Victim Statement

Victim statements, a presentation of the impact of a crime during a judicial proceeding, became common here late in the 20th century, although other cultures have had similar and earlier versions. One of the more flamboyant examples in art occurs in the latter stages of the trial in Rashomon, the great Kurosawa film about the murder of a traveler and the rape of his wife. 

Unable to determine whether the truth lies with the accused or the wife, the court enlists a medium to question the spirit of the dead man. Unsurprisingly, the ghost's version of a victim statement is also biased, yet this is fair enough, given that the other two have presented their own self-serving narratives.

I began thinking about victim statements while reading Tommy Orange's Wandering Stars. It has some of the same characters as his highly praised There There, but ranges back in time to the later stages of the Indian Wars and the remote ancestors of characters like Lony and Orvid Red Feather.

 The novel begins with the ghastly massacre at Sand Creek, November 1864, when members of the Third Colorado Cavalry under Colonel John Chivington attacked a Cheyenne and Arapahoe village, killing and mutilating anywhere from a couple of hundred to as many as 600 people, mostly women and children.

The attack was so egregious that several of Chivington's officers had refused to participate, and one testified later at a Congressional hearing highly critical of the Colonel. None of this, however, changed the situation on the Plains. Treaties continued to be made and broken, the buffalo, and even native ponies, continued to be slaughtered, and Cheyenne and Arapahoe land continued to shrink.

Were the plains tribes then doomed to utter extinction by government policy? Not quite. There was an alternative that two of the Wandering Stars Sand Creek survivors wind up experiencing. Taken into US military custody and imprisoned in an old fort in Florida, they undergo the regimen of English language education, military drill, and Christianization that would later be the pattern for the now notorious Indian Schools. 

Their new non-Native names are Jude Star and Victor Bear Shield. They are the male progenitors of the subsequent characters, and as Orange is neither an historian nor a lawyer, their victim statement is in the form of a novel, made up of their stories and the testimony of their descendants, male and female, right down to the twenty-teens.

Orange is an excellent writer, and many of the short narratives are gripping, particularly the historic accounts that will be new to many readers. What is striking is that it is not the brutal events (and Star and Bear Shield see and experience a lot) that cause their families the worst  damage but rather the cultural losses. Besides the near extermination of the buffalo, the key animal in the whole plains ecology and in the Cheyenne economy, these included the loss of ancestral languages, religion, art, diet, even clothing and hairstyles.

The re-education program that intended to "kill the Indian, save the man" was in some ways more devastating that any battle, because it took away identity and substituted something coerced, something the descendants know is not authentic.  Characters like Opal Viola Bear Shield and Orvil and Jacquie Red Feather know that they are missing something vital, and without even the residue of the old ways that sustain Jude Star and Victor Bear Shield, they fill up the void with alcohol and drugs. 

Tommy Orange

The later sections of the novel deal with their struggles with addiction, and more interestingly, how they begin to piece together the remnants of the old culture and adapt what in contemporary society can be useful and meaningful. This is not an easy task. For some, while even the identity of their original tribe is lost, they still remain "other" in the society. Yet they persist. Wandering Stars serves not just as a literary victim statement, but as a testament to survival.

 

A Prince of Detection

I made the acquaintance of a Prince last week. This was somewhat belated, as Florizel, Prince of Bohemia, had made his London Magazine debut in 1878. Later, seeing his stories plagiarized, Robert Louis Stevenson collected the four stories comprising "The Suicide Club" in the hardback New Arabian Nights.

His Highness is a lively character who forms an interesting comparison to his near contemporary Sherlock Holmes, who appears in 1887. Both inhabit similar, mostly masculine, worlds, have a good-hearted companion, and confront a criminal mastermind.

The Prince lives in London. Despite his marked affection for his homeland, Florizel prefers to reside in the British capitol where he collects interesting experiences and usual characters alongside his Master of Horse, Colonel Geraldine.

In this set up, the Colonel, though younger than the prince and very much the faithful subordinate, is easily the more prudent and sensible of the pair. Indeed, Florizel's adventures would have ended with his initial outing, "Story of the Young Man with the Cream Tarts", if Geraldine had not, for once, taken matters into his own hand.

