The Lineup: The World's Greatest Crime Writers Tell the Inside Story of Their Greatest Detectives

I

I never met Belinda Pereira. By the time I heard her name spoken for the first time, she was already dead. But on the night that she was killed, I stood outside her apartment in the rain, and I listened as a detective described the circumstances of her death. She was twenty-six years old. Were it not for her, I don’t think I would be writing the books I write. In a way, they are an attempt to make sense of her murder, and for that reason they all fail.

Because there was no sense to her murder.

Dublin is a peculiar city. It closes down for the Christmas season and doesn’t really find its stride again until early in the New Year. When I worked as a journalist, Christmas was a period during which most staff journalists preferred not to work. It wasn’t simply that they wanted to spend time with their families, as most people do at that time of year, or to leave the grim winter weather behind and head for somewhere warmer; it was because nothing much really happened in Ireland at Christmas. During the Troubles, even the terrorists would call a brief cease-fire beginning about December 24, so they could stay at home and pretend to be ordinary men and women without blood on their hands.

But I was a freelance journalist, and I worked whatever hours I was offered because I was afraid that if I turned them down, I would never be given work again. By 1996, I had essentially been a full-time freelancer for the Irish Times newspaper in Dublin for three years, and had graduated from education and assorted features to regular shifts in the newsroom, which was how I came to be working on December 28, when Belinda died.

One of the tasks newsroom journalists are required to do is to call the police or the fire department and ask if anything newsworthy has happened. These calls are usually made every hour because, personal sources apart, it is not the place of the police and the fire department to take the initiative in informing journalists of interesting events. In fact, the office of the Irish Times could have been on fire, and the fire department wouldn’t have called us to let us know. That was just the way things were.

So, on the night of December 28, I made my final call to the press office of the Garda Síochána, as the Irish police are called. I was about to go home, and I was expecting nothing different from what I’d been told a number of times already that day: all is quiet.

But that was not what I was told. Instead, the officer informed me that a young woman’s body had been found in an apartment at Mellor Court, on the north side of the city not far from the newspaper’s offices on D’Olier Street. She had been badly beaten, so the gardaí were treating it as a suspicious death. And, since there was nobody else in the sparsely staffed newsroom who was free, and as I had made the call, the story was mine.

This was something of a mixed blessing. On any ordinary news day, the crime correspondent or a more senior reporter would have been assigned to the story, but as it was Christmas, I was as good as it was going to get for the newspaper. It would be a front-page story, and an above-the-fold byline, which all journalists love. On the other hand, I had already been working for nine or ten hours, and it was raining outside. It would be a long night.

I walked down to Mellor Court, and there I did all of the things that give journalists a bad name: I stopped people going into the apartment building to ask if they knew anything of what had occurred; I talked to the security guard who was manning the door of a nearby convenience store; and then, when my efforts had come to nothing, I simply waited in the rain for someone from the gardaí to emerge and tell me what was happening.

When the detective in charge did eventually come out, he looked pale and shaken. No formal identification of the body had been made, he said. A passport had been found in the apartment, and a preliminary identification had been made from that, but the victim had been so badly beaten that there was no way as yet of being sure she was the girl in the passport photo. All he could say for now was that she was not an Irish national, and she was dead.

I went back to the newspaper office and wrote up the story. Later that night, the girl’s identity was revealed: her name was Belinda Pereira, a child of Sri Lankan parents living in London.

Dublin, at that time, was not a very violent city. In fact, Ireland still has one of the lowest homicide rates in Europe, although gangland killings have inflated that figure in recent years, and we have become increasingly inured to casual homicide. But in 1996, Belinda Pereira’s death was shocking to the Irish public. Here was a young woman, far from home, who had been brutally murdered, and at Christmas too, a season of peace. It was felt that the person or persons responsible for her death should be found and punished. Her murder was headline news in every Irish newspaper.

Then, a few days after her death, it emerged that Belinda Pereira had come to Dublin to work as a prostitute. It wasn’t the first time that she had done so, and she had also worked as a call girl in England. A convent-educated schoolgirl, she was studying to be a beautician in London. Prostitution appeared to be a way to supplement her income. In addition, there were reports that her parents had decided to separate, and her mother wanted to return to Sri Lanka. A week’s work in Dublin would have allowed Belinda to earn the money to help her mother get home.

