SOMETHING IS GOING TO HAPPEN

Warm wishes and and thanks to all of our readers, contributors, and friends.

We’re looking forward to cozying up with a hot beverage and some exciting new mysteries in the months ahead. What will you be reading this winter?

What are your favorite horror-mysteries?

Fall is arriving in our northeast United States HQ, and we’re thinking about our favorite fall reads. Let us know yours!

In today’s post, essayist, short-story writer, prolific reader, and often a blogger on this site Kevin Mims talks about the frustrations of watching contemporary TV police dramas. We all know the feeling of asking, “Why would they do that!?” to our screens while knee-deep in a televised procedural . . . here, the author gets specific. Share what you think about this phenomenon in the comments section!— Jackie Sherbow

Don’t read this essay if you haven’t watched A Perfect Couple on Netflix. It is full of spoilers.

I have harped on this before, but it bears repeating because the situation just keeps getting worse. The contemporary TV crime drama relies way too heavily on some extremely illogical behavior by both the cops and the suspects involved in various mystery investigations. This current rant is inspired by the Netflix series A Perfect Couple, starring Nicole Kidman, Liev Schreiber, Dakota Fanning, and a handful of other talented and attractive people. The basic storyline is this: Kidman plays Greer Garrison Winbury, a successful author of popular crime novels. Her books sell so well, in fact, that she and her husband, Tag (Schreiber), live in a $40 million mansion in Nantucket. What’s more, she seems to be keeping most of her deadbeat relatives afloat as well. As the story begins, one of the Winburys’ three sons is about to marry a young woman named Amelia Sacks. Amelia is from a normal—i.e. working-class—background (she herself works at the Brooklyn Zoo) and thus seems almost like a fish out of water amongst the wretched excess of the Winbury family. On the night before the wedding is scheduled to take place, Amelia’s maid of honor, Merritt Monaco, is murdered on the beachfront property where the Winbury family resides. The whole family and various guests were present on the property and celebrating the upcoming nuptials, so just about everyone at the party is a potential suspect. So far, so good.

The problem is that the police who investigate the murder do very little in the way of actual sleuthing. Most of what they learn about the crime they discover while interviewing subjects in that hoariest of all TV clichés the police interrogation room. These interrogations are handled by Police Chief Dan Carter and Detective Nikki Henry. Again and again they pull members of the immensely wealthy Winbury family down to the station and subject them to thoroughly hostile interrogations. Again and again, these cops seem to believe that they have arrested the murderer, only to have to release them at the end of the interrogation. This, of course, is absolutely insane. The Winburys are fabulously wealthy and well connected. They undoubtedly have an entire team of attorneys on retainer for any sort of emergency (considering how loathsome many of the family’s members are, the Winbury’s attorneys are probably kept fairly busy). The local police would not arrest a Winbury unless they had proof positive of that person’s guilt. Otherwise, they would open themselves up to a wrongful arrest lawsuit.

What’s more, the Winbury clan would certainly be aware of their right to remain silent. And they would certainly insist on exercising that right, as well as the right to be represented by an attorney during questioning. The Winburys are not nice people They are mostly arrogant jerks. Even the innocent ones, who had nothing to hide from the cops, would never in a million years voluntarily step into a police interrogation room and allow themselves to be verbally abused by a couple of prole police officers. What’s more, the family’s attorneys would be all over the place trying to thwart any sort of investigation into the Winburys. The local yokel cops would be informed that they are not to question any member of the Winbury family without an attorney present. The attorneys would be denying the police access to the Winbury home, the Winbury cell phone records, the Winbury vehicles, the Winbury computers, and the Winburys themselves. It is idiotic to think that every one of the hostile jerks who make up the Winbury family would allow themselves to be hauled in and interrogated like a common criminal. It simply wouldn’t happen.

