Crime Writer Margot Kinberg

There are a lot of ways in which people communicate. For many generations, that was done by sending letters; now, of course, email and texting are important communication tools, too. When we write letters, emails, or texts, though, there’s always the risk that our privacy might be compromised. Letters can be read by others (unless they’re destroyed first), and emails and texts can be hacked, accidentally read, and so on. On the one hand, that can help police who are looking for evidence of a crime. On the other, it can be embarrassing to say the least if a very personal letter or email gets out. And it can have dire consequences.

For example, in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Purloined Letter, the prefect of the Paris police visits private investigator C. Auguste Dupin to ask his opinion of an odd case. A compromising letter has been stolen from its recipient. The victim knows who stole the letter, and she knows why. However, she can’t say anything or have the police do much about it, because if she does, some very sensitive things will be made public. The only solution seems to be to take the letter back from the person who stole it and return it to its rightful owner. But the thief’s rooms have been searched to no avail. The letter seems to have disappeared. Dupin works out where the letter must be and determines that the thief has put it in an ingenious place.

Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton also has to do with letters taken by a blackmailer. In this case, Lady Eva Brackwell goes to Sherlock Holmes for help. It seems that years earlier, she had written some indiscreet letters. Now, they are in the possession of a blackmailer named Charles Augustus Milverton. He’s demanding ten thousand pounds, or he’ll send the letters to Lady Eva’s fiancé, who is likely to break off their engagement if he sees them. Holmes agrees to take the case, and he meets with Milverton. It’s not a successful meeting, though, so Holmes devises another approach; he and Dr. Watson will break into Milverton’s home, find the letters, and take them back. It turns out to be a very adventurous night…

Agatha Christie’s The Veiled Lady is a short story featuring Hercule Poirot. In it, a young woman calling herself Lady Millicent Castle Vaughan is engaged to be married. As she explains to Poirot, she once wrote a compromising letter to another man, and now a blackmailer named Mr. Lavington has the letter. If she doesn’t get the letter back, he’ll reveal all to her fiancé. The letter, so Lady Millicent says, is tucked into a small box with a secret drawer in it. Once Poirot has a description of the box, he and Captain Hastings make a plan to get the box back. It turns out that very little in this story is as it seems, and it’s an interesting look at the way Poirot can be unconventional about his detecting.

In Claire Baylis’ Dice, a jury gathers at the courthouse on Rotorua, on New Zealand’s North Island. They’re there to hear and vote on a disturbing case. A group of teenage boys is on trial for a variety of rape and sexual assault crimes, and the jury will have to decide which, if any, of the boys is guilty. It seems that the boys had invented a sex game they called Dice; each boy rolled two dice to determine which sex act he’d have to perform with the girl whose name came up. The original idea was that each girl would have to give consent, so it wouldn’t be rape. But as the trial goes on, we learn that in several instances, it wasn’t a clear case of ‘consent given.’ Was it rape? If so, what should the consequences be? And what does the game itself say about rape culture and attitudes towards girls and women? Some of the evidence in the case comes from a series of text messages among the boys and with some of the girls – texts that come to light during evidence gathering, and that several people involved in the case probably regretted sending.

And then there’s Nishita Parekh’sThe Night of the Storm. In that novel, Jia Shah and her son Ishaan have recently moved to from Chicago to Houston after Jia left her husband Dev. She’s just starting to get settled when a major hurricane threatens the area. Jia’s own home is at risk, so she and Ishaan go to the home of her sister Seema and Seema’s husband Vipul. That house is better placed to withstand the storm, and it’s more than large enough to accommodate both families. Vipul’s brother Raj and his wife Lisa also take refuge there, as does Vipul’s mother. When the storm hits, the group is more or less stranded in the house. There’s plenty of food and drink, but the tension brings out the worst in everyone. As the novel goes along, we learn about the days and weeks and months leading up to the storm, and we see that there are underlying conflicts and tension that come boiling to the surface because of the storm and everyone’s close proximity. It all leads to tragedy and more than one death, and part of it comes from a series of texts which should never have been sent. Those indiscreet texts play a role in the story.

And that’s the thing about letters and now, emails and texts. They don’t always stay private. When they do come to light, the results can be tragic. It makes one wonder why people save those things…

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from the Box Tops’ The Letter.