When the details of her lifestyle were revealed, public attitudes toward her death changed. I think people made two judgments upon her. The first was that her murder was not as terrible as it had first seemed, and was certainly not as tragic as it might have been had she worked as, say, a nurse or a secretary. The second was that she had asked for what had happened to her. After all, she was working as a prostitute. She should have expected to meet people who were less morally scrupulous than the norm. In fact, she was obviously less morally scrupulous than many other young women. She had put herself in harm’s way, and she had suffered for it. It was her own fault.

I did not feel that way. Perhaps it was because she was young-two years younger than I was-and beautiful. It might have been because it was the first murder I had ever covered, and I had not yet grown used to such matters. Whatever the reasons, I believed that there was nothing this young woman could have done in life to merit the terrible death that was visited upon her. In fact, there was nothing that very many of us could do to deserve such an end. When the tabloid newspapers began routinely to refer to her as “the Sri Lankan hooker Belinda Pereira,” I felt ashamed and angry. That was what she had been reduced to: a foreign hooker. Such casual dismissal of her life was the first step on the road from caring about what happened to her to not caring at all.

And so Belinda Pereira’s death stayed with me, even as the public gradually forgot about her.

II

I have always written.

That sounds like a rather arch statement to make, but it’s true. When I was a young boy I began reading Enid Blyton books, struggling phonetically with unfamiliar words. (As a consequence, I believed for many years that the word cupboard was pronounced “cup-board” instead of “cubbard.”) The next natural step seemed to be to tell stories of my own. I was addicted to Ron Ely’s Tarzan TV series and the adventures of Casey Jones, both of which were shown on television in Ireland on Saturday mornings, so they became the subjects of my first stories. I was six. My teacher, Mrs. Foley, would pay me five pence for each tale I submitted, so I was, I suppose, a hack from an early age.

I read voraciously, as all writers should. Like many boys, I flirted with the horror genre and then, in my early teens, I read my first mystery novel. Each summer, my father would take us to spend two weeks with my grandmother in Ballylongford, a small village in County Kerry. She had bookshelves that would be regularly raided and refilled by visiting relatives, and at the beginning of each vacation my father would engage in the solemn ritual of the Choosing of the Book. Only on vacation would my father read a novel, preferring newspapers for the rest of the year, so the selection of the right book was of paramount importance to him. (He once chose I, Claudius, which was a grave error, as it took him two years to finish, a mistake he never repeated.)

That summer, my father chose a book entitled Let’s Hear It for the Deaf Man, by Ed McBain. I think he chose it because it was short, and after the I, Claudius debacle, short was good. One day, he put it aside to tackle the newspaper, and intrigued by the title, I began reading. That book became the first, and only, book over which my father and I fought for possession. Thereafter, I read every single Ed McBain book I could find. It was my introduction to the genre of which I would ultimately become a small part.

I met McBain, whose real name was Evan Hunter, shortly before he died. There had been a misunderstanding between us early in my career when, as a means of paying homage to him, I had given some characters in my first novel names that echoed his own work. There was a Fat Ollie, and an Evan Baines-awkward, I know, but well-intentioned. McBain was incensed, misinterpreting it as an act of theft. Years later, when we met at last, I explained to him the reason for what I had done and subsequently received a gracious and apologetic e-mail in reply. It was a great relief. It’s possible that I might not have ended up writing what I do had it not been for him, and I did not want him to think ill of me.

Now that I come to think of it, my encounters with my literary idols have usually involved a dollop of mild humiliation for me. When interviewing James Lee Burke in Montana, I managed to get lost for a time in the Great Rattlesnake Wilderness while out for a walk with him, and was eventually found by his neighbor’s dogs. I interviewed Stephen King, and managed to cause my pile of first editions, ready to be signed, to fall on his foot. Sometimes I wonder if it’s really safe to allow me out on my own.

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.

In Dark Hollow, the person responsible for the death of Rita Ferris is found, and a degree of punishment is meted out. In real life, Belinda Pereira’s killer has not been found. It has been suggested that two pimps from Monaghan, a county in the north of Ireland, were responsible, but if they were, there is not enough evidence to bring them to trial. A public appeal by the Garda Síochána in 2005 for new information led nowhere.

I wonder sometimes if part of the appeal of mystery fiction is its capacity to give us answers and solutions that we don’t always get in real life. In real life, the guilty go unpunished. In real life, a young woman can be beaten with a hammer until she is beyond identification, and her killer or killers can retreat into the shadows, never to be found. But in mystery fiction, a man of some goodness, however compromised he may be, can choose to act on behalf of the victim and achieve a measure of justice. No matter how dark such fiction may appear to be, it is never entirely without hope.

