Crime and Calamity

As we mark this first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s deadly rampage across the U.S. Gulf Coast, complete with photographs, newspaper recollections (see here and here), reports of promises unkept in the storm’s wake, and efforts by the White House to downplay its too little, too late response to the storm last August, it’s also interesting to look at how disasters of various sorts have been incorporated into crime fiction. This genre has benefited from the occasional integration of real-life characters and historical events into its tales, and disasters--whether natural and manmade--have helped enrich that storytelling.

The most significant purveyor of what might be called “disaster mysteries” has been Max Allan Collins. Over half a dozen years, he produced a series of novels backdropped by noteworthy calamities and featuring familiar mystery writers as their protagonists. Everything got started in 1999 with The Titanic Murders, which found Jacques Futrelle, author of the once-renowned “Thinking Machine” whodunits and an actual casualty of the Titanic sinking in 1912, investigating a pair of murders on board that ill-fated passenger liner. From there, the series offered up 2000’s The Hindenburg Murders (which turned Leslie Charteris, of “The Saint” fame, into a sleuth on board the doomed Zeppelin Hindenburg in 1937), 2001’s The Pearl Harbor Murders (with Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs solving the slaying of a Japanese-American singer during the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii), 2002’s The Lusitania Murders (in which Willard Wright--aka S.S. Van Dine, author of the Philo Vance yarns--covertly probes the World War I-era transportation of munitions aboard the soon-to-be-torpedoed RMS Lusitania), and 2004’s The London Blitz Murders (sending Agatha Christie to figure out the identity of a modern-day Jack the Ripper in bomb-ravaged, 1942 London). Collins apparently ended his “disaster mysteries” series with The War of the Worlds Murder (2005), in which pulp writer Walter Gibson, creator of The Shadow, investigates actor Orson Welles’ part in a killing during the latter’s infamous 1938 radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds. A seventh installment of this series, The Cocoanut Grove Murders, which was to have followed “Untouchables” honcho Eliot Ness as he looked into the deadliest nightclub fire in U.S. history, at Boston’s Cocoanut Grove in November 1942, may or may not appear sometime in the future.

Beyond Collins’ contributions to this subgenre, let us not forget William Seil’s Sherlock Holmes and the Titanic Tragedy (1996). It imagines the Great Detective and Dr. John H. Watson being summoned out of retirement in order to protect a secret agent, Christine Adler (the daughter of Irene Adler, from “A Scandal in Bohemia”), who’s traveling across the Atlantic on board the world’s largest luxury liner bearing submarine plans for delivery to the U.S. Navy. Naturally, those plans disappear, and Holmes, with help from the convenient Jacques Futrelle, goes looking for them--a task hindered by the looming presence of Colonel Moriarty, brother of Sherlock’s late archenemy.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s protagonists participate in another disaster-based tale, Larry Millett’s Sherlock Holmes and the Red Demon (1996). The first of Minnesota newspaperman Millett’s five Holmes novels (and the predecessor to his Sherlock Holmes and the Ice Palace Murders, 1998), Red Demon removes history’s most famous detective from his native Britain and drops him, instead, into Minnesota in 1894. There, he undertakes an assignment for railroad magnate James J. Hill: to find a homicidal arsonist who’s been plaguing Hill’s Great Northern Railway. Millett makes admirable use of the frontier types so common in the northern Minnesota “pineries” of that time, casting Holmes and Watson into the sometimes malodorous company of hard-fisted loggers, wily backcountry whores, and irritable railroad employees. And he sets his action against the build-up to the Great Hinckley Fire, a devastating blaze that took the lives of 400 people and burned away 400 square miles of timberland.

Even more tragic is the calamity at the heart of James Dalessandro’s 1906: the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire. Originally published in 2004, this novel takes a few liberties with history--Dalessandro renames the city’s major villain of a century ago, for instance, then draws up from the grave the eccentric “Emperor” Joshua Norton (who had actually succumbed 16 years earlier) in order to increase what would seem to have been the already abundant local color of that period. In addition, the author is rather too fond of cameo appearances by familiar historical figures. But Dalessandro manages to fit the details of the city’s destruction into his narrative without bogging down its pace seriously, and his two interweaving plot lines--following the quake and blaze of ’06 , along with a corruption probe that was set to be unveiled before all the shaking and dying began--serve to keep adventure, crime, and history lovers alike interested. Perhaps only Richard S. Wheeler’s Aftershocks (1999) does a better job of fictionalizing the otherworldly events of the San Francisco disaster, but that’s more a mainstream novel than crime fiction.

I’m surprised that there aren’t many more “disaster mysteries.” Blending criminal activities and investigations together with natural or manmade catastrophes would seem to heighten the urgency of the former, and attract broader audiences with the latter. Look how successfully writers such as Philip Kerr (March Violets), Jonathan Raab (Rosa), and John Katzenbach (Hart’s War) have erected their criminal tales against the vivid background of World Wars I and II, accepting the notion that quotidian crimes must be solved, even when violence on a much larger scale rages all about. Couldn’t the same sort of excitement be generated by murder mysteries set around, say, the 1883 volcanic explosion of Krakatoa, or the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, or the 1692 sinking of Port Royal, Jamaica, or Europe’s 14th-century Black Plague? For that matter, could not a thrilling genre story take place in New Orleans amid the human hardships and desperation of Hurricane Katrina? Maybe someday.