Do not, by the way, be deceived by the cozy suggestions of this title. As in the later adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the whimsical and trivial is often reveals some deep and sinister matter. In this case, 'cream tarts' lead direct to the Suicide Club, which, starting with film rights in 1909, has showed up on film, on stage, on TV, and as recently as 2017 in a Caliber Comic.

The Colonel plays a big role in this story, not so in most of the others. Unlike Watson, that most famous of detective companions, Geraldine does not narrate the stories. Rather, his function is to offer good advice and reminders of the political responsibilities of a prince. These Florizel usually ignores, pulling rank and so precipitating the complications that inspire a good story.

Although an intelligent, socially astute, generous, and gentlemanly character, Florizel is young and very far from the coolly analytical Holmes, who was destined not only for monstrous popularity but for a long life post-Doyle, acquiring not only new authors but a wife and child as well.

By contrast Florizel inspired seven stories in New Arabian Nights, all good. In them he is perhaps as much fixer, if that term is not insulting to a royal personage, as investigator. And unlike Holmes, he is not onstage the majority of the time. Indeed, he sometimes appears only toward the end of the narrative to sort matters out.

Florizel is less a sleuth than a collector of interesting people. If they prove to be in difficult straits, he tries to tip the scales toward the good. He is generous with his help but very much the entitled royal when facing the criminal element.

Throughout, Florizel is brave and capable, a man of the world with an admirable sense of humor, a bit of a philosopher, and fond, like Sherlock, of disguises. Since Stevenson was a fine writer, a master of atmosphere, characterization, and plot, and always very much in need of money, the Prince would seem to have been a good candidate for many more stories. Might he also have become a great detective?

Stevenson did bring him back in More New Arabian Nights, written with his wife, Fanny Van De Grift Stevenson, but by this time, Florizel has lost his kingdom after too much time away from Bohemia. He is now running the finest tobacconist shop in London and clearly does not have the resources and agency he enjoyed as prince.

Perhaps the seriously ill Stevenson ran out of energy for Florizel; perhaps the prince's station and character proved limitations, or perhaps Stevenson simply decided to keep him part of an ensemble rather than the star of the show. In any case, Florizel's fame, if lasting, if modest, and, having settled him comfortably as a merchant in his beloved London, Stevenson spared himself the artistic conflicts that so bedeviled his fellow writer, Conan Doyle, who eventually could not rid himself of his greatest creation.

And here, a Stevenson type of story suggests itself: an astute author who spies Conan Doyle's error in sending Holmes over the falls but failing to produce a body. A character can return from the dead, it seems, but not from becoming a tobacconist in London.

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The Fallible Detective

We are in an age of superlatives, fond of the latest and greatest, enamored of super heroes and extraordinary feats. Detective fiction is not immune to these desires, which is perhaps why Holmes, Poirot, and Miss Marple, the three infallible, never to be corrected sleuths, are still crowding the shelves and showing up on screens big and small.

I'm personally very fond of them, but lately I have come to a renewed appreciation of the fallible detective. Not the comic type like Inspector Clouseau, but the competent, hardworking investigator who makes the occasional mistake and who owns up to error, like St. John Strafford.

Strafford, John Banville's detective, is a bit of an odd duck, being a Protestant police officer in very Catholic 1950's Dublin. A member of the Protestant Ascendancy, a fancy term for the descendants of the English colonization project that began in the 12th century, Strafford is a privileged and well educated member of the elite country house set. He is intelligent, quiet, a bit socially awkward, and almost terminally reserved.

Both saddened and relieved by the end of his marriage, Strafford admits he doesn't understand women, an insight that fails to keep him from unwise entanglements. Just the same, Under his cool courtesy, he has considerable sympathy as well as a strong desire to do the ethical thing. This is just as well because unlike some fictional detectives he is not infallible.

John Banville

Strafford's qualities are on display in The Drowned, the newest of Banville's Strafford and Quirke series, the latter being a pathologist who conducts post mortems for the Dublin police. Quirke and Strafford are on uneasy terms, being unlike in nearly everything but a concern for careful work and crime solving. The fact that Stafford is currently seeing Quirke's daughter Phoebe has not helped their relations, either.

