Taking A Position on Social Themes

Elizabeth Zelvin

At the recent Malice Domestic, I was on a panel on the topic of tackling social issues in mystery fiction. At last fall's Bouchercon, they assigned me to "the booze panel." That one was a challenge, though you could say I asked for it by choosing to write about recovery from alcoholism and, in the book due out this fall, addictive relationships. Everybody has opinions about drinking and relationships, and the views that come out when I write about these issues can be provocative even when I just want readers to relax and enjoy the story. At any rate, there is plenty of meat for discussion in writing that takes a position. Before the Malice panel, our moderator circulated a number of questions. The one that stuck in my head and wouldn’t stop itching until I scratched it was this:

“Must we present a ‘balanced’ view? Introduce opposing sides or viewpoints on an issue?”

Some mysteries lend themselves to balance. Their authors can create appealing characters who take opposing points of view and “tackle” the social issues they address by making a case for both sides. The book that springs most readily to mind is Canadian author R. J. Harlick’s The River Runs Orange—probably because we were Malice-Go-Round partners last year and speed-dated our way through twenty tables of readers and twenty repetitions of our respective three-minute pitches for our new books. Harlick’s protagonist finds some ancient human remains and feels torn between the competing claims of scientists who want to study them and the local band of Algonquins who want to give them a sacred reburial.

Some mystery authors take a strong stand for one point of view, but present the opposing beliefs and values by giving them to the villains. At the top of this list is Betty Webb, whose powerful Desert Wives portrayed the plight of young girls forced into polygamous marriages in patriarchal compounds in the Southwest so eloquently that it influenced legislation against the abuses it portrayed.

My intuitive short answer to the original question of whether we must present opposing viewpoints along with our own position was, “Hell, no. The opposition is doing fine without me.” When I started to think about how I could elaborate on that, I realized that I could name seven distinct “opposing sides” to the themes in my first two mysteries: alcoholism in Death Will Get You Sober and addictive relationships in Death Will Help You Leave Him—or to put it positively, recovery from addictions and the true nature of love.

I base my position on many years of experience as a mental health and addictions professional, director of treatment programs, and psychotherapist as well as many years of life experience and hard-won personal growth. Yet for many of my readers, the positions in these books will come as a surprise. Our culture has deeply embedded misperceptions about drinking, recovery, and relationships. Therapy flourishes in our society because we have to unlearn mainstream beliefs and values in order to move toward emotional health and maturity. The case against the views I explore through my characters is already made and constantly reiterated. My task is to offer readers a fresh look at the alternatives.

Here are the seven areas in which I can identify my stance and the opposing viewpoint:

1. Alcoholism is a disease with symptoms, a clinical course, and treatment. (The opposing view: Alcoholics are weak and lack will power.)

2. Alcoholics must abstain from alcohol and other mood-altering substances to achieve and maintain recovery; in other words, sobriety is always the goal. (The opposing view: It’s too hard for alcoholics to stay sober; harm reduction and moderation management are valid goals.)

3. In the absence of recovery, alcoholism is a painful, tragic, and life-threatening disease, characterized by increased tolerance and loss of control. (The opposing view: Excessive drinking or drunkenness is laughable and entertaining. High tolerance for alcohol—the proverbial hard head or hollow leg—is proof that the drinker is in control.)

4. Alcoholic drinking impairs functioning in every area of life, including health, mental acuity, productivity, relationships, and creativity. (The opposing view: Alcoholic drinking fosters creativity.)

5. Intimate relationships take work and require both a sense of self and an available and accepting partner. People who stay in bad relationships may have attachment problems, love addiction, and/or codependency. (The opposing view: Persistence in a relationship in spite of the partner’s abuse, unavailability, or indifference demonstrates love.)

6. Intimacy, or long-term bonding, is the key to a successful relationship. (The opposing view: falling in love, ie passion or short-term bonding, is the key to a successful relationship and can be maintained indefinitely.)

7. Psychotherapy and recovery programs are powerful tools for change and growth that can help and empower those who use them well. (The opposing view: Psychotherapy and recovery programs are merely psychobabble.)

Of course, this is not how I’d put any of this in a work of fiction. Like all my fellow panelists who write about social issues, I have a horror of sounding preachy. Instead—let me quote my characters Barbara and Bruce in Death Will Help You Leave Him:

“He swore he’d change,” Barbara said, “and she believed that this time he meant it.”

