Moments In Crime

Dumb, Dumber, and I'd Rather Be In Math Class

       Okay, so if I had to list the crimes I'm least interested in reading about, I think they'd go under the headings of "sex" and "drugs."  I don't mind reading about normal sex, two people who have the hots for each other, jealousy, bigamy, betrayal and that kind of thing, but the serial killer with sexual kinks whose crimes are described in excruciating detail turns me off, at least partially because I really don't want to know all the painful things that can be done to nipples.

       Still, every once in a while a serial killer novel comes along that gets me interested, and true-crime serial killer cases sometimes do, too.  Jeffrey Dahmer leaves me cold, but the Mason family always has me interested, and so did Aileen Wurnos.

       If there's one kind of crime that just makes my mind turn off, though, it's definitely anything to do with drugs.  For one thing, I get really exasperated with stupidity.  How many IQ points do you have to have before you realize that stoking up on heroin or cocaine every day isn't likely to make  your life any better?

       And then, of course, there are the meth labs, that always seem to be operated by people who flunked out of chemistry in high school because they just can't help blowing things up.  We get a couple of meth blowouts a year out here, and the news stories that follow them are routine:  here's the trailer or the triple decker house that just went up in flames; here's the four other dwellings next to it that are also going up in flames;  here's the guy who was operating the meth lab, now with only two fingers on his left hand and no right hand at all.

       If he's lucky.

       Part of the reason why I can't get interested in drug crimes, though, is that I've become increasingly resistant to the law enforcement hysteria that surrounds them.

       It's not that I don't think drugs are dangerous, because I do.  It's not that I don't think that we would be better off if more people would stop taking them.  It's just that the way we all behave around the topic these days bears as much relation to common sense as a zebra does to a jelly fish.

       Let's get real here:  there are drug cartels, and big bad distributors with gang connections and semi-automatic weaponry, but by and large, the  people most likely to commit drug crimes are teen-agers.  Your local on the street retail drug dealer is not a shadowy figure with gang tattoos or connections to Columbia, but a kid who lives on your street and who uses too much of his own product to make much money on it.

       What's more, the vast majority of the drug users in your town are almost certainly not even as connected to drug trafficking as that guy.  They're fifteen and sixteen and seventeen year olds who get high at a party every once in a while or smoke a joint in the girls' room because somebody has one and they want to see what it's like.

       You know what the problem with that is?  When the casual experimenters get caught, they're in almost as much trouble as if they'd been doing something serious.  Mandatory minimum sentencing laws mean that a fair number of them go to jail for five years or more over what were really no more than a couple of stupid mistakes that hurt nobody, not even themselves, very much.

       And the ones who do not go to jail--the ones who get probation, or who are never turned in to the police at all and instead get their punishment from their school administrators--find not only that they have become the focus of a lot of pressure and attention (go to rehab! join a twelve step program! see a psychologist!), but that they're lives are affected forever.

       Once you're known to have used drugs, whether you've been arrested or not, virtually no college on earth is willing to touch you.  And if you have been arrested, you suddenly become ineligible to several kinds of federal education aid, and state aid, too, in some states.

       I'd really like someone to explain the rationale of this to me, which is on a par with the rationale that says that if a guy was an alcoholic in his twenties, then recovered and stayed sober for forty years, he's unfit to hold elected public office.  Johnny Dogood for president?  Nope, can't have that, he was a drunk for a few months back in 1967.

       For crime to make sense to me in fiction, is has to make sense to me in real life.  And, of course, the gangs and the cartels are perfectly rational.  They're just out there making money.  In fiction, though, they've become too much like cartoon villains.  There isn't much going on an a personal level to make them interesting as characters.

       As for the people involved in drugs who would make interesting characters--the student of mine from a couple of years ago, for instance, whose single experiment with Ecstasy got him expelled from high school, convicted of a misdemeanor and put on probation, kicked out of his house and rejected from every one of the colleges to which he applied, in spite of a 3.8 GPA and board scores in the ninety-fifth percentile--never appear in fiction at all.

       They don't even appear in my fiction, because I don't know how I'd use them.  It's one thing to write books around contemporary issues, which I do a lot of.  It's another thing to make such issues interesting in a way that isn't lecturing or preaching or any of the other really bad things you can do, as a writer, when you try to take on something you care about.

