What She Didn't Do

by Sheila Connolly

This past week the news in my area has been full of stories about the tragic death of Amy Lord, a young woman living in Boston.  She was only 24, and had moved not long ago to South Boston (the notorious "Southie" that spawned Whitey Bulger, currently on trial in Boston for multiple murders and other crimes, but now increasingly gentrified), sharing an apartment with roommates, working, and enjoying her independence.  She was educated and pretty, and had everything going for her, including a loving and supportive family not far away.

Then one day she opened the door to the wrong person, who attacked her.  That was bad enough, but then he insisted that she go with him—in her car—to get cash for him from ATM machines.  And here's where the story goes awry.

They stopped at five ATM machines.  In broad daylight.  On busy streets, in plain view—there is bank surveillance footage of at least one of these stops, and you can see the cars passing on the street behind. So why did she meekly get back in the car with her assailant, over and over, rather than running like hell, screaming, into the bank or to a police station or almost anywhere else?  The man acted alone; he wasn't holding her family or her children or even her dog hostage. Why did she do what he asked, and then keep doing it?

I know it's wrong to blame the victim.  Of course she was terrified and disoriented—things like this don't happen to nice pretty girls from the suburbs, certainly not in the middle of the day. But why couldn't she have found a way to get away?  Instead she accompanied him, and at the end of the day he stabbed her and dumped her body in a wooded park (where she was found very quickly).  Could she have saved herself?

As writers we are charged with creating characters who are both appealing and believable.  We want the readers to be able to identify with them, so that they care what happens to them.  Of course, what you as the writer set down on the page is not exactly real life, and you can shape your fiction any way you choose, but you usually want your characters to be liked..

We all carry in the back of our minds the movie image of the sweet young coed who is all alone in the house when she hears a suspicious thump in the basement while all her sorority sisters are out on fabulous dates (and the nerds are at the library).  So she decides to investigate, usually clad in the skimpiest of nightgowns, barefoot; maybe she takes a flashlight (the lightbulbs are always burnt out in these basements).  Of course things end badly for her, but we all know she was asking for it.  We label these young women Too Stupid to Live.

I'm not for a moment saying that Amy Lord made such poor decisions, but I can't shake the feeling that she should have been more proactive.  I can't believe she didn't have more than one opportunity to save herself, merely by making noise and running.  Would he, could he have shot her?  Maybe.  Would he have hit her?  Possibly, but by no means surely.  Wouldn't being shot be preferable to what actually happened?

Please don't think I'm unsympathetic, because this bright, talented young woman's death is truly a tragic waste.  But I keep thinking, if I had read this in a novel I would have said, "What's wrong with you? Do something!"

Samuel Thomas Guest Blogger: Death and the Midwife

Sam Thomas is a fellow St. Martian and I'm pleased to welcome another historical mystery writer to Poe's Deadly Daughters. I met Sam face to face in Cleveland just this year at Bouchercon. In addition to The Midwife's Tale being Sam's debut novel, he teaches history at University School, an independent boys' school outside Cleveland, Ohio. He lives in Shaker Heights with is wife and two sons. Readers can expect a sequel to Sam's debut in 2014.

When I tell people that I’m writing a series of murder mysteries about an English midwife, I often receive the kind of condescension that people reserve for the very young and the very old. That’s nice, they say with an uncertain smile, not entirely sure that they’ve understood me. Actually, that’s not true. They know they have understood me. They’re just not sure that I’m making any sense. After all, what could midwives have to with murder? Lawyer-sleuths? Sure, we’ll believe that. Crime-solving doctors? Absolutely. But midwives?

Yes, midwives. While we (rightly) associate midwives with bringing life in to the world, for several centuries midwives also sent people out. Most obviously, thanks to comparatively high infant and maternal mortality rates, midwives saw their share of death in the delivery room. But this is just the start, for midwives were key players in England’s legal and judicial system, and when a woman came into contact with the law, whether as a victim or a suspect, a midwife often was on the scene.

The most common legal task that midwives faced was to discover the fathers of illegitimate children so that they could be made to pay for the upkeep of their offspring. Midwives did this by – to be blunt – threatening the mothers: If a woman refused to name the father of her bastard child (perhaps she had been paid for her silence), the midwife was supposed to withhold care during the birth.

