The Big Blowdown, if you read it closely enough, is a crime novel that can make you cry. There aren’t enough of those, I think.
Declan Burke is the author of Eightball Boogie (2003), The Big O (2007), and Absolute Zero Cool (2011). He is the editor of Down These Green Streets: Irish Crime Writing in the 21st Century (Liberties Press, 2011), and hosts a website dedicated to Irish crime fiction called Crime Always Pays. His latest novel is Slaughter’s Hound (2012). He lives in Wicklow with his wife and daughter, where he is not allowed to own a cat, or be owned by one. Visit him online at www.crimealwayspays.blogspot.com.
A Crime in the Neighborhood
by Suzanne Berne (1997)
THOMAS H. COOK
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Suzanne Berne (b. 1961) won the Orange Prize for her debut novel, A Crime in the Neighborhood (1997), which concerns itself with the murder of a child against the backdrop of the Watergate scandal, as recounted by a ten-year-old girl. Berne, an associate English professor at Boston College who has taught at Wellesley and Harvard, specializes in psychological narratives in a domestic setting. In addition to A Crime in the Neighborhood, Berne has published A Perfect Arrangement (2001), The Ghost at the Table (2006), and Missing Lucile (2010).
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I have always believed that a crime novel, at its best, should simply be a novel in which there is a crime. This casts a very wide net, of course, since there are very few works of fiction that do not involve, at least tangentially, some manner of crime. How much Dostoyevsky would there be without a crime? The same can be said of Thomas Hardy, and certainly of Dickens as well. The larger problem is that many crime writers have pretty much ceased to include those elements of character and atmosphere that add so much to any novel. They have also had a tendency to cast aside any sense of organic development. Nonetheless, I continue to trumpet the so-called literary crime novel and to admire the crime novel that gives readers a full fictional dinner: starter, entrée, and dessert.
Suzanne Berne’s A Crime in the Neighborhood is not only a novel that happens to be about a crime, but one that beautifully combines the suspense of a crime novel with all the elements that make for a fully rounded reading experience.
There are two crimes in A Crime in the Neighborhood. The first is the murder of a little boy. True to the stark and unblinking sense of reality that pervades this novel, the victim is a nasty little bastard, unattractive in every way a child can be unattractive, the sort of kid no one in the neighborhood might actually miss, save for his parents. And yet the murder of Boyd Ellison shakes the lives and rattles the sense of security that has, until now, been the signal reality of the neighborhood. “Mistakes,” Berne writes, “are where life really happens,” and it is this murder that will mark the grave mistake later to be committed by the novel’s thirteen-year-old narrator, the precocious, sensitive, and somewhat dreamy Marsha.
A sense of some great impending wrong pervades A Crime in the Neighborhood. Reading it is like sitting on a sunny lawn as a black line of thunderstorms steadily and fearsomely advances along the far horizon. The reader watches helplessly as Marsha is drawn into the investigation, the girl taking note of various details in the way she thinks Sherlock Holmes would have taken note of them. But Marsha, as the reader knows, is no Sherlock Holmes. Rather, she is a young girl on the quivering brink of adulthood, living with her mother and siblings in a home abandoned by her father, who has run off with the “other woman.” The loss of the father creates yet another layer of dread in A Crime in the Neighborhood. Acts have consequences, often quite unexpected ones, and Marsha’s loss of her father has created a perilous imbalance in her life; and, as we learn, a person who loses purchase can grasp for terrible things while attempting to regain it.
It is this Marsha, abandoned by her father, and with her natural inquisitiveness and sense of drama fueled by the murder of a little boy, who first begins to take note of a new neighbor, a bachelor, Mr. Green: “He was a squat man, with a pinkish face, blandly familiar, although he didn’t actually resemble anyone I knew. When he bent his head, I saw that he had a bald spot, shaped like a heart.”
