Category Archives: Crime

Think the Truth Protects You?

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Texas, guns

(photo: C. Holmes, CC license)

Douglas Starr in the December 9, 2013,  New Yorker, describes how the most commonly used confrontational interrogation technique used in the United States leads to false confessions. The method relies on detectives’ observing non-verbal behavior, looking for (or creating) anxiety, never giving the suspect a chance to voice a denial, minimizing the crime and trying every trick to make it easier for the suspect to admit it, even claiming to have evidence they don’t have, with their right to lie to suspects in many circumstances protected by a 1969 Supreme Court decision. The goal is simply to get a confession.

Psychologists became suspicious about the issue of false confessions several decades ago and began studies on it. And experienced detectives have begun to doubt it, as they’ve seen suspects mold their statements to fit the information the detectives have fed them.

In Britain, police don’t try for confessions, they go for information. They focus on the content of what is said, not nonverbal behavior or anxiety (proved to be not correlated with lying). Instead, they look for inconsistencies: “For the suspect, lying creates a cognitive load—it takes energy to juggle the details of a fake story.” It’s hard to keep it up. Nor are the police allowed to lie about what evidence they have.

In the United States, out of 311 people exonerated by post-conviction DNA testing, more than a quarter had given false confessions—perhaps most notoriously, the Central Park Five. (Ken and Sarah Burns film on the case). Why do they confess? Worn down by the interrogation, an innocent suspect “fabricates a story to satisfy his questioners.”  This is most likely what led to the false statement made by Amanda Knox, which, although she recanted, has been used against her ever since.

This post originally appeared February 3, 2014.

***A Tapping at My Door

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The Raven, MWA, Poe

Page by Ian Burt (photo: c2.staticflickr.com)

By David Jackson, narrated by Jonathan Keeble – The early chapters of this police procedural are tremendously intriguing. A woman copper in Liverpool is murdered in her back garden, with a dead raven splayed over her face. Only when the crime scene investigators remove the bird do they learn her eyes have been gouged—pecked?—out. And that the raven has a note attached to its leg saying ‘nevermore.’

Even for people who are not fans of Edgar Allen Poe, that’s spooky. And, it’s a puzzle the police must struggle to work out. Not too long afterward, another police officer is found murdered in his home, again with a dead bird nearby, carrying a new message.

While these crimes are bizarre, at least there’s something to work with. Both murdered officers were implicated in the death in custody of a mentally challenged youth a few years earlier. An investigation cleared the two officers of wrongdoing, but the family and a large segment of the public still blame them for this death. Accordingly, the family is questioned, with all the renewed mutual hostility one might anticipate.

When two more police are killed who seem to have no connection to the earlier tragedy, what are the investigators to think? Are these new deaths merely a diversion? Jackson does a good job portraying the fractured relationships between the community and the coppers, writ small in this family tragedy, and writ large. He presents the action through alternating perspectives, mostly those of DS Nathan Cody and the unknown murderer, whose motives ultimately—well, you can pass judgment on that.

Cody is the principal investigator of the crimes, and to his surprise he’s teamed up with a new murder unit detective, Megan Webley. Unbeknownst to the powers that be, Cody and Webley were once an item, engaged to be married even, until his love of the job put a wedge between them. They dance around each other, not wanting to bring up the past and wanting to get on with their current assignment. There’s a cop-killer out there, after all.

But Cody become unhinged in several run-of-the-mill situations and Webley is starting to doubt his mental stability. His strange outbursts and reckless self-endangerment hearken back to an experience a year earlier in which he was held and tortured by a mysterious group of kidnappers.

About the time of the lengthy flashback in which Cody relives this hostage situation for the sympathetic Webley—an experience he has refused to seek any counseling for—I began to lose interest. The gruesome nature of the torture seemed intended to titillate, not interest me in Cody as a character. From there on out, the plot followed the well-trodden path of escalating craziness and bad decisions, woman-of-interest in danger, and drawn-out final resolution, with a particularly ham-handed, flashinglightsallaround ‘sequel!!’ signaled at the end.

