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 By Karen IrvingWebpage E-mail  Karen Irving is the author ofPluto Rising: A Katy Klein Mystery published by Polestar Press. Her forthcoming release Jupiter's Daughter, is due out in April 2000. She is working on a third novel, tentatively entitled Mars Eclipsed. The seeds of murder grow particularly well in the family garden. That sounds like a horrible thing to say, doesn't it? After all, the family is supposed to be our safe haven, the place we come home to at the end of the day, not a place where we're likely to get bumped off! And yet, if you think about it, where else do people know one another's weaknesses and foibles so well? Is there another venue in which people have the potential to irritate one another so much? And where else can petty arguments boil over into full-blown vendettas with potential to end in the most final of solutions - Murder? Before I left to become a full-time writer, I was a social worker, one of the many on the front line of family battles. Social workers are made privy to some of the worst human impulses. Specialization develops often in the area of working with victims, or with perpetrators of one kind of violence or another. And yes, I could dredge up some pretty bizarre stories about murder - family-style. Well, attempted murder, actually. I can only think of a couple of instances where things got so far out of hand that someone actually died. But I can say with a degree of certainty that if you're looking for a place to commit a murder, start with the family. I'm talking about the malice domestic, a corner of the mystery writing universe that focuses on people in families, doing one another in. Traditionally, the malice domestic has been equated with the cozy - a tea-and-crumpets kind of murder mystery, in which everything is terribly civilized, the killer is "one of us, dahling", and the victim is considerately off-ed in such a way as not to cause the reader too much discomfort. You know, the off-screen murder, or else the unmarked body, found sprawled in the bedroom, an open bottle of gin and a packet of pills beside the bed. Well, it's a far, far cry from this traditional sort of cozy to the real murders that happen within families. Because murder, at its heart, is really the antithesis of civilized - when you get right down to it. For instance, here's a story about a family - mother, father, almost-grown daughter - in which the father, who earns enough to afford to buy a million-dollar house in a well-to-do suburb, is a cocaine addict. For so long, the mother has been physically and mentally abused by the husband that she's got the spunk of a whipped dog. And the daughter is furious with both her parents - her father for humiliating and shaming her all her life, and her mother for failing to stand up to Dad. One night - and we don't exactly know what triggers this - the father comes home and demands a divorce. The mother is flabbergasted. She has endured years of abuse from this man. But in her mind, the trade-off was living in a fancy house with three cars and a couple of servants. The daughter is nowhere to be found, probably out with some of the neighborhood kids shoplifting at the local mall. So what happens next? As a writer, I see this scenario as a tinderbox, just waiting to be ignited. Who's going to snap? Is the daughter really not at home, or is she hiding behind the curtains, ready to blow the father away? Will the father, enraged and high on cocaine, finally lose it altogether and break his wife's neck with an ill-placed blow? Will the mother finally discover lost reserves of strength she never knew she had, and grab a kitchen knife to free herself of her tormentor? I'll tell you the end of this story, and you can fill in the details. Several hours after the first confrontation when the father demands a divorce and the mother refuses, the mother wakes up, several hundred feet away from the house, next to the swimming pool, in a lot of physical pain but she doesn't know why. She smells smoke, but is too weak to lift her head and find out where it's coming from. There's a lot of shouting coming from someplace far away, and she puts her head back down and passes out again. Next time she wakes up, she's in the burn unit of a local hospital. The family's million-dollar home is nothing but charred rubble. The husband was found several hours after she was, in a local motel with a prostitute and the family dog. The daughter was in fact spending the night with her boyfriend, who claims he never left her side the entire evening. There's physical evidence to show that the wife didn't make it out to that swimming pool on her own - she was dragged there by the ankles and left by person or persons unknown. Now, in fiction, most likely the wife would have died, but she didn't. The husband would’ve drugged the wife with her own sleeping pills, then set the fire to collect the insurance money. The daughter would’ve come home and caught him in the act, and dragged her unconscious mother to safety. Or perhaps the daughter, furious with both her parents, might have waited until the mother took the pills and the father left to find himself a hooker, something he'd been known to do in the past. Then the daughter would have set the velvet curtains on fire. And the father, returning home to collect his prized Afghan hound, would smell the smoke and rush to his wife, pulling her out to the pool and abandoning her there for reasons unknown. Perhaps the wife herself lit the fire - hoping to incriminate the husband - and the only way he could save himself from a murder charge would be to pull her outside and leave her next to the pool, while he went off to burn out the rest of his cocaine high. The thing is, when you're a writer, you get to choose the scenario. You get to decide who the bad guy is, who the victim is, and who will make the awful discovery that things in this family were not as they ought to have been. When you're just a social worker, all you can do is sit and listen while your client tells and retells their version of the story. There's no way of knowing which parts are true and which aren't, and there's no way of making sure that the bad guy is not only discovered, but appropriately punished for his crime. You can probably see why, after 11 years, writing began to appeal to me more than social work! Three years ago, when I started writing my first book, Pluto Rising, I didn't set out to write a malice domestic. I hesitate to say, "It just turned out that way", because that would make it sound much more random than it