       And then, of course, there's that last thing, the thing that you would have to find a way to address if you ever wrote a book centered on how teenagers actually use drugs and interact with people who use them.

       You'd have to deal with the stoner movies.

       Because as hysteria about drug use has escalated, and penalties for even minor drug use have become Draconian at their best, the movie screens of the country are full of Harold and Kumar and all their cousins,

Sleepless in Connecticut

It's raining as I type this, really raining, the kind of crazy-hard pelting that usually comes accompanied by thunder.  The thunder isn't here yet, but then it's only quarter to five in the morning.  This would not necessarily be bad news, since I usually get up at three thirty, except for the fact that I didn't manage to sleep anywhere close to three thirty last night.  I got up at one-- after going to bed at ten--because I seem to have had a dream about one of those disasters waiting to happen in my life.  In my dream, it had happened.  I've spent the three hours trying to convince myself it didn't really happen.  Eventually, I'll just get so tired I'll fall over like a tree, and then my body clock will be screwed up for at least a full calendar week.
I've read all the scientific explanations for why dreams are what they are, but the process still makes little or no sense to me.  For one thing, I'd like to understand why it always seems to be so difficult, at least for me, to convince myself that a dream actually was a dream.  The one tonight--last night?  it's impossible to get the terminology right here--was easy enough to mistake for reality.  It concerned one of the caps on my front teeth, which is old and has been feeling a little unstable lately.  I've got this absolute horror of it just blowing out of my mouth some time when I'm talking to somebody.
A lot of the dreams I can't convince myself are dreams, though, are completely bizarre and rationally impossible.  Some of them are also pretty damned awful.  I dreamed once that every person has inside him, near his stomach and intestines, a small organ shaped like  a lima bean that, crushed, will immediately render him dead.  I dreamed that I had been present at surgery on all my nieces and nephews and crushed the lima bean every time.  I came awake in a cold sweat and couldn't talk myself down from the panic for an hour.
I don't know how many crime writers dream about murder, but I do.  I don't do it often.  A couple of years tend to go by between acts of subconscious homicide.  Still, I do it, and the dreams of homicide are the ones I find it most difficult to shake off once I wake.
At one point, soon after I left college, I dreamed that my best college friend and I murdered her brother at a gas station and then stuffed his body into a big garbage can at the side of the gas pumps.  I woke up convinced that I had somehow gotten away with this and that I would not go on getting away with it for long.  It took three cups of tea to bring me all the way back to reality.
If there's one consistent fact about all these dreams of murder over time, it's that they never concern the death of anybody I might actually want to be dead.   When I had the dream about my nieces and nephews, for instance, they were very tiny children and I'd seen them maybe twice in my life.  When I had the dream about the murder of my college friend's brother, I'd never actually met the man, and everything I'd heard about him had been positive.
In fact, my homicide dreams seem to be less about the homicide and more about some underlying, ineradicable sense of free floating guilt, I have no idea about what.  It's as if some part of me I'm not usually aware of feels that I ought to feel guilty about something, and when I go into REM sleep it tries to give the guilt an anchor.
And that's the other thing about the homicides in these dreams--they don't feel real.  The guilt feels real, and it stays with me, but the act of murder itself doesn't.  If I try to remember the actual scenes, I never come up with a picture of actual blood and skin and bone.  Instead, the victims in my dreams die the way the victims in cozy mysteries do.  One minute they're alive, the next they're dead.  Between those two things, not much seems to have happened.
There are a lot of people out there who believe that anybody who writes crime novels must be mentally ill, and I suppose I've given that sort of person a lot of ammunition here.  But the dreams don't seem mentally ill to me, either.   They seem instead to be trying to tell me something about myself, but not something having to do with actual murder, or even actual violence.  Oddly enough, they're not violent dreams.
Somebody once said that we love murder mysteries not because we are fascinated with violence, but because we are passionate for order.  In my sleep-deprived state, I can't remember who that was.
But I think he might have had a point.

Death and Money

       Like a lot of women who write detective novels, I started out as a child reading Nancy Drew, often in big stacks at a time, in a kind of total emersion experience that ate up week-ends and school vacations the way video games eat up the time for my sons.