“You don’t want to name the father?” she would ask. “Then you’re giving birth alone. Good luck and Godspeed.” (It is not for nothing that I opened The Midwife’s Tale with just this situation.) And while most mothers probably relented, there are cases in which midwives did indeed make good on their threat. In thus was the midwife’s job to expose infidelity and lechery to public view – reason enough for some men to kill, no?

More dramatic – and mercifully less common –was the midwife’s role in infanticide investigations. When an infant’s body was discovered, the constable would summon the local midwife and she would search out and interrogate suspects. Imagine the scene from the mother’s perspective:

A young woman has given birth to an illegitimate child, and she has done this in secret and by herself. Perhaps the child is stillborn, perhaps not, but the mother panics and abandons the child out of fear of discovery and punishment.

Within days or even hours, the midwife arrives with a dozen women in tow. She corners the mother and squeezes her breasts to see if she is lactating. She then insists on examining the mother’s privities (to use the early modern word) for evidence of a recent birth. Then the midwife and her assistants begin to badger the mother in confessing to a crime which had only one punishment: death by hanging. In depositions from infanticide cases, the language of pressing is ubiquitous: “after much pressing, Jane did confess” or “we pressed her further and again, until Jane did confessed.” There were no lawyers, no Miranda rights, just the mother and the women who would not be denied. Such work was not for the tender-hearted.

Nor was this all. As the local expert on women’s bodies, it fell to the midwife to examine women or girls who had been raped, and to testify against their assailants. If a woman were sentenced to death and claimed to be pregnant (which would prevent execution), the midwife judged whether she was lying. When a woman was accused of witchcraft, the midwife examined her body for evidence of the Witch’s Mark, where Satan’s imp had suckled. Guilt or innocence lay in the midwife’s hands.

Midwives thus dealt in their community’s darkest secrets:  adultery, murder, rape and witchcraft were their stock in trade. And in these cases, the midwife’s word determined who lived and who died.

What more could you want from a protagonist?

Sam Thomas is an author and teacher living in Shaker Heights, Ohio. His debut novel, The Midwife’s Tale: A Mystery, will be released by Minotaur/St. Martin’s on January 8. For more about mysteries and midwives, visit http://www.samthomasbooks.com, http://www.facebook.com/SThomasbooks. The book is available for preorder at Amazon and B&N.

IRISH CRIME

by Sheila Connolly

I'm in the throes of completing the first (unnamed) book in my new (unnamed) Irish series, coming in just over a year. I've been to Ireland more than once—four times, in fact. The last trip, with my husband, was supposed to be a research trip, but the research was somewhat sidetracked by a broken ankle (it won't surprise you that I managed to include a visit to the emergency room in the new book, but it's justified because that's where the autopsies for County Cork are performed).

But no tourist can investigate crime in a foreign country (although I did once visit a local station of the Garda Siochána (the Irish police, called "guards" rather than police, in Avoca, which is where the PBS series Ballykissangel was filmed, if anyone remembers that). For an understanding about how crime is regarded, and how the police/gardaí and courts actually operate, I have to rely on public reports.

In the past year or so I have become a news junkie, checking CNN headlines frequently through the day. News is condensed to current shorts bits, and I have the option of learning more or passing by. I shouldn't have been surprised to find that RTE (Raidió Teilifís Éireann, the public service broadcaster for Ireland) offers a similar website, which provides news (both international and local), business reports, sports info and more for Ireland. Now I'm hooked on that too. It's interesting to see which headlines they pick up and how their coverage compares to that of CNN.

Since I'm writing a book that includes more than one murder, naturally I gravitate toward reports of murders in Ireland, and how they are investigated and prosecuted; I'm trying to understand the terminology so I can get it right. (Which is probably absurd, since as far as I can tell, no one in Ireland reads cozies, so no one is likely to write to me and complain that I got the chain of command or who investigates which aspect of a crime wrong.)

It's interesting reading. Bear in mind that Ireland is physically about the size of New Jersey, and the total population of the country in 2011 was 4.7 million. The US national crime rate for 2010 was 4.8 per 100,000 people; the Irish crime rate for that year was 1.25 per 100,000, roughly one-quarter that of the US.

