The New Yorker, where she talked about difficulty getting parts in her early career, in part because “I wasn’t pretty enough.” In this film, she’s a knockout!
Rotten Tomatoes Critics’ Rating: 65%; Audiences: 64%.

Correction Line

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Craig Terlson’s crime thriller, Correction Line, underscores how badly off track people can become if they just keep doing what they’re doing. Surveyors learned this in a late-1800s project to survey the vast prairies of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba and divide them into equal sections. They soon realized the longitudinal (north-south) meridians they established would converge as they reached higher latitudes, so that truly square sections would be impossible to achieve. They needed correction lines.

Just as the survey’s meridian lines met at a single point, the characters in Terlson’s story converge on a destructive human nexus named Dave. Like a black hole, he draws people and their energy to him. Being involved with Dave is extremely risky business. His career has gone from bringing in liquor, to marijuana, to hard drugs, to human trafficking. Dave doesn’t appear all that much in the story, yet he is everywhere in it. He’s the motivating force behind almost everything Terlson’s fascinating cast of characters does.

Terlson uses the wide open prairie of western Canada to great effect, as the characters range over its empty spaces in their pickup trucks and old Dodges and Pontiacs. Much of the novel is set several decades ago, and the gas-guzzlers cruise the surveyors’ grid and take the gentle curves—the correction lines—that adjust the strict geometry. He describes the stunning sunrises, the farm fields and grasslands that stretch to the horizon, and the lonely dwellings. When it seems you can see forever, the sky becomes more present. Terlson’s descriptions are more than painting pretty pictures. You need this solid grounding in the familiar, because what the characters are up to will stretch your perspective.

A young woman named Lucy has a past relationship with Dave, but she’s disappeared. Now he has cancer, and he wants her back. Alive. Lucy’s late mother made a strange potion he thinks will cure him, and Lucy makes something similar, but does it work? Dave puts his best man, Lawrence, on the job, and Lawrence recruits the rootless Curtis to help him search.

Whether she can replicate her mother’s strange mixture or not, her real talent is precognition. Maybe she doesn’t know exactly what bad thing is going to happen, but she knows something bad is heading her way. And it isn’t Roy, the failing door-to-door encyclopedia salesman who’s taken up with her.

Roy is a good guy in way over his head, with the opportunity to do something worthwhile for a change. He also has a sixth sense when trouble is brewing. Of course, this realization isn’t much of a stretch, when violent armed men are lurking about. Houses get destroyed. Cars, even big ones, don’t have a chance. Hospitals are visited. Much of the drama plays out along the roads surrounded by those endless fields, and, as you gradually get to know these dodgy characters, you come to like most of them too. You may yearn for their travels to make the slight angle of correction that would bend their lives in new directions—somewhere Dave is not.

Order from Amazon here.

The Missing Family

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The Missing Family is the latest in Tim Weaver’s popular series of thrillers featuring missing-persons investigator David Raker. Here, Weaver presents an impossible crime, the unexpected tentacles of which stretch clear from England across the Atlantic to the North American continent.

Sarah Fowler hires Raker to solve the mysterious disappearance of her family a year earlier. After a day at a favorite Dartmoor lake, her husband, teenage son, and his girlfriend row the family’s twenty-foot dinghy out onto the water one last time. Drowsy from the sun, Sarah briefly falls asleep—her wristwatch confirms she napped for no more than a minute or two—until her toddler, Mable, awakens her. Halfway across the lake, the dinghy bobs, empty. The police are baffled. The boat’s too far out for the trio to have swum to shore in the available time, not to mention the girlfriend’s arm was in a cast. They find no evidence of violence and have no witnesses.

You don’t stay with the grieving Sarah long, though. In Los Angeles, detectives from two different departments—eventually three jurisdictions—are baffled by a trio of shootings. Five bodies, killed by bullets typically used in hunting rifles, are found in remote areas. Far apart, there’s nothing to link them, and they continue for years as separate cold cases.

In yet a third plotline, at a massive London-area casino resort, the Skyline, a high-rolling gambler and casino investor is viciously stabbed to death. He and the two brothers who own the casino have been best friends for years. Despite the owners’ determination to find the murderer, security camera footage of the victim in the frequent company of another man is notably—possibly suspiciously—uninformative. Who was this stranger?

The brothers also own the world’s largest casino, The Afrique, in Las Vegas. (Coincidentally, I was at a conference in Las Vegas while reading this book, which was almost too much verisimilitude!) Weaver certainly captures the over-the-top, mildly uneasy, anything-can-happen casino buzz.

