Stansfield, the town where they live and work, is neither beautiful nor remarkable. All of these low-key elements leave the spotlight slot free for the fiendishly puzzling conundrums that they grapple with in each book. Readers can rely on Lloyd and Hill remaining stable enough to be able to give their full attention to each tangled mystery they encounter, because they aren’t overloaded with exaggerated character traits, or cumbersome music or whisky collections that need to be itemized in every chapter. As a reader, I appreciate detectives who don’t try to compete for my attention with the mysteries we are, all three of us, trying to solve.
McGown’s is a plot-first approach to characterization, which has the wonderful effect of making Lloyd and Hill seem modest and unassuming, and demonstrates that so often forgotten truth: that without an unpredictable plot, character cannot muster the necessary conditions for revealing itself. McGown cleverly avoided inventing larger-than-life characters; she understood instinctively that no individual actor in a drama can ever be as compelling as the situations that arise when lots of barely connected people brush against each other’s needs and priorities in unexpected ways, creating a cocktail of the unforeseeable. No one in her books, not even her series detectives, is ever allowed to be the only pebble on the beach of her creative imagination; she divides her authorial time between the members of her cast with scrupulous fairness and balance, making sure each gets his or her turn. No one is larger than life, her novels show us again and again; the infinite plot permutations of the bizarre everyday render us all vulnerable and insignificant.
It’s impossible to convey the flavor of a writer’s work in words that aren’t written by that writer, so you’ll have to take my word for it that Jill McGown was a unique talent. Her stories are as precise and cleverly designed as the best Swiss watches, and, more importantly, they’re like no one else’s. If, like me, you’re a structure freak, if you believe the puzzle aspect of crime fiction matters, read her: she is criminally underrated, out of print now, and the rightful heir to Agatha Christie’s plotting throne.
Sophie Hannah is the author of seven best-selling psychological thrillers, the most recent of which is Kind of Cruel. Her novels are published in twenty-five countries, and two have so far been adapted for ITV1 and broadcast under the series title Case Sensitive. Sophie is also an award-winning, best-selling poet, and in 2007 was short-listed for the T. S. Eliot Prize for her collection Pessimism for Beginners (Carcanet). Visit her online at www.sophiehannah.com.
A Simple Plan
by Scott Smith (1993)
MICHAEL KORYTA
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Scott Smith (b. 1965) is the American-born writer of two novels, A Simple Plan (1993) and The Ruins (2006), a horror story about young tourists who become trapped on a Mayan ruin in Mexico. Smith has adapted both novels for the screen, and received an Academy Award nomination for his screenplay for A Simple Plan. He said that he turned to scriptwriting “to escape a long book that was never going to happen,” a reference to a novel he attempted to write between A Simple Plan and The Ruins, and which was eventually abandoned after one thousand pages.
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Bring up the question of “best debut” with a roomful of crime writers and I’ll give you high odds that Scott Smith’s A Simple Plan is among the first titles mentioned. Simply bringing up the topic of great crime novels will assuredly call it forth as well, but the jaw drops a little more when you read a book like A Simple Plan and realize that it is the writer’s first published effort.
The initial setup of A Simple Plan is in fine keeping with its title. The narrator, Hank Mitchell, and his brother, Jacob, along with Lou (who is Jacob’s friend and Hank’s nemesis, and one of the most beautifully crafted characters in the book, dumb enough to annoy, sly enough to fear) discover a small, wrecked plane in the snow-covered Ohio woods. There’s a bag of cash inside. $4.4 million in cash.
Jacob and Lou want to take it. Hank wants to report it. They argue. It’s not stealing, Jacob insists, it’s more like discovering a lost treasure.
“There was some sense in what he was saying, I could see that, yet at the same time it seemed like we were overlooking something,” Smith notes in one of the all-time great understatements in crime fiction, as crows settle like vultures into the trees, and darkness falls around the three men, the atmosphere a gorgeous gothic promise upon which Smith delivers handsomely.