Right. Pigs may fly. But first you have to go down to Kitty Hawk and build them some wings.

Recovery and Transformation

Elizabeth Zelvin

I’ve been planning my book tour, an essential activity for an emerging writer. I’m finding some of the venues myself, but my publicist is working on the midwestern leg of the trip. When she first proposed the itinerary, I thought the biggest challenge would be breaking the news to my husband that he’s going to Indianapolis. He’s coming with me for that segment of the tour because he has family, my in-laws, in Ohio, but he’s the kind of New Yorker who gets very, very antsy when he has to cross the Hudson. But when I allowed myself to imagine what it would be like to stand by a table piled with my books near the door of a Borders in a mall in Illinois, I began to wonder how on earth I could persuade those ordinary folks out there in the heartland to plunk down their money on the premise that they might enjoy a book called Death Will Get You Sober and come to care about a a guy they’ll first meet on the Bowery coming off a bender.

I enjoy public speaking, and I’ve never doubted I’ll have plenty to say at bookstore discussions. There’s all that backstory about my characters that I took out over the course of many revisions. And I have lots of stories about the Bowery in the old days when I ran an alcohol treatment program there that didn’t make it into the book. But it’s occurred to me that maybe I shouldn’t start there. Maybe I’d better begin with why I wanted—want—to write about recovery. It’s simple: recovery is transformational.

I once knew a nursery school teacher who had her class do a butterfly project every year. They’d watch the caterpillar form its chrysalis and wait for the brightly colored butterfly with its glorious wings to emerge. At the end of the term, she’d take them to the park so they could release the butterflies and see them fly free. Sometimes it’s kind of like that when an alcoholic finds recovery.

Before two guys named Bill W. and Dr. Bob came up with the idea for Alcoholics Anonymous in 1935, alcoholism was truly a hopeless illness—though it was seen as a moral weakness, not an illness—whose outcomes were inevitably “madness” (depression, delirium tremens, irreversible dementia) and death. AA offered another choice: stop drinking for just one day, admit you need help, find some kind of spiritual path, get rigorously honest about your own shortcomings, make amends for the harm you’ve done others, and help another alcoholic. In other words, all you have to do is stop drinking and change your whole life. As they say, the program works.

The real-life agency where I worked for more than six years was greatly appreciated by the surrounding community. It had cleaned up the notorious Third Street Shelter and turned the kind of guys you’d be scared to pass on the street at night into citizens with pride and dignity, ambitions and dreams. Not all of them, but some. The agency used to invite the whole neighborhood to a holiday party. At one of these, a woman asked me what the success rate was. I answered honestly: 15 or 20 percent. It’s hard to kick drugs and alcohol and turn your life around, especially since America doesn’t exactly lift its lamp beside the golden door any more. Some people are never satisfied, and this woman was one of them. “That’s not very much,” she said. I said, “We consider every one a miracle.”

Psychopathology in Mysteries: Past and Current Trends

Elizabeth Zelvin

As a mental health professional in my “other hat,” I have a tendency to diagnose the protagonists, victims, witnesses, and murderers in the mysteries I read. Sometimes these characters’ psychopathology is intentional on the author’s part, with a greater or lesser degree of accuracy or at least probability. Sometimes it’s not.

I recently was asked, in a series of questions and answers for a fellow writer’s crime fiction blog, to name my “guilty pleasures” as a reader. I confessed that one of my favorite comfort read characters (or rereads many times over) is Patricia Wentworth’s Miss Silver. These mysteries from the 1940s and 1950s are classic cozies. They are totally predictable and tremendously soothing. (I do love a happy ending!) They are also incisively written and astute about character as long as you accept some stereotypical assumptions about men and women that most of us in the 21st century no longer buy into. Admitting how much I like Miss Silver was embarrassing only because the guy asking the question was a hardboiled crime novelist. Some over-easy traditional mystery writers reread Patricia Wentworth too.

