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I first came across Roseanna by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö in a St. Louis city library book sale: old and worn out, retailing for twenty-five cents, along with several other books by the same authors. It was in the mid-1990s, I remember, when I was a student from China, working hard on my PhD dissertation in comparative literature. I had never heard of the two Swedish authors before, though I had enjoyed detective stories; first, like forbidden fruit, in China, and then like supermarket product in the United States. Roseanna might give me a much-needed break, I supposed, from all those befuddling new historicist and deconstructionist terms in the dissertation.
But the book gave me an almost mind-boggling shock, although not so much in terms of the story line. The naked, raped body of a young woman is dredged up from the bottom of a Swedish lake; with her identity as well as her nationality unknown to the police, and with no one reported missing in the area and no matches to her description found in the records, Inspector Martin Beck of the Stockholm Homicide Squad and his colleagues begin a long and studious search. This involves interviewing a lot of people, and following a number of false leads and directions, before a portrait of the dead woman, and of her psychopathic killer, slowly emerges out of the painstaking, meticulous investigation. With the evidence of the case long vanished, however, the police then have to risk a great deal to trap the murderer into a confession.
It was in the way the crime story was told that Roseanna came as a shock to me. In contrast to other heroes in the genre I had encountered years earlier, such as Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot, Inspector Martin Beck reads almost like an antihero. He is hardworking and conscientious, and finally solves the case through his persistence, yet through luck as well—at least to some extent. He is by no means as brilliant or as full of incredible deductive power as those “great masters,” and the police work of which he is a part can be slow, sometimes even boring, with repeated missteps.
Roseanna nonetheless held me spellbound—not just because of the investigation, but more because of a realistic, panoramic representation of the social, political, and cultural circumstances in which the human tragedy takes place. The characters are rounded, real, fully developed, not convenient stage props designed simply for the presentation of a mystery. Roseanna, even though a victim at the beginning of the story, comes to life in the course of the investigation with chilling detail and psychological depth. And then there is the unhappy yet unyielding Inspector Martin Beck, moping about the problems in his police work and his family life, and his colleagues who plod through the intrigues and struggles of the case while dramas unfold in their personal lives.
To me, Roseanna served as an eye-opener. It more than subverted my ideas about the genre formed earlier in China, with translation at the time limited to a handful of authors like Conan Doyle or Agatha Christie. It greatly enlarged the horizon of crime fiction for me and opened up a world of new possibilities.
I went on, of course, to devour the remaining books in the series, and no longer the twenty-five-cent copies from the library book sales. What a great series it proves to be, again and again, with each of the books engaging, readable as a fascinating stand-alone, and character- as well as plot-driven. But for me, perhaps more than anything else, they are excellently written novels with a sociological approach full of penetrating insight and vivid details, as well as brilliantly executed police procedurals.
Naturally, I researched Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. They started writing the Martin Beck police mysteries with the intention of using “the crime novel as a scalpel, cutting open the belly of the ideologically pauperised and morally debatable so-called welfare sate of the bourgeois type.” From their clearly defined socialist viewpoint, they set out to expose the inequality, injustice, and crime of capitalist society, a dynamic critique of social evils through the form of the police procedural.
A few years later, when I first tried to write a novel about contemporary Chinese society in transition, I met with some structural problems. It was Roseanna and the Martin Beck series that came to the rescue. Under the influence of the two Swedish authors, I, too, decided to adopt the form of the crime novel, one in which Inspector Chen looks into the problems unfolding in China today, struggling through one investigation after another in an ongoing series. It’s something of which I could never have dreamed when I first picked up Roseanna in that St. Louis city library.
Chinese author Qiu Xiaolong first visited the United States in 1988 to research a book on T. S. Eliot. Accused of previously fund-raising for subversive students in the wake of the Tiananmen Square protests, he found himself unable to return home for fear of persecution by the Chinese Communist Party. Now domiciled in St. Louis, Missouri, Qiu Xiaolong has written six crime/mystery novels, all of them featuring the poetry-quoting Chief Inspector Chen Cao. His first novel, Death of a Red Heroine, was published in 2000, and won the Anthony Award for Best First Novel. The most recent novel is Don’t Cry, Tai Lake (2012). He has also published a collection of poetry, Lines Around China (2003).
In Cold Blood
by Truman Capote (1966)
JOSEPH WAMBAUGH
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Truman Capote (1924–84) was born Truman Streckfus Persons in New Orleans, Louisiana. He led an unsettled early life, raised by relatives following his parents’ divorce. He was reunited with his mother following her marriage to the Cuban-born Joseph Capote, who adopted the young Truman and gave him his surname. Capote began writing when he was eleven, and by his early twenties had already gained a reputation as a writer of short stories, as well as publishing his first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, in 1948. In Cold Blood, his most famous work, was inspired by a short article in the New York Times of November 16, 1959, describing the murder of the Clutter family in Kansas. Assisted by his friend and fellow writer Harper Lee, Capote began a lengthy process of investigation of the crime and its aftermath. Originally serialized in 1965, it was published in book form early the following year. Capote described In Cold Blood as a “nonfiction novel,” and stood over the veracity of all that he had written, even in the face of accusations of distortion and fabrication.
