Crime Writer Margot Kinberg

It’s the beginning of a new year, and for many people, that means setting goals for themselves. The thing about setting goals, though, is that you have to make a plan to achieve them. Whether it’s getting a new job, making a major purchase, or something else, it’s hard to achieve a goal if you haven’t planned for it. Some people aren’t very good at bold, sweeping plans. Others aren’t afraid to make major plans. And it’s interesting to see how those bold planners fare as characters in novels. Sometimes their boldness works; sometimes it doesn’t. But characters like that are nearly always interesting.

For instance, in Agatha Christie’s After the Funeral (AKA Funerals are Fatal), Hercule Poirot finds out the truth about the death of wealthy patriarch Richard Abernethie. His younger sister Cora claims that he was murdered, and since all of his relatives were eager for money, that’s not out of the realm of possibility. When Cora herself is murdered the day after making that statement, it seems even more likely. One of the people who benefit from Abernethie’s will is his niece, Susan Banks. She’s a smart, bold planner who wants to open her own salon and beauty care business. All she needs is ‘seed money;’ she can plan for everything else. While Abernethie was alive, he wasn’t keen on giving a lot of money to a woman to open a business. But with his death, Susan inherits more than enough to start her enterprise. Is that enough to have driven her to murder?

In Robert Pollock’s Loophole; or, How to Rob a Bank, Mike Daniels and his gang of professional thieves choose a new target: City Savings Deposit Bank. It’s not going to be easy to get in, as the bank has the latest in security equipment. But they develop a big, bold plan. They’re going to tunnel underneath the bank to get in (yes, fans of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Red-Headed League, it is very similar in that way). The group’s going to need some expert advice to break in. Daniels thinks he’s found his man when he meets Stephen Booker, an out-of-work architect who works nights driving cab. After a bit of persuasion, Booker agrees to go in with the team, and they lay their plans. It’s all carefully put together, and on the day of the break-in, all starts out well enough. Then a sudden storm comes up and changes everything…

Donald Westlake’s John Dortmunder is a professional thief. When we first meet him, in The Hot Rock, he just been released from prison. He’s planning to ‘go straight,’ but everything changes when his friend Andy Kelp tracks him down. It seems that there’s a new heist in the works, and Kelp wants Dortmunder to be a part of it. The target is a very valuable emerald currently on display at New York’s Coliseum. It’s officially the property of the country of Akinzi, but the country of Talabwo has a historical claim on it and wants it back. Major Patrick Iko, U.N. Ambassador from Talabwo, hires Dortmunder, Kelp, and the rest of their group to steal the emerald. The group makes careful plans to take the jewel and tries to account for all of the possible challenges they might face. Of course, as you might imagine, things don’t go exactly as the group has planned…

Catherine O’Flynn’s What Was Lost introduces ten-year-old Kate Meaney. She lives a rather humdrum life in a bleak sort of Midlands town. But Kate doesn’t mind all that. She wants more than anything else to be a detective and has a bold plan to become a famous PI. She even has her own agency, Falcon Investigations. She spends a great deal of her time at the newly built Green Oaks Mall, watching for suspicious activity. Her grandmother, Ivy, thinks that it would be best for Kate to go away to school, so it’s arranged for Kate to sit the entrance exams for the exclusive Redspoon School. When she doesn’t return after the exam, everyone gets concerned, and there’s a major search. Nothing’s turned up, though – not even a body. Twenty years later, a mall security guard named Kurt keeps seeing a strange figure on the mall’s CCTV camera: a young girl who looks a lot like Kate. Kurt and his new friend Lisa Palmer (who knew Kate) go back to the past, if I can put it that way, to find out what really happened to Kate and her big plans.

And then there’s Paul Doiron’s Massacre Pond. Mike Bowditch is a game warden who works in rural Maine. One day, he gets a call that several moose have been killed on the property of Elizabeth ‘Betty’ Morse. She owns a very large piece of land that she’s planning to give to the state to be used as a wildlife sanctuary. She has big plans for conservation, species reclamation, and so on, and it starts with her ceding the land to the state. But there are many legalities and other complications with that plan, and it’s all proving more difficult and time consuming than she thought. It doesn’t help that her plan has become quite controversial, since plenty of Mainers don’t want the land restricted. People like guides, hunting lodge owners, hunters, and plenty of ordinary people want to be able to use the land to hunt. It’s a bitter feud, and the dead moose are not helping to calm things down. Then, there’s a murder. Now, the already-charged atmosphere gets even more tense, and Bowditch will need to find out who killed the moose, and who committed the murder.

Bold, sweeping plans can have a lot of appeal, especially if you imagine a ‘dream’ result. But plans don’t always go the way we think they will, and bold planners can meet a lot of trouble. Still, they can add much to a crime novel.

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from Billy Joel’s This is the Time.