The suspected murderer returns to the Skyline, is identified (facial recognition software at work), detained, and put in one of the casino’s secure holding cells under guard. When the police arrive to arrest him, the locked cell is empty. It’s another missing person case, which cries out for Raker’s assistance. Raker’s investigations—the missing family and the casino murder and disappearance—work in tandem, while you learn about the West Coast murders through the eyes of the California detectives. A lot is going on. You may suspect that all three plot lines will eventually weave together, but how?

Though the plot is complex, Weaver’s chapters are short and keep things moving. Sometimes he tries a little too hard to end each chapter with a startling revelation, just before the next chapter switches to another plot. That said, you’ll encounter quite a few nifty surprises.

The book is written in both first-person (the Raker chapters) and third-person (all the others), which effectively provides immediacy from the lead detective, plus the differing points of view and voices of other characters. It’s never confusing. Overall, an entertaining puzzle.

Order here from Amazon.

Imaginations on Fire

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As news of the Southern California Line Fire explodes, another in a long line of catastrophes, authors have taken note. Fire’s destructiveness reveals heroism, and can equally well hide dastardly deeds. These thrillers have some strong points, and I also recommend the nonfiction Fire Weather by John Vaillant. You’ll discover real-life heroes (and villains) and understand fire’s dangers much better.

What Fire Brings
From the first pages of Rachel Howzell Hall’s new psychological thriller, What Fire Brings, Bailey Meadows’s situation is fraught with deception. This young Black woman has finagled a writing internship with noted thriller author Jack Beckham, but she isn’t a writer. She’s secretly working toward obtaining her private investigator’s license, and wants to use this opportunity to find out what happened to a woman who disappeared near Beckham’s Topanga Canyon property.

Topanga is a famously bohemian community west of Los Angeles whose hilly terrain and dense tree cover make it seem remote and wild. Thanks to Hall’s deft descriptions, the Canyon, with its one road in and one road out, becomes another potentially dangerous character here.

The story is told entirely from Bailey’s point of view. If you’ve read other works by Howzell, notably her debut, Land of Shadows, you won’t be surprised her narrative reads as if she is in an existential crisis. Living in two worlds makes her easily distracted—not the best headspace for conducting an investigation.

On a hike in the canyon, she sees a fire in the distance—too far away to pose any risk to the Beckham property, or is it? I read an advance reader copy of this book, which was labelled an ‘uncorrected proof.’ Typos will (presumably) be caught, and other changes may be made. However, when Bailey asks the fire chief about the maximum temperature a human body can tolerate, and he says 250 to 300 degrees Fahrenheit, that’s so wrong, I thought it was another intentional deception. The human body is about 60 percent water, which boils at 212 degrees F. Then he says higher temperatures are survivable “if there’s water around.” Water (humidity) actually worsens heat’s effects of heat on the body. This apparent slip-up is much more than a cosmetic problem, it affected my understanding of the plot.

That stumble aside, when you finally understand the whole of Bailey’s predicament, you may, like me, be struck by Hall’s accomplishment here. She turns the tables on some issues I didn’t realize were actually on the table. Despite Bailey’s annoying dithering, and the unanswered story questions (like, who was that old lady?), What Fire Brings is an exciting and memorable read.

Into the Flames
James Delargy’s incendiary new crime thriller, Into the Flames, like his previous two, is set in wildfire-prone rural southeastern Australia. Former Sydney police Detective Alex Kennard is making a heroic effort to reach the hilltop home of a missing artist—Tracy Hilmeyer—on one of the most threatened blocks in the rapidly burning fictional town of Rislake.

The superheated road surface pulls away as the tires of his commandeered Personnel Carrier labor up to the Hilmeyer house. Kennard doesn’t expect to find much at the house, certainly not what he does find—Tracy’s dead body, lying in a pool of blood. It takes superhuman cajoling to persuade the firefighters to concentrate on saving this one structure—now a crime scene—and to get the necessary investigating officers up the hill to the endangered dwelling. All the usual trappings of a murder investigation are here—coroner’s reports, paper trails, motor vehicle searches, warrants, interviews, development of suspects—all of which takes place amid an utter catastrophe.

Author Delargy is good at developing a complicated plot, red herrings and all. And, if you like a flat-out adventure, the story moves quickly from one event to the next. His writing style doesn’t lend itself to much character development, and he tends to tell you what his characters are feeling, rather than convey their motivations through more subtler means. As a result, I didn’t become really attached to any of them and to outright dislike a few.

What I did like was the dramatic set-up. The increasing number of devastating real-life wildfires around the world are a growing menace, and a story like this one vividly brings home the kinds of perils that such tragedies pose.