       Unlike a lot of fans of that series, though, I had no interest in being Nancy Drew.  For one thing, I could never quite believe her situation  My father was a lawyer, and I knew perfectly well that he'd never share the details of any of his cases with me.  In fact, I was pretty sure that that would be illegal.  As to giving me a car and letting me run around on an allowance when  I wasn't in school and didn't have a job--not likely.  And if I'd ever gotten myself mixed up in a criminal investigation, he'd have packed me off to boarding school in Switzerland.

       Then I moved on to Agatha Christie, and the only woman solving crimes was a little old lady from St. Mary Mead.  But something else was gone as well, and it brings me to a question I really can't answer.

       Why is it, in detective stories for adults, that the crime is always murder?

       There is no reason why a detective story has to have a body in it.  Nancy Drew and her sisters in the Grosset and Dunlap pantheon almost never encountered bodies.  They focussed their attention on thefts, kidnappings, frauds, all kinds of crimes that are much more likely to exist in the real world.

       Murder is, after all, a relatively unusual crime.  There are more serial killers in books than there have ever been in real life.  The number of women in the United States who have ever killed their husbands for the insurance money is dwarfed by the number who have done it in books.

       In real life, in the meantime, police departments and federal policing agencies have expanded exponentially, and not just because of the drug war.  There are so many different scams, so many cases of fraud, such an explosion of identity theft that  police manuals can't keep up with them.

       There are the crimes that exist because we've manufactured them--crimes against regulations, for instance, that didn't exist twenty or thirty years ago.

       There are crimes that aren't crimes, but should be.  Most of the social workers who investigate complaints for state child protective services agencies know that a hefty percentage will be fabricated wholesale and an even larger number will be deliberately exaggerated, often for reasons of revenge.

       After all, why shouldn't  you call in a false report?  Reports are anonymous, and in most states, the law prohibits your victims from suing you for making them.
      
       Most of these false reports result in nothing worse than a waste of social worker time and taxpayer money, but in a few highly publicized cases they've resulted in much worse:  a kid removed from a loving family and placed in foster care for three days was raped by his foster father and left with HIV positive; another, in a different state, was murdered while in protective custody.

       By now, both the publishing industry and the review organs have largely given up the terms "murder mystery" and "detective novel" in favor of the "crime novel," but it seems to me that we don't actually have much in the way of novels that deal with crime.

       Instead, we get sex and death, often together, and the vast universe of the evil we do to each other goes largely unexplored.

       But then, I'm the kind of person who finds the details about Bernie Madoff a lot more interesting than the details about Jeffrey Dahmer.      

A couple of weeks ago, one of the houses on the other side of my road went into the worst phase of foreclosure.  There was a sign in the front yard announcing a public auction.  The family that had lived there for four years had everything else in the front yard, too, including their children's toys, staging a last major yard sale before they had to be out for good.

       It wasn't the fact of the foreclosure so much that bothered me, although I liked the family that lived in that house quite a bit.  They were a young and very vigorous couple with two tiny children, the second born less than two years before in that very same house.  They had two dogs, a miniature Scotty and an enormous black Newfoundland.  The dogs wandered through all our yards, and we were happy to see them.  The Scotty was yippie and fast and excitable.  The Newf was incredibly friendly and slow and gentle, but his sheer size--my guess would be around 150 pounds--was enough to scare the turkeys.

       Lots of things happen that lead to foreclosures.  I don't know what happened here.  What struck me about this particular foreclosure was the name of the mortgage company on the auction sign.

       There have been a lot of blithering and posturing politicians around the "mortgage crisis," but there are actually two mortgages crises, and this particular mortgage company has become infamous for the worst of them.

       The bad but not really criminal end of the mortgage crisis concerns people who took conventional mortgages for more money than it was sensible for them to borrow.  You can fault them, or their banks, for not doing the math, but nobody was engaging in fraud, deceit, or theft.

       The kicker end of the mortgage crisis, the thing that's covered by that bland term "subprime loans," has to do with mortgage companies (and especially the one involved here) who marketed mortgages to people--usually first time buyers, recent immigrants, and others not likely to know how the system worked--who not only weren't likely to be able to repay the loans, but who weren't likely to read the fine print either, or to understand it if they did.
      
       And the fine print was unbelievable.  Agents for this company and others sold adjustable rate mortgages to people by implying that this was the best kind, since rates could only go down.  Then they structured the loans in such a way that any late or missed payment immediately raised the interest rate and socked dozens of penalities on top of that as well.