Since this was an audiobook, the narration inevitably affected my reaction. In some passages Jonathan Keeble was terrific, but in others, it was as if he were narrating a silent film (you can listen to a bit through the Amazon link below). They were jarringly melodramatic. In other words, a mixed bag.

****Little Sister

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Lake District

photo: Vicki Weisfeld.

By David Hewson – This third police procedural in Hewson’s Netherlands series again features Amsterdam police brigadier Pieter Vos and his misfit Frieslander colleague, Laura Bakker. The story centers on the plight of Mia and Kim Timmers—two from an original set of three. Mia and Kim have been institutionalized for a decade in a remote facility for young female mental patients deemed dangerous.

Ten years earlier, when the girls were 11, their parents and the third triplet, Little Jo, were murdered by parties unknown. That same night lead singer of the local pop band The Cupids was murdered and the girls accused of the crime.

The girls have aged out of their facility, and the psychiatrist in charge says they are no longer a danger. They are released. A male nurse assigned to drive them to an Amsterdam halfway house is found murdered, the girls have disappeared, and before long, another corpse is discovered. Did they do all this? Any of it? Secrets highly placed people have tried to hide for a decade are bursting to come out.

It’s a good study of the kinds and extent of evil that can occur when society judges some people not worth caring about and turns its back. Is what happens to the girls hidden or just not seen? Locating the institution on the island of Marken, connected to land (and reality, normalcy) by only a thin thread of road atop a grassy dyke, is symbolic as well as plot-relevant.

As in the earlier books in the series, Vos lives on his decrepit houseboat with wire-haired terrier Sam. Hewson’s descriptions of Amsterdam when Vos is walking Sam, for example, and of the part of the country where the sisters are from—the Waterland—are created with admirable atmospherics. He ably summons the low flat green country, its dykes and lakes, a land criss-crossed with sparkling channels where “life teemed beneath the emerald surface and nothing was quite what it seemed.”

Hewson provides plenty of interesting suspects, though some of them appear rather intermittently, and I had occasional difficulty recalling their identities. Although I enjoyed this book, it seemed about fifty pages longer than it needed to be, with some motivational untidiness around the climactic scene.

Hewson is an accomplished crime writer and has worked with Shakespeare scholar AJ Hartley on novelizations of Hamlet and Macbeth. I listened to Macbeth: The Novel, narrated by Alan Cumming, and Hewson’s prose—description of the witches, for example—was riveting. He brings that same ability to describe an environment in which difficult choices become inevitable to the story of Mia and Kim Timmers.

A longer version of this review appeared on CrimeFictionLover.com.

Broadchurch

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David Tennant, Olivia Colman, Broadchurch

David Tennant & Olivia Colman

The engaging ITV crime drama Broadchurch (trailer) (available on Netflix) has run for two eight-episode seasons, released in 2013 and 2015, with a third season filming this summer for release in 2017. It follows the investigation of the mysterious death of an 11-year-old boy in his small seaside town. Soon all the residents are looking differently at people they’ve known for decades. Secrets emerge; journalists are sleazy; people want revenge; and the coppers make mistakes.

The action in Broadchurch takes place in Dorset, in Southwest England, and the investigation is led by police detectives Alec Hardy (played by David Tennant) and Ellie Miller (Olivia Colman). Colman is all over screens big and small this year (The Night Manager, The Lobster). A prize to you if you can catch everything Tennant says, between his character’s thick accent and habit of swallowing his words.

A Cast That Really Supports

All the acting is first-rate, especially that of the detectives and the dead boy’s parents, played by Jodie Whittaker and Andrew Buchan. The story keeps you guessing as to the culprit, revealed at the end of season one. Season two is the trial and introduces some additional fine acting, notably Marianne Jean-Baptiste as the defense attorney. You may remember her as Viv in the U.S. tv series, Without a Trace. She has a severe new hairstyle that gives her a different look, but the voice is unmistakable. Also in season two is Charlotte Rampling as the prosecuting attorney and James D’Arcy as a possible badguy in a previous case that haunts DI Hardy. I remember him fondly as 1st Lt. Tom Pullings in Master and Commander, way back in 2003.

