Crime Writer Margot Kinberg

Not everyone follows the mainstream cultural norms. In fact, some groups, like hippies, actively oppose the dominant culture. They reject the dominant culture’s norms and expectations, and sometimes protest that culture. Hippies are generally associated with the late 1960s and early 1970s, but there are still people who live the hippie life. As characters in crime fiction, hippies can add an interesting layer to a story and can give a different perspective.

In Agatha Christie’s Third Girl, Hercule Poirot gets a visit from a young woman who tells him she may have committed a murder. Then, she abruptly changes her mind about hiring him and tells him he’s ‘too old.’ As you can imagine, Poirot is miffed, and he tells his friend, detective novelist Ariadne Oliver, about the incident. It turns out that Mrs. Oliver has met the girl before, and soon identifies her as Norma Restarick. On the chance that she did commit a murder (or knows something about a murder), Poirot and Mrs. Oliver try to track Norma down and find out what they can. But she seems to have disappeared. The trail leads in part to a group of counterculture people you might think of as early hippies. As the story goes on, we get Poirot’s and Mrs. Oliver’s view of these young people, and it’s interesting to see how they were perceived at the time Christie wrote the novel (it was published in 1966).

Walter Mosley’s Little Green features PI Ezekiel ‘Easy’ Rawlins. In the novel, Rawlins’ friend Raymond ‘Mouse’ Alexander persuades him to look for a missing Black man nicknamed Little Green. It seems that Little Green disappeared after getting involved with a group of hippies, so Rawlins looks among those people for answers. He finds that a young white woman named Coco may know something about the group of hippies and where they spend their time. Rawlins tracks her down, and they agree to meet at a local diner. Perhaps in part because she is counterculture, Coco isn’t put off by the fact that Rawlins is Black and she is white, even though in 1967, that was often an issue. It’s an interesting look at how hippies’ views impacted their views of others.

One of Kerry Greenwood’s protagonists is Melbourne-based baker Corinna Chapman. She was born in a New South Wales hippie commune and isn’t even sure when her birthday is. As the years went by, she rejected living ‘off the grid,’ and became an accountant, then a baker. Her parents, however, have not left the commune. They still hold fast to their hippie ways, and that’s caused no end of friction between daughter and parents. Even so, in Devil’s Food, Corinna helps when her father, who calls himself Sunlight, runs off to Melbourne with the couple’s money. Her mother, who is called Starshine, pays Corinna an unannounced visit, begging her to find Sunlight. The search takes Corinna through some of the last refuges of Melbourne’s down-and-out population. It doesn’t change her views of the hippie life, but she does help take care of her parents.

Vicki Delany’s In the Shadow of the Glacier introduces readers to one of her protagonists, Constable Moonlight ‘Molly’ Smith. She lives and works in Trafalgar, British Columbia. She has her own place to live, but she also spends time with her parents, Andy and Lucy ‘Lucky.’ They are both hippies – well, at least Lucky is (hence, Molly’s name) – who own a wilderness adventure store. In fact, they first came to Canada from the US because of the Vietnam War. Lucky is an activist who frequently gets involved in protests and other resistance work, and although Molly loves and even admires her mother, it can be difficult to have an activist parent.

And then there’s Eleanor Catton ‘s Birnam Wood. In the novel, we meet a guerilla gardening collective called Birnam Wood. For years, the group has been quietly planting crops wherever people won’t notice, especially on abandoned land. Most of the time, they use peaceful means to make their point. But not always. Their latest target is a chunk of land near the small town of Thorndike, on New Zealand’s South Island. Their goal is to live a completely sustainable life. The land they’ve chosen, though, is also of interest to American billionaire Robert Lemoine, who wants to set the property up as a bunker. When he meets Birnam Wood’s leader, Mira Bunting, he’s hoping to be able to use his money to get the group to do what he wants. But will he be able to sway Mira? Even if he does, what will the group do? How much influence does she really have? It’s an interesting psychological approach to storytelling.

Hippies and other countercultural groups can sometimes show us ways in which we can grow as a society. They call attention to some of society’s wrongs, and demand change in ways that other groups may not. Sometimes they’re peaceful, sometimes not. But either way, they make for interesting crime-fictional characters.

ps. Bonus points if you can guess where I was when I took this photo!

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from Galt MacDermot and James Rado’s Aquarius.