       These were not mortgages that were subprime because they might fail.  These were mortgages that were subprime because the company knew in advance that there was virtually no possibility that they would not fail. 

       They were foreclosures waiting to happen.

       In the traditional mortgage market, this sort of behavior on the part of a lender would have made no sense at all.  Your friendly local bank does not want to forecloase on your house.  It's a pain in the ass, they look bad to the local community, and they're almost certainly going to lose money.  That's why your local bank is so fussy about credit ratings and verified income sources.

       For large mortgage finance companies like this one, however, the mortgage was only the first step in a process that was the proverbial cash cow.

       First, they gave the subprime mortgage to a borrower they knew couldn't handle it, under conditions that were not fully disclosed.

       Then they took it and other mortgages like it, bundled them together, labeled them something snazzy like Long Term Residential Estate Fund--and then sold shares of stock in that fund to anybody they could sell them to.

       Since real estate is supposed to be a safe and conservative investment, lots of people bought shares in what were called "mortgaged backed securities," and the finance company made many times more money for the sale of those shares than it had ever leant out to anybody.

       Then, when all the fine print provisions kicked in, the company foreclosed on the house, and whatever they got from its sale was pure, unencumbered profit.
      
       It didn't matter if the house sold for less than the amount of money they'd loaned in the mortgage, because they'd already made that money back by selling shares in their mortgage bundle.

       In other words, this was damned near a license to steal.

       And to my mind, it's a far greater crime than anything  Bernie Madoff managed to pull off.

       Madoff's clients were players, by and large.  They were sophisticated people who should have known better, and did know enough to pay more attention to what was happening in  Madoff's fund than they did.

       The finance company's clients are almost all young and relatively poor families who ended up losing their homes and their credit ratings because somebody played them for suckers.

       But here's the thing--give it a year or two, and there will be a dozen thrillers on the market with Bernie Madoff-inspired plots.  There will be none inspired by the actions of that finance company and its sisters, even though that's who created the mess we're in now.

       I wish sometimes that real crime was as interesting as fictional crime, and that more authors of fiction used those mucky crimes against ordinary people as the basis for their fiction.

       Fiction is a good way to learn to understand what's going on in this kind of thing, and I think that if more people understood it, I'd be less likely to see big Newfoundland dogs disappear from my back yard.

A Short Introduction, with Death

Never really know how to start these things.  I blog on my own website, and I've blogged at Moments in Crime before, but I find myself starting topics and wondering how much I should say about myself.

Because, if you ask me, I'm not the most fascinating person in the world.  The name on my books is Jane Haddam.  That's a pseudonym for something very long and Greek.  Other than that, though, I write murder mysteries--very classic, puzzle-oriented detective novels--and bring up children, and teach, sometimes, at local colleges.

That's just to get me out of my house.  I live in the country, and my back yard is full of wild turkeys, and I hate them.  They chase the cats. 

That's right.  I should have mentioned that.  I have cats.  One is called Creamsicle.  The other has gone by various names at various times.  At the moment, he's Holli, short for Doc Holliday.  He's enormous, and gorgeous, and thick as two planks. 

The other one is a lot smarter, but not nearly so pretty. 

The other thing, of course, is that I spend all my time thinking about who I'd like to kill.

If there's one good reason to write a murder mystery, it's definitely that you get the chance to murder all those people you really can't in real life, because of the, you know, law enforcement situation.

For instance:  over the years, I've killed off every single member of the Popular Crowd in my junior high school class, the guy who ripped me off when I bought my first new car, and my high school algebra nun.

That last one, I did twice.

These days, I spend a lot of time killing off Registered Nurses, who were not on my radar four years ago. 

This particular Registered Nurse will, if she reads this, think it's a real death threat.  That's because she has the imagination of sea sludge.

She's one of those people who think that if you haven't done it, you can't write about it. 

I hope she doesn't read my books, because...well, yeah.

Up until this person, though, all the RNs I knew were wonderful people.  So I'm expecting to be off the murder-the-RN kick as soon as I get this out of my system.

Writing murder mysteries keeps me out of jail, and I'm willing to bet I'm not the only one. 

Of course, in Living Witness, I was mostly in to killing off Concerned  Citizens.

But then, I don't think I have a very good attitude.

Blogging This Week: Jane Haddam!

