Crime Writer Margot Kinberg

I’m sure you know the sort of thing. It might be a new partner who wants to ‘invest your money.’ Or it might be a job interview where you’re asked if you’re comfortable staying very late and coming in every weekend. Or it might be an online company that doesn’t seem to have an address or reliable telephone number. These are all ‘red flags’ that something isn’t right, and they’re worth heeding. People don’t always pay attention to those signs, but they’re there. Of course, when it comes to crime fiction, if people did heed the ‘red flags,’ there wouldn’t be much of a story to tell. Still, it’s interesting to see how people can choose to ignore those signs.

For instance, in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Red-Headed League, we meet Jabez Wilson, who owns a local pawn shop. One day, his shop assistant tells him of an advertisement for a position that might suit him. It seems that a group calling itself the Red-Headed League is looking for a new member/employee. Wilson goes along to the interview and ends up getting hired. His job, so his employers tell him, will be to copy the Encyclopaedia Brittanica. The whole thing seems a bit odd to Wilson, but he takes the job. It’s only for a few hours a day, so he can still run his pawn shop. It seems too easy and good to be true, and so it turns out to be. One day when Wilson goes to the new job, he finds the place shuttered and a note saying that the Red-Headed League is disbanded. Perplexed about the whole thing, he goes to Sherlock Holmes for help in finding out the truth. The whole interview and overly easy job were warning signs. So was the requirement that Wilson not leave his desk while he was copying the encyclopaedia. It turns out he was being used by a criminal gang that wanted to dig a tunnel between his pawn shop and a nearby bank.

In Agatha Christie’s Evil Under the Sun, famous actress Arlena Marshall, her husband, Kennth, and her stepdaughter, Linda, take a seaside holiday at the Jolly Roger Hotel. Before long, it’s clear that she is carrying on a not-very-well-hidden affair with another guest, Patrick Redfern. There’s a lot of gossip about her notoriety, but it doesn’t seem to stop her. Then one day, she is murdered and her body is discovered at a cove not far from the hotel. Hercule Poirot is staying at the same hotel, and he works with the local police to find out who the killer is. As Poirot looks into the victim’s background, he finds that she ignored several ‘red flags’ in her relationships. And that refusal to heed those warnings had a lot to do with her murder.

John D. MacDonald’s The Deep Blue Goodbye is the first of his series featuring Travis McGee, who bills himself as a ‘salvage consultant.’ In reality, he is a private investigator who helps people who’ve been bilked are desperate to get their money back. In the novel, a friend of McGee’s tells him she’s concerned about her friend Catherine Kerr. It seems that Catherine has had something stolen from her and desperately needs to get it back. McGee meets with Catherine and learns that she’s a single mother whose ex-partner made off with something of value – something that she needs back. The odd thing is, McGee’s not really sure what was stolen. Still, he follows the trail and catches up with both Catherine’s property and the man who stole it. Along the way, we learn that there were ‘red flags’ in this relationship, but that Catherine was drawn in despite knowing there could be trouble.

Mark Billingham’s Their Little Secret sees Detective Inspector (DI) Tom Thorne and his team investigating the death of Philippa Goodwin. On the surface, it looks like a straightforward case of suicide, but Thorne thinks there’s more to it than that. It soon comes out that the dead woman had been the victim of a ruthless con man called Conrad Simpkin. His stock in trade is swindling his female conquests out of any money they have, and now Thorne wants to track him down. It’s not going to be easy, though, because Simpkin’s victims are not eager to admit they’ve been fleeced. One even admits that she should have paid attention to the ‘red flags,’ but didn’t. The stakes are raised when a young man called Kevin Deane is murdered, and his body found on a local beach. DNA at the scene proves to be a match for one Patrick Jennings, which is one of the aliases Simpkin uses. Now, he’s wanted not just for fraud, but for murder.

And then there’s Patricia Melo’s The Body Snatcher. In it, an unnamed narrator has recently moved from São Paulo to the small town of Corumbá, not far from the Bolivian border. He and his partner are hoping to start a life for themselves, although neither has much money. One day, the narrator happens to see a small plane crash in a field. He rushes to the scene to see if there’s anything he can do. It’s too late to save the pilot, but the narrator does find a backpack. On impulse, he grabs it and takes it home. When he opens it, he’s shocked to find that it’s full of cocaine. That, of course, is a major ‘red flag,’ and the narrator is smart enough to know that. But the thought of all that easy money is too tempting to resist. So, the narrator decides to sell the cocaine, just this once. Then, he and his partner can truly start their future. He enlists the help of a friend and at first it looks as though things will go well. But before long, things begin to spin out of control when a Bolivian drug king finds out what’s happened to his cocaine…

‘Red flags’ are there for us to see, whether they’re related to toxic relationships, ‘too good to be true’ investments, or something else. People don’t always heed those warnings, but they’re there. And when we don’t pay attention, anything can happen.

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from Billy Joel’s Storm Front.