Special mention should be made of the haunting Broadchurch music from Ólafur Arnalds (soundclip), an Icelandic composer and musician, which adds immeasurably to the atmosphere.

U.S. Version Fails

Fox TV created a U.S. version of the series, set in the Pacific Northwest, in a similar seaside town. Called Gracepoint, the series’s most interesting aspect is that David Tennant crossed the Atlantic and the North American continent to reprise his role as the lead detective. In this version he is called Det. Emmett Carver. I wasted no time finding a clip from the show to hear him speak American. He inhabits the other role so completely, the effect was startling! Nick Nolte also appears, as does Michael Peña (The Martian). Alas, the Fox version didn’t measure up and was cancelled after one season of low ratings.

Awards

Broadchurch won many accolades from critics as well as a number of awards. In series one, Olivia Colman won a Best Actress award from the British Academy of Film & Television Arts (BAFTA) and the program received seven BAFTA nominations altogether, including one for Best Original Television Music.

Broadchurch enjoyed a huge audience in the U.K., but not in the United States when it played on BBC America or via streaming. Chances are then that you haven’t seen it, and if you like a compelling crime drama (minus Hollywood’s excessive gore), you might enjoy it!

Awaiting series 3.

The Year’s Best Crime Fiction: 2016

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police car

photo: P.V.O.A., creative commons license

Why deal with poorly executed [!], formulaic, airport quality crime fiction, when there’s Best Crime? Booklist’s longtime crime fiction reviewer Bill Ott has combed reviews of the amazing spectrum of books in this genre—from “crime caper novels, psychological thrillers, and history-mystery blends,” to police procedurals, and every kind of crime, white collar to noir, to come up with his top 10 crime novels of the year, 5/1/15-4/15/16.

An end-of-year summary of Best Crime/Mystery/Thriller fiction of 2016, is here.

And, the 2017 update of Ott’s list is here.

Every time the award-granting groups publish their nominees for the year’s top books in this genre, I’ve usually not read (and often not even heard of) any of them. This, despite reading some 70 books a year, heavily weighted toward the new and the criminal.

Booklist’s Top Picks

Mexico, drug cartels

(graphic by Christopher Dombres, creative commons license)

I was delighted, therefore, to see at the very top of Booklist’s review two novels I not only read and reviewed, but found absolutely spectacular—Don Winslow’s The Cartel, a cri de coeur for greater understanding of the clueless U.S. War on Drugs, its spectacular failures, and its deadly impact on the people of Mexico.

The other is Bill Beverly’s Dodgers, a terrific debut novel about a young black man growing up in Los Angeles, how race and crime affect his worldview, and so much more. While I’m not usually a fan of coming-of-age novels, this one will knock your socks off. Says Ott, Beverly’s characters “all live, breathe, and bleed.”

These two books are beautifully written, with convincing characters and engaging plots, and I wish that all the thrillers I read had the same moral significance. The other eight on Ott’s list—which I now want to read to see whether they meet the standard set by Winslow and Beverly—are:

  • Forty Thieves, by Thomas Perry—says Ott, “irresistible” comic capering
  • House of the Rising Sun, by James Lee Burke—“a quest of Arthurian proportions” and, since it’s based in Texas, a must-read for me—hey, those are my kinfolk
  • Is Fat Bob Dead Yet?, by Stephen Dobyns – uproarious, says Ott, who invokes my favorites Elmore Leonard (in his comic vein) and Donald E. Westlake; “loosen the reins of realism,” he advises
  • Jane Steele by Lyndsay Faye – “Reader, I murdered him.” Jane Eyre devotees need know no more
  • King Maybe, by Timothy Hallinan – “one of the best in a sinfully entertaining series” involving crooks in LA, their perfect setting
  • Little Pretty Things, by Lori Rader-Day – A Mary Higgins Clark award-winner, atmospheric and suspenseful
  • The Passenger, by Lisa Lutz – a dark psychological thriller about a woman fleeing the consequences of her husband’s death (What, no sticking around for the insurance?)
  • The Whispering City, by Sara Moliner – an evocative historical, set in Barcelona in the early 1950’s, where General Franco’s security police are everywhere and a newspaper reporter is investigating a death best left alone.