The two of them were last seen in The Lock-Up, and one of the interesting things Banville does in the current novel is to shed not only light but doubt on the earlier case. It is an interesting strategy for a novelist and one that raises questions for his detectives.

The 1950's really were a different century as far as forensics goes. Cell phones with their useful location functions, advanced DNA testing, and CCTV footage are tools way beyond what even the best funded copper had in the '50's. Detectives in period novels like The Drowned must rely on interviews, observation, and knowledge of human nature.

This perhaps is what makes a good detective like Strafford a little more cautious, a little more careful, a little less certain that he's on the right track. Or perhaps a certain humility is just part of his character. Another cop on the case has no doubts whatsoever and backs his hunches up with a frequent resource to the third degree.

Indeed, at the end of The Drowned, it appears that the higher powers are about to make a serious mistake, one Strafford sees all too clearly. Is Banville setting up for another novel with yet another course correction? It would certainly be a different strategy and one that his intelligent, humane, and self-doubting detective would be ideal to handle.

The Nordic Murders

 

I am always happy to find some new twist in our favorite genre, given that there are so many familiar tropes and patterns. This is especially true of TV police procedurals, where both cast and plots tend to stick to such familiar ingredients as faithful sergeant, the difficult or incompetent or overly political chief, the feisty if misunderstood detective, the serial killer and the falsely accused.

So there is something to be said for a bold move within the familiar, and The Nordic Murders, a multi-season German production now on PBS Passport, PBS stations, has indeed done something different. One of its chief, if unofficial, investigators is a convicted murderer.

Karin, the murderer

Now murderer as narrator has been around at least since Agatha Christie's Who Killed Roger Ackroyd. I even tried my hand at one with "The Writing Workshop," narrated by a frustrated mystery writer trying to improve his luck by eliminating unsympathetic editors. The Nordic Murders takes a different approach.

Karin Lossow (Karen Sass) was a prosecutor with the local police force when she impulsively shot her unfaithful husband using their daughter's police revolver. Eight years later at the start of the series, Karin is released from custody and returns to Usedom, a German island in the Baltic off the coast of Poland.

Her probation officer, many of her neighbors and certainly her daughter would much rather she take an apartment in some distant mainland town. Karin will have none of it. She intends resume to life in her fine old house and reconnect with her family, namely her daughter Julia (Lisa Marie Potthoff) and her granddaughter Sophie (Emma Bading).

Karin tells her grand daughter that she survived prison by helping and comforting others. To her daughter's understandable dismay, her mom intends to continue this good work on the outside. Given her mastery of German law and legal practices, Karin soon involves herself in the legal troubles of both criminal suspects and victims of crime. Worse yet, as far as the powers that be are concerned, she has a sharp eye for official incompetence, political grandstanding, and procedural errors. An awkward mom to say the least.

Naturally, with five seasons of The Nordic Murders, some rapprochement between mother and daughter is eventually in the cards, but the series makes quite good drama out of the process of reconciliation. It also, rather unusually, has three big female roles. Karin is the most interesting and the most complex, but her feisty, idealistic ,and impulsive

Julie, police commissioner

granddaughter also has a lot of possibilities.

Julia, a police commissioner is the most conventionally drawn. Conscientious and perceptive at work, if a bit chilly, her love for her nice husband and daughter have not kept her from a torrid romance with an attractive Polish police officer. This affair, I suspect, was devised to add interest to a character that is not as well drawn as her female relatives.

Still, big female roles are not to be sniffed at, and possibly because of them, The Nordic Murders relies less than usual on violent action, car chases and assaults. The writers also seem fond of gray areas, both moral and legal. Sometimes what looks like murder, turns out to be something else; sometimes murder results from an array of intolerable choices; sometimes the most likely perpetrator really is innocent and someone perfectly nice has done a dreadful thing.

Sophie, Julie's daughter

The Nordic Murders' sparse dialogue, German with the occasional Polish (both subtitled in English) and rather subdued acting style represent a change from the snappy repartee and non stop action favored by most English language series. But the series has a good cast, well constructed plots, and an unfamiliar setting in one of the most contentious and long suffering regions of the planet. A kidnapping victim is stashed in an old WW2  bunker and desperate refugees huddle amidst sparse conifers, for history, political as well as personal, underlies this interesting series.

