With so much email and other electronic communication, people don’t write letters as they used to. But letters can be important – even valuable, and they can give us insight into the writer. In crime fiction, they can provide interesting clues, too. What’s especially interesting is when a letter is from a person who’s died. It can happen, and when it happens in crime fiction, it can add a plot twist, valuable clues, or important information. There are a lot of examples of this in crime fiction; here are a few.

In Agatha Christie’s Five Little Pigs, Carla Lemarchant hires Hercule Poirot to find out the truth about the sixteen-year-old poisoning death of her father, famous painter Amyas Crale. At the time, everyone assumed that Crale’s wife, Caroline, killed him. She had motive, too, as her husband was having a barely hidden affair. In fact, Caroline Crale was arrested, tried and convicted in the matter, and died a year later in prison. Carla, however, is convinced that her mother was innocent. Part of her confidence comes from the fact that her mother wrote her a letter from prison. Carla shows Poirot the letter, and it figures into Poirot’s investigation. That’s quite true, fans of Dumb Witness. In fact, I almost chose that example, but didn’t use it in the end.

Vaseem Khan’s The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra is the first in his Baby Ganesha series. In it, Inspector Ashwin Chopra is set to retire from the Mumbai police on medical grounds (his heart hasn’t been doing well). On his last day of work, Chopra gets a letter telling him that he has inherited a baby elephant from his beloved Uncle Bansi. And a letter from his uncle advises him that the elephant is ‘unusual.’ At first, Chopra has no idea how he will keep and feed an elephant, let alone look after it. But out of respect for Uncle Bansi, he takes the elephant in, calling it Ganesha. And it turns out that Ganesha plays a role in solving the last case that Chopra investigates as an active police officer. Later, when Chopra decides to hang up his shingle as a private investigator, Ganesha becomes, in a way, his investigating partner.

Alonso Cueto’s The Blue Hour takes place in contemporary Lima, where Adrián Ormache is a successful lawyer. He’s also got a solid marriage and healthy children. Then, his beloved mother dies. After the funeral and other formalities are finished, Ormache cleans out her possessions. That’s when he finds a letter from a woman named Vilma Agurto. The letter claims that Ormache’s father had raped her niece during the government’s late-1980’s/early 1990’s war against the Shining Path/Sendero Luminoso guerillas. The letter unsettles Ormache, as he had a completely different view of his father. His mother isn’t there anymore to tell him why she kept that letter or what he should do. But Ormache decides to try to find out more. So, he finds out where his father was stationed and begins the search for this woman, if she exists. His search leads him to the past, and to a better understanding of his father.

Matthew Sullivan’s Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore features Lydia Smith, who works at a quirky Denver bookstore. One of the regular patrons there is Joey Molina. One day, Joey is found dead in one of the bookstore’s upper floor rooms. It’s a shock and a great sorrow to just about everyone. But it has a deeper meaning for Lydia. It seems that Joey has left her a note: You found me, Lydia. At first, Lydia has no idea what the note means or what Joey might have been trying to tell her. But she soon learns that Joey left her a coded letter. Once she works out the code, she’ll know exactly what he wanted to say. Decrypting the code leads Lydia on a search through Joey’s past, as well as the strange way in which his past and hers are connected. And in both pasts is a murder.

And then there’s Charity Norman’s Remember Me, which introduces Emily Kirkland.  She’s originally from the Hawke’s Bay area of New Zealand but has been living in London. She gets a call from a family friend, who lives next door to her father Felix, and it’s not good news. Felix is suffering from dementia and needs someone to help look after him. At first, Emily doesn’t want to go, as she is somewhat estranged from her family. But she agrees and makes the trip to New Zealand. As she begins to spend time with her father, Emily renews her acquaintance with people she knew before, including the Parata family next door. Twenty-five years earlier, their daughter Leah went missing and was never found. Her disappearance has weighed on the town since then, but no-one really knows what happened to her. Little by little, Emily starts to put the pieces of the past together, and she learns some of the ways in which her family’s history and the Paratas’ history are linked. Then Felix dies. As Emily is making final arrangements, clearing the house, and so on, she finally feels free to open and read a letter that Felix had written to her, and that was supposed to be read only after his death. The letter adds perspective to the town, to Felix’s personality (and his relationship with his daughter), and more.

And that’s the thing about letters, especially when they come from the past, if I can put it that way. They can reveal truths, let the reader get to know the writer, and add character layers. They can also add tension and surprises.

*NOTE: The title of this post is the title of a song by John Lee Hooker.