Have you ever felt so overwhelmed that you weren’t even sure where to start or what to do next? If you do, you’re not alone. I think a lot of us feel that way sometimes. So, when we read about a character who’s a bit overwhelmed, we can connect with the character. Add to that the tension that can make a character feel like that, and it’s little wonder that we see this happening in crime fiction.

For example, in Agatha Christie’s Hickory Dickory Dock, we are introduced to Mrs. Hubbard, who manages a hostel for students. The residents are all from different places and backgrounds, so she has her hands full at times just working with them, especially when they clash. It doesn’t help that the owner of the hostel, Mrs. Nicoletis, is demanding, unstable, unreliable, and sometimes rude and insulting. Managing her is at times harder than managing the students. She’s faced with even more pressure when odd things start happening and students’ things start disappearing. One night, one of the residents, Celia Austin, confesses to several of the petty thefts, and Mrs. Hubbard thinks the matter is settled. The next morning, though, Celia is found dead. It’s not long before it’s determined she was murdered. Mrs. Hubbard’s sister is Felicity Lemon, Hercule Poirot’s terrifyingly efficient secretary. She persuades Poirot to look into the matter, and he finds out who’s behind all that’s been going on in the hostel.

At the start of Gail Bowen’s Joanne Kilbourn Shreve series, Joanne is an academic and political scientist. She is also the widowed mother of three children (later in the series, she adopts a fourth). Along with all that she does as a mother, political activist, and academic, Joanne gets involved in police investigations. Often (as in the first novel, Deadly Appearances), it’s because she or someone in her family knows the victim. Sometimes she does feel a little overwhelmed, especially as the series goes on and she begins to date again. It’s a lot to balance, and Joanne doesn’t always do it successfully. But her friends and family know they can trust her. And she feels too strongly about justice and what’s right to back away when she feels strongly.

At the beginning of Abir Mukharjee’s Captain Sam Wyndham series, Wyndham has just arrived in 1919 Kolkata/Calcutta to take up a job with the Indian Police Service. He has a lot to juggle and a lot to manage. There’s also the fact that he’s in a new-to-him culture where he doesn’t know the norms. He hasn’t yet earned the respect of the people who work with him, and he has to get used to the very different lifestyle in Kolkata. It’s especially hard for him because he has what we would now call PTSD from his time serving in WW I. He’s got an opium habit because of it, and his struggles with the drug do not make managing his life any easier. Still, he is a very good cop and has a strong sense of what’s right.

Sinéad Crowley’s Can Anybody Help Me introduces readers to Yvonne Mulhern. She and her husband Gerry have just moved from London to Dublin, so Gerry could take advantage of an attractive job offer. With them, they’ve brought their newborn daughter Róisín. It’s all very difficult for Yvonne. For one thing, she doesn’t really know anyone in Dublin except Gerry’s mother and his brother. Gerry’s mother is judgemental and critical, and Gerry’s brother, while he tries to help, is ineffectual. Since Gerry is gone a lot for work, Yvonne takes on much of the care for Róisín. That in itself is overwhelming enough, but with little support, it’s almost more than she can handle. With so much on her plate, so to speak, Yvonne is desperate for some support. She finds it in an online group called Natmammy. The other members are new mothers like Yvonne, so she fits in right away. Before long, she sees the other members as her friends. Then one of them goes ‘off the grid,’ and Yvonne becomes concerned enough to contact the police. They can’t do much, though. Then, a woman’s body is found in a vacant apartment. It could be Yvonne’s missing friend, so this time, the police investigate. If it is Yvonne’s friend, this means the Netmammy group might not be the support system Yvonne thought it would be.

And then there’s Paul Cleave’s Killer Harvest. Sixteen-year-old Joshua Logan has been blind since birth. He’s gotten used to it because that’s all he’s ever known. Everything changes, though, when his father Mitchell is killed in the line of (police) duty. Dr. Toni Collette has developed a procedure for transplanting eyes, and she believes that she can help Joshua to see, using his father’s donated eyes. Joshua faces grief at the loss of his father, and the operation and rehab will put another strain on him. But he does want to see, so he and his mother prepare for the procedure. It goes well, and he starts to be able to see. But that’s hardly the end of the demands made on him. For one thing, his whole social and academic lives have been based on blindness. Now that he’s no longer blind, he has to negotiate new friendships, a new school, and so on without losing his old friends. There’s also the physical rehab that can be draining. Things get more stressful when he starts to have some very dark visual experiences. And he learns some dark things about his father. It all adds a great deal to the burdens he bears.

And that’s the thing about doing too much at once. It can be overwhelming, and it can lead to stress, exhaustion, and worse. It’s not at all pleasant to live through, but it can add layers to a fictional character, and it can add tension to a story. Which ones have stayed with you?

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from Billy Joel’s Running on Ice.