V

Why, then, given the nature and setting of Belinda Pereira’s murder, did I not choose to set Dark Hollow in Ireland? Why is Charlie Parker not Irish?

Like most writers, I began writing what I read, and what I read was largely American fiction, and not exclusively mystery fiction either. I had never been very attracted to the British model, and mystery fiction has never really been part of the Irish literary tradition.

That latter observation may be worth closer examination, given the surge in production of Irish crime fiction in recent years. Nobody has ever been able to come up with a single compelling reason why Irish writers chose not to investigate the possibilities of crime fiction for many years, even while English and Scottish writers pursued them with a vengeance. The dearth of Irish crime fiction is, I suspect, a consequence of a number of factors, some literary and some social.

To begin with, Ireland was a rural society, and it was G. K. Chesterton who noted that crime fiction functions better in urban rather than rural settings, that it is, on one level, tied up with the poetry of urban life. Ireland was also not a very violent society, terrorism apart. I realize, of course, that the use of the term “terrorism apart” is a little like saying that Einstein didn’t achieve much scientifically, “the Theory of Relativity apart.” Terrorism cast a shadow over modern Irish life for the best part of three decades, and its influence extended far beyond the bombings and shootings that took place in Northern Ireland and, on occasion, in the South. One might argue that it would be difficult to write about crime in Ireland and not touch upon the subject of terrorism, which may be why so many writers chose instead to neglect the genre entirely.

There are exceptions: Eugene McEldowney’s A Kind of Homecoming, for example, or Eoin McNamee’s Resurrection Man, which dealt with the Protestant killers known as the “Shankill Butchers,” although McNamee might well dispute the description of Resurrection Man as a crime novel. Perhaps, too, there was a sense that mystery fiction was simply not up to the task of tackling the subject of terrorism, particularly terrorism that was ongoing and so close to home. The wounds were too raw, and fresh ones were being inflicted every day. Even Irish literary fiction seemed to struggle with the enormity of what was happening on our small island.

Finally, there has long been a strong antirationalist tradition in Irish literature, which found its expression in, among others, the great Anglo-Irish gothic novels: Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray; the fantasy fiction of Mervyn Wall (the two Fursey books); and the surreal visions of Flann O’Brien (At Swim-Two-Birds; The Third Policeman, itself a kind of anticrime novel). By contrast, crime fiction, in its most conservative form, is intensely rationalist in outlook. Think of Poe’s Dupin, Christie’s Poirot, and Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, each of whom places great store by the processes of ratiocination. Philosophically, this is at odds with the Irish outlook, one that for many years placed a greater emphasis on an artistic rather than a scientific response to the world.

Quite simply, I did not see an Irish literary tradition of which I wanted to be a part. It also seemed that Irish literature was concerned primarily with the nature of being Irish, itself not unreasonable given that we are a young state, but I had no interest in writing about the nature of Irishness. There were two options, then: to import elements of the American crime novel into the Irish realm, which I did not feel would work, or to bring a European perspective to the American crime novel, which was the path I chose.

Since then, Irish crime fiction has begun to flourish (a result of the changes in Irish society over the past decade, among other things), but it is interesting that Irish readers still prefer to read crime novels set elsewhere. We remain uncomfortable with crime fiction as a means of examining Irish society, and I suspect that Irish writers will continue to find a more sympathetic audience in the United States than they will at home for some time to come.

VI

From the moment that I began writing Every Dead Thing, there were supernatural elements in the novel. The supernatural touches to my books are frequently criticized by the more conservative elements in the genre, those who would like to see mystery fiction set in aspic somewhere between the birth of Sherlock Holmes and the last appearance of Hercule Poirot. It is, I suppose, the side of the mystery community that I find most depressing, this reluctance to countenance experimentation, particularly when it comes to the intermingling of genres. Yet, in so many aspects of art and culture, it is through precisely this kind of experimentation that new and interesting forms emerge.

Anthony Cox, in a dedication to his fellow writer Milward Kennedy, stated that he himself wished to produce a novel that “breaks every rule of the austere club to which we both belong.” Cox was writing in 1930. Almost seventy years later, I had something of the same urge, but in my case there were specific rules I wished to break, if only because I did not accept their validity. One was a rule of structure, which explains the peculiar “hourglass” form of Every Dead Thing, in which a crime that is committed, and solved, in the first half of the novel feeds into the larger mystery tackled in the second half. Another was to do with the supernatural and the metaphysical.