JANE HADDAM, finalist for both the Edgar and the Anthony Awards, is the author of over twenty novels. She lives in Litchfield County, Connecticut.

In her 91 years, Ann-Victoria Hadley has often been the most hated person in Snow Hill, Pennsylvania. But now, it's worse than ever.  After a new school board inserted "intelligent design" into the curriculum, they were sued by a coalition including Hadley, the one member of the board who wouldn't go along with rest. With the trial about to start and the town held up as a national laughing stock, Annie-Vic is found clubbed into unconsciousness and not expected to survive. The local police chief, part of the school board himself, can't investigate, doesn't want to leave it to the state police, so he decides to bring Gregor Demarkian in.
Gregor Demarkian, former FBI agent, is only happy to help - his wedding is coming up and he's desperate for a bit of time away from his too-involved neighbors on Cavanaugh Street in Philadelphia. Even if it is to investigate a brutal crime in a powder-keg of a small town.

Going Gentle

So, here it is.  The last day  I do this.

     And, of course, people have now posted comments starting a discussion I wish I could follow up on.  I am not one of those people who want to see more fiction about people getting away with justifiable homicide, no matter how much the dead person seems to have deserved killing.  But my reasons for that are long and involved, and I'd never get them all in in just one post.

     For what it's worth, there's a British television series called Foyle's War, and  Foyle would understand why I feel the way I do.

      But I'd better clean up, because this is my last shot.

      Where I've been going over the last six days is here:  I think that what readers, and writers, actually want out of novels about deliberate murders, is murderers whose driving force is something they can believe that they themselves would fall prey to.

      That is, I don't think we want to know why other people commit murder.   I think we want to know why we might.

       If you think of it, that makes the classic murder story (concentrating on victims and suspects, with the detective secondary) a lot more like both softboiled and hardboiled mystery fiction than it appears at first.  In hard and soft boiled, the stress is on the personality and motives of the detective investigating the crime, and readers and writers can put themselves in his (or her) place.  And, in fact, they want to.  There are Philip Marlowe wannabes out there even today, and more than one woman fantasizing herself as Kinsey Milhone.

       I don't think we want to be the murderer in a classic murder story so much as we want a satisfactory answer to the question:  under what circumstances would I be capable of this?

       And that means that we want to think we are capable of that, that we in some way find ourselves deficient in humanity if we think we are not capable of that.  The fact that most of us really aren't, that murder wouldn't even occur to us in the situations in which most real-life deliberate murderers make their choice, doesn't make us happy.

       The murderers I write tend to be people who have something they want and the determination to get it.  They do not consider other people's feelings, or needs, or rights, or even human-ness.  They would all make terrible mothers.  Most of them would make terrible teachers, too. 

        I wonder how much of that, in my books, is a personal backlash against my own sense of responsibility, which sometimes seems to be endless, and often seems to land me in a place where I'm taking on one more job that nobody else wants to touch because, well, somebody has to do it. 

        In my real life, I don't fantasize about murdering anybody.  I fantasize about taking off for Jamaica, permanently.  You need to go to the doctor and have nobody to drive you?  You need your clothes washed and your meals cooked and transport to every sports game and play rehearsal for the next three months?  You've absolutely got to have this course if you're going to graduate in June?  The manuscript is three months late? Too bad!   Get somebody else to do it!  I'm in Montego Bay!

         But, of course, I  would never do that.  I just want to.  And the characters of people who would do it, and worse, fascinate me. 

         Right now,  I've just handed in the book for next year, so I'm not fantasizing about much of anything, but I'll be back to murder in a month or two.

         In the meantime, thank you to all the people who posted comments.

         And now I'd better do what this blog is for.

        My new book is called Cheating At Solitaire.   It's out now in hardcover.  Last year's book is called Glass Houses.  It's just out in paperback. 

         I hope you like them.

Never Let Facts Get In The Way of A Good Story

When I teach composition, which  I do sometimes, the first thing I tell my students is this:  human beings are narrative animals.  We are all hardwired to think in stories.

      This is, like anything else you can say about people, actually a statement of probability. Some small percentage of us seem to think in numbers instead of stories, and that's fortunate, because those people make it possible for us to go to space, speculate about the Big Bang, and invent the internal combustion engine.