I’m singling out A Perfect Couple here, but this problem is widespread in contemporary crime dramas. I realize that cops do often interrogate criminal suspects in dark and scary interrogation rooms with two-way windows in them. But on TV, we see all manner of wealthy people—doctors, movie stars, politicians, investment bankers—allowing themselves to be hauled into interrogation rooms and treated like common criminals. Occasionally the writers of these TV shows provide the suspect with a lawyer, but this lawyer generally does absolutely nothing. If the lawyer does make an effort to advise his client not to answer a question, he’ll almost always be rebuffed by a client who will angrily declare, “I’ve done nothing wrong. I’m not afraid to answer the question.” A self-respecting lawyer who has been neutered like that by his own client would probably just walk away. Why sit by and watch as your client ignores your very sound legal advice and creates immense difficulties for himself by blabbing angrily to the police?

I realize that some suspects do actually spill their guts to the cops in interrogation rooms. I once served as a juror on a murder case in which a seventeen-year-old suspect was questioned in an interrogation room for eight hours. Watching even selected segments of that interrogation session was painful as hell. The child was clearly frightened and the detective was able to manipulate him into saying anything he wanted him to. The suspect changed his story over and over again at the insistence of the police officer. The suspect claimed to be in the second of three vehicles that were involved in the incident. The officer insisted that he was in a different vehicle. The officer offered no evidence to back up his claim. He just seemed to need to place the suspect in the other vehicle so that he could get him to testify as to what was said in that vehicle. The entire interrogation session was horrifying and, in the end, none of it was used in court and the child wasn’t charged with a crime. The jury was given access to a video recording of the interrogation simply because it had been entered into the evidence collected by the police. Neither the prosecution nor the defense ever used the video. It was easy to understand why the prosecutor never used it. The child was bullied into changing his statements so many times that it was impossible to know what the facts were.

But that was an impoverished minor who had no attorney and who didn’t understand his right to remain silent. Suspects like that may well sing like a canary when hauled into an interrogation room. But almost no college-educated professional is ever likely to utter a word in a police interrogation room. And if he has an attorney—which he almost certainly would—said attorney wouldn’t ever let his client be interrogated by the police. And, if the college-educated professional were a member of a fabulously wealthy and well-connected family, no cop would ever try to drag him unwillingly into an interrogation room. It’s a lazy trope of contemporary crime TV. What’s more, it usually makes for pretty dull TV.

Nearly as nonsencial is the way that cops in contemporary TV shows are able to get search warrants with such ease and speed. For about five years, the house next to mine was used as a sort of unofficial halfway house for convicts who were out on parole. The landlord apparently was making good money by allowing nearly a dozen people at a time to flop in a three-bedroom, one-bathroom house. In fact, she even parked an inoperable van in the driveway and rented it out as well. Needless to say, this was not an ideal situation. I chatted with and liked some of these ex-cons, but there appeared to be a great deal of drug dealing going on next door. The SPD spent several months observing the house from undercover vehicles parked up the street. At the end of that period, the SPD sent all of the neighbors a report indicating that they had seen plenty of behavior that appeared to be consistent with drug dealing. But the police report also noted that their investigation didn’t yield anywhere near the kind of evidence that would be necessary for them to obtain a warrant to enter the house and search for drugs. It is not easy to obtain a search warrant in America, nor should it be. None of us would want the police to be able to barge into our home simply because a neighbor suspected we might be doing something illegal.

But even before criminality moved in next door to me, I knew enough people involved in law enforcement—including a few assistant district attorney’s—to know that getting a search warrant is rarely a quick or easy process. But on today’s TV crime shows, you regularly see cops telling suspects—including well-heeled ones like the Winburys—“If you don’t willingly let me come inside and search your house, I’ll be back here in a few hours with a search warrant.”

If the cops want to search your house, you should insist that they get a search warrant first. The cops themselves would probably want to get a warrant. Anything they find in a search would be inadmissible in court if it weren’t collected lawfully. And any thinking person knows that a cop isn’t likely to be able to obtain a search warrant in a matter of hours. They probably wouldn’t be able to get it in a matter of days. Cops don’t usually appeal directly to judges for search warrants. They take their evidence to the district attorney’s office and request that the D.A. present it to a judge and then request a search warrant. This is a long and complicated process. If a cop tells you, “Let me search your house now or I’ll be back with a search warrant in an hour,” he’s probably lying to you. (I suspect that no real cop ever actually makes this statement.)