Order from Amazon here:
What Fire Brings
Into the Flames
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The Dark Side of The Movies

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It’s week four in our six-week zoom course on neo-noir cinema, a tour through a half-dozen of the best/most interesting/groundbreaking films in this genre, and we’re leaving bloody footprints in our wake. Having to watch a movie for “homework” is the best! So, you may wonder, what distinguishes neo-noir from plain old noir?

A few things, but as in all classification schemes involving creative endeavors, the edges blur a bit. The original noir genre includes black and white films produced mostly in the 1940s and 1950s. They involved a femme fatale, some mystery or crime or double-dealing, a hard-to-impress detective trying to work it out, and a lonely, jazzy trumpet. In fact, the sound track alone could send shivers up your back. If that didn’t, the cynicism would. Often urban. The top 5, says Rotten Tomatoes? Laura, Shadow of a Doubt, The Maltese Falcon, The Third Man, and Sunset Boulevard.

Neo-noir, then, is number one, more recent. These films are in living color, they often still involve a femme fatale, crime, a jaded detective/investigator, and some thematic music that may branch out a bit. The cynicism and double-dealing are still there, of course, and the violence is heightened.

So far we’ve seen The Conversation (1974), which was both more and less than I remembered. Gene Hackman is a professional eavesdropper who doesn’t like what he hears. You may mis-identify the femme fatale, and I could have done without the toilet that explodes in a bloodbath worthy of The Shining. I think that was a hallucination. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola with a fine, understated performance by John Cazale—reason enough to see it again. Not to mention a young Harrison Ford.

Next: Body Heat (1981).No question that Kathleen Turner is the femme fatale here or that the double-dealing involves her lover (William Hurt) and husband (Richard Crenna). Sexy stuff directed by Lawrence Kasdan.

The Coen Brothers first feature film, Blood Simple (1984) was next. Frances McDormand as the put-upon wife never realizes she’s a femme fatale, despite the body count evidence. The extent to which the characters misunderstand what’s going on has definite comic moments.

Last night we did our homework and watched L.A. Confidential (1997). It has it all, FF, crime, double-dealing, rampant cynicism, and appreciably more violence than the others. Russell Crowe, Kevin Spacey, and Guy Pearce are great as cops trying to figure out what side of the law they’re on. Directed by Curtis Hanson.

Two more to go!

The Serpent Dance

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With Sofia Slater’s latest crime mystery, you have not only an intriguing whodunnit, but, although it’s set in contemporary times, The Serpent Dance feels like a trip back in time to the era when Cornish midsummer revelries first involved bonfires, iconic music, river offerings, and the creation of wicker animals, later consumed by the ritual fire. Slater draws on the persistence of these ancient practices, mixing the traditional and the modern in ways that occasionally baffle her protagonist.

London graphic designer Audrey Delaney’s boyfriend of ten months, Noah, has planned a surprise getaway for them. She’s convinced herself (and prematurely told all her friends) that he’s taking her to Paris. When it turns out they’re headed to the fictional Cornish village of Trevennick, she tries not to show her disappointment, but Noah realizes he’s missed the mark.

From there, their situation goes from bad to much, much worse. Their B&B is a modern, glass-walled home overlooking the river. Inside, it’s open-plan carried to an extreme. Their landlady will be staying in the master bedroom, with just a wisp of separation between her and the guest bedroom.

Their hostess is a renowned television personality, and Noah takes to her with unexpected enthusiasm. Something isn’t right. Why this place? What’s Noah’s real agenda? Why his interest in this older woman? The twisting lines of the eponymous serpent dance itself can’t compare to the secrets Audrey is about to discover.

No need to worry be jealous of their hostess, though, because before morning she lies dead in a pool of blood, a knife to her throat. The police initially consider it a suicide, but elements of the crime scene simply don’t add up. Since Audrey and Noah are the only other people in the house, and since anyone else padding about could not do so without risking being seen (all those glass walls), police attention is on them. On Noah, particularly.

The town is preparing for the midsummer Golowan festivities, masks and wicker obby orses everywhere. It’s a deeply local tradition and outsiders aren’t especially welcome, especially when the shadow of murder has fallen on them.

Though Noah is tucked away in jail, their hostess’s isn’t the only body to turn up. Audrey tackles her predicament in the way she tries to work through any difficult circumstance, by drawing, and the realism of her depiction of Stella’s corpse, among other local characters is inevitably misunderstood. It’s a classic case of being out of one’s own element. This profoundly unsettling atmosphere makes Audrey anxious about the wrong things, so that she doesn’t recognize the danger to herself.

I found the mix of past and present, culture and calamity quite captivating. Nice job, Sofia Slater! Order your copy here.