       For most of us, though, a good story, with a solid narrative arc and characters who fit into a small range of reoccurring archetypes, will always sound more true than the often disjointed, unfocussed, meandering chaos of real life.  And that's a problem, and not just for the writers of crime novels.

        One of the people who was nice enough to comment on this blog pointed out that real murderers in the real world would usually make very bad novels, and that's true.  The problem is that for the same reason they make very bad novels, they make very big headaches for prosecuting attorneys, defense attorneys, judges and juries. 

        How many times have you watched one of those crime shows on Tru-TV or A&E and heard a juror insist that he had to vote to convict the poor, hapless sod who has recently been discovered to be innocent after spending fifteen years in jail.  After all, when they defendant was on trial, he showed no emotion at all!

         I come from a family, and a part of the country, where showing emotion is not considered to be a good thing.   And I know myself well enough to know that my first response to really bad news is often to simply go dead flat.  Worse yet, my response to being under pressure is either to laugh or get angry, practically admissions of guilt in the minds of the people who seem to get to be on juries.   If I'm ever wrongly accused of murdering somebody, I'd better just plea out in spite of my innocence.  I'm only going to hang myself in a courtroom.

        What stories give us is a sense of how things happen, and how people respond to the happening.   Jurors want to see distress on the face of a defendant because they're sure that that's how they would behave if they were wrongly accused, and they think that's how they behave because it's how they've seen countless characters behave on countless television shows, and in movies, and in novels.

         And the bias in favor of narrative doesn't just make it difficult to acquit the innocent, either.  It's an equal problem in convicting the guilty, if the guilty is one of th ose deliberate murderers we've been talking about.  These people do not come off as monsters.  They don't breathe fire and sprout horns  They're seldom contemptuous or dismissive.   In fact, they're often incredibly "nice," so "nice" that jurors just can't imagine them killing anybody.  It takes a mountain of evidence to counteract the impression of wide-eyed innocence given by somebody like Susan Smith.

           Fortunately, there often is a mountain of evidence.  One of the reasons I think that your average deliberate murderer has a skewed sense of proportion--that she or he thinks of murder in the same way you and I think of picking up milk at the supermarket--is that, in spite of elaborate attempts at cover stories and even at staging a crime scene, she often leaves evidence scattered all over the landscape.

          Fingerprints, stray hairs, fibers from carpets and ropes, footprints, easily identifiable pictures caught by security cameras--these are the standard stuff of crime entertainment of all sorts, some of it going all the way back to  Sherlock Holmes.  You'd think any human being with an IQ in triple digits and a desire to off his spouse would at least have the sense to wear gloves, or wipe down the doorknob, or something.

          I'm not talking about CSI-like superforensics, here. I'm talking about the bread and butter of every detective story since the dawn of the twentieth century.  It's as if these people can't quite make themselves believe that other people will take what they've done any more seriously than they do themselves.   

           And even when they seem to have vaguely grasped what a big deal this is going to be, they don't seem to be able to get their minds around just how big a deal, or how likely it is that somebody else will see it as a major, rather than a minor, event.

           Take my favorite category under the heading "really stupid crime stories," the one that's called "hiring a hit man."

          The first of these stories is one my editor brought to my attention.  It took me a little while to find,  but I think I found it.  But I only think.  It turns out there are dozens of stories like this out there.

          For the first, consider Nancy Sue Lasiewski, who ended up pleading guilty to attempted murder in Williamsburg, Maryland, after an undercover cop took her $40 down payment for the job.

          No, that's not a typo.  I said $40.

          Then there were Robert and Versi Jackson of Orlando, Florida, who paid an undercover cop $100 as a down payment on the murders of their three grandchildren, their daughter-in-law, and the family dog.

           And that's not a typo, either.  $100. 

           From a quick look through the literature, anybody willing to take less than $1000 as a down payment on murder is definitely a police officer, but plenty of "real" hit men (that is, guys willing to do a murder for hire) will work for $1000 to $1500 and even actually make somebody dead before they get caught and bring their employers down with them.   

           The country is awash in Jimmy the Tulip wannabes who didn't listen to that line in the movie where the hit men thought it was hilarious that some woman would expect them to do a hit for only ten grand.

            The country is even more awash--is that even a grammatical construction?--in people who have not read enough mafia novels.   

            Sometimes I  think they're all really like children, and don't actually understand what the word "dead" means.