But even for a TV cop this is a stupid line of dialog. Even stupider is the fact that it often works. Why would a suspect in a murder case let a cop into his house? If he knows that he has incriminating evidence in the house, the obvious response to the cop would be, “Go get the damn warrant.” Even if the suspect has nothing to do with the murder, why would he let the cops go wandering about his house?

Usually, when the police are given a search warrant, its parameters are fairly narrow. The police aren’t allowed to search for any damning piece of evidence they can possibly find. They have to inform the D.A. and the judge of what exactly it is they are looking for in the house. And that is usually all they are allowed to look for. But if you were somehow convinced to give the police carte blanche to search your entire house without a warrant, well, God help you. Normally, people like that are only found on TV crime dramas.

If any of this sounds as if I am anti-cop, let me dispel that notion right now. I have always been an admirer of police officers in general, just as I admire doctors and teachers and firemen. These are tough jobs and I am grateful for the people who do it well. You may think that I am making this up, but at 6:30 p.m., on September 5, while my wife and I were watching A Perfect Couple in our living room, we were the victims of an attempted home invasion. The perpetrator kicked in the glass panels of our front door, sending shattered glass and splintered wood everywhere and terrifying my wife and I. We shot up out of our seats and made a beeline towards the back of the house, hoping to escape into a neighbor’s property through our backyard. I was dialing 911 while we did this. But by the time we reached our backdoor, the home invader had already gone down the side of our property and was climbing over the fence into our backyard. Terrified, we made a u-turn and bolted back through the house and out through our shattered front door. My wife was barefoot and cut up the soles of her feet. We ran across the street to a neighbor’s home and explained the situation. Unbeknownst to us, the police were already on their way, because several neighbors had already reported their own interactions.

Multiple police cars showed up within minutes of my wife and I exiting the property. Before two entered, they asked for my permission to enter the property. They also asked me if anyone else other than the intruder might be there. These cops had no idea what they would find inside. My house is small—1,235 square feet—but they spent forty minutes looking through every square inch of it. When they finally allowed us back into the house, every closet door was open and the door to the basement we never use was also opened. They had checked under the bed and behind every piece of furniture. What’s more, while they had been searching the house, their colleagues had actually caught the would-be intruder on a neighboring street, where he had gone to continue looking for a house he could rob.

Needless to say, this was an extremely unnerving experience. But it was made infinitely less traumatic than it could have been by the bravery and professionalism of the SPD. They took statements from numerous witnesses. The SPD sent a CSI photographer to our house to photograph the damage to the house. They provided me with a police report number that I could use when dealing with my homeowners insurance company. The police drove me to where the suspect had been apprehended, so that I could identify him as my intruder. And they followed up the next day with several text messages identifying the suspect and providing me with additional information.

All of the SPD officers I have ever interacted with have been consummate professionals. It burns my biscuits when I see cops portrayed on TV shows such as A Perfect Couple as buffoons, authoritarians, or both. It is highly ironic that I happened to be watching A Perfect Couple just as I found myself in the midst of a frightening police emergency. But that is exactly what happened.

As I mentioned when Sue Parman first posted on this site a month ago, she is an anthropologist by profession. In that post she pointed out how something she learned through her anthropological work turned out to be relevant to mystery writing. Here is a second post on the theme of parallels between the work of anthropologists and mystery writers. The author’s EQMM debut, the story “Gannets and Ghouls,” appears in our current issue, September/October 2024. She’s an award-winning poet, short story writer, memoirist, and artist. Recently, she won the Travelers Tales’ Grand Prize for Best Travel Tale of 2024.  —Janet Hutchings

To solve a mystery the anthropologist, like the detective, must decipher codes. Codes are rules, both explicitly stated and implicit in a culture. Sometimes they are written down (local building codes), sometimes unwritten but understood and shared by a group (the code of the Samurai), and often they are secret (Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code). Genetic codes, spy codes, computer codes, area codes, bar codes, Morse Code, alphabets, language, culture itself—all depend on a system of replacing one message with another, which no one understands unless they know the system.