There is a deadpan accuracy to this description, one that makes it all the more frightening when, to these far from unusual traits, Marsha later adds characteristics of appearance and behavior that are to her mind at first creepy, then sinister, and at last murderous. Helplessly, the reader follows her descent as she becomes just the sort of girl who once conjured up the madness of Salem, but without the outward hysterics; a transformation that is quiet, inward, and for that reason, all the more fraught with terror.
But A Crime in the Neighborhood would be no more than a well-done little thriller if it were only about the murder of Boyd Ellison and its impact upon a neighborhood girl. What makes the book memorable is its perfect blending of small story with great theme. Of a burglary, Ms. Berne has a neighbor say: “This break-in stuff is going to turn into a big disaster. Sometimes things like this start small, but then they get out of control. That’s what happens. It doesn’t take long for a lousy mistake to turn into a crime.”
From that simple insight, Ms. Berne builds her novel into a work of genuine and heartbreaking social criticism, and by that means delineates a second, far more sweeping and profound crime in the neighborhood than the murder of Boyd Ellison. She does this without beating a loud philosophical drum. Thus, at one point, when the neighborhood forms a watch group, no one comes to Marsha’s house in search of assistance or support: “No one had knocked on our door, probably because they realized my father no longer lived there.”
The image of the missing father looms very large indeed in A Crime in the Neighborhood, its impact much more disastrous and far-reaching than the occasional missing child. From the Watergate era that is the setting of the novel onward, the rate of divorce and the consequent number of fatherless homes rises continually in the United States.
Ms. Berne connects all this without rubbing our faces in it or for one moment straining Marsha’s narrative voice:
In a confused manner, I think I’d begun to connect my father’s leaving us with Boyd Ellison’s murder and even with whatever it was that had happened at Watergate. Although I couldn’t have explained it then, I believed that my father’s departure had deeply jarred the domestic order not just in our house, but in the neighborhood, and by extension the country, since in those days my neighborhood was my country.
As A Crime in the Neighborhood so eloquently demonstrates, a book doesn’t have to be pretentious or self-conscious in order truly to be about something. Yet even when the book announces its theme, it does so in a way that does not impinge upon the suspense of the narrative or cause it to lose its focus on Marsha as the book’s central character. For the social disintegration that is the second crime in the neighborhood is one against which Marsha finally cries out in a quiet, yet devastating passage: “Years later, during one of our infrequent visits, I told my father about that night and how the twins and I had watched from the porch as all the other fathers gathered on the street, talking with their arms folded. ‘We were frightened. We needed you . . . And you weren’t there.’ ”
A Crime in the Neighborhood never departs from the crime that generates the book’s forward momentum, but neither does it give in to the temptation of many crime writers to toss overboard every aspect of the literary novel—character, atmosphere, a passage so lovely it stops us in our tracks—in order to ensure that the “action” continues at a breakneck pace. For that reason, I think it should be read not only because it is a fine book in its own right, but because it also shows just how fine a “crime novel” can be.
Thomas H. Cook is the author of twenty-six novels and two works of nonfiction. He has been nominated for the Edgar Allan Poe Award seven times in five different categories, and his novel The Chatham School Affair won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1996. His novel Red Leaves won the Barry Award, and various other novels have been nominated for the Strand Award, the Hammett Prize, the Macavity an
d Anthony awards, the Silver Dagger of the Crime Writers’ Association, and France’s Grand Prix de Littérature Policière. He has won the Martin Beck Award of the Swedish Academy of Detection twice, the only author ever to have done so.
Out (Auto)
by Natsuo Kirino (1997)
DIANE WEI LIANG
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Natsuo Kirino (b. 1951) is the pen name of the Japanese writer Mariko Hashioka. She has written novels, short stories, and essays, but it was the translation of her 1997 novel Auto (Out) into English in 2003 that brought her to a larger international audience. Her books frequently deal with the issue of women and power, or their lack thereof. “I feel that this society [Japan] takes advantage of powerless women,” she said in an interview conducted shortly after Out’s English publication. She went on to describe herself as “a sort of ‘deviant’ that really doesn’t fit into an easy category. My debut as an ‘author’ was as a mystery writer, but in reality, I really don’t like mysteries that much. My main motivation to write is to ‘observe the fabric of human relationships.’ Sometimes the threads that connect people are strong, or warped, or weak, or twisted by the encounters. Isn’t that what storytelling is really all about?”
