When Real Murder Happens While Reading a Murder Mystery — or a Hundred Mysteries

I read a lot of mysteries. It’s my life: I write them and I review them, and they’ve always been a retreat from reality, a puzzle challenge.

But in the past few years, two women I knew have been murdered. I’ve grieved, shared the community processing of the deaths, followed in the local newspaper the prosecution of the murderers (thank goodness, they were found and caught). Each woman — one of them two decades younger than me, the other two older — gave to this part of northeastern Vermont a kind of invitation toward living a good life. Melissa told people, “You need to love the people who need love the most.” (Not easy to do. Obviously.) She taught school, and on the side she waited on tables at a local restaurant, which is where I knew her, a bit. Every time I go to get my taxes written up, I drive past the place along the river where she was attacked.

Pat, well dressed with fresh red lipstick and a cap of silver hair, showed daily how to give to local organizations. I met her one summer, and she invited me to speak at her town historical society annual meeting. By the time the meeting happened that fall, she was gone.

I don’t want to talk about the killers. (Let’s sum them up as horribly twisted and evil. Close enough.) And I didn’t know either woman well enough to really write about them. So I’m left with two effects: (1) trying harder to do what each one modeled, and (2) realizing nothing will ever be the same again. Especially the books I read.

S. J. Rozan, the basketball-playing New York City mystery author, came to northern New England a few years ago and talked with a group of seniors at a college alumni program. One asked her, “Why do you put such violence into your crime fiction?” S. J. answered, “Because it’s the only way to face it honestly.” She said her sense of how to live required that she face the truth of violence.

This week my youngest brother is in the hospital. It looks like he’ll recover, and still be able to use his foot — the foot where an injury and massive infection took him to emergency surgery, screaming with pain until the anesthesia cut in. It shook me, a lot. And I read another handful of mysteries, some really good, some not so much, and realized all over again that my patience with people who don’t face the truth about violence and injury and death just … isn’t patient now. If a mystery author doesn’t admit the horror of violent death among us, why should I trust the story?

What does that mean for people in Detroit, or in Waco, Texas, or, God help us all, in Iraq or Afghanistan or Liberia? What does it mean for you, reading this today — how is your life changing as a result of the violence around us? Is it as small a change as shifting what you read? Or is it a weight in your heart, a new set of decisions?

Two nights ago I had a dream that I can’t escape. I stood in a warehouse stacked with cartons of documents. Some of them belonged to a family who shared the space with me; some were from my dead father’s life and the lives of his parents. The challenge was: find the right ones that represent what the people before you loved, and worked for, and cared about. I knew that if I failed to open a box that “belonged to my people,” I’d be letting those lives shrink and mean a little less. Remember, the dream said. Remember what mattered to them, and protect it. Cherish it.

Melissa and Pat, I’m writing this for you.