Mystery writers have a lot of fun with codes. They play with the alphabet (The ABC Murders by Agatha Christie) or hang clues on different meanings of words (The Word is Murder by Anthony Horowitz). A surprising bestseller was Umberto Eco’s dense semiotic mystery, The Name of the Rose, in which his medieval Sherlock Holmes, William of Baskerville, analyzes ancient texts and wrestles with issues of interpretation and truth in order to solve murders.

As an anthropologist, I’m especially interested in mystery novels set in different cultures: Laos in Colin Cotterill’s Dr. Siri Paiboun books beginning with The Coroner’s Lunch; Botswana in Alexander McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series; Nigeria (Easy Motion Tourist by Leye Adenle and Lightseekers by Femi Kayode); Finland in Leena Lehtolainen’s Maria Kallio books; any book set in Scandinavia (Jo Nesbø, Henning Mankell, Arnaldur Indriðason, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö’s Martin Beck mysteries such as The Laughing Policeman, Peter Høeg’s Smilla’s Sense of Snow, and Stieg Larsson’s Girl with the Dragon Tattoo trilogy). And of course Scotland, where I studied a Gaelic-speaking community in the Outer Hebrides as described in my previous blog post of August 22, 2024. In addition to the Peter May books I mentioned there, I would add Ann Cleeves’s Shetland Island Mysteries beginning with Raven Black as well as any book set in my favorite city, Edinburgh, in particular Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories and Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus books.

An anthropologist must not only learn a new language (as I had to learn Gaelic in preparation for my year and a half of fieldwork in the Hebrides in 1970-71), they must learn what is left unsaid. The organization of gaps and silences is an important principle in the structure of cultural codes. In this blog I describe three examples of things unsaid that helped me decipher an underlying cultural code called “limited good.”

Unsaid Thing #1: The Mystery of Names. In the fall of 1970, a few months after I came to live in Shawbost, a village on the west side of Lewis, I was asked to serve as the village’s Secretary of the local Youth Club. Despite Gaelic being the dominant language in the village, all meetings of the Youth Club were in English, and all the minutes were in English, including the names of the participants. One of my motives for accepting the job was to get access to the minutes so I could get an idea of who the leaders were.

Individuals in the community had at least three names: their English names with which they were baptized (John MacLeod), their patronymics (Iain Iain Murchadh, or John the son of John the son of Murdo), and nicknames (Bogey, the Ghost). But the minutes included only the formal English names; and since, unlike the diversity of urban communities, there are only a handful of first names and surnames, I found myself looking at dozens of John Macleods, Murdo Murrays, and Catherine MacLeans, with no way to distinguish Iain Iain Murchadh from Iain Chonnich Murchadh or Catriona Phluic from Catriona Dubh. The minutes were useless for my purposes. When I asked why the minutes left out the means to identify the participants, I was given vague answers, such as that record-keeping required English.

Unsaid Thing #2: The Mystery of Avoiding Praise. Around that time, I read an entry in the personal notices of the Stornoway Gazette that gave me a clue to solving the mystery of minutes that followed the rules of record-keeping and yet kept hidden the identity of the participants. It took me a while to realize its significance and connect the dots.

On the anniversary of the death of a beloved elder, families frequently send little notes of remembrance to be published in the local paper, including the curious phrase, “his voice was never heard in the community.”

I was used to obituaries that praised the dead for their significant contributions, such as winning Nobel Prizes in Medicine or being nominated for Academy Awards seventeen times. Why would a culture praise their dead by saying their voices were never heard in the community? Like the minutes of the Youth Club that listed leaders in a manner that left them invisible, obituaries both recorded and erased the people they memorialized.

Unsaid Thing #3: The Mystery of the Dancing Witches. Before going to live in the village, I contacted the local minister, schoolmaster, and Harris Tweed mill owner for help in finding a place to stay. They said they would try but warned me that they would probably not succeed because no one took in outsiders. That I found someone to take me in was a matter of luck, timing, and the curiosity and kindness of a particular woman.

After being turned away by the minister and schoolmaster, I arrived, soaking wet, on the doorstep of the Harris Tweed mill. The owner’s secretary told me she was very sorry, but the owner was away on business. It was raining heavily. I commented, in Gaelic, on the heavy rain. “You speak Gaelic?” she said, surprised.