Anyhow, it got me thinking about the Wentworth canon. I have 42 or 43 of her books: all the Miss Silvers and quite a few of her many other novels, which are just like them except for the decorous but highly intelligent sleuth’s absence, some even featuring other characters—police and villains—from the Miss Silver books. Having read so many of them, I’m struck by how many of the plots revolve around amnesia. In the mid-20th century, amnesia was a tried and true plot device that many mystery writers turned to. Manning Coles’s Tommy Hambledon, for example, was a British intelligence agent who lost his memory in Germany for long enough to join the Nazi Party and participate actively in the rise of Hitler. Luckily, he recovered his memory in time to save the day for England. Writers have also made use of alcoholic blackouts, another form of amnesia. In David Carkeet’s 1980 mystery Double Negative, if I remember correctly, the hero hid a key piece of evidence during a blackout and had to get drunk again to remember where he’d put it: a condition I know now is called state-dependent learning.

Amnesia still crops up from time to time. Annette Meyers’s most recent Smith and Wetzon mystery, Hedging, comes to mind. But amnesia is no longer “in.” I suspect the reason is it’s more widely understood that retrograde amnesia doesn’t usually work quite the way most mystery writers use it.

Blackouts, another kind of amnesia, are still common in crime fiction. So are other symptoms of alcoholism. Sometimes the characters are aware they’re dealing with this serious and painful form of illness. Sometimes neither characters nor author get it. As a longstanding alcoholism treatment professional, I have a bias against what I call “cute alcoholism,” when excessive drinking is presented as comical or charming. Nowadays, we find more and more characters in recovery or at least intermittently trying to get sober. But compulsive hard drinking and cute alcoholism still appear in mystery fiction.

For a while, in the 1980s and 1990s, incest, pedophilia, and dissociative identity disorder (formerly called multiple personality disorder) became popular with novelists. In one of P.D. James’s books, one character with a history of sexual abuse in childhood hides her sexuality in obesity and overeating, while another, who had run away, is found under another identity—not a subterfuge, but to those familiar with DID, clearly another personality. One of Colin Dexter’s best Inspector Morse books turns on the fact that a character who is not what she seems has alters. I’ve also read mysteries by proponents (or by authors who believe proponents) of “false memory syndrome.” Professionally and personally, I’ve met too many people with dissociative issues due to childhood trauma and sexual abuse to have much sympathy for this point of view. It’s made for some interesting stories. But by now, it has been used so often that I can see it coming hundreds of pages before the denouement. Or is that because I’m professionally familiar with the symptoms?

Nowadays, serial killers are in fashion. I’m not very fond of them myself. But readers seem to love them. And some wonderful writers bring them to life. Besides Hannibal Lecter and Dexter, Lawrence Block and Jan Burke have created some convincing sociopaths as foils for Matt Scudder and Irene Kelly. Many sociopaths, by the way, never kill anyone: they just go through life hiding utter lack of empathy behind devastating charm. I’ve had quite a few clients myself who were immensely likeable, so that I had to keep reminding myself that the charm was an integral part of the sociopathy. I’m fascinated by how easily people are fooled. Will I ever write about such a character? You never know. In the meantime, the serial killer trend has to reach saturation point some time. So what kind of twisted souls—or mental illness, depending on your frame of reference—will mystery writers turn the spotlight on next?

Bill W. and Dr. Bob

Elizabeth Zelvin

I saw a terrific play the other day, Bill W. and Dr. Bob, about the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous. This is tricky material for a general audience, as I know, since my own first mystery has a recovering alcoholic protagonist. In the course of selling it, I found the theme of alcoholism acted as a kind of litmus test for agents and editors who read it. And I’m still waiting with some apprehension to see how mystery lovers receive it when it comes out next year. So I was heartened by the enthusiastic reception the play got from a mixed audience. The New York Times called it “an insightful new play,” and the New Yorker said it “paints an endearing portrait of friendship and human weakness with warm humor.” I know the audience was mixed because when Robert Krakovski as Bill Wilson spoke the opening line, “My name is Bill, and I’m an alcoholic,” about half the audience chorused, “Hi, Bill,” immediately getting it that we were in an AA meeting.

For those who don’t know the story, Bill Wilson was a stockbroker with a big ego and a bigger alcohol problem whose last-ditch attempt to stop drinking before it killed him led to a meeting with Bob Smith, a surgeon and equally hopeless drunk, in Akron, Ohio in 1935. After having tried everything, including religion, the two men found that talking to another alcoholic—someone who’d been there too—made it possible to stay sober for just one day, and then another and another.