Name Your Poison (actually, no, don’t)

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A thought-provoking presentation on poisons at last month’s conference of the Public Safety Writers Association reminded me of a blog post I’d written a while ago. Such a relief for a crime writer to get away from guns for a while—and don’t even talk about knives! The tagteam presentation by Janet Gregor and Gloria Casale prompted me to update my earlier post. Plus, it gives me a chance to use this painting of “Cleopatra Testing Poisons on Condemned Prisoners,” showing she didn’t let an opportunity to conduct scientific research go to waste.

A PBS documentary on poisonings begins: In 1922, 101 New Yorkers hanged themselves, 444 died in car accidents, 20 were crushed in elevators. There were 237 fatal shootings, and 34 stabbings. And that year, 997 New Yorkers died of poisoning.

Not all those deaths were intentional, it turns out. A century ago, life was full of poisoning hazards at work and at home. You may remember the below-stairs tour of cleaning products, rat poisons, polishes, and “remedies” in the movie Gosford Park, each one of which looked mighty suspicious when the master was murdered.

A major cause of death was carbon monoxide (CO), an odorless, tasteless gas that got into the air thanks to leaky stoves and gaslights piping. Even today, when houses are shut up tight for winter, we still hear about deaths from malfunctioning space heaters or, difficult to believe though this is, charcoal grills people roll inside to heat up the house. You may remember when seven members of a Minnesota family died of accidental CO poisoning in December 2021.The culprit? A faulty furnace.

apothecary bottles, poison

Still, poisonings are much rarer today than they used to be because in 1917 New York City hired Dr. Charles Norris to be the city’s (and the nation’s) first chief medical examiner. Norris, born into a wealthy family, was one of those larger-than-life characters who create their own weather. Norris, in turn, hired Alexander Gettler to head the City’s first toxicology laboratory. Gettler and his staff built the field of toxicology from scratch, and he and Norris created modern forensic science. CSI fans are grateful.

As they brought science to the analysis of murder victims, murder by poison became less and less feasible. A fun (!) read is The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy. During his lifetime (120-63 BCE), Mithradates Eupator fought some of the most famous Roman generals, mostly successfully. At the height of his career, he governed 22 nations around the Black Sea and could speak all of their languages. And, he was an infamous poisoner. He believed that was how his mother murdered his father, so, to protect himself, he learned as much as he could about them.

One protection he engaged in was to take small doses of certain poisons every day to build up his tolerance. As a result, when Mithradates’ enemies gave him a lethal dose of something, it had no effect, which didn’t hurt his reputation for invincibility. He also developed a “universal antidote” to poison, still of scholarly interest. When the Romans finally captured Mithradates, he tried to commit suicide by poison, but his protection worked too well, and he was ultimately stabbed to death. Gardeners may recognize the King’s name: Eupatorium is a genus of flowering plant with several hundred species, including (and in my garden) Joe-Pye Weed. One of its species is, of course, poisonous to humans.

Much as Americans complain about “government regulations,” before the Food and Drug Administration took dangerous patent medicines off the drug store shelves in the 1920’s, and before there was a Consumer Product Safety Commission, and before the workplace safety rules that protect people like the poor young women who worked as radium dial-painters and died horribly of jaw and bone cancer, everyday life was full of deadly hazards, and mystery writers had one more handy tool in their store of potential mayhem-makers.

Want more?
12 Toxic Tales from National Geographic
The Poisoner’s Handbook by Deborah Blum
The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy by Adrienne Mayor—fascinating!!
The Poison Artist fiction by Jonathan Moore – great use of the weapon

“Tell Me What You Think the Problem Is”

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French Windows by Antoine Laurain

This unconventional short novel by French author Antoine Laurain, translated into English by Louise Rogers Lalaurie, proves once again that delving into another person’s psyche is tricky business. You know from the cover that the book is a murder mystery, but what is this murder? When and where does it occur? And when the event finally appears in the story, the victim and perpetrator are a surprise. What the book has been up to in reaching that point is a trip through the richly imagined garden of a psychiatric patient’s mind.

Parisian psychiatrist Dr. J. Faber relates his encounters with a new patient, Nathalia Guitry, a beautiful young woman who is a successful photographer. But she’s stopped taking pictures. In fact, she says the last photograph she took was of a murder. Shocked, Faber ends the session. Nathalia returns for a second appointment and reveals that she spends her days observing the people in the flats opposite hers. Observing is what she’s good at, after all.