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Out is a story of four women who work night shifts at a boxed-lunch factory in a suburb of Tokyo. Forty-three-year-old Masako likes to keep to herself. Yoshie is a widow with university-aged children. Yayoi is young and beautiful, the mother to two small boys. Kuniko is flashy, overweight, and over her head in debt. They seem to have little in common other than that they work together. But one of them happens to be a murderer, the others her accomplices.
Their story begins on an ordinary night, when the four friends meet to start their usual night shift. From midnight to 5:30 a.m. they work the assembly line at the factory, filling lunch boxes. At dawn they say good-bye to each other and go their separate ways home.
Masako’s husband is leaving for work. They hardly speak to each other anymore. Her son, who has dropped out of high school, refuses to talk to her. Yoshie changes and washes her invalid mother-in-law, who scorns her for being late. Yoshie’s younger daughter demands yet more money. Yayoi is home in time to get her young children ready for school. Kuniko has a fight with her boyfriend and goes out to look for a better-paid job.
Later in the day, Yayoi’s gambling, philandering husband returns home, having been thrown out of the nightclub he frequents. He beats Yayoi, but instead of submitting as usual, Yayoi flies into a rage and strangles him with his tie. Realizing that she has killed her husband, she calls Masako for help. After some convincing, Yayoi’s friends agree to cut up the body and dispose of the parts in rubbish bins.
Out, therefore, is not so much a book about “whodunit,” but the consequences of crime and punishment, friendship, loyalty, and self-discovery.
Masako is confined in a homelife from which she has been excluded as a person. Yoshie is a slave to other people’s problems. Yayoi is a victim of her husband’s cruelty and her own weakness. Kuniko cannot resist material goods and the fantasy of a better life. It is life in Tokyo presented without glamour or apology; each of the women is trapped in a place where she does not want to be, and from which she has no way of escaping. As the women navigate the consequences of their actions, and the investigation that follows, they slowly become aware that the murder of Yayoi’s husband might be their opportunity for freedom, if they can only get away with it.
Some of the bags containing the body parts of Yayoi’s husband are discovered. The police launch a murder investigation. Yayoi is a suspect. The women have to cover their tracks, staying a step ahead of the police. Cracks appear in their fragile solidarity.
The investigation also leads the police to the nightclub where Yayoi’s husband was last seen. His missing jacket is recovered. Witnesses report that they have seen the club owner Satake beating up the victim on the night he disappeared. Satake, who has a previous conviction, is arrested, and charged with the murder.
The news brings relief and jubilation to the women. Yayoi collects her husband’s life insurance and pays off her friends. Yoshie is happy to buy herself a piece of jewelry as a reward. Kuniko pays off her loan. Masako, who has found the task of cutting up the body thrilling and has not wanted money for her part, takes her share without fully understanding why she is doing so. They go back to work at the factory, gleeful that life is returning to normal.
But they are wrong.
Kuniko’s loan shark, Jumonji, becomes suspicious of Kuniko’s new income and coerces her into revealing the truth. He decides to blackmail the women, especially Masako, who has a secret of her own.
Satake is released due to lack of evidence. His businesses have collapsed in the time that he has been in police custody. He vows revenge.
Strange things begin to happen around the women. A kind neighbor appears to help Yayoi, looking after her children. Someone is asking questions about Yoshie in her neighborhood. A new security guard starts at the boxed-lunch factory, and moves into the same apartment building as Kuniko.
