Sometimes what the law says is against what people believe is the right thing to do. So, they break those laws, sometimes risking everything in doing so. We’ve all heard of examples of this in real life (e.g., Mahatma Gandhi; Martin Luther King, Jr.; Lois Gunden). Sometimes people break established law because the law limits their rights (check the biography of any suffragette). For whatever reason, people occasionally take great risks to defy a rule that seems wrong to them. We see it in crime fiction just as we see it in real life.

There’s a small example of this in Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express. The main plot concerns the murder of Samuel Edward Ratchett, who’s stabbed on the second night of a three-day trip on the famous Orient Express train. Hercule Poirot is also on the train, and he is persuaded to find out who the killer is. One of the suspects is an American, Cyrus Hardman. When his luggage is searched, it’s discovered that he has a quantity of alcohol with him. It’s illegal for him to bring alcohol in the US at the time, because of Prohibition, but he risks that, claiming that what’s left of his supply will go into a bottle labeled ‘hair wash.’ For him, the law just doesn’t make sense, and as you’ll know, it really didn’t stop people from drinking. 

In Giorgio Scerbanenco’s A Private Venus, we are introduced to Dr. Duca Lamberti. He’s just been released from prison after serving a sentence for euthanasia. As Lamberti sees it, he was respecting the last wishes of a patient, and was releasing that person from even more suffering. But the law doesn’t see it that way, so he lost his medical license and he’s now got a criminal history. Still, he did what he thought was the right thing. He’s trying to work out what he’ll do next when wealthy business executive Pietro Auseri hires him for an unusual job. Auseri’s son Davide has begun to drink excessively, and even a few stints in rehabilitation haven’t stopped him. Auseri wants Lamberti to work with Davide to get him to stop drinking. Lamberti’s not sure what he can do, but he agrees to try. He soon learns that Davide believes he is responsible for the suicide of a young woman he’d met. Lamberti comes to think that if he can find out the truth about the woman’s death, he can relieve Davide of his guilt. So, he sets out to learn what really happened to her.

 Zöe Ferraris’ Finding Nouf is the story of Nayir al-Sharqi, a Palestinian desert guide who works in Saudi Arabia. One day, he is approached by a friend, Othman ash-Shrawi, with a new commission. Othman’s sister Nouf went missing and was later found dead in a dry wadi. The official explanation for her death is that she was caught in an unexpected storm and drowned. There is the possibility, though, that she was murdered. Nayir is tasked with finding out the truth. In the process, he meets laboratory technician Katya Hijazi, who is also Othman’s fiancée. Both separately and together, they work to find out what happened to Nouf. Saudi laws are very strict about interactions between men and women, and the unwritten rules are strict about interactions between social classes. There is a great deal to risk as Katya and Nayir search for the truth. Yet both of them want to find out what happened to Nouf, and both of them are willing to risk a great deal to do that. To them, the existing laws serve only to stifle people, although both of them are very accustomed to those laws.

In one plot thread of Paddy Richardson’s Swimming in the Dark, we follow the stories of Ilse Klein and her mother Gerda. They live quiet lives in a small town on New Zealand’s South Island, where Ilsa is a secondary school teacher. Their lives haven’t always been so peaceful, though. They’re originally from Leipzig, in what was once East Germany. During the 1980’s, at the height of the Cold War, East Germany was very much under the control of the dreaded Stasi, the secret police.  Ther were strict laws about what one could or couldn’t do, write, say, and so on. There were terrible penalties for doing anything that could be perceived as critical, and people were encouraged to betray friends and families. Gerda Klein and her husband did not believe those laws were right, and they felt very much in danger for their opinions. So, they risked everything and, taking their daughter Ilse with them, they left East Germany. They managed to make their way to New Zealand, and Gerda has never regretted the decision. She and Ilsa are drawn into drama again when fifteen-year-old Serena Freeman, one of Ilse’s students, goes missing. In wanting to help Serena, Ilse and Gerda get involved in much more than they’d imagined.

Eric Brown’s Murder by the Book takes place in 1950’s London, in the literary community of the time. Charles Elder is a successful homosexual literary agent at a time when homosexuality is against the law. When he receives a blackmail note and a demand for money, he asks Donald Langham, one of the authors he represents, to help find out who the blackmailer is. Elder’s thinking is that Langham writes thrillers, so he will know what to do. Langham agrees, but he and Elder’s assistant Maria Dupré end up getting involved in a web of multiple murders as he tries to find out who has a grudge against Elder. Elder doesn’t publicly announce that he’s gay, but at the same time, he and Langham don’t see why there should be laws like those that punish gay people. They’re both willing to risk a great deal to stop the blackmailer and hopefully stop some of the bigotry.

There are many other books, too, in which characters defy an existing law or set of laws to do what they see as the right thing. I know, for instance, that I’ve not mentioned Qiu Xiaolong’s Inspector Chen series, which takes place mostly in Shanghai. There are plenty of others, too. Which ones have stayed with you?

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from Tom Petty’s I Won’t Back Down.