To get their conversations started, he suggests she write down what she thinks she’s seeing—the stories of these other people’s lives. He hopes her written words will be a window into her own thoughts. She agrees, and she writes interesting and clever stories from these other people’s points of view, which become chapters in the book. Some of these stories become so engaging, you may wish they weren’t so short. They also capture many aspects of daily life in Paris, deconstructing French people’s attitudes and preoccupations. I felt as if that apartment building revealed an entire world through its residents’ friendships, regrets, ambitions, and longings.

But what about that murder? You just have to wait for it

Order a copy here.

Jack & I

Laury Egan’sJack & I is the dark tale of a 16-year-old New Jersey boy growing up in a succession of foster homes offering varying degrees of sympathy and exploitation. Most of his problems result from undiagnosed Dissociative Identity Disorder – what used to be called Multiple Personality Disorder.

Sometimes, Jack is his painfully shy and socially inept self, but when his alter ego takes over he is brash, aggressive, and predatory. The unpredictable emergence of this other Jack (whom I’ll call Jack2 for this review) is one of the reasons foster families don’t keep him long. Egan states up-front that her depiction of Dissociative Identity Disorder takes a few liberties for fiction’s purposes, but the condition usually originates in early childhood trauma. Jack has learned not just to seal off this trauma, he also hides the existence of Jack2. He has only fragmentary memories of Jack2’s misdeeds, and sometimes none at all, though he has to bear the punishment and social exclusion that result.

While Jack is a sympathetic character, Jack2 is not, and with a story involving the sexual exploitation of minors Jack and I is a difficult read. The depravity of the adults involved is shocking, but Jack2 is completely complicit and is disdainful of Jack, upon whom his whole existence depends. But don’t despair. At last, there may be light at the end of the tunnel.

The previous book by Egan reviewed here, The Psychologist’s Shadow, also featured a significant psychological component, and the author handles these issues with great sensitivity.

Itʼs an extreme case study, yes, as well as a reminder of how badly the world treats the most vulnerable among us and how high the stakes are.

Order a copy here.

Crime Fiction: Partners, Sidekicks, and Foils

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Paging through the notes I’ve taken on innumerable Zoom calls—book discussions, writing tips, publishing conundrums—one from a few months ago caught my eye. The Zoom was sponsored by the New York area chapter of Mystery Writers of America, organized and moderated by expert author Gary Earl Ross of Buffalo.

It was a discussion about “partners in crime” detection—the reasons why in crime fiction the principal detective so often has a sidekick. It’s quite a useful device, because a slightly dim or new-on-the-job partner gives the detective a reason for explaining (to the reader) what they’re doing and why they’re doing it in a natural-feeling way.

As I’m rereading all of Sherlock Holmes currently, Conan Doyle uses Watson in this way. He is not dull-witted (the Nigel Bruce portrayal notwithstanding), but he finds Holmes’s methods baffling. You can empathize with his confusion, especially when Holmes is attempting some high-wire mental acrobatics, and you can feel a tiny bit superior to Watson, confident that Holmes will have it all figured out, even if you can’t see how he gets from A to Z, either.

One characteristic of our fictional detectives that readers (and viewers and hearers) like is their perseverance. Tim Sullivan’s Detective George Cross is like that. He doesn’t give up on an investigation, even when his superiors insist the case is solved. He keeps at it and…he’s right. As Ross said, readers appreciate an investigator who works hard. Of course, it’s the #2 who’ll have to kick in the doors (I’m looking at you, Ben Jones).

In cozy mysteries the bake shop owner (etc.) and her confederates (shop assistant, sister, best friend) frequently encounter a kind of person they don’t generally have to deal with. These meetings inspire readers’ thoughts of how they would handle that kind of person or situation. And, in cozies, having these confederates around provides some safety in numbers.  

Partners can not only provide flashes of insight, they also earn their keep by inserting a bit of humor. The lead detective’s colleagues in the New Zealand cozy-adjacent television series Brokenwood (quite fun) are not only good investigators themselves, they contribute big-time to squadroom humor.

Conveying a sense of justice is good rationale for the genre. But that’s not always simple. I’m thinking about S.A. Cosby’s Razorblade Tears—one of his very best—and the uneasy partnership between two very different fathers. It’s that collaboration that lets Cosby explore highly fraught social territory.

Justice, of course, doesn’t always mean following the letter of the law, or even enforcing the laws. Having a partner lets a character thrash out those options. Here I’m thinking of The Plinko Bounce by Martin Clark—a wonderful tale about a public defender and his colleagues trying not to be outplayed by the man they’re defending. In crime stories, characters with a strong sense of right and wrong may find it in the law and, sometimes, outside it. In tricky situations, it’s great to have a partner you trust to hash things out with.