Simple enough, right? Take the money and run. Only of course they aren’t running, that would be foolish. So it is take the money and wait . . . to either do the right thing or to do the just-a-little-bit-wrong thing that won’t hurt anyone.
The plotting of A Simple Plan is, and should be, widely praised, but I’d argue that the greater genius of the novel is in the way in which Smith renders the voice of Hank, our narrator. In those early pages, Hank is compelling and familiar and reasonable. Oh so reasonable . . .
He’s not a typical suspense novel protagonist—no military skills, police background, or heroic traits. No, he’s the accountant at a feedstore in a small midwestern town. He has a pregnant wife and a troubled brother and the weight of two lost parents and one lost farm hanging over him, but these are problems we know or can relate to. This man is one of us. He’s speaking for us.
And so his first decision—keep the cash for six months, and if no one comes looking for it during that period, the three men will split it up—is so measured, so damned reasonable that we can all imagine making it ourselves. “My plan . . . would allow me to postpone a decision until we had more information. I’d be taking a step, but not one that I couldn’t undo.”
That’s all it is! A postponement of a potentially damaging decision. What’s there to fear? Hank has thought of every angle. He’s protected against every possible harm. In his simple plan, there is no threat.
By that night, the first promise has been broken; by the next day, the first murder has been committed. Those dreaded steps that cannot be undone have now been made, quite literally, down a slippery slope, with blood waiting beneath the snow. Hank’s character has taken its first ingenious ripple as well. His reasonable façade breaks down in a moment of startling evil—which is then rationalized away. After all, Hank didn’t make the mistake that leads to the first killing. He’s simply protecting his brother, who made the mistake. We can all understand that, no matter how uncomfortable it makes us. You’d go to special lengths to save your own brother, wouldn’t you?
And here Smith really begins his exploration into evil, and the pacing shifts into overdrive. The plot of A Simple Plan is a series of brilliantly compounded moral compromises. Hank’s good judgment and sound character bend once, and problems ensue, and so they bend again, a little further, to stop the damage, and then . . .
Through it all, we have that voice of measured reason, the alarming one that just might be in each of us.
“Then, of course, there was the other path,” Hank observes, looking away from the right choice, the obvious choice, and toward a darker moral ground. “It was already prepared for, already halfway trodden upon. I had the power to save Jacob, save the money. And in the end, I suppose, that was why I did it: because it seemed possible, it seemed like I wouldn’t get caught. It was the same reason I took the money, the same reason I did all that follows. By doing one wrong thing, I thought I could make everything right.”
I’ve often thought you could hold that line up to newspaper headlines every day and match it with more stories than not. It is what we wonder so often about so many people: Why on earth would they have done that?
Because it seemed possible, and it seemed like I wouldn’t get caught.
The tightening noose of problems related to Hank’s decision to keep the money is obviously a critical part of the drama and relentless pacing of A Simple Plan, but the grander trick is played out with our narrator on the internal level as the novel progresses. All bad choices aside, we’re rooting for Hank, because his choices have been justified and rationalized and explained in
a way that—perhaps with a wince or two—we can stomach. And we are worried about him, because his partners in crime are both foolish and dangerous. Jacob and Lou are an alarming duo, lacking Hank’s pragmatism, his maturity, his sense of potential danger. His cunning.
It’s a shame that he’s caught in this mess with them, we think. Until the novel really unfolds, that is, and then you begin to question who is caught with whom.
