Sometimes, people keep things secret for reasons they think are the right ones. For instance, for a lot of reasons, you might not tell a young child that his uncle and aunt are getting divorced because of infidelity. That silence can go on and on until it’s second nature, long after someone would be mature enough to make sense of things. And that’s when resentment can set in (i.e. ‘Why didn’t anyone ever tell me?’). Keeping secrets like that may be a wise decision on a lot of levels, but it can have unforeseen consequences later. And it can be an effective plot tool in crime fiction.

For example, in Agatha Christie’s Dead Man’s Mirror, Hercule Poirot is summoned to the home of Gervase Chevenix-Gore. It seems that Chevenix-Gore suspects that someone in his household is trying to steal from him, and he wants Poirot to investigate. Poirot is not accustomed to being summoned, but he goes to the Chevenix-Gore home. To everyone’s shock, Chevenix-Gore is found dead just before dinner on the night of Poirot’s arrival, before Poirot can speak to him. At first, it looks like a suicide, but the victim was assuredly not the sort of person to take his own life. Besides, Poirot finds a few things that aren’t consistent with suicide. So, he interviews the family members, including Chevenix-Gore’s adopted daughter Ruth. She knows she’s adopted, but there are facts about her that she doesn’t know, and they play an important part in the story. It’s interesting to wonder how it might have turned out if she did know those facts.

One of the plot lines in Babs Horton’s A Jarful of Angels concerns four children growing up in a small Welsh village during the summer of 1962. Since they don’t have a lot to do, they spend most of their time together and do a lot of exploring. They also happen to find out a lot about some of the people in their village. They don’t have a real understanding of what they learn, but the reader can make inferences. And as it turns out, there are secrets that people haven’t told them. Forty years later, we follow former police officer Will Sloane returns to the same village (he’d left for Spain). He’s been told he hasn’t much longer to live, and he wants to solve one case he was never able to solve: the disappearance of a child. As the book moves along, we see how his story and that of the children intersect, and we see how those secrets they never learned have impacted them.

Graeme Macrae Burnet’s The Accident on the A35 is the story of the death of Bertrand Barthelme, who drove his car off the road and into a tree. As a matter of course, the police investigate, and Chief of Police Georges Gorski interviews Barthelme’s widow Lucette and his son Raymond. In the normal course of things, the victim would never have been on that road; in fact, he was supposed to be somewhere else. So Gorski now has the task of processing what Lucette and Raymond say, figuring out what Barthelme was doing on that road, and what really happened to him. In the meantime, Ryamond wants to learn more about his father. The two were never close, and now he wants to find out what led his father to be on that road, what sort of person he was, and so on. As he starts to learn things, Raymond discovers that there are things he didn’t know about his father. At the same time as his curiosity is satisfied, he also finds that he has to look at life differently.

In Matthew Sullivan’s Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore, we are introduced to Lydia Smith, who works at a quirky Denver bookshop called the Bright Ideas Bookstore. One day, she discovers the body of Joey Molina, one of the regulars at the shop. It’s not spoiling the story to say that Molina has committed suicide, but for Lydia, there’s more to it than that. Molina left her a note: You found me, Lydia. He also left her a long, coded message. Lydia doesn’t know what the note or message means, but she’s determined to find out. So, she starts to ask questions. Her search leads her to the truth about a long-ago tragedy and her own traumatic history. She also learns some secrets that people have been keeping for decades. It turns out those secrets have had a powerful effect on the people they concern.

In Charity Norman’s Remember Me, Emily Kirkland returns from London, where she’s been living, to her native New Zealand. She’s there to help her father Felix, who’s suffering from dementia. On the one hand, she’s hesitant to come back for several reasons. On the other hand, she does want to help her father. The small town they live in was devastated 25 years earlier by the disappearance of a young woman, Leah Paralta. In fact, Emily was the last person to see Leah before she went missing. No evidence has ever been found, not even a body. The incident still haunts the town. As Emily goes through her father’s things, she finds that her family may be connected to the Paralta family in ways she didn’t know. She also finds out other secrets that her parents never told her. And little by little, she finds out the truth about Leah’s disappearance.

When secrets are kept for decades, it can often be easier to keep them than to reveal them, even to people who are directly concerned. And it can seem kinder. But sometimes, that has consequences, too, both in crime fiction and in real life. Right, fans of John Grisham’s Sycamore Row?

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from Billy Joel’s Through the Long Night.