Page 22 of Wham Line (The Last Picks #10)

Then I took out my laptop. I did a few searches and found a chain florist who could get lotus flowers in a reasonable amount of time.

With that done, I did what I’d been avoiding for the last day and a half: I updated my spreadsheet of agents.

It shouldn’t have been so painful; after all, it was just the last in a string of rejections.

But it was surprisingly soul crushing, and when I’d finished, I closed my laptop and set it next to the bed.

One of the things they tell you about writing— they being the melting pot of people on the internet who give advice, and most of the time, you have no idea who they are or why they’re qualified to give advice or if they’re crazy people living in their basements surrounded by dozens of glass cages with hamsters running on tiny wheels—is that the best thing to do when you get a rejection is to write something new.

Okay, that’s not quite true. The best thing to do is to send the story out again, but since I’d exhausted my list of potential agents, that wasn’t an option.

The other thing you were supposed to do was keep writing. Always be writing.

If someone wanted to be rude about it, they might have pointed out that this wasn’t my strong suit.

On the other hand, though, writing had always been a way for me to process my emotions. And telling stories about things—putting what happened to me into a narrative, giving it a beginning and ending, making sense of it—had always been a trick that got me through the bad times.

The word I kept coming back to was grief .

I didn’t have a lot of firsthand experience with grief.

I’d been sad when my grandparents had died; I’d loved them, but I’d been much younger, and the memory of that loss was distant.

It certainly wasn’t equivalent to losing a parent or a child.

Breaking up with Hugo had been hard, but it had been the right thing to do.

Even the anguish of all my ups and downs with Bobby, however intense it had been at the time, hadn’t been grief.

It had been hurt and embarrassment and maybe even sorrow.

A broken heart, for sure. But not grief.

And the more I thought about it, the less sure I was that mystery novels ever dealt with grief.

Sure, there was often someone grieving—a relative of the victim, for example.

There was loss. Mystery novels were full of bereaved parents and lovers and even, occasionally, children.

But their pain was always external. And it usually didn’t occupy more than a chapter.

In some novels, true, the detective was the one grieving.

Sometimes, this was a loss from a long time ago—a psychological wound that had never healed.

Sometimes, it was directly related to the case at hand.

The detective had a personal relationship with one of the victims, for example.

Often, the so-called Dark Night of a mystery novel occurred when the detective failed to save someone he cared about.

So, it wouldn’t be true to say that mystery novels didn’t contain grief.

But at the same time, most mystery novels didn’t deal with it.

They didn’t dwell on it. They didn’t ponder it, or examine it, or even—I saw now—even understand it.

Not really. Because in most mystery novels, grief was like the trigger of a gun: it was something you squeezed to fire off the next part of the plot.

Grief, in a mystery novel, was nothing more than a stepping-stone toward justice—or revenge.

How did you get justice when the killer was a heart attack or a stroke or whatever it had been? What kind of revenge could you have when you came home and found your wife dead; she’d been to the store that day, and she’d still been unpacking groceries?

The writer part of my brain understood that grief wasn’t the focus of mystery novels because, well, the focus was the mystery.

And in that same way, I knew that trying to capture the nature of grief was tricky.

For one reason, grief looked different for everyone.

It wasn’t consistent. It wasn’t linear. I had seen it firsthand with Bobby a few hours before, when things had seemed almost normal, and he’d been playful, and I’d almost forgotten what had happened—and then the abrupt swing to anger.

Or, worse, the icy nothingness I’d seen more and more.

Like a bottomless well that had frozen over.

And for another reason, grief was devastating.

It was incapacitating. And when you need your detective to solve a mystery, they can’t shut down.

They can’t start responding in one-word answers.

They can’t suddenly be cut off and adrift on the ocean of their own pain, where you can’t reach them no matter how hard you try.

In a mystery, you need a detective who’s sharp and interesting and a pleasure for the reader to be with; they can’t be a zombie who forgets to eat, who shambles through the day, barely making it from one small task to another.

So, if I’m being totally honest, part of me wanted to find a way to write about grief to help myself—to work my way through what I was feeling, to understand what was going on with Bobby.

And (this is less admirable) part of me wanted to write about it because it seemed like a challenge.

The thing about writing mysteries, though, is that you’re up against some pretty stiff competition.

And I suspected that one of the masters of the genre had done something with grief—something thoughtful and insightful and true.

Which meant digging into the wealth of my intimate knowledge of the genre.

(AKA, I got on my phone and looked at Wikipedia and Goodreads and did a lot of googling.)

One title that caught my eye was Murder on the Orient Express —big surprise; if anyone could have done grief, it was Christie.

Most people remember Murder on the Orient Express because it has a classic Christie twist. (Spoilers incoming.) After wading through a veritable lake of clues, intrepid detective Hercule Poirot eventually realizes that everyone was involved in the murder—and, even more stunning, he offers them a way out.

The reason for Poirot’s leniency (and why readers weren’t bothered to see a gang of murderers get away with their crime) is, in a way, because of grief.

The murder on the train is justice, payback for the kidnapping and killing of a child decades earlier.

Some of the killers on the train are related to the girl by blood; others worked for her parents.

They’ve spent years trying to find the man responsible, and when they do, they take things into their own hands.

Some of them have changed their names, or they hide their true identity, which makes it even more difficult for Poirot to spot the hidden associations.

When he does, his response is a rare one in the canon of crime fiction: compassion for their pain, understanding of what they’ve lost and can never get back.

Chandler, too, had his own spin on grief—for himself, as much as for the characters in his story.

Like most of his books, The Long Goodbye is intricately plotted, with layers of deceit and an underlying web of connections.

For precisely that reason, it’s difficult to summarize (obviously that’s not going to stop me—more spoilers ahead).

At the beginning of the book, detective Philip Marlowe meets and befriends a man named Terry Lennox.

He helps Terry flee to Mexico when Terry is accused of killing his wife.

Later, he learns that Terry has been killed in Mexico.

In a separate storyline, Marlowe gets involved with the Wade family.

Both Mr. and Mrs. Wade are desperately unhappy.

One night, drunk, Mrs. Wade makes a pass at Marlowe, mistaking him for her first husband who died in the war.

The truth comes out after Mrs. Wade kills her husband: Terry Lennox was her first husband, who had faked his death in the war and come back under a different name.

Then, in one of those coincidences that defy belief, Terry’s second wife had begun having an affair with Mr. Wade, which led to the first murder, and Terry fleeing to Mexico.

Not complicated at all, right?

Here’s where it gets even trickier. The last bit of the book is about Marlowe’s conversation with a Mexican man who claims to have witnessed Terry’s death.

Marlowe reveals that this man is Terry, and that he has had plastic surgery and faked his own death (twice now, which is kind of impressive).

Marlowe rejects Terry, acting as though Terry is already dead, and the book closes on that loss and regret.

There’s a lot of grief happening in the book.

Mrs. Wade’s grief for a husband who came back into her life pretending to be a different man.

Mr. Wade’s grief for his failure as a writer and a husband.

Marlowe’s grief as he slowly realizes that he has been manipulated by a man he thought was a friend.

In that final scene with Lennox, Marlowe says, I won't say goodbye. I said it to you when it meant something. I said it when it was sad and lonely and final . It’s impossible not to hear the loss in those words.

But the book is also about Chandler’s own grief. He wrote the book while his wife was dying and his own writing had stalled, and in the book, the tragic characters of both Mr. Wade and Terry Lennox mirror the author’s life in important ways.