really was. In fact, I suspect that I had no choice but to keep the murder in my book "all in the family". For me, it was no leap of logic at all to cast around within the victim's family for my culprit, because who else would have enough invested in the victim to actually kill him? By which I mean, who but a family member would have a compelling psychological reason to want to murder someone he (or she, I'm not about to give anything away here!) was so close to? So the family was the first place I looked - and sure enough, that's where I found my killer. I say Pluto Rising is a malice domestic, but it's certainly not a cozy in the traditional sense. For one thing, my amateur sleuth, Katy Klein, would be much more likely to eat a bagel with lox and cream cheese than a buttered crumpet. And I've never seen her raise a bone china teacup to her lips! (In any case, she's a big-time coffee drinker.) The crux of the book is a family whose entangled relationships eventually culminate in a murder, which then leads - as these things often seem to - to another murder. Katy, who is now an astrologer, but who used to be a psychologist working in a large mental hospital, has an ingrained understanding of the hatreds and feuds that can rage inside families. She soon finds herself drawn into discovering the true nature of the killer. In the end, she's forced to confront the ugliness of the victim's family as well as a trauma she's been suppressing for a long time. There's also a whole other kind of family dynamic at play in Pluto Rising. Katy's own family is the kind of place where it would be almost impossible to imagine such things going on. She and her daughter, Dawn, live in a small apartment in the same building as her ex-husband, Peter. They have all made a conscious choice to live as a family, even though it might not be a very traditional arrangement. Katy's parents clearly love their only daughter, and one another, and have gone to great lengths to provide her with a safe and nurturing childhood. I wasn't conscious of making this distinction when I first wrote the book, but in some ways, I guess all mysteries are morality plays. This dichotomy between the ideal family and the dysfunctional one is something I've thought a great deal about over the years. I do think it's important to insert a small plug here for the functional family, which gets virtually no press these days. Back to the concept of the malice domestic as a morality play. In the story I told earlier about the family whose house burned down, there was no real way of attaining closure of any kind with my client. No one knew what had really happened that night, or if they did, they weren't telling. My client, the woman as you might have guessed, was left with a huge gaping void in her life. She had no memory of anything after her husband demanding that she sign a separation agreement on the spot. There was a police investigation of the fire, of course, but no conclusions were drawn as to whether it was arson or an accidental fire. My client didn't know whether her husband had actually tried to kill her, or whether she'd done something to set the fire herself. And neither did I. So we had no demonstrable bad guy, no amateur sleuth figuring out the real sequence of events, and definitely no retribution. In fact, the woman wound up living in relative poverty, while her husband took off to a warmer climate with his dog and his new girlfriend. The daughter now works as a dancer and doesn't speak to either of her parents. If I'd written this book, I'd have done it differently! I'd have had someone launch an investigation, and my amateur sleuth would have discovered that say, the daughter did it. Just to be different. So the daughter is the killer, the mother is the victim, the father is a jerk, but he was set up -- so the amateur sleuth will be obligated to clear his name, in the interest of serving justice. Still, given the fact that the father has been a wife beater for the past 20 years or so, I think he deserves to suffer a bit, don't you? So maybe somewhere along the way, just at the point when the amateur sleuth is beginning to think Dad must have set the fire and so on, I'll have someone bump him off. Nothing gory, and the reader won't actually see it, but I'll have my sleuth stumble over the body, maybe. Of course, at this point, the killer could only be the daughter, who will be discovered to be her father's cocaine supplier, and will nearly kill my amateur sleuth in a confrontation during which she admits to everything and explains any missing bits in the story. My sleuth will get away through a combination of luck and her own clever resourcefulness. The daughter will go to the Big House for this one, I can tell you, and everything will be wrapped up all nice and neat. Not like real life, but satisfying. And in fact, that's probably the point of this whole mystery writing (and reading) exercise. It leaves us satisfied. When we finish, we can sit back and know that justice has been done. And even if the family I've just described has been torn apart, each person has paid for his or her sins, and the monster has been contained. Which brings me, not all that coincidentally, back to the original idea. The malice domestic allows us to peek at the ugliest side of family relationships. No matter how awful things get, we know justice will be done and the forces of goodness and light will prevail. And if we're lucky, the amateur sleuth will not only wrap things up on this case but go on to become a series character who makes a habit of solving this kind of thing. Which, of course, is the case with Katy Klein, my astrologer detective. There's something very cathartic about knowing that while the family can provide the ideal venue for murder, it can also be healed in a sense. Not that people will be brought back to life, but that balance will be restored, and life will go on. About Karen Irving - A native of Victoria, British Columbia, Karen Irving has lived on both coasts of Canada, and has now settled in the middle, with her husband, 17-year-old son and five-year-old daughter (not to mention their Sheltie and three cats!). Karen has a Master's degree in social work, and has worked as a writer and a psychiatric social worker for the past 15 years. Three years ago, she started writing Pluto Rising, her first novel, which she sold to Polestar Book Publishers in November 1998. Her forthcoming release Jupiter's Daughter is due out in April 2000. She is working on a third novel, tentatively entitled Mars Eclipsed. |
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