Taboos

Back at the end of the 20th century, I received a rejection letter from a magazine that had started to publish my short stories. I was assured that it was a good piece (it later appeared in 1998's The Best American Mystery Stories) but they declined to publish it because their readers did not like this sort of thing.

"This sort of thing" was about a small girl and her mother, undocumented Irish immigrants. They are very much under the thumb of their "protector," their landlord and the proprietor of the restaurant where the mother works, who uses his power to extort sex from the mother. The events in the story are precipitated when he turns his attention to her small daughter. 

There was nothing graphic in "Secrets" but the sexual abuse of children was taboo in some publishing quarters. And, as we now know, such abuse had long been a forbidden topic elsewhere. The Me Too Movement was not so much the start, as the culmination, of a series of scandals involving schools for Native Americans, Junior Hockey players, elite female gymnasts, and religious institutions of nearly every persuasion.

Nowhere has the breaking of this taboo been more significant than in Ireland if recent Irish journalism, films, novels, and short stories are any indication. The title of Fiona McPhillips new novel, When We Were Silent, says it all. Secrecy, a culture of sexual shame, and the immense power and prestige of the Catholic Church conspired for centuries to hide the sins of the powerful and, instead, to punish their victims.

That's very much the deal in When We Were Silent which presents two story lines. Now- when Lou (Louise) Manson is a successful teacher living with her daughter, Katie, and her wife, Alex, and Then, when Lou was repeating her level six year at tony Highfield School, where as a poor girl she is definitely an outsider.

 Lou at 17 is tough and clever, a good student and a gifted athlete. Besides her poverty and her lack of a posh accent, she has two other distinguishing features, both well hidden from the powers that be. She is attracted to women and she has a secret agenda: getting the goods on the swimming coach whom she believes ruined her best friend's life.

McPhillips is very good on the inner lives of adolescent girls and on their passionate friendships and rivalries. In general, the girls' characterizations are superior to those of the Highfield adults who are vividly one dimensional and even to the adult Lou, who is perhaps necessarily less dynamic than her reckless early self.  

Also good is McPhillips account of Highfield School which is very nearly a character itself. Of course, exclusive private schools and colleges, the more isolated the better, have long been a favorite of mystery writers. Their inbred cultures, their sense of social and intellectual superiority, and their distasteful entitlement not only inspire thoughts of homicide but provide a good deal of satisfaction when institution and/or perpetrators are brought down to earth.

So is it with When We Were Silent – but not for a long time. McPhillips novel reflects the changes over the last 30 years that were essential before teachers, parents, authorities, church officials would listen to children and before same sex relationships ceased to be considered a damnable catastrophe. 

When the situation that ended in near disaster for Lou at 18 is replicated with another accusation of sexual misconduct and another coach, Lou and her friends find themselves with big decisions: to remain silent and become complicit or to speak out and reawaken old wounds and old dangers. The contemporary section both opens and closes the novel as McPhillips skillfully presents the costs of silence – in both the past and the present of her characters' lives.

This is a mystery writer to watch.

Janice Law's The Falling Men, a novel with strong mystery elements, has been issued as an ebook on Amazon Kindle. Also on kindle: The Complete Madame Selina Stories.

The Man Who Met the Elf Queen, with two other fanciful short stories and 4 illustrations, is available from Apple Books at:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-man-who-met-the-elf-queen/id1072859654?ls=1&mt=11

The Dictator's Double, 3 short mysteries and 4 illustrations is available at: 

https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-dictators-double/id1607321864?ls=1&mt=11

Switch Hitters

 by Janice Law

I recently read Red Comet, Heather Clark's fascinating biography of poet Sylvia Plath. Aside from thinking that the prevention of so complete and probing a book might make an excellent motive for a literary mystery, I was interested that Plath sold some illustrations to The New Yorker before the editors bought her poetry.

That made me think of other notable artists who moonlighted in another discipline: Michelangelo wrote sonnets, Van Gogh, wonderful letters; novelist Gunther Grass did handsome etchings, while both Bob Dylan and Tony Bennett paint, not to mention several present and former Sleuthsayers who compose songs and perform music.

I am a minor member of this interesting fraternity, being a semi-serious painter of long standing. Although I have done the occasional illustration for my own pleasure and, years ago, did cover drawings for a number of Anna Peters novels when I participated in the Back in Print opportunity, I have rarely combined the two arts or even treated the same subjects.

