Authors: Otto Penzler
I read voraciously, as all writers should. Like many boys, I flirted with the horror genre and then, in my early teens, I read my first mystery novel. Each summer, my father would take us to spend two weeks with my grandmother in Ballylongford, a small village in County Kerry. She had bookshelves that would be regularly raided and refilled by visiting relatives, and at the beginning of each vacation my father would engage in the solemn ritual of the Choosing of the Book. Only on vacation would my father read a novel, preferring newspapers for the rest of the year, so the selection of the right book was of paramount importance to him. (He once chose I, Claudius, which was a grave error, as it took him two years to finish, a mistake he never repeated.)
That summer, my father chose a book entitled Let’s Hear It for the Deaf Man, by Ed McBain. I think he chose it because it was short, and after the I, Claudius debacle, short was good. One day, he put it aside to tackle the newspaper, and intrigued by the title, I began reading. That book became the first, and only, book over which my father and I fought for possession. Thereafter, I read every single Ed McBain book I could find. It was my introduction to the genre of which I would ultimately become a small part.
I met McBain, whose real name was Evan Hunter, shortly before he died. There had been a misunderstanding between us early in my career when, as a means of paying homage to him, I had given some characters in my first novel names that echoed his own work. There was a Fat Ollie, and an Evan Baines—awkward, I know, but well-intentioned. McBain was incensed, misinterpreting it as an act of theft. Years later, when we met at last, I explained to him the reason for what I had done and subsequently received a gracious and apologetic e-mail in reply. It was a great relief. It’s possible that I might not have ended up writing what I do had it not been for him, and I did not want him to think ill of me.
Now that I come to think of it, my encounters with my literary idols have usually involved a dollop of mild humiliation for me. When interviewing James Lee Burke in Montana, I managed to get lost for a time in the Great Rattlesnake Wilderness while out for a walk with him, and was eventually found by his neighbor’s dogs. I interviewed Stephen King, and managed to cause my pile of first editions, ready to be signed, to fall on his foot. Sometimes I wonder if it’s really safe to allow me out on my own.
I studied English at university, and one option was a course in detective fiction. It was to be a defining choice for me, as it introduced me to the work of Ross Macdonald. Although it would be another five years before I began writing my first novel, it owes its genesis to that course. I hunted down every book by Macdonald I could find, which, in those pre-Internet days, meant scouring used-book stores for British paperback editions with fantastically unsuitable covers, usually featuring women in various states of undress. I even found a first edition of Find a Victim from 1954 on my parents’ bookshelf at home. It had come from a lending library in the American Midwest. I have no idea how it ended up in my parents’ possession.
After college, I entered journalism, mainly because I liked writing and I could see few other ways in which I could be paid to write. Inevitably, perhaps, I grew frustrated with journalism. I wanted to write fiction, and newspapers tend to disapprove of the urge toward the fictitious in their reporters.
So one evening I sat down at my computer at home and began writing about a man driving toward a cemetery, flowers on the backseat of his car, his mind filled with memories of his dead wife and child.
He was Charlie Parker, and it was the beginning of Every Dead Thing.
III
In 1996, I had already completed the first half of what would eventually become my first novel. I had been very influenced by two writers mentioned earlier, James Lee Burke and Ross Macdonald. Burke’s influence was stylistic and linguistic, while Macdonald’s was more difficult to pinpoint. It was thematic, perhaps, or even philosophical. His detective, Lew Archer, was profoundly empathetic. Archer himself says at one point, “I hear voices crying in the night, and I go see what’s the matter.” I loved that about Archer: his inability to remain silent or inactive while another was suffering. It has always seemed to me that empathy is one of the greatest of human emotions, the capacity to feel another’s pain as one’s own and, as a consequence, to work to take that pain away. For me, evil is the absence of empathy.
The Irish philosopher-politician Edmund Burke once wrote, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” At some level, that is what the best of mystery fiction is about: the refusal of good men and women to do nothing in the face of evil, even at considerable cost to themselves, because a failure to intervene makes one complicit in what occurs.