So I think it's safe to say that there's a difference in attitude toward homicide, and I think it's reflected in the language used in news releases. There is a kind of innocence about the individual reports, a courtesy of language. It's sometimes possible to follow a case over time, although a surprising number of cases reported took place well in the past. Just this month, a man already serving a sentence for the attempted murder of a friend was given a life sentence when the friend died, two years after the attack. The report on that one closes with "this case has made legal history and this is the first conviction of its kind."

A number of "political" murders continue to occur, or at least reach the final stages of prosecution. A member of one or another dissident group (yes, the IRA lives on, in various splinter groups) may be told to bring a target to a site for a "punishment shooting." One such suspect who confessed,"named the others involved and his life is now in danger."

The gardaí are persistent about following up on unsolved cased, and there are often reports of an arrest being made years after the crime. Often someone who had disappeared years earlier is found. In both old and new cases, a pathologist "attends the scene" and a post mortem is conducted. The scene is "technically examined" or "forensically examined" (presumably by their equivalent of Crime Scene Investigators). The gardaí often "appeal for information" from the public.

Charges of murder are not brought lightly in Ireland: in the case of one murder (which I'm saving for a book!), over a thousand people in the (rural) area of the murder were interviewed, and it took five years to declare the death suspicious—and they still haven't made an arrest.

I'm not saying that Ireland is crime-free. There are gangs, there are drug dealers, and criminals are not all confined to the big cities. I don't want to paint a picture of a bucolic place where everyone loves everyone else, because that would be false. But I want to believe that in a small country, where most people could play the "six degrees of separation" with almost anyone else, murder is a crime taken more seriously than we do here. So if I have murders in my book, I'd better have a good reason—and make sure they're solved.

A Taste for Killing

Elizabeth Zelvin

Books have always provided a way for both readers and writers to live vicariously. They sweep us off into another place and time, invite us inside the heads of people we’re unlikely ever to meet, and make our hearts ache and soar for strangers who exist only on the page. But only mystery writers routinely get to kill. A mostly law-abiding and compassionate bunch in RL, as Internet users call real life, we are not merely permitted but required by our trade to knock off at least one victim in every book. We even get to choose our murderees, so we can seize the occasion to get rid of those who displease us blamelessly and with great satisfaction.

In the first mystery I ever wrote (thirty years ago, unpublished and unpublishable today), I killed off the wife of a young man I knew, in fictional guise, of course. She was not a very nice person, and her existence was the reason that particular friendship never blossomed into romance. In the long run, I can say now with perfect hindsight, it was for the best, since we have remained friends all these years. He’s now married to someone much nicer—and so am I. But man, it felt good to let my murderer kill her. (Hmm, maybe I’m the one who’s not so nice. But mystery readers will surely understand.)

The victim in a mystery is not necessarily an unsympathetic character. Murdering a good person can elicit a strong desire for justice in both reader and protagonist. Or the victim may be deeply flawed but likable, so that the protagonist cares enough about his or her death to be driven to find out what happened.

The first draft of Death Will Get You Sober had only one victim. I didn’t start talking with other mystery writers about our craft and how it has changed in recent years until after I finished the manuscript. I learned that the leisurely build-up, letting the reader get thoroughly acquainted with the characters before anything happens, is passé. Editors and especially agents nowadays want to be gripped on the first page, preferably by a body. I also learned that many traditional mysteries solve the problem of “sagging middle” in a book-length story by killing off a second character—often the prime suspect, so that his or her death forces the investigation to take a new turn.

The basic premise and circumstances of the plot did not allow me to kill off my original victim any sooner. I brought the death as far forward as I could by eliminating a lot of backstory—another thing I learned from other writers. But to kick-start the action, literally, I had my protagonist stumble over a body at the end of what at that time was Chapter One. I then needed a reason for this new death. That led to other victims. At the same time, I added suspense to the ongoing investigation by killing off some of the suspects along the way. I found that murder was addictive. By the time I was through, my simple one-victim mystery had turned into one of which Edgar-winning author Julie Smith (who kindly gave me a great blurb) said that my characters “maneuver their way through a forest of bodies.”

A forest? How did that spring up? I only spat out a single murder seed….