But about a year ago, writing a short story focused on the Tour de France gave me a little insight into the differences, at least for me, between writing and painting. 

I have long been a fan of grand tour cycling and had done quite a number of paintings inspired by the grand tours. For non-cycling fans, these events, even on TV, are a visual feast. They traverse spectacular scenery in France, Italy, and Spain, with, increasingly, well-chosen visits to other cycling mad countries.

 

The colorful array of team uniforms proves a real challenge to the fans, who themselves favor wild costumes–dinosaurs and inflated fat suits are popular this year– along with Borat style tiny bathing suits, big fluffy wigs in team colors, and, of course, at Le Tour, the giveaway shirts and caps from the sponsors' Caravan, in white with red polkadots (the King of the Mountains jersey) or bright yellow (the maillot jaune– the famous Yellow Jersey of Tour leader). You can imagine how promising all this is to a painter!

 

A short mystery story was a different matter, and though I had often thought of writing something set in the cycling world, there were always technical difficulties. A body can be dropped anywhere in a story, so can forbidden drugs or an act of violence. But timing is difficult around a cycling race. People consuming the equivalent of 4 or 5 bananas an hour just to keep pedaling are unlikely to get into much trouble, while riding along at up to 70 kilometers an hour just inches away from other bikes does not lend itself to anything but the tightest focus.

 

Commentators, professional observers that they are, are trapped in their booth watching multiple screens, while understanding the duties and techniques of the professional security people would have required serious research. It was not until I thought of a favorite former rider, himself a terrific writer, who does color commentary for Le Tour and blogs on  random topics during the race, that I found a plausible protagonist.

I decided that someone along his lines would do. Only the crime remained, and that was easy. A mystery about the Tour had to involve the Devil. Not, you understand the genuine Hadean item, but the fan who for years has danced and capered along the sidelines in horns, red top and tights, a pitchfork, and in recent editions, a black cape, which, one commentator remarked last month, he wears to breakfast.

With these ideas in hand, I struggled as usual to construct a plot, as I like mysteries to be plausible and am more at ease with interesting characters than unforeseen twists and turns. As usual the beginning went swimmingly, the end was at least vaguely visible, the middle, a struggle. It was finished, revised, fussed over, sent out and sold. Thank you, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine.

About a year later, I got an idea for a painting on the same subject: the Devil at Le Tour, which is actually the name of the short story. I had been taken with the dinosaur costumes and the sea of yellow and polkadot t-shirts and thought the brilliant red of the devil costume would serve to pull it all together. One day as the TV camera panned along a group of fans, devil gave a hop and there was the picture. 

I made some drawings, pinned a satisfactory one up next to my easel, picked up a small brush and, using burnt umber, sketched out the design. At this point, I really should wait a day or so to be able to spot the inevitable little errors. But no, although I can wait for a literary idea to develop, an image, once arrived, must be gotten down fast. I use inch wide brushes and rough the whole thing in as fast as possible.

For better or worse, I usually have a good sized (20 x24 or 24 x 28 inch) board covered in an hour. Then I spend probably 50% more time looking at the picture than I do physically painting, and, I must admit, a fair bit of time making corrections that could maybe have been avoided with a less impulsive and more professional and craft wise approach. 

However, I am not sure one can change one's working style too much. Little modifications, yes, complete change, no. Too much of creative work is beyond conscious control, and while I have sometimes thought that I would have done better with a more careful approach to painting and a more colorful approach to writing, change of that magnitude is not possible.

"The Devil at Le Tour" may or may not have appeared in AHMM by the time this emergency piece runs, but the painted version appears below.

Janice Law's The Falling Men, a novel with strong mystery elements, has been issued as an ebook on Amazon Kindle. Also on kindle: The Complete Madame Selina Stories.

The Man Who Met the Elf Queen, with two other fanciful short stories and 4 illustrations, is available from Apple Books at:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-man-who-met-the-elf-queen/id1072859654?ls=1&mt=11

The Dictator's Double, 3 short mysteries and 4 illustrations is available at: 

https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-dictators-double/id1607321864?ls=1&mt=11