Page 45 of Wham Line
How did you get justice when the killer was a heart attack or a stroke or whatever it had been?What kind of revenge could you have when you came home and found your wife dead; she’d been to the store that day, and she’d still been unpacking groceries?
The writer part of my brain understood that grief wasn’t the focus of mystery novels because, well, the focus was the mystery.And in that same way, I knew that trying to capture the nature of grief was tricky.For one reason, grief looked different for everyone.It wasn’t consistent.It wasn’t linear.I had seen it firsthand with Bobby a few hours before, when things had seemed almost normal, and he’d been playful, and I’d almost forgotten what had happened—and then the abrupt swing to anger.Or, worse, the icy nothingness I’d seen more and more.Like a bottomless well that had frozen over.
And for another reason, grief was devastating.It was incapacitating.And when you need your detective to solve a mystery, they can’t shut down.They can’t start responding in one-word answers.They can’t suddenly be cut off and adrift on the ocean of their own pain, where you can’t reach them no matter how hard you try.In a mystery, you need a detective who’s sharp and interesting and a pleasure for the reader to be with; they can’t be a zombie who forgets to eat, who shambles through the day, barely making it from one small task to another.
So, if I’m being totally honest, part of me wanted to find a way to write about grief to help myself—to work my way through what I was feeling, to understand what was going on with Bobby.
And (this is less admirable) part of me wanted to write about it because it seemed like a challenge.
The thing about writing mysteries, though, is that you’re up against some pretty stiff competition.And I suspected that one of the masters of the genre had done something with grief—something thoughtful and insightful and true.Which meant digging into the wealth of my intimate knowledge of the genre.(AKA, I got on my phone and looked at Wikipedia and Goodreads and did alotof googling.)
One title that caught my eye wasMurder on the Orient Express—big surprise; if anyone could have done grief, it was Christie.Most people rememberMurder on the Orient Expressbecause it has a classic Christie twist.(Spoilers incoming.) After wading through a veritable lake of clues, intrepid detective Hercule Poirot eventually realizes thateveryonewas involved in the murder—and, even more stunning, he offers them a way out.
The reason for Poirot’s leniency (and why readers weren’t bothered to see a gang of murderers get away with their crime) is, in a way, because of grief.The murder on the train is justice, payback for the kidnapping and killing of a child decades earlier.Some of the killers on the train are related to the girl by blood; others worked for her parents.They’ve spent years trying to find the man responsible, and when they do, they take things into their own hands.Some of them have changed their names, or they hide their true identity, which makes it even more difficult for Poirot to spot the hidden associations.When he does, his response is a rare one in the canon of crime fiction: compassion for their pain, understanding of what they’ve lost and can never get back.
Chandler, too, had his own spin on grief—for himself, as much as for the characters in his story.Like most of his books,The Long Goodbyeis intricately plotted, with layers of deceit and an underlying web of connections.For precisely that reason, it’s difficult to summarize (obviously that’s not going to stop me—more spoilers ahead).At the beginning of the book, detective Philip Marlowe meets and befriends a man named Terry Lennox.He helps Terry flee to Mexico when Terry is accused of killing his wife.Later, he learns that Terry has been killed in Mexico.In a separate storyline, Marlowe gets involved with the Wade family.Both Mr.and Mrs.Wade are desperately unhappy.One night, drunk, Mrs.Wade makes a pass at Marlowe, mistaking him for her first husband who died in the war.The truth comes out after Mrs.Wade kills her husband: Terry Lennox was her first husband, who had faked his death in the war and come back under a different name.Then, in one of those coincidences that defy belief, Terry’s second wife had begun having an affair with Mr.Wade, which led to the first murder, and Terry fleeing to Mexico.
Not complicated at all, right?
Here’s where it gets even trickier.The last bit of the book is about Marlowe’s conversation with a Mexican man who claims to have witnessed Terry’s death.Marlowe reveals that this manisTerry, and that he has had plastic surgery and faked his own death (twice now, which is kind of impressive).Marlowe rejects Terry, acting as though Terry is already dead, and the book closes on that loss and regret.
There’s a lot of grief happening in the book.Mrs.Wade’s grief for a husband who came back into her life pretending to be a different man.Mr.Wade’s grief for his failure as a writer and a husband.Marlowe’s grief as he slowly realizes that he has been manipulated by a man he thought was a friend.In that final scene with Lennox, Marlowe says,I won't say goodbye.I said it to you when it meant something.I said it when it was sad and lonely and final.It’s impossible not to hear the loss in those words.
But the book is also about Chandler’s own grief.He wrote the book while his wife was dying and his own writing had stalled, and in the book, the tragic characters of both Mr.Wade and Terry Lennox mirror the author’s life in important ways.