The Truth, Even If It Didn't Happen

      I'm going to go off on a semi-tangent this morning, partly because this is a blog, and a blog doesn't absolutely require linear thought, and partly because this is just what I've been thinking about.

      Ken Kesey once had one of his characters say about somthing he was supposed to be writing that it was "the truth, even if it didn't happen."  I think a good book is like that.   It's the truth, even if it didn't happen, and in order for that to be the case, the writer has to get the people right.   Plot is decoration, in a way.   You can have your hero fly to Mars in a Volkswagen, get sucked into a black hole in Detroit, or ride to the defense of England in full armor.  It doesn't matter how impossible the events are, if the people are true, the book will be a good one.

       What does it mean, though, to write a murderer who is "true?"

       The more I look at real life murderers, the more I think that writers have been getting them wrong pretty much throughout the course of time.

       Maybe it's a function of culture and era.  Maybe the murderers who lived when  Aeschylus did, when Shakespeare did, were different from the murderers we have now.  Maybe they had better focus, and more intensely felt emotions.  Maybe they were more careful to be sure that their motives were proportionate to the crime they were about to commit.   Maybe, but I doubt it.

       Clytemnestra broods on her wrongs for ten long years in a cold, white, clear-sighted rage .  Lady McBeth calculates the exact worth of the profit to be had from getting her husband to kill the king.  Both women are flames of determination and conviction.  And both women, when they have what they want, fall prey to the madness of guilt.

        I'm not Shakespeare, or Aeschylus, but I understand those characters, and I could write approximations of them.  Intensity is not difficult to write.   It makes sense, and it makes sense of the otherwise senseless.   It's a kind of intoxication, really, and we all understand that, being caught up in our drive to do something, so caught up we aren't counting the cost.

        But Susan Smith and Diane Downs, Betty Broderick and Scott Peterson, do not really seem to be "caught up" in anything, and none of them has yet evinced anything at all like guilt-induced madness.  In fact, some of them don't seem to be bothered by guilt at all.

        A couple of years ago, Susan Smith caused an enormous ruckus when it turned out she had put her photograph up on one of those sites that finds pen pals for people in prison.  She had a picture of herself, looking very perky, and the notation that "children" were one of her favorite things.   Her crime was listed as "murder," but not otherwise explained. 

         This is not a woman who is pacing her cell every night, rubbing her hands and demanding "out, damned spot!"  Nor is there anything to indicate that she's gloating, like BTK says he was, going back over the crime and feeling satisfied with herself.  She's just...there, going along, day by day, almost as if none of it ever really happened, and her incarceration is an accident of circumstance, like the color of her hair.

        There's a lot of this kind of thing among real-life deliberate murderers.  If they get the chance to appear before a parole board, or on American Justice, they'll deliver pious little lectures on how they have to "live with what happened every single day."  The words just don't seem to have any connection to anything the rest of us would call emotion.

        In all the years I've been reading about murderers, and writing about murderers, and watching movies and television shows about murderers, I've seen exactly one example of this attitude in any character presented anywhere.   That was the character played by  Sissy Spacek in the movie Badlands.  The character was very well done.  She gave a downright eerie feeling to the entire movie, since she narrated it as well as participated in it.  On the other hand, although Badlands has achieved cult status, it's nothing like one of the highest grossing movies of all time.

       Maybe the reason we don't know more about murderers is that we don't want to know.  Maybe the idea that somebody could commit a murder in the same mental state in which they would do a shop at the grocery store is a little more realistic than any of us is ready for. 

       And maybe, just maybe, we've got the entire idea of "motive" wrong.

No Fault

So here's the thing:  I sometimes teach a course or two in at a local college, mostly to get myself out of the house and talk to actual people.   It's the one great drawback of writing for a living.  You can do it at home in your bathrobe, but you're going to do it alone, and unless you make plans to get in touch with actual human beings, you're going to end up talking to the turkeys. 

       So I've been teaching a couple of sections of composition over the past few months, and now that the term is winding down I've been looking for something to read to seque into summer.  The book I came up with was the Orestia, the three plays by Aeschylus following the story of the House of Atreus, from Clytemnestra's murder of her husband Agamemnon to her own murder by her son Orestes. 