Masako and Yoshie begin working with Jumonji, cutting up and disposing of bodies for gangsters. Masako asks a coworker at the boxed-lunch factory to keep her earnings safe, and it seems as if Masako is planning something. Yoshie’s daughters steal her money and disappear.
Then, one day, Jumonji delivers another body to be dismembered. It is Kuniko . . .
Out is a subtle tale of the psychology of a crime—an unpremeditated murder. As events spiral out of control, the women have to react, exposing who they really are and forcing them to question what they are seeking in life. Masako comes to accept her isolation and the darkness in her own heart. Yoshie no longer wants to be a slave to others. Yayoi is thrilled to be freed of her cruel husband, and feels no remorse for killing him. Kuniko’s greed cannot be contained, and eventually consumes her.
When asked why she acted as she did, Masako replies: “Because I want to be alone. Because I want to be free.”
Out is brilliant not only for its unrelenting pace, but for its study of the lives of ordinary women in Japan. The society has forced on them duties of family, and demands that they simply accept their fate. It takes an extraordinary event for the women to begin questioning their lives and reexamining their choices. At no point does the book, even in the most page-turning rush of pace, forget to convey the struggles and longings of these women, and how they desperately attempt to escape their burdens. Even though the women are engaged in criminal acts, one cannot help but sympathize with them, and root for them.
There is tenderness in crime, light in darkness.
Diane Wei Liang was born in Beijing. She spent part of her childhood with her parents in a labor camp in a remote region of China. A graduate of Beijing University, Diane took part in the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. She has an MBA and a PhD in business administration from Carnegie Mellon University. She was an award-winning business professor in the United States and the U.K. Diane is the author of Lake with No Name (memoir) and three novels: The Eye of Jade, Paper Butterfly, and The House of Golden Spirit. Her novels have been translated into more than twenty languages. She lives in London. Visit her online at www.dianeweiliang.com.
Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned
by Walter Mosley (1997)
MARTYN WAITES
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Walter Mosley (b. 1952) has published more than thirty books across various genres, including science fiction, literary fiction, short fiction, and nonfiction, but is probably most famous for his mystery novels, in particular his series featuring the black private detective Easy Rawlins, and, latterly, the books featuring ex-convict Socrates Fortlow. These novels function not only as entertaining mysteries in their own right, but as social, political, and cultural histories of Los Angeles and, in particular, of the black experience in that city.
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Ten years ago I was in prison. I suppose I should clarify that by saying that I was working in prison,
as a writer-in-residence. Actually two prisons, to be precise: a Young Offenders Institution and an adult HMP (Her Majesty’s Prison). I loved that job, especially working with the boys in the YOI. I was there for the stories, to show them how to construct them, to see their own, to recognize that the endings they expected weren’t necessarily inevitable. It was an honor being able to effect a positive change in their lives, to see them go from angry, uncommunicative youths to pleasant, happy boys. And all through using words and telling stories. Some days were brilliant, but it didn’t always work, of course. And when it failed there was no middle ground. Stacking shelves at a Tesco supermarket would have been more rewarding. But those good days, they were worth everything.
The adult HMP was slightly different. Pecking orders had been established, fates accepted. For some, it was hard to tell whether interrupted lives meant being inside or outside the walls.
But they all had one thing in common: they wanted escape. Not the physical, going-over-the-barbed-wire kind, but the kind that could take them out of themselves, out of their cells, while they killed time. The library was one of the most popular places in the prison, and horror and crime the most popular genres. They always asked me for recommendations. And the one book I recommended more than any other was Walter Mosley’s Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned.
Mosley had been one of my favorite writers ever since I read, along with everyone else it seemed, Devil in a Blue Dress. Here was a voice that seemed unique, taking the postwar African American urban experience and filtering it through the prism of private-eye fiction. But not doing it in a way that was worthy, preachy, or dull. Using the crime novel as a form of societal excavation while never forgetting that he had a story to tell, a reader to entertain. Brilliant. My kind of writing.