Edgar Winners 2016

While I’m at it, I’ll mention that the Mystery Writers of American recently announced its 2016 Edgar winners. None of the nominees for “best novel” were in the list above, with the winner Let Me Die in His Footsteps by Lori Roy (“a hybrid of mystery, coming-of-age and Southern gothic,” says the LA Times). MWA’s award for “best first novel” went to Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer (a cerebral spy thriller about the Vietnam War and winner of the Pulitzer Prize).

Be sure to check out the “Reading . . .” tab above to find more book reviews, many in the crime/mystery/thriller genre.

***Sunset City

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Houston, flock of birds

photo: Adam Baker, creative commons license

By Melissa Ginsburg — Lots of buzz about poet Melissa Ginsburg’s debut crime novel. In it, her home town of Houston becomes as much a character as the protagonist, Charlotte Ford, a young woman in her early 20s. Houston’s suffocating heat and dark corners, its breakneck freeways, its seedy bars and lush suburbs – a living paradigm of the income gap – are the kind of noir backdrop against which a multilayered story can play.

Narrated by Charlotte, the story begins in a terrific rainstorm when she encounters a man on the landing outside her apartment and unlocks her door in front of him – the first clue she’s missing a little something in the “ be a little careful” department.

Luckily for her, he’s a Houston police detective named Ash, but unluckily, he’s come to tell her that her oldest friend, the glamorous Danielle Reeves, has been bludgeoned to death. Charlotte and Danielle attended high school and took some drugs together, but Danielle drifted into heroin and didn’t get clean until she got caught. After four years in prison, her friendship with Charlotte had cooled, and she had taken up acting in porn videos.

Charlotte’s back story is handled mostly in a couple of awkward information dumps about her deceased mother, high school years, and growing up relatively poor. Danielle, by contrast, came from money. Her mother, Sally, from whom she is estranged, had a high-powered, high-paying job. What they had in common was that both of them were rather neglected–Charlotte because her mother was a chronic pain patient, and Danielle because of the demands of her work. No dads in the picture.

Work kept Sally so busy during Danielle’s childhood, she didn’t realize her brother was sexually abusing the girl–a plot choice that has become a cliché and, here, is not explored for its specific impact on Danielle. Now Sally wants to be in touch with Danielle and enlists Charlotte to do the outreach. That mission puts the two former best friends in touch again, just two days before Danielle’s murder. Did Charlotte’s visit begin a deadly chain of events?

She starts hanging out with Danielle’s new friends—fellow actress Audrey (another child sexual abuse victim) and video producer Brandon. To Charlotte these people seem exotic, but the first-person point of view limits readers’ access to their thoughts and feelings. Their motivations and experiences are always second-hand, filtered through Charlotte. I’d contrast this approach with John Schulian’s A Better Goodbye, which provides a fully rounded picture of people working in the sex trade.

Ginsburg attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Mississippi. In this novel, she mostly avoids literary flourishes, but occasionally her poetic side peeks through. For example, regarding the police station, Charlotte says, “Loud and ugly, the place banged against my eyes.”  Ginsburg does not shrink from discussing the seamier side of life and its difficulties, which is brave for a first novel, and in future perhaps her characters will be strong enough to carry that weight.

A longer version of this review appeared on the Crime Fiction Lover review website.

*****Dodgers

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police car

photo: P.V.O.A., creative commons license

By Bill Beverly – A modern crime classic in the tradition of Richard Price’s Clockers, Dodgers is the story of a youthful soldier in the south Los Angeles drug trade. East, a black 16-year-old, is a yardman for a drug house, which means he runs a team of younger boys who look out for approaching trouble, 24 hours a day.