They made every mistake in the book, taking drunks into their homes, lending them money, and overselling their method instead of listening, while their long-suffering wives wondered if the remedy didn’t leave them as lonely and overburdened as the alcoholism had. But it worked. Two men in Akron in 1935 have become a fellowship of more than two million worldwide.

What was then deeply stigmatized as an incurable moral weakness has become understood as a chronic but treatable disease. The success of AA has led not only to additional self-help programs for those suffering from a variety of addictive disorders and those who love them but also to effective professional treatment: counseling, therapy, and addiction medicine.

It’s a small world. I know of playwright Janet Surrey as a fellow addiction professional and feminist psychologist. (Her coauthor and husband, Stephen Bergman, is a highly regarded novelist and playwright under the pseudonym Samuel Shem.) And I once shook Lois Wilson’s hand, when she was a frail but still feisty little old lady of 93. Dr. Bob, the older of the two men, went to medical school in 1898, to give an idea of the time span involved. I could have chosen a lot less risky theme for my mysteries, but I write about recovery from alcoholism because it’s a life-changing experience. I have seen this transformation many times, and it is always inspiring—awesome in the true sense of the word. At some point in the play, Bill and Dr. Bob are accused of calling everything a miracle. I don’t blame them. I’d say recovery is a miracle every time.

Down on the Bowery

Elizabeth Zelvin

Death Will Get You Sober starts with my protagonist waking up in detox on the Bowery on Christmas Day. The Bowery in lower Manhattan, along with Seattle’s Skid Row and its namesakes in Los Angeles and other cities, has long been synonymous with down-and-out chronic alcoholism. The area was famous for its bars and flophouses as well as the “Bowery bums” who came from all over the country to drink cheap Thunderbird and sleep it off in the gutter.

I first went there in 1983. For a seminar connected with getting my alcoholism counseling credential, I had a choice of places to intern. My professor urged me to pass up the expensive private clinic and go down to the Bowery. “You’ll love it,” he said, and he was right. I caught the very end of the era before the homeless spread out all over the city. There were only a few bars and two or three genuine flophouses left. But walking down the Bowery from Astor Place, you entered another world when you crossed Fifth Street.

The program was housed in the notorious men’s shelter on Third Street, still a scary place at that time. To reach the elevator, you had to breast your way through crowds of not too sweet-smelling men who stood around in a fog of cigarette smoke. The elevator had no buzzer. To get to the program on the fourth floor, you had to pound on the scarred elevator door with your fist, and eventually Wisdom the elevator man would bring it creaking down to get you. (His name was Winston, but no one called him that.) You took your life in your hands if you used the stairs.

My first day as an intern, the last of the cops who’d formed the first “rescue team” in 1967 to bring “Bowery bums” to detox instead of just throwing them in jail took me out with him. It was Check Day, when all the guys on any kind of public assistance or veteran’s benefits got their monthly check. So nobody was lying in the gutter. The cop said we’d find them in the bars. It was 10:30 in the morning. I remember the sun slanting down across the bar, the dust, the bartender polishing a glass, and the row of heads that turned toward us in unison. They all knew the cop. They knew why we were there. The bartender sounded like an elevator man in Bloomingdale’s. He said, “Fourth floor! fourth floor! who wants to go?” They knew exactly what he meant. They’d all spent many nights in the shelter. Some of them had been in detox 60 times.

One elderly gentleman slid off his stool and announced, “I’ll go!” He was small and grizzled, and I remember his baggy black and white checked pants. Chatty in the police car as we drove the short distance back to Third Street, he told me he’d once been a social worker himself. Not likely, the cop told me.

I kind of telescoped the gentrification of the Bowery in the book. But the shelter was cleaned up by the time I went back in 1993 as program director of an outpatient alcohol program. The building also housed a drug therapeutic community. I once walked up the formerly dangerous stairs in a Santa Claus hat and a red feather boa to help sing Christmas carols in the detox. During the later 90s, chi-chi restaurants and fern bars started moving onto the Bowery. A block east, blue recycling garbage cans stood neatly in front of the Hell’s Angels clubhouse. Their stretch of Third Street curb was painted yellow. The city had put up a sign: “Parking reserved for Hell’s Angels motorcycles only.”