I wanted Charlie Parker to be haunted, but not haunted in the manner most commonly found in mystery fiction, where “haunted” tends to be a euphemism for “brooding,” “drinks a bit,” or “stares into space a lot.” I wondered what might happen if a man believed himself literally to be haunted, if his guilt and grief were tormenting him to such a degree that he was unable to determine if the visions of the dead he encountered were real or merely manifestations of his troubled psyche.

There were some literary influences at work here, particularly the early-twentieth-century ghost stories of English writers like M. R. James. It’s possible, too, that something of that Irish antirationalist tradition had also crept in. Then, of course, there are my own Catholic origins, which seemed to find an echo in the themes of reparation and redemption that are so much a part of the mystery fiction I love.

For me, the supernatural serves a number of functions in my novels. To begin with, it suggests a deeper understanding of the word mystery and its religious origins-a mystery as the Greeks would have understood it, or as the writers of the medieval mystery plays, which were versions of Bible stories, would have interpreted it. The curious thing about mystery novels is that generally they are not very mysterious at all. What seems beyond understanding at the start is usually explicable in quite simple terms by the end: the butler did it. I hoped to restore something of that older sense of mystery in my work, and the supernatural touches suggested a means of doing so. They also function as indicators of a larger moral universe, and in that sense they are as much metaphysical as supernatural. (Even here, though, there are antecedents. Chesterton, in the Father Brown stories, introduced a strong metaphysical element to the genre. What gave Father Brown his insights into crime was an “understanding of sin,” of the nature of the human soul.)

Perhaps at the heart of my difficulties with the structures and rules of the classical crime story is the simple fact that I don’t share the beliefs on which they are based. The world is not rational and intelligible. Order is fragile, a thin crust upon the underlying chaos. Any answers we get will be partial at best and at worst will simply give rise to further, deeper doubts. It is interesting that the classical detective story exerted such a strong influence on the postmodern novel. In the latter, writers found a means of antiliterary expression, a way to react against the weight and expectations of an older, restrictive literary tradition, but the classical story also provided them with something to disprove: the rationalist belief that the mind can solve everything. When just one or two details of the mystery novel are twisted, the opposite becomes the case, and the world that is revealed is both more frightening and more real as a consequence.

Thus, we have Nabokov writing Despair, or the genre experiments of Borges. Thomas Pynchon can produce The Crying of Lot 49, a Californian anti-detective novel that leaves us awaiting a moment of revelation that does not come. There is no explanation at the end, because there cannot be.

Sometimes I envy literary writers that freedom: the freedom not to explain. Ultimately, crime readers expect a solution, however partial, to the mystery with which they have been presented in the course of the book, and writers in the genre have a certain obligation to fulfill that expectation. Literary writers have no such obligation.

Yet there are ways of subverting those expectations, even within the genre, so that some questions can remain unanswered or are, in fact, rendered more interesting by the fact that they are unanswerable. Thus, for me, the supernatural represents my small effort at genre subversion.

VII

After the publication of Dark Hollow, one of Belinda Pereira’s relatives got in touch with me. He had read the book not knowing that one of the characters was based on Belinda, and had only discovered the connection when he saw an interview I gave about the novel and its origins. He wrote to tell me that he did not object to Belinda’s being remembered in that way, and he gave me a little background into what happened to her family following her death. Her parents did not know that their daughter had sometimes worked as a prostitute. By the time her mother managed to return to Sri Lanka, the news of Belinda’s death, and the circumstances surrounding it, had reached there. The family was disgraced. Her mother, he told me, never recovered from Belinda’s death. She contracted cancer and died without ever seeing a measure of justice achieved for her lost child.

The novelist John Gardner once wrote that there are two choices open to the writer who lives in a world in which there are pits filled with the skulls of children. The first is to gaze into one of those pits and write about what one sees. The other, the one that I have made, is to write about how one can endure a world where there are pits filled with the skulls of children; the skulls of children and the bodies of young women who die far from home at the hands of violent men.

And so I created Charlie Parker, and through him I try to understand that world, and present a version of it in which one might live, and in which justice is attainable not only in the next life but in this one too.