Somehow, trouble slips past them, and when the police converge on the house, sirens shrieking, East narrowly escapes. But before he flees, the curious younger girl who has approached him is caught in the crossfire and dies before his eyes, an innocent whose death he cannot shake.

After the raid, of course, the house is compromised, and the drug lord gives East a new assignment. He and three others are to drive to Wisconsin and kill a man about to testify in Los Angeles against one of the gang leaders. In the great American tradition of road trips, East heads east on a fateful journey with an ill-assorted group of companions: Michael Wilson, a self-assured, one-time UCLA student who thinks he’s by far the intellectual superior of the other boys; Walter, an overweight age-peer of East’s with an aptitude for electronic crime and a greater understanding of the big picture; and, unexpectedly, East’s younger brother Ty, a stone killer at age 13 whose internal dynamics East cannot begin to comprehend.

The interactions among the four are full of youthful wit and jockeying for position, even though the outcome of the journey is uncertain and potentially catastrophic. The last piece of advice they receive before leaving LA? “Don’t make no friends.”

The book takes its title from the boys’ purchases at the sports apparel store they visit before their departure. There they purchase shirts and caps emblazoned with the logos of the Los Angeles Dodgers, not because East or the others have ever cared about the team personally, but because “White people love baseball. White people love the Dodgers.”

The trip across America and the notice four young black men arouse among the residents of the middle-America states—and the fear of the notice they may arouse—are significant and compelling features of the plot, while he nuanced depiction of East’s mental state makes for a rich and engaging reader experience.

Beverly is a teacher of American literature and writing at Trinity University in Washington, D.C., and the quality of his writing is a great strength of the book. Take this simple description: “There was a gas station. The lights in the cold made the cars gleam like licked suckers.” Any author who can conjure up an image like that deserves to be savored.

A longer version of this review previously appeared on CrimeFictionLover.com.

***Betty Fedora – “Crime Fiction for Kickass Women”

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Betty Fedora

It’s always delightful to find a new publisher of short fiction in the crime genre. I just read Issue Two of Betty Fedora, tagged “Kickass Women in Crime Fiction.” What’s not to like? The nine stories in this issue, selected by editor Kristen Valentine, cover a wide range of criminal activity—preventing it, investigating it, perpetrating it. Five of the nine are by women authors, too.

The first story in Issue 2 is by Montreal-based screenwriter Shane Simmons. His “Heads Will Roll,” is a story about whose title you could say “literally” and be correct. Colleen Quinn’s “Lucifer” takes a look back at an unhappy upbringing, and the difficulty of escaping it. London-based Lara Alonso Carona’s “A Diet Rich in Noir” combines the investigatory talent and family sparring skills of police detective Regan Monroe and her 19-year-old daughter Kat, a licensed private detective (first in a series of news flashes for mom). Clever.

I laughed out loud at John H. Dromey’s “Burden of Proof.” He has a woman judge, prosecutor, and witness running rings around a purse-snatcher and his male defense lawyer. At one point, the judge says to the defense attorney, “(I) wonder if you haven’t already decided you cannot win this case on its merits, so now you’re laying the groundwork for an appeal based on incompetent representation.”

I met New Jersey-based Al Tucher when he served on a panel of authors discussing why they pick faraway and exotic settings for their stories. At the time, he said he was planning a series set in Hawai`i, and here in Betty Fedora is “Luxury to Die For,” one of the results of that plan. An interview with Al is on the Betty Fedora home page.

If you like crime stories—and kickass women—and not necessarily in that order, you may want to snag a copy. I ordered mine from Amazon.

***Devil in the Grass

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alligator

(photo: heymeadow, creative commons license)

By Christopher Bowron – This debut thriller is an ambitious mix of Florida politics, Satanic cults, Seminole tradition, and alligators. And a bull shark. Author Bowron is clearly familiar with the southwest Florida setting, which he describes expertly, bringing the story to vivid life.

The Florida Everglades is home to any number of dangerous predators, including humans of the sort who don’t mix well with civilization. The 9-foot tall sawgrass that gives the Everglades its nickname—River of Grass—provides Canadian author Bowron’s inspiration for the book title as well as superb cover for his characters as they ply their small boats through its waters.