The echoes of myth, and a near-biblical feel to the story, add a sense of moral weight to A Simple Plan that many suspense novels lack. At times the novel seems to draw heavily from the book of Genesis: Jacob dreams of using the money to reclaim the family’s lost farm, seeking wisdom in a hopelessly outdated agricultural manual; the brothers who have promised to protect each other ultimately turn upon each other; and from the novel’s first selfish choice, the first sin, spins forth a multitude of troubles in which the characters are soon hopelessly mired. Through it all, Smith conjures up one memorable device after another, my all-time favorite being the teddy bear that Jacob brings to Hank’s newborn daughter. Turn the key in its belly and a soft nursery rhyme plays. Of course, it’s the one toy that Hank’s daughter prefers, and, as the relationship between the brothers deteriorates, the key is turned and the tune plays, haunting the pages of the novel.
Later, the carnage having reached its crescendo, Hank the Reasonable having slipped away from us to morph into Hank the Horrifying (a transformation that is all the more chilling to us because we once understood him so well), Hank paces an empty liquor store, walking past a dead clerk while a radio preacher blares forth with the Gospel.
“And is there a difference . . . between a sin of omission and a sin of commission?” the voice asks as Hank proceeds with yet another wrong thing that could, just maybe, make everything right again.
“And then there were hundreds, maybe thousands of people all across the region—Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, West Virginia, Pennsylvania—sitting in their homes, driving in their cars, listening,” Hank thinks of the radio preacher. “Each of them was connected to the others, and all of them were connected to me, simply by the sound of this man’s voice.”
He turns the radio off and goes about cleaning up his bloody mess, noting: “Without the preacher’s voice, the building had an ominous silence to it. Every noise I made echoed back at me from the shelves of food, sounding furtive, rodent-like.”
At this point in the novel, nine people are dead. Hank has gone from a reasonable man with a simple plan to an abhorrent figure, and we wonder what his punishment or reward will be, what will be gained or suffered for all that we’ve seen, all the blood that has been shed.
Smith gives it to us in a single, beautiful sentence that begins: “It took me four hours to—”
To do what? I leave it for you to find out, but I can remember coming upon that line during my first reading of the book, and it still brings on a dark laugh and a shake of the head. This grand denouement of Smith’s blood-soaked tale is the kind of act of smooth confidence that you rarely encounter, the perfect choice perfectly executed, and the fact that it came in his first novel is, I have to admit, a bit maddening. He’s so locked into the story that every beat, no matter how jarring, somehow seems natural, and every twist reminds us of the way we once understood Hank, refusing to let us off the hook for our own willingness to go along with it all.
The novel ends with Hank explaining that he often calls upon memories—including a specific image of his brother looking out at the family’s lost farm, the windmill creaking, a barn missing—in order to force himself to weep. “And when I weep, I feel—despite everything I’ve done that might make it seem otherwise—human, exactly like everyone else.”
In this is the essential page-turning chill of A Simple Plan, the carefully created sense that a man of reprehensible deeds is not that far from you, dear reader, not that far at all.
Smith has published only one more novel in the two decades since his debut. The Ruins is a stark, fatalistic horror story, and while this impatient reader hungers for him to return, he need not ever publish again to be assured of a place in the canon of great suspense novelists, a position he achieved upon arrival with A Simple Plan.
Michael Koryta (b. 1982) is the author of four novels in the Lincoln Perry series, the first of which, Tonight I Said Goodbye, was published in 2004 and won the Private Eye Writers of America Best First Novel Award, and the Great Lakes Book Award for Best Mystery. He has also published four nonseries novels: Envy the Night (2008) won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Best Mystery/Thriller, while So Cold the River (2010), The Cypress House (2011), and The Ridge (2011) were all New York Times Notable Books. His most recent novel is The Prophet (2012). Visit him online at www.michaelkoryta.com.
Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (aka The Trial of Elizabeth Cree)
by Peter Ackroyd (1994)
BARBARA NADEL
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Peter Ackroyd (b. 1949) is an English novelist, poet, biographer, and critic whose particular passion is the history and culture of the city of London—“its power, its majesty, its darkness, its shadows”—leading him to become its greatest living chronicler. His novels frequently place real historical characters, in whose lives Ackroyd has immersed himself through research, in fictionalized or reimagined settings. These have included the writer Oscar Wilde, the poet Chatterton, the architect Nicholas Hawksmoor, and the English occultist John Dee. “The marvelous thing about research of that nature,” Ackroyd has remarked, “is that you can come upon luminous and illuminating details which tend to be neglected by more academic historians, or more professional historians.”