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It is difficult for me to get beyond Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood when I’m asked to name my favorite crime novel. Of course I know that the groundbreaking book was not precisely a novel, but, to quote Capote, a “nonfiction novel.” However, in recent years much has been written, and two feature films have been made, suggesting that the great book was more of a novel than any of us realized when we read it in 1966. Now we know that Truman Capote had become so caught up in re-creating the story’s characters, particularly with the killer Perry Smith, that the line between fact and fiction was blurred. But whether it is a novel, or reportage written in the style of a novel, it is a superb and unforgettable book about a crime and its consequences.
The crime itself was terrible. In November 1959, two young, small-time criminals staged a home invasion in the rural community of Holcomb, Kansas, intending to steal money from a farmer, Herb Clutter. Before they left the Clutter home, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock had shotgunned to death Herb Clutter’s wife and their two teenagers. Mr. Clutter, bound and helpless, died from a slashed throat, followed by a shotgun round to the face. Five years later the two killers were hanged for the murders.
The book is less interested in the bogeyman terror of the event or the whodunit aspect of the investigation than in the psychological exploration of the criminal mind and motive, which had not been done in such depth since Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. But Capote went much further in bringing vividly to life the Clutters and all others in the story, and by making that quiet midwestern community almost a character in itself so that readers could better appreciate the horror that this crime represented in such an unlikely place.
I was an LAPD cop at the time of the book’s publication, taking graduate English classes at Cal State, Los Angeles. I saw that there was much to learn from Capote’s metho
d if ever I hoped to fulfill a secret ambition to write about the things that I was experiencing on the streets of Los Angeles. I watched Capote’s television appearances where he claimed to have a “photographic memory” with no need for note-taking during his many interviews of the people of Holcomb, Kansas. This troubled me because I was in the business of interviewing people who’d been victims, witnesses, or perpetrators of crime, and the notebook and pen that I carried were far more important to me than the handgun on my hip. I had never met a detective or anyone else with a “photographic memory” sufficient to replace pen and paper.
Cut to 1971 when I had become “the writing cop,” having penned a runaway best-selling novel, The New Centurions, which was soon to be made into a movie. I was determined to remain with the LAPD for twenty years, despite the media attention that was making my job as a detective sergeant almost impossible. That was when The Tonight Show, still in New York at the time, booked me for a show they were planning with a crime theme. Of course, my publisher was excited, and I agreed to do it.
The show featured author Truman Capote along with Alvin Dewey, the investigator from the Kansas Bureau of Investigation who had worked the Clutter murder inquiry. Capote and Dewey were friends, and Truman called the older man “Pappy.” I was too nervous to now remember anything I said to Johnny Carson, but one thing I will never forget is that, during a commercial break, the old lawman turned to the young lawman, and whispered to me, sotto voce, “Truman fell in love with Perry Smith, but I didn’t. Truman portrayed me as feeling pity for Smith at the end, but the truth is, if I’d been asked to stand in for the hangman, I could’ve dropped that killer without batting an eye.”
That was my first personal indicator that In Cold Blood might be more of a novel than I had realized, but there had been several who’d questioned Capote’s depiction of people and events from the date of publication. It has even been maintained that, in order to transform his book’s main character from a conscienceless sociopath into a sinner capable of remorse and redemption, Capote had invented the book’s poignant apology spoken by Perry Smith by the scaffold. Other witnesses that day have said that Smith said nothing before he mounted the steps.
My wife, Dee, had a great time in the green room that evening chatting with Truman Capote while I was out in front of the cameras, and he invited us for drinks at “21” following the show and to his Palm Springs home after we returned to California. That desert visit was momentous in my life as a writer.
It was a blister of a summer day in Palm Springs, with the temperature hovering around 115 degrees. Truman’s housekeeper was a charming older black woman who had been a dancer at the Cotton Club in New York back in the day. I had expected to find Jack Dunphy there, Truman’s longtime partner whose name, along with that of Truman’s lifelong friend author Harper Lee, is on the dedication page of In Cold Blood. But Capote’s Palm Springs houseguest was a hunky bartender from a New York gay nightclub.
We were all immediately served screwdrivers made with fresh-squeezed orange juice and one-hundred-proof vodka as we sat by the pool and chatted. Rather, I sat by the pool because, after sipping her second screwdriver, Dee excused herself and asked for directions to the bathroom. She later told me that, while in the bathroom, the ceiling started to spin wildly and she felt as though she might faint. She actually got down on the floor and pressed her cheek to the cool tiles hoping to revive. After several minutes she pulled herself up and staggered through the nearest doorway, which happened to lead to the master bedroom, where she collapsed onto the bed.
