I studied English at university, and one option was a course in detective fiction. It was to be a defining choice for me, as it introduced me to the work of Ross Macdonald. Although it would be another five years before I began writing my first novel, it owes its genesis to that course. I hunted down every book by Macdonald I could find, which, in those pre-Internet days, meant scouring used-book stores for British paperback editions with fantastically unsuitable covers, usually featuring women in various states of undress. I even found a first edition of Find a Victim from 1954 on my parents’ bookshelf at home. It had come from a lending library in the American Midwest. I have no idea how it ended up in my parents’ possession.
After college, I entered journalism, mainly because I liked writing and I could see few other ways in which I could be paid to write. Inevitably, perhaps, I grew frustrated with journalism. I wanted to write fiction, and newspapers tend to disapprove of the urge toward the fictitious in their reporters.
So one evening I sat down at my computer at home and began writing about a man driving toward a cemetery, flowers on the backseat of his car, his mind filled with memories of his dead wife and child.
He was Charlie Parker, and it was the beginning of Every Dead Thing.
III
In 1996, I had already completed the first half of what would eventually become my first novel. I had been very influenced by two writers mentioned earlier, James Lee Burke and Ross Macdonald. Burke’s influence was stylistic and linguistic, while Macdonald’s was more difficult to pinpoint. It was thematic, perhaps, or even philosophical. His detective, Lew Archer, was profoundly empathetic. Archer himself says at one point, “I hear voices crying in the night, and I go see what’s the matter.” I loved that about Archer: his inability to remain silent or inactive while another was suffering. It has always seemed to me that empathy is one of the greatest of human emotions, the capacity to feel another’s pain as one’s own and, as a consequence, to work to take that pain away. For me, evil is the absence of empathy.
The Irish philosopher-politician Edmund Burke once wrote, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” At some level, that is what the best of mystery fiction is about: the refusal of good men and women to do nothing in the face of evil, even at considerable cost to themselves, because a failure to intervene makes one complicit in what occurs.
Macdonald’s novels are also fascinated by the idea of the sins of the fathers being visited on the sons, of one generation suffering for the sins of its predecessors. Macdonald understood that suffering is frequently not earned or deserved. People suffer through no fault of their own. They suffer because they are vulnerable or oppressed. They suffer because they are in the wrong place at the wrong time. They suffer because they are the wrong color, or creed, or sex. They suffer because they can be made to suffer.
It seemed to me that there was a distinction between the outlook of Macdonald (and some of his peers) and that of certain British crime writers of a similar vintage. If one reads the classic “Golden Age” British crime novels, one again and again encounters individuals who suffer and die because they are bad. Few nice people die in Agatha Christie’s novels. Most of them are adulterers, or thieves, or blackmailers. They bring their deaths upon themselves. We are not asked to feel pity for them or empathy. Their killers have to be found and punished as a matter of social order rather than because the murders they have committed diminish us all as human beings, or as an effort at recompense for the deaths of innocents. Even Dorothy L. Sayers, whose awareness of a moral universe ruled by God could hardly be in doubt, is not immune to cold-heartedness. In The Nine Tailors, death comes to a thief in the form of divine retribution. Even God is not merciful in the face of criminal behavior.
I think that something of Macdonald’s intensely humane view of people and how they suffer influenced my reaction to Belinda Pereira’s death. As a consequence, the novel on which I was working began to change. Its central character, the private detective Charlie Parker, became a being defined not simply by anger and the desire for revenge, but by his own sufferings. Because he has suffered, he is unwilling to allow others to suffer in turn. It is his capacity for empathy that ultimately ensures he does not destroy himself with selfishness and grief, or allow himself to be destroyed by the man he is hunting, the killer of his wife and child.
The novel had always begun with its prologue. That was the first part of it I wrote, and although it went through many revisions, the essence remained the same. I wanted to write about a man who loses everything and who struggles to survive, to remain human in the aftermath. There was a kind of awful liberation, I thought, in having one’s worst nightmares come to pass. Once someone had endured loss on that level, it seemed to me that very little could ever hurt him to a similar degree again. I gave him the name Charlie Parker because I liked the connotations of flight, freedom, and spirituality that came with the nickname Bird, the moniker given to the jazz musician with whom he shared this name, especially for a man so mired in mortality. In subsequent novels, the nickname was largely dispensed with. I didn’t want readers to think it was a gimmick, because it was not meant to be.
Yet Parker was still in the process of being formed, even when that first novel was completed and eventually published in 1999, and Belinda Pereira was still hovering in the background, battered and bloodied. By that time, the investigation into her death had ground to a halt.
IV
Let’s return for a moment to Macdonald, who, as well as being a great novelist (the greatest mystery novelist of his age, I would argue, greater even than Chandler), was also a generous and perceptive critic. In an essay on James M. Cain, Macdonald wrote, “A first novel can be a kind of index to an author’s ensuing work.”
First novels are frequently criticized for including rather too much material. In part, this is a consequence of a writer’s belief that he or she may never have the opportunity to publish a novel again, and therefore everything that seems even mildly important or relevant should be included in what may be that single published work. Also, first novels tend to represent the sum total of a writer’s knowledge and experience up to that stage in his or her life. To put it another way, it takes a lifetime to write a first novel, and then a contract gives one a year to write a second.
Macdonald offers a different perspective on the first novel. It is an introduction to a writer, and to that writer’s obsessions. Not every subject or theme may be dealt with in depth in that first work, or examined in great detail, but they will recur later in the writer’s career, and a passing reference in a first novel may become the core of a later book. (That has certainly been my experience as a writer. The novel I’m currently working on, The Lovers, deals with an incident that is barely described in Every Dead Thing, and I have very consciously crafted the Parker books as a sequence of novels, each one building upon what has happened earlier.)
The seeds of what Parker would become were sown in Every Dead Thing, but it was only over the course of the subsequent books that they bore fruit, a not uncommon characteristic of detective series. The first signs of this are apparent in Dark Hollow, my second novel, and the book in which I decided to deal explicitly with my feelings about the Belinda Pereira case. In the novel, Parker is required to view the body of a young woman, Rita Ferris, who has been murdered in her apartment. He forces himself to imagine her final moments, an act of painful empathy but one that is necessary for him, a small service for the dead. Later, it becomes clear that Rita has been working as a prostitute to supplement her income and support her child, but Parker keeps that knowledge to himself until he has to divulge it. He does not want her to be judged and discarded because of this one aspect of her life.