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I like novels that I want to read again and again. But they also annoy me because they take me away from new literary adventures. As it is, a normal life span is hardly long enough to make even a dent on a fraction of all the good literature in the world. This book, Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, is a particular offender. Every year it drags me back, tantalizing and teasing me with mysteries that are not only fascinating but are also connected to my own past.
The setting for Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem is London in the 1880s, just before Jack the Ripper began his career. It concerns the rise to fame and then downfall of a music hall artiste called Elizabeth Cree. The book opens with her execution for the murder of her husband, John, and it also ends with a theatrical rendition of the same event. At the same time a serial killer, known as the Golem, is stalking the streets of a London characterized by fog and lamplight, by opium-tinged illusion and the fear of dark-eyed strangers from unknown Eastern Europe. It is a landscape that is both bewitching and very familiar to me.
My paternal grandparents, products of the 1880s themselves, lived in an East End of London that existed beside the one I resided in as a small child in the 1960s. They were an eccentric pair who chose to exist in Edwardian London. They had gas lamps instead of electricity and my grandmother cooked on an old range—that would be enormously fashionable now—and the talk among them was always of a life that had disappeared. I spent a lot of my time in their house and so my early years were colored by tales of green-tinged fog, of funerals like theatrical productions, of murder, of poverty, and I was always surrounded by artifacts such as gas mantles, art pots, and mourning jewelry. In light of that, it is obvious why I’m always drawn to tales of bloody killing in Old London. But this book also appeals to the psychology graduate I grew up to be, too.
Who the killer known as the Golem might be is never revealed, although he speaks to the reader in the first person throughout the novel. Three prominent, and real, people from that era are suspected of being the Golem—Karl Marx, the Father of Socialism; the author George Gissing; and Dan Leno, the music hall star and so-called “funniest man on earth.” Leno is also, in the book, instrumental in advancing Elizabeth Cree’s theatrical career. Even more intriguing is the fact that all three suspects occasionally see each other, without knowing one another, in the Read
ing Room at the British Museum. In addition, at various stages during the narrative, they all read something by the famous “opium eater” Thomas De Quincey—significantly (or not) an essay entitled “On Murder, Considered as One of the Fine Arts” (1827). This work, based around the so-called Ratcliffe Highway murders of 1811, charts the bloody killings of the Marr family by a man called John Williams, who subsequently hanged himself and was buried with a stake through his heart. This is very rich and dastardly Victorian fare!
That the serial killer is dubbed “The Golem” is significant inasmuch as it speaks volumes about the prejudices of the day. A Golem is a mythical Jewish creature, originally created in Prague to help protect the community there from Gentile oppression. Now relocated to London, it is a figure of fear and a symbol of the danger inherent in the “otherness” that Judaism represents in a Christian society. Predictably, Marx, a Jew, is suspected of being the killer, as well as two Gentiles, who are nevertheless outsiders, too: Gissing, who lived with an alcoholic prostitute, and Leno, who, as a theatrical, existed outside of mainstream society. With its concentration on the notion of a Jewish villain, Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem acts as a fictional early warning of the madness that engulfed parts of the old East End in the wake of the Jack the Ripper murders. A lot of the early suspects were Jews, and graffiti specifically naming Jews (“The Jewes are not the men to be blamed for nothing.”) was found scrawled on a wall and was then scrubbed off by police anxious to prevent unrest between communities. I enjoy these echoes of and from the real historical world as well as the way Ackroyd uses De Quincey’s essay as a vehicle for the musings of both the Golem and the other characters on the nature and morality of murder.