Macdonald’s novels are also fascinated by the idea of the sins of the fathers being visited on the sons, of one generation suffering for the sins of its predecessors. Macdonald understood that suffering is frequently not earned or deserved. People suffer through no fault of their own. They suffer because they are vulnerable or oppressed. They suffer because they are in the wrong place at the wrong time. They suffer because they are the wrong color, or creed, or sex. They suffer because they can be made to suffer.
It seemed to me that there was a distinction between the outlook of Macdonald (and some of his peers) and that of certain British crime writers of a similar vintage. If one reads the classic “Golden Age” British crime novels, one again and again encounters individuals who suffer and die because they are bad. Few nice people die in Agatha Christie’s novels. Most of them are adulterers, or thieves, or blackmailers. They bring their deaths upon themselves. We are not asked to feel pity for them or empathy. Their killers have to be found and punished as a matter of social order rather than because the murders they have committed diminish us all as human beings, or as an effort at recompense for the deaths of innocents. Even Dorothy L. Sayers, whose awareness of a moral universe ruled by God could hardly be in doubt, is not immune to cold-heartedness. In The Nine Tailors, death comes to a thief in the form of divine retribution. Even God is not merciful in the face of criminal behavior.
I think that something of Macdonald’s intensely humane view of people and how they suffer influenced my reaction to Belinda Pereira’s death. As a consequence, the novel on which I was working began to change. Its central character, the private detective Charlie Parker, became a being defined not simply by anger and the desire for revenge, but by his own sufferings. Because he has suffered, he is unwilling to allow others to suffer in turn. It is his capacity for empathy that ultimately ensures he does not destroy himself with selfishness and grief, or allow himself to be destroyed by the man he is hunting, the killer of his wife and child.
The novel had always begun with its prologue. That was the first part of it I wrote, and although it went through many revisions, the essence remained the same. I wanted to write about a man who loses everything and who struggles to survive, to remain human in the aftermath. There was a kind of awful liberation, I thought, in having one’s worst nightmares come to pass. Once someone had endured loss on that level, it seemed to me that very little could ever hurt him to a similar degree again. I gave him the name Charlie Parker because I liked the connotations of flight, freedom, and spirituality that came with the nickname Bird, the moniker given to the jazz musician with whom he shared this name, especially for a man so mired in mortality. In subsequent novels, the nickname was largely dispensed with. I didn’t want readers to think it was a gimmick, because it was not meant to be.
Yet Parker was still in the process of being formed, even when that first novel was completed and eventually published in 1999, and Belinda Pereira was still hovering in the background, battered and bloodied. By that time, the investigation into her death had ground to a halt.
IV
Let’s return for a moment to Macdonald, who, as well as being a great novelist (the greatest mystery novelist of his age, I would argue, greater even than Chandler), was also a generous and perceptive critic. In an essay on James M. Cain, Macdonald wrote, “A first novel can be a kind of index to an author’s ensuing work.”
First novels are frequently criticized for including rather too much material. In part, this is a consequence of a writer’s belief that he or she may never have the opportunity to publish a novel again, and therefore everything that seems even mildly important or relevant should be included in what may be that single published work. Also, first novels tend to represent the sum total of a writer’s knowledge and experience up to that stage in his or her life. To put it another way, it takes a lifetime to write a first novel, and then a contract gives one a year to write a second.
Macdonald offers a different perspective on the first novel. It is an introduction to a writer, and to that writer’s obsessions. Not every subject or theme may be dealt with in depth in that first work, or examined in great detail, but they will recur later in the writer’s career, and a passing reference in a first novel may become the core of a later book. (That has certainly been my experience as a writer. The novel I’m currently working on, The Lovers, deals with an incident that is barely described in Every Dead Thing, and I have very consciously crafted the Parker books as a sequence of novels, each one building upon what has happened earlier.)
