amateur detective | Bertram's Blog

Ill-Conceived Stories

May 30, 2022 — Pat Bertram

There have been a whole slew woman characters over the years who were amateur detectives. In many of them, the amateur was smarter than the whole police force put together, and she managed to find out the truth while they were still bumbling along. In others, the amateur had a cop boyfriend or a reporter or someone who could feed her information while she made fools of them all. Some put a twist on the story, and make the woman character the detective — private or otherwise — and she still finds out the truth before the professionals with all their equipment and resources.

I’ve recently come across still another version of this same archetype, a variation on the cop boyfriend theme. In this version, the amateur and the cop are not in a relationship but are merely best friends. (Even though it’s obvious to everyone but them that they really are in a relationship, just haven’t gotten to the sex part yet.) What makes this version so appalling is that the girlfriend, whether an ex-cop or merely a know-it-all, is allowed to accompany the cop on his investigations, as if she were her partner, and no one has any complaints about this — not the other cops, the police higherups, or the victims. They all just go along with that. Despite the ridiculousness of this, and the ridiculousness of the girlfriend showing up the cop, the worst is that the cop is a doofus and lets the girlfriend tell him how to do his job and even does her bidding when she sends him on assignments. For example, in once case, the amateur tells the cop, “I’ll go talk to the guy. You go find out what the woman has to say.”

How did these books get published? I suppose stories like this made sense before women became street cops and detectives, but it doesn’t make sense that such inane novels would be published now.

Luckily, not all books are as poorly conceived and written. There are plenty out there for me to choose from.

Even luckier, at this time of year, I don’t need to hunker down with a good book quite as often as I do in the winter.

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What if God decided S/He didn’t like how the world turned out, and turned it over to a development company from the planet Xerxes for re-creation? Would you survive? Could you survive?

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When Life and Writing Overlap

June 17, 2014 — Pat Bertram

Many writers claim they feel compelled to write. I am not one of them. I either write or don’t write depending on whether there is anything “real” going on in my life or not. Most of the time, real life is going on, so I feel no need to write. (Except for blogging, of course. I do that every day no matter what.)

There is one thing that does compel me to write fiction and that is when a story gets in my head and writing it is the only way to clear it out of my mind.

I’ve been planning to write a story about my exercise group, and I can’t write it until I’ve finished another, non-writerly project. (I am so not a multi-tasker!) Meantime, the story goes round and round in my head as I try to figure out the logistics of the plot. For example, I thought I knew who the murderer is, but he turns out to be a secondary gunman, someone who will be caught up in the police investigation. I did figure out what the victim was doing at the studio, how she got inside, when she was killed, and why she was wearing what she was wearing. The murderer is still up for grabs.

Besides trying to figure out the story, I’ve been researching what will happen to those of us who find the body. Will the cops simply take names and contact information? Will they keep us near the scene? Take us down to the police station? It’s amazing how many mysteries are from the POV of cops or the cozy little old (and sometimes cozy young) woman who is playing amateur detective. Little is written about the moment-to-moment demands on the would-be witnesses. In movies, TV shows, books, you see the witnesses, bystanders, body watchers/catchers/snatchers or whoever already talking to the cops. How did they get to that point?

I know it’s time to write the story to get it out of my head when strange thoughts start ricocheting around in my brain, thoughts like, “I don’t have to do the research to find out what will happen to us witnesses. When the cops come to the studio after the murder, I’ll be able to see first hand what they do to us.”

Yesterday I even heard myself thinking, “I better clean the house. If the cops come here, I don’t want them to know how messy I am.”

I’m sure some of these thoughts are showing up because real life will overlap fiction. The women in my dance class are all part of the story and I . . . well, I am the narrator, a suspect, possibly the amateur detective. (Someone even suggested I should be the killer. It’s a clever twist, but Agatha Christie already used the ploy in The Murder of Roger Akroyd and besides, it felt like a betrayal when she did it, and I don’t like cheating my readers.)

Whatever the reason for the stange thoughts, I’ll be glad when it’s time to start putting the story on paper and out of my head. It’s getting just a bit confusing.

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Pat Bertram is the author of the suspense novels Light Bringer, More Deaths Than One, A Spark of Heavenly Fire, and Daughter Am I. Bertram is also the author of Grief: The Great Yearning, “an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.” Connect with Pat on Google+. Like Pat on Facebook.