I admitted that I had studied it at the University of Edinburgh under the Reverend Willie Matheson, which led to a detailed discussion of the family connections of the Reverend to people in Lewis, and to fundamental differences between the people of Lewis and the Uists, Matheson’s home in the Hebrides. After a long moment she said she would hate to turn me away; that she was sure the mill owner would have had something in mind for me; and invited me to move in with her until he got back.

Johnina lived with her husband, Calum, their six-year-old son, Calum Beag (Wee Calum), and Calum’s unmarried sister, Annie. The house was huge, and until recently had housed Calum’s parents and four aunts. Almost a year later, after I had settled in for good with the family, I was attending a funeral wake. As the night wore on and the singing, drinking, and telling stories died down, a man sitting beside me said abruptly, “It’s no mystery how you came to live with that family. They had witches who danced on the moor.”

By this time, I had heard many stories with supernatural elements and had some idea of the functions they served. Tales of the each uisge, the waterhorse that lived in fresh springs out on the moor, kept young people from wandering (especially young women, who were the preferred victims of the waterhorse). Second sight, the dreams or visions in which close family and friends sent warnings of death or danger, helped to maintain a close sense of community even though people might be scattered across the globe. But this was the first I’d heard of witches, especially in the family with whom I lived.

“Luck always comes to that family,” he said. “Like Johnina taking you in. How much rent do you pay her?”

I told him and then asked, “How do you know Calum’s aunts were witches?”

“They kept cattle and took them out to the moor. On the shieling they danced naked, and everything they asked for they got. One of them stole my grandmother’s sweetheart. And how do you explain why Calum’s never without a tweed for the loom, whereas I have to beg for one every few months?”

That’s when I realized that the man was operating by a cultural code that the anthropologist George Foster called the theory of limited good in an article published in the journal American Anthropologist in 1965. According to this theory, there are certain communities in which all desirable objects (especially money and luck) exist in finite quantity. When one person gains, another loses. Crofting communities have access to communal memory that goes back hundreds of years. Crofters talk about the Clearances (when landlords, after traditional bonds of clanship weakened, removed small landholders from their lands to make way for sheep in the 18^th and 19^th centuries) as if they happened yesterday, and it’s common for someone to hold a grudge against someone else’s great-great-grandfather for a debt he never paid. What better way to explain why someone has more money and luck than to invoke witchcraft?

And the threat of these kinds of interpretations creates intense fear. If someone is seen as having more than their neighbor, they become the target of envy and suspicion. They pass up opportunities to succeed, or they engage in devious deceptions to conceal their success. The focus on “equality” that I first considered admirable took on a darker tone. If we are equal, we all have access to the same resources; we share in order to redistribute excess and avoid distrust. Someone lucky enough to afford a car always gives lifts to neighbors. Most of the catch from a night’s fishing gets shared. People keep their heads down. They lie about how many tweeds they get. They don’t brag about themselves or their children. They avoid taking credit for leadership positions, such as hiding behind their English names in Youth Club minutes, and after they die, they prefer to have their descendants praise them for their voices never being heard in the community.

When my book Scottish Crofters was published in the Holt, Rinehart, and Winston Cultural Anthropology Case Studies series, I went against the advice of the publisher. Usually the cover highlighted an individual performing some cultural act appropriate to that culture. Initially I selected a photograph of Calum bottle-feeding a lamb. And then I felt a wave of horror. To put Calum on the cover would hold him up for attack and ridicule. He would be mortified. Instead, I chose a photograph in which a group of men were gathered around their sheep, their backs to the camera. By the time the second edition of the book was published, crofting law had changed. Crofts could be taken out of crofting, and croft houses (owned separately from the land) could be sold. The community was being invaded by mainlanders, even Englishmen. This new cover shows two men with sheep that can be easily identified. Those who know them are more likely to talk about the price of wool, or the contrast between the weather in Scotland as opposed to the weather at their last vacation to Florida, than they are likely to talk about witches. The secrets that would have once torn apart a closed-mouth community now belong to a larger world: the concealed nature of the British royal Kate’s cancer, for example. The glue of forbidden knowledge that once helped a village community cohere is melting. The code of silence and limits is becoming a code of limitless possibility.