The seeds of what Parker would become were sown in Every Dead Thing, but it was only over the course of the subsequent books that they bore fruit, a not uncommon characteristic of detective series. The first signs of this are apparent in Dark Hollow, my second novel, and the book in which I decided to deal explicitly with my feelings about the Belinda Pereira case. In the novel, Parker is required to view the body of a young woman, Rita Ferris, who has been murdered in her apartment. He forces himself to imagine her final moments, an act of painful empathy but one that is necessary for him, a small service for the dead. Later, it becomes clear that Rita has been working as a prostitute to supplement her income and support her child, but Parker keeps that knowledge to himself until he has to divulge it. He does not want her to be judged and discarded because of this one aspect of her life.
In Dark Hollow, the person responsible for the death of Rita Ferris is found, and a degree of punishment is meted out. In real life, Belinda Pereira’s killer has not been found. It has been suggested that two pimps from Monaghan, a county in the north of Ireland, were responsible, but if they were, there is not enough evidence to bring them to trial. A public appeal by the Garda Síochána in 2005 for new information led nowhere.
I wonder sometimes if part of the appeal of mystery fiction is its capacity to give us answers and solutions that we don’t always get in real life. In real life, the guilty go unpunished. In real life, a young woman can be beaten with a hammer until she is beyond identification, and her killer or killers can retreat into the shadows, never to be found. But in mystery fiction, a man of some goodness, however compromised he may be, can choose to act on behalf of the victim and achieve a measure of justice. No matter how dark such fiction may appear to be, it is never entirely without hope.
V
Why, then, given the nature and setting of Belinda Pereira’s murder, did I not choose to set Dark Hollow in Ireland? Why is Charlie Parker not Irish?
Like most writers, I began writing what I read, and what I read was largely American fiction, and not exclusively mystery fiction either. I had never been very attracted to the British model, and mystery fiction has never really been part of the Irish literary tradition.
That latter observation may be worth closer examination, given the surge in production of Irish crime fiction in recent years. Nobody has ever been able to come up with a single compelling reason why Irish writers chose not to investigate the possibilities of crime fiction for many years, even while English and Scottish writers pursued them with a vengeance. The dearth of Irish crime fiction is, I suspect, a consequence of a number of factors, some literary and some social.
To begin with, Ireland was a rural society, and it was G. K. Chesterton who noted that crime fiction functions better in urban rather than rural settings, that it is, on one level, tied up with the poetry of urban life. Ireland was also not a very violent society, terrorism apart. I realize, of course, that the use of the term “terrorism apart” is a little like saying that Einstein didn’t achieve much scientifically, “the Theory of Relativity apart.” Terrorism cast a shadow over modern Irish life for the best part of three decades, and its influence extended far beyond the bombings and shootings that took place in Northern Ireland and, on occasion, in the South. One might argue that it would be difficult to write about crime in Ireland and not touch upon the subject of terrorism, which may be why so many writers chose instead to neglect the genre entirely.
There are exceptions: Eugene McEldowney’s A Kind of Homecoming, for example, or Eoin McNamee’s Resurrection Man, which dealt with the Protestant killers known as the “Shankill Butchers,” although McNamee might well dispute the description of Resurrection Man as a crime novel. Perhaps, too, there was a sense that mystery fiction was simply not up to the task of tackling the subject of terrorism, particularly terrorism that was ongoing and so close to home. The wounds were too raw, and fresh ones were being inflicted every day. Even Irish literary fiction seemed to struggle with the enormity of what was happening on our small island.
Finally, there has long been a strong antirationalist tradition in Irish literature, which found its expression in, among others, the great Anglo-Irish gothic novels: Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray; the fantasy fiction of Mervyn Wall (the two Fursey books); and the surreal visions of Flann O’Brien (At Swim-Two-Birds; The Third Policeman, itself a kind of anticrime novel). By contrast, crime fiction, in its most conservative form, is intensely rationalist in outlook. Think of Poe’s Dupin, Christie’s Poirot, and Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, each of whom places great store by the processes of ratiocination. Philosophically, this is at odds with the Irish outlook, one that for many years placed a greater emphasis on an artistic rather than a scientific response to the world.