Ten minutes passed before Truman stood and said to me, “I’d better look for Dee.”
What happened next, according to Dee, was that Truman entered the bedroom and in his memorable, squeaky little lisp said, “You go ahead and take a nice nap, Dee, honey.”
Which she did. Truman returned to the pool and explained to me that booze and scorching desert days often produce similar results.
During the time that my wife was indisposed and the housekeeper had gone home, I had just enough grain alcohol in me to seize the opportunity to tell Truman Capote of a crime that had haunted me for several years. It was the story of a March 1963 kidnapping of two LAPD officers from the streets of Hollywood, culminating in the murder of Officer Ian Campbell in a remote onion field ninety minutes north of L.A. I told Truman that, just as in his book, one of the two small-time young criminals was named Smith, and the aftermath of the killing was more interesting to me as a writer than the event itself.
I told him how the surviving officer, Karl Hettinger, was callously subjected to roll call appearances where he had to tell rooms full of cops about how he had surrendered his weapon while his partner had a gun in his back, and how that decision had led directly to murder. Karl Hettinger, a scrupulously honest man, soon began engaging in a baffling series of shoplifting episodes that became ever more reckless until he was finally caught and resigned from the LAPD as a common thief.
I had seen Karl Hettinger around the Police Administration Building from time to time and thought that perhaps overwhelming guilt over his partner’s murder had been crying out for punishment, because after Hettinger suffered dismissal and disgrace his shoplifting compulsion vanished as mysteriously as it had come. It seemed to me that his was a classic case of post-traumatic stress disorder, even though the Vietnam War had not as yet made the condition well known and understood by the general public, nor by the world of law enforcement.
Finally, I told Truman I had learned from reading In Cold Blood that if I were ever to write this story as a nonfiction novel, I must remember never to let the murder victim be forgotten. At the end of his book Truman brought back Nancy Clutter’s school friend, who had grown into a lovely young woman, in order to remind the reader of what Nancy could have been had she lived. I wished to somehow bring back the murdered cop, a physician’s son of Scottish parentage, who had been an avid bagpiper. I hoped to do it in a scene with Ian Campbell’s widowed mother, Chrissie, and Ian’s daughter, and Ian’s love of the mournful bagpipes.
Suddenly, I was embarrassed when I looked at my watch and realized that I had talked, and Dee had slept, for more than an hour! I apologized for monopolizing Truman’s time, but he shook his head and said something that I’ll always remember.
He said, “I wish I could write that story.”
When I heard those words from the lips of Truman Capote, I knew that the book would be written. During my off-duty hours I interviewed sixty people connected to the case, including both imprisoned killers, read thousands of pages of court transcripts, and examined numerous case exhibits. Then I took a six-month leave of absence from the LAPD to write, but I was so ferociously energized—partly from my day with Truman Capote—that I completed the project in three months and returned to my job as a working detective for another year.
My wife and I saw Truman on a few more occasions, and he was always friendly and kind, but it was obvious that alcohol and prescription drugs were taking a toll on him. When The Onion Field was ready for publication, I was thrilled by a generous jacket quote from the master himself.
As for my wife, she has never believed that it was the Palm Springs heat and the screwdrivers that caused her collapse that day. She swears to all that Truman Capote “slipped her a mickey” in order to be alone with her “cute young cop.” Then she is quick to add, with not a little pride, “But it was okay, because I think I may be the only woman ever to have slept in Truman Capote’s bed.”
Joseph Wambaugh is the author of twenty-one books, both fiction and nonfiction, since 1971 when he was a detective sergeant with the Los Angeles Police Department. Visit him online at www.josephwambaugh.net.
Endless Night
by Agatha Christie (1967)
LAUREN HENDERSON
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The peerless doyenne of the mystery novel’s Golden Age, the hugely prolific Dame Agatha Christie (1890–1976) wrote eighty mystery novels and short-story collections and nineteen plays, a
nd is heralded as the bestselling novelist of all time by the Guinness Book of Records, her sales ranking third behind those of the Bible and William Shakespeare. Her best-known creations include Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, while her play The Mousetrap, which first opened in 1952, is still running in 2012 after more than twenty-four thousand performances. She also wrote under the pen name Mary Westmacott. Agatha Christie was the first recipient of the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award, and she was made a Dame Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in 1971.
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It’s one of Christie’s less famous novels: no Poirot or Marple, no exotic Egyptian locations or idyllic-seeming English country villages, just a poor young man, Michael Rogers, who meets an American heiress and tells her of his dream to commission a famously eccentric architect to build a house for him on a plot of land called Gipsy’s Acre. The couple elope, settle down in the new house, and find themselves persecuted by an increasingly unpleasant series of events that leads, of course, to tragedy. It’s narrated by Michael, which makes it one of the rare Christies written in the first person: but does Michael have more in common with Dr. Sheppard from The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, or Jerry Burton from The Moving Finger and Mark Easterbrook from The Pale Horse?