Crime Writer Margot Kinberg

As this is posted, it would have been John Steinbeck’s 123^rd birthday. Many of Steinbeck’s characters were poor or members of the working class, and as fans of his work will know, he wrote about the realities of their lives. He’s not the only one to do this, of course; Dickens did, and so did many other authors. And it’s interesting to see how such characters are portrayed in crime fiction. In some detective fiction (e.g. Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone), there’s not that much focus on the lives of the poor and working class. But there is in a lot of other crime fiction.

Fans of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee novels will know that he lives on a boat, The Busted Flush, that’s moored in Lauderdale, Florida. McGee refers to himself as a ‘salvage consultant.’ That’s his term for an unofficial private detective whose specialty is recovering stolen property. People who seek him out are usually desperate and have no other option. Very often they’re poor or working-class people who’ve been bilked or outright robbed, who can’t afford a high-priced detective, and who don’t get a hearing from the police. McGee’s ‘salary’ is one-half of whatever he recovers for his clients. He knows that his clients are down and out, and although he takes his share, he has compassion for those who have so little and is fiercely determined to recover what they lost.

In Peter May’s Entry Island, we are introduced to Sime Mackenzie, a police detective with the Sûreté du Québec. When successful businessman James Cowell is found murdered in his home on Entry Island, Mackenzie is sent to investigate. One thread of this plot tells the story of that investigation. Another thread tells the story of one of Mackenzie’s ancestors, also called Sime, who came from the Hebrides to Canada during the Highland Clearances of the 19^th Century. As we follow this earlier Sime Mackenzie’s story, we learn about the lives of crofters in the Scotland of that time. It wasn’t an easy life, and the Clearances only made things worse. As it turns out, the two timelines in the novel are connected, and as the modern-day Sime Mackenzie learns about his family’s history, he also sees how the current investigation is related.

One plot thread of Graeme Macrae Burnet’s His Bloody Project is the story of seventeen-year-old Roderick Macrae. It’s 1869, and Roderick and his family live in the small Scottish village of Culduie, on Scotland’s Applecross Peninsula. They’re a poor family, and they’ve had the bad fortune to fall afoul of the local constable, Lachlan Mackenzie/Broad. He makes the Macrae family’s life miserable, and it doesn’t help matters that he works for the local landed gentry, the Middleton family. When three murders are committed, Mackenzie immediately arrests Roderick Macrae, and he’s soon imprisoned. He doesn’t deny killing the victims, so the only question is: was he insane at the time, or did he plan these murders? In order to help Roderick as much as possible, his lawyer suggests he write his story. Many people aren’t willing to accept that a poor boy from a village background could actually put together a memoir, but in it, Roderick tells of his life, of the poor treatment of his family, and of what led to the murders. Among other things, it’s an interesting look at the life of the poor at that time.

Kalpana Swaminathan’s Greenlight takes place in the Mumbai slum of Kandewadi. Everyone there lives in real poverty, but that doesn’t mean that the people have no dignity. There’s a scene in the novel, for instance, in which a group of children is on the way to school:

‘They were all extremely spruce, the girls particularly, their hair ribbons in crisp bows.’

Still, these are poor people with little agency. So, when children begin to go missing and are later found dead, not much is done about it at first. Then, the media gets wind of the story and puts pressure on the police to do something. Inspector Savio takes the case, and seeks help from his former mentor, Lalli, a retired police detective. Throughout the novel, we learn about the lives of people who live in Kandewadi and about the struggles they face, although they maintain their pride and dignity.

Eva Dolan’s Long Way Home introduces Detective Inspector (DI) Dushan Zigic and Detective Sergeant (DS) Mel Ferreira, of the Peterborough Hate Crimes Unit. They are called in when a dead man is found in the ruins of a shed. It looks as though the man was living in the shed for a time, and that’s not uncommon among migrant workers in the area. They don’t have enough money for better lodgings, and even if they do, they’re not always exactly warmly welcomed. After a time, the dead man is tentatively identified as an Estonian named Jaan Stepulov. Now that they have a name, the two detectives start to trace the man’s movements from his arrival in the UK. In doing so, they meet several other migrant workers, most of whom aren’t willing to say much because they fear for their jobs, if not their lives. But gradually, Zigic and Ferreira put together the pieces of the puzzle and discover who the murderer is. Throughout the story, we see what the lives of present-day migrant workers are like. The life is often dirty, dangerous, and transient.

It hasn’t always been the case, but there are plenty of crime novels that feature down and out sorts of characters who are scrabbling. They have their own depths and their own ways of life, and their stories can make for interesting crime fiction.

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from Claude Michel Schönberg and Herbert Kretzmer’s At the End of the Day.