The impetus for the plot is also grounded in real life: the ongoing political battle between those who want to save the Everglades as a unique and irreplaceable natural resource and the agricultural interests making vast fortunes growing sugar cane and raising cattle along its edges. In Devil in the Grass, former pro football player and half-Seminole Jackson Walker works as an intern for Republican State Senator, James Hunter, who supports Clean Water legislation. Walker, in his mid-20s, meets and falls for a woman working for the state Republican Party. She seeks him out, seduces him, and gradually exposes him to the Satanic cult called The Brotherhood of Set.

After a while, Walker does what he believes will be an innocent errand for the cult leader, and at the book’s opening we find him hiding out in Big Cypress Swamp, accused of slaying a man and woman in a Satanic ritual. Although he believes he’s being framed because of his work with the Senator, letting himself become soft and apathetic may have contributed. He regrets the demise of his football career and its heroes: “It was the fearlessness with which they marched onto the field that had mattered to him.” Inevitably, Walker will be called upon to demonstrate that same fearlessness before the book’s last page.

If the leaders of the Satanic cult weren’t creepy enough, they have for generations used a particular local family—the McFaddens—to be their clean-up crew. They are prone to torture and killing, and they let the vastness of the Everglades hide the evidence. I’m a little burned out on serial killers with chain saws, but the alligators make for heart-pounding excitement.

As the story gets rolling, not only the police, but also the Satanists and their instruments, the McFaddens, are after Walker. And don’t forget the gators.

The book clearly ends with the promise of a sequel, which I hope can make the bad guys as believable as the environment and that Bowron gets a little help with dialog. I’m not sure when this novel takes place, but if Buck Henderson’s “old Cadillac” was manufactured after 2002, it has a trunk release lever. And I ardently wish he hadn’t laid Jimmy McFadden’s psychotic behavior at the door of “severe autism.” Scientific study has failed to link the two.

A longer version of this review appeared on CrimeFictionLover.com.

Related articles

Photographic Evidence

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Julius Caesar, bust

Julius Caesar (photo: William Warby, creative commons license)

On view in New York now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Gilman Gallery is “Crime Stories: Photography and Foul Play” for those whose interest in crime stories goes beyond the fictional to the grittily real. Since its earliest days, photography and other arts have been used to document crime and its purported perpetrators.

In this assemblage, crime-related photography from the 1850s to the present has been assembled from photojournalists, including such auteurs as Diane Arbus and Walker Evans, and a great many more dubious and less artistic sources. The resulting exhibition of some 70 works will be on display through July 31, 2016.

Among the highlights of the installation are such early examples of the genre as Alexander Gardner’s documentation of the aftermath of the assassination of President Lincoln, and rare forensic photographs by Alphonse Bertillon. In the Paris of the late 1800s, detectives throughout Europe and the United States were using Bertillon’s methods—called “bertillonage”—to identify criminals. According to the Met’s website, Bertillon’s system of criminal identification paved the way for the modern mug shot. Psychological research over the decades has failed to eradicate the “common-sense” perception that malefactors can be detected by the way they look.

In the current day, Bertillon’s methods have been displaced by much more scientific measurement and identification techniques, such as modern fingerprinting, iris scanning, and other biometric assessments.

Says the Met, in addition to the photographs on display, the exhibition will feature work by artists who have used the criminal underworld as a source of inspiration. These include Richard Avedon, Walker Evans, Andy Warhol, and Weegee. (Weegee was the pseudonym for a New York City press photographer in the 1930s and 1940s, who developed a very stark, black and white, photojournalistic style and found his subjects by trailing city emergency service workers.)

While many of the works on view may suggest an impulse for artistic debridement of the incomprehensible wounds violence inflicts, New York Times critic Ken Johnson found the exhibition “confused and confusing.” Perhaps that’s because the impulses that lead to crime and its aftermath are not necessarily coherent. They are open to interpretation.

That very confusion at the heart of the matter is part of the fascination. But, see the exhibit, and decide for yourself.