Crime Lady: Crime Novel Catch-Up

Introducing an occasional, but hopefully regular, feature on crime novels vintage and recent I didn't get around to reading until now

Dear TCL Readers:

I’ve spent many months thinking about how I can retool this newsletter into something less author update-y and more along the lines of how I used to blog. No accident that, exactly twenty years (!) after I began blogging, and at a time when social media is in shambles, the old feelings would return. Not necessarily nostalgia, because I’m deeply suspicious of it, but the memory of how writing used to feel when I was much younger — looser, less tethered to publication house styles or deadlines, more open and inquisitive.

And while I would love nothing more than to devote time and energy to an original crime investigation of some kind, with a book due next year, a living to make, and my mental health to protect, it’s better that I listen to where my instincts are pointing: leaning in to my love of reading, and why I love crime fiction in particular. I obviously read a lot, but there are gaps. So going forward, expect semi-regular dispatches on crime novels, vintage and more recent, that I never got around to reading before now.

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I know exactly why I missed reading Please See Us, Caitlin Mullen’s debut novel, when it was published. First, it had the unfortunate publication date of March 3, 2020, and we know what happened next. So many books fell into the pandemic memory hole and barely climbed out, if at all. But I also had no professional obligation to read it: I was finishing Scoundrel, preparing for the publication of Unspeakable Acts, and wouldn’t start the column until the following February, after which it again became my mandate to pay attention to crime fiction in earnest.

There would be times I noted Please See Us over the years, as when my predecessor, Marilyn Stasio, raved about it, and when it won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel. But it seemed impossible to find a copy in a bookstore, when I remembered to look for it. Then I found one at Mysterious Bookshop last weekend and began with some degree of trepidation, immediately dissipated with the book’s opening line: “By the second week in June, there are two dead women laid out like tallies in the stretch of marsh just before the Sunset Motel.” Of course I wanted to know more, to keep reading. And the writing was so potent, so present, robust and compassionate at the same time.

The Sunset Motel is a hole-in-the-wall located in Atlantic City, clearly based on the $15/night motel in nearby Egg Harbor Township, long gone now, near where the bodies of several women were found together in 2006. (Those murders are unsolved, but garnered recent attention with the arrest of a suspect in some of the Gilgo Beach killings.) I bring this up because I made the connection, but it’s not at all explicit — and I was glad Mullen never made it so, that she was able to take this kernel of truth and spin it into a novel of true imagination and feeling.

She does so, primarily, because of her characters. Teenage Ava has reinvented herself, not entirely by choice, as Clara Voyant, a boardwalk psychic at the liminal space between con and truth. It shouldn’t have been a space at all; Clara and her guardian Des are trying to survive a harsh world and taking easy money from desperate clients is better than the alternatives, though two in particular — sex work and dying a violent death — will be explored in heartbreaking fashion throughout the novel.

Then Clara starts having visions, out of time and step and synchronicity, which terrify her. She’s always known she had a real gift, albeit one with limits: “Some clients thoght I could see their entire futures like a film reel — beginning, middle, end. But usually, what I saw was a glimpse of the past — a moment that pulsed with intensity for them. Something essential to their personalities, an instance in their life that shaped the way they thought.” But these visions feel different, more visceral, and more connected, she wonders, to the growing number of missing women and girls in the city.

Mullen, in short sections throughout the novel, gives these women and girls space to reclaim their own humanity, even as they remain, for the most part, Jane Does. Some we do get to know by name at various points in the narrative; others never have that chance. “The women pass the long days and nights working the past over, studying the mistakes they mde, the bad luck that reached in like a hand and turned them away from the lives they should have had.” Mullen articulates how remaining unidentified, forgotten, is a true lack, an absence not only of information and resolution, but of actual lived, messy personhood.

Mess is what Lily, once a gallery girl with a burgeoning career in Manhattan who has slinked back to her Atlantic City hometown to rebuild her psyche and sort through the wreckage, knows all too well. She gets her palm read by Clara and an impulsive act binds the girls together — as does a shared sense that the newest missing girl, 18-year-old Julie Zale, means more to them than either can fully say. We’re never sure whether Lily, Clara, or both are destined for danger, and because we come to know them and care for them, the sense of dread grows.

Aside from the characters, beautifully drawn and depicted, what I loved most about Please See Us is its sense of place. The sights and smells and sounds of Atlantic City feel rendered in a specific fashion, and the events that happen seem fated to have happened only there, at that time, by these people. Too many crime novels to my liking forget that a book still needs to engage all of a reader’s senses, not just concentrate on turning pages or signposting to contemporary references as shorthand. Please See Us does the literary work, so the emotional payoff is even greater as a result.

Three years isn’t long to wait on a novel, but it feels like way too long. Take the time and effort to track down a copy of Please See Us, because yes, it is that good. I don’t know what’s next in store for Mullen — it would not surprise me at all if it wasn’t a crime novel, her writing ambitions feel like they have different questions to ask going forward — but I will certainly be reading what she writes next in great haste.

Until next time, I remain,

The Crime Lady