        If you happen to be one of the people who saw the movie Troy but otherwise know nothing about  Greek myth, this is going to surprise you, because the producers/directors/whatever idiots were responsible killed Agamemnon off before he ever got a chance to get home again and get murdered by his spouse.

         But you really don't want me to get started on that movie.  Because, trust me, we'll be here all day.  Suffice it to say that the only thing I think was worthwhile about the thing was the amount of time  Brad Pitt spent with his shirt off.

          The point here, in case you haven't guessed yet, is that the story of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra is the story of a husband murdered by his wife.   Cases of child murder are actually, and fortunately, very rare, but cases of spousal murder are numerous.  Most of those cases come under the heading of thoughtless acts of emotion--the finding her with her lover sort of thing, or the kind of rage that sometimes results from really nasty divorce proceedings.

           In spite of all the grounds for losing it, though, it's remarkable how many spousal murders are of the cold and deliberate kind.  I don't mean that there is no emotion involved.  Of course there is, often deep and lasting emotion.  It's one thing, however, to pop your cork and unload your pistol before you have a chance to think.  It's another to nurse your grievances while you plot your revenge.

          Clytemnestra plotted for years, all the way from the time Agamemnon sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia to get the gods to give him victory in Troy, to the time, a decade later, when he came home with a Trojan mistress named Cassandra.   

           Later, Orestes, their son, would plot his way into appearing at his mother's house in disguise, in order to murder her to avenge his father.

            The House of Atreus was not exactly chock full of role models for Happy Family Living. 

             On the other hand, neither was the House of Broderick, and Betty Broderick had far fewer causes for complaint than Clytemnestra had.  What's more, in twentieth century California, with no fault divorce and both a husband and a legal system inclined to compensate her for her travails, it's difficult to see the motive for her behavior as anything much more than...spite. 

              And spite, unlike the rage of a mother whose daughter has been murdered by a man who expects her to go on sleeping with him, is a very petty emotion indeed.

            To recap a bit, on the subject of Betty Broderick:  she was the housewife married to a prominent attorney who, having been dumped by said attorney in favor of a newer model, responded by walking into the new couple's house in the dead of night and shooting them both in the head.

             It was the perfect set-up for a made-for-Lifetime movie, except that Betty was not your average wronged spouse.   If she had been, she would have been satisfied with a settlement that included a brand new house and custody of the children.  That doesn't mean she wouldn't also have been furious.  Of course she would have been.  But by and large, women with adequate divorce settlements don't go looking to off the source of their alimony checks.

            There are people who claim that Betty Broderick was mentally ill, at least temporarily, driven insane by the pressures of the divorce and her husband's remarriage.  And it's true that a lot of her behavior does seem downright nuts.  At one point, for instance, she drove her car right through the front door of the house her ex-husband shared with his new wife.   On several occassions, she left foul-mouthed messages on his answerng machine, messages she knew her children would hear, or that were actually left for her children.  And as for staging a scene--well, Betty Broderick was the queen of the scene stages.  She seemed to think of it as a sort of hobby.

            But after you clear out all the debris here, the facts remain stark:  the divorce had been over for some time before Betty walked into that bedroom with her gun.  The arrangements had been made.  The new marriage had already happened.  There had been adequate time and distance for everybody to calm down.  Nor was the murder itself a spur of the moment thing, a single explosion of rage.   In order to commit it, Betty had to get the gun, drive across town, sneak into the house, walk upstairs, kill her husband and his wife, go downstairs again, and then proceed to an elaborate series of acts in an attempt to cover up what she had done or, that failing, give herself a good excuse for having done it.  That's a lot of planning to in a single moment of rage.

       I think that, of all the real-life murderers I've looked into over the years, Betty Broderick comes closest to the mental/emotional/moral/philosophical human being that fascinates me.  I even understand the underlying personality.  I, too, am a person who does not let go of hurt easily.  Hell, let's be honest here.  You don't want to do something that really gets me angry.   I've got grudges I've kept intact for thirty years.

       But in spite of the facile "truth" that we are all capable of murder "under the right circumstances," I've never had the least urge to murder any of the few people who have inspired my long-term wrath.  And I think that, for me, "the right circumstances" would have to include a momentary explosion, a psychological break, a loss of countrol.

       In other words, although we might all be capable of murder "under the right circumstances," I don't think we are all capable of deliberate murder.   Only some of us are, and the question becomes, what makes them so?