The last title that came to mind, in terms of grief and mystery fiction, wasn’t actually a book.It was a movie—Alfred Hitchcock’sVertigo.Like so many of Hitchcock’s stories, it’s full of passion and erotic obsession and a downright nuttiness that somehow seems to make sense within the confines of the film.(Here’s your final spoiler warning.) The film follows former police officer Scottie Ferguson.Left with a fear of heights after the death of a fellow officer, Scottie now makes his living as a private detective.He’s hired by Gavin Elster to follow his wife, Madeleine, who he claims has been acting strangely.Scottie follows her to the grave of a woman named Carlotta Valdes, and then to an art museum, where Madeleine stares at Carlotta’s portrait.Scottie learns more about Carlotta, who died by suicide.Worse, it turns out Carlotta is Madeleine’s great-grandmother, and Gavin is afraid his wife is possessed by Carlotta’s spirit.After Scottie saves Madeleine when she jumps into the San Francisco Bay, they fall in love.Of course, not long after that, Scottie witnesses Madeleine jump from a church bell tower and die.
I’ll spare you the full summary, but it turns out, Madeleine was a fake—a woman hired to impersonate Elster’s wife as part of a murder scheme.Elster threw the real Madeleine off the bell tower, and Scottie, because of his vertigo, was the perfect witness to ‘see’ Madeleine’s death by suicide.Scottie has a complete breakdown; his love for Madeleine, his grief, and his fear of heights land him in a sanatorium.
That’s when the movie really gets weird.After Scottie recovers, he happens to see a woman who resembles Madeleine.He becomes obsessed.He convinces her to change her hair, her clothes, everything, and then sheisMadeleine.Which makes sense, since she’s the woman who was hired to impersonate Madeleine.(I told you: this film is nuts.) The movie culminates with Scottie forcing her to re-enact the events of Madeleine’s death.They reach the top of the bell tower, and Scottie overcomes his fears and learns the truth—but then a nun startles them, and not-Madeleine falls to her death.
Yeah,thatwasn’t a plot I was going to steal for my cozy noir.
As I looked over my notes, I tried to spot patterns among the three titles.The most obvious thing I could come up with was the fact that guilt made people do crazy things—plan an elaborate dinner-for-twelve murder on a train, for example; kill their husband’s lover and then their husband and then themselves; or obsess about the person they lost until that obsession led to the loss of the very thing they loved.
The other thing I noticed was that in all three of the titles, someone is complicit in the crime in a way that makes them a victim as well.Pretty much everyone inMurder on the Orient Expressqualifies for this description—with the distinction that they were victims first.InThe Long Goodbye, Terry is part of the crime even though, in many ways, he’s also the victim.And inVertigo,the woman hired to help cover up Madeleine’s death eventually becomes a victim as well.
Did that help me?
I wasn’t sure.Mostly because I wasn’t sure why Mal had been murdered.Certainly, Mal had done enough harm to people in his life that something like theMurder on the Orient Expressplot was possible; someone from his past might have finally shown up for revenge.But if so, why now?And an even bigger problem was that the only people from Mal’s past who might have had reason to hurt him were Indira and Sparkie—and I was sure neither of them had done it.
The idea that the killer was also a victim was tempting for a few minutes.Maybe Sparkiehadkilled Mal, and then she’d—what?Accidentally poisoned herself?Killed herself out of guilt?Or maybe a specific kind of serial killer, one who only poisoned people at new restaurants, had made Sparkie his latest victim.
It wasn’t mybestbrainstorming session.
After banging my head against the wall for a while, I opened a new tab and did some research on tetrodotoxin.If that’s what had killed Sparkie—and my parents had jumped to that possibility fairly quickly, so it seemed like a safe bet—I wanted to know more about it.
Tetrodotoxin was a neurotoxin derived from several types of fish—pufferfish were the most notorious—and other animals.It killed you by paralyzing you, and you died because you couldn’t breathe.
Just reading that made me stop and listen to Bobby’s soft, sleeping noises.
The toxin could enter the body by ingestion, injection, inhalation, or abraded skin.That made sense; Sparkie had eaten my food and ingested the poison meant for me.Then, when Bobby had given her CPR, enough of the toxin must have still been in Sparkie’s mouth to enter his system through his split lip, but not enough to kill him.(Thank God—I sent up another prayer to the patron saint of little gay boys who had finally found the man of their dreams.)
Before I could think about what I was doing, I opened another tab and typedAm I a good boyfriend?
Let me tell you: the internet had alotto say about that.
But that wasn’t actually what I wanted to know.I typedHow to be a good boyfriend.
