Crime Writer Margot Kinberg

Criminal investigations are challenging in and of themselves. They’re even more so when they involve police and other authorities from more than one country. Countries have different laws, not to mention different languages, customs, and so on. If you add in the all-too-human desire to be ‘in charge,’ it can be hard to co-operate and get the job done. And yet, it happens, both in real life and in crime fiction. And cross-border investigations can add suspense and plot layers to a story.

Patricia Moyes’ Dead Men Don’t Ski features Scotland Yard’s Henry Tibbett. In the novel, he and his wife, Emmy, visit Santa Chiara, in the Italian Alps, for a skiing holiday. It doesn’t turn out to be the restful, enjoyable winter holiday they’d planned, though. Right from the start, they notice an undercurrent of tension at the Bella Vista Hotel, where they’re staying. Then one morning, the body of fellow hotel guest Fritz Hauser is discovered on the ski lift that goes between the hotel and the town below. Capitano Spezzi and his team start the investigation, and they’re by no means incompetent. But Tibbett has his own background and experience, and he has insights to share. So, first a bit grudgingly and later more warmly, Spezzi includes Tibbett in the investigation. Together, they find out who killed Hauser and why.

In Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö’s Roseanna, Stockholm homicide detective Martin Beck and his team investigate when the body of a young woman is pulled from Lake Vättern. One of the first orders of business is to identify the victim, but that’s going to be difficult, since she wasn’t a Swedish citizen. After a time, though, the team learns that she was an American tourist called Roseanna McGraw. With that link, Martin Beck and his team work with Lieutenant Kafka, a police detective from Nebraska, where Roseanna lived. The cross-border co-operation isn’t easy; at the time the novel was written, there was no Internet, and international telephone calls were expensive and didn’t always offer reliable reception. Still, the job gets done and we learn why Roseanna was in Sweden, who killed her, and what the motive was.

Jo Nesbø’s The Bat introduces Oslo police detective Harry Hole. As the novel opens, he’s been sent to Australia to observe the investigation of the rape and murder of Norwegian citizen Inger Holter. He’s made welcome and greeted warmly, but he isn’t there to investigate; his role is to observe and report back to the Norwegian authorities. Hole is paired with Andrew Kensington, and the two start the task of finding Inger Holter’s killer. They develop a positive working partnership, and Kensington is open to what Hole has to say. But that doesn’t mean it’s smooth sailing. Hole has his own ideas about how to find out the truth, and sometimes he’s quite wrong. And the investigation itself leads to some very dark places. But in the end, we find out who the murderer is and how it happened.

Michael Stanley’s A Carrion Death is the first in his series featuring Botswana police detective David ‘Kubu’ Bengu. When the body of an unknown man is found in a remote area, it looks at first as though he had strayed from a camp and been killed by wild animals. But Kubu isn’t so sure of that. And forensic evidence bears that out. Now that it’s a murder investigation, the police go into further action. It comes out that the man may have been transported to the site where he was found by a truck belonging to Botswana Cattle and Mining Company (BCMC). If so, someone from that company might be involved. That possibility adds a real complication, because the BCMC is a powerful major employer. The company leadership has a lot of influence. Still, Kubu and his team continue their work. Since the BCMC is involved in the international mining and gem trade, it takes cross-border co-operation from authorities in Angola Botswana, and South Africa to follow the leads and find out who the man was, why he was killed, and by whom.

Cat Connor’s Veronica Tracey, PI series makes a great deal of use of international collaboration. Veronica ‘Ronnie’ Tracey is an Upper Hutt, New Zealand-based PI who used to work for New Zealand Intelligence. She now owns an investigation agency called Wherefore Art Thou, and she is very good at finding people who don’t want to be found. She still has contacts in intelligence agencies from New Zealand and from other countries, and gets involved in some of their cases. Those cases have serious international implications, so Ronnie’s worked with the CIA, Australian Intelligence, Canadian intelligence and MI6, among other groups. Her closest teammates are an Australian and an American, so at every level, there’s international collaboration. It’s not always easy. There are different personalities, different countries with different agendas, and those people can’t always be trusted. But working together is the only way to get the job done.

Cross-border collaboration is easier now than ever, what with modern technology. But it can be complicated. Still, crime is international, and people travel to different countries where bad things happen to them. So investigating across borders is an important part of police work. These are just a few examples of how it happens in crime fiction. Your turn.

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from Jim Post’s Reach Out in the Darkness.