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![[cover]](../images/Transit.jpg) Murder in Transit Volume 13, No. 3, Fall 1997
TABLE OF CONTENTS
- More Cops In Training by Jim Doherty
- Life Is Like a Train: Agatha Christie's Murders In Transit by Nicole Décuré
- Two Sides of the Boat by Jill Grundfest
- Dick Francis: Always In Motion by Kate Derie
- Cruisin' for a Mystery by Jackie Harris
- Mayhem In Motion by Jane Rubino
- Fictional Crime and the Airplane, British Fashion by Philip Scowcroft
THE WRITERS WRITE
COLUMNS
- Mystery in Retrospect: Reviews by Don Sandstrom, Marilyn McArthur, Peter Kenney, Harriet Klausner, Carol Harper
- Magazines, Periodicals, Fanzines, and Newsletters by Janet A. Rudolph
- A Mystery Reader Abroad: Modes of Transport, Chinese Style by Carol Harper
- The Reference Book Case by Harriet Swift
- One for the Road by Beth Fedyn
- In Short: In Transit by Marvin Lachman
- Just Juveniles: Hit the Road, Jack... and Jill by Nancy Roberts
- MRI Mayhem by Janet A. Rudolph
- Letters to the Editor
- From the Editor
by Janet A. Rudolph
Mayhem In Motion
by Jane Rubino
Malice, mayhem, mischief and murder in motion have
been cinema staples since the first days of narrative film. Mac
Sennett's frenetic Keystone Cops chases, the peril and rescue dramas
of Edwin S. Porter (The Great Train Robbery, 1903), the
nail-gnawing climaxes of D. W. Griffith's Way Down East (1920;
with the unconscious heroine hurtling toward a waterfall on an ice
floe) or Intolerance (1916; crosscutting among four races to
the rescue) illustrate how early the moving picture appreciated the
ability of motion to elevate dramatic tension and suspense.
The "motion" in the motion picture can be the use of a vehicle as
the setting for the action or the manipulation of film itself through
crosscutting or acceleration of film speed. One of the earliest
directors to grasp the dramatic possibilities of movement in the
moving picture was Alfred Hitchcock. In an early film, Number
Seventeen (1932), Hitchcock was said to be irked with I.J.
Farjean's hackneyed screenplay and demonstrated a wry revenge as he
sets up the plot -- a jewel heist -- by piling on every possible
suspense cliché, then throwing the film into warp speed with a
fast -- paced, virtually dialogue-free second act chase that pits a
hijacked bus against a runaway train, and concludes with the train
plowing into a departing ferry.
The Master could, in fact, be hailed as the Master of Motion. Most
of his films exploited it in some way. In Rope (1948), he
experiments with the motion of the medium (the camera), by filming in
ten-minute continuous takes; Vertigo (1958) uses film movement
to express the distortion of the mind; Rear Window (1954)
substitutes a roving lens for the protagonist's eye. (It is
interesting to note that the technique of using the moving camera in
the first person was employed in the 1947 film Lady in the
Lake, based on Raymond Chandler's thriller. Here, the camera is
subjective -- it is Philip Marlowe -- and the actor/director playing
Marlowe, Robert Montgomery, is seen only in the brief prologue and as
a reflection when he passes a mirror.)
One of Hitchcock's more famous thrillers was co-written with a
contentious Raymond Chandler -- Strangers on a Train (1951).
The plot is set in motion on a moving train: two strangers meet; each
has someone in his life he would like to eliminate, one a wife, the
other a father. They plot to carry out murders for each other, thus
leaving no obvious motive and allowing each man to provide an alibi.
Hitchcock sets all of the critical action on a moving stage: the
set-up is on a train, the pivotal murder is in a Tunnel of Love
canoe, the climax is on an out-of-control carousel.
This formula -- converting an innocuous vehicle into a sinister
one -- is used many times by Hitchcock: the lethal crop duster in
North By Northwest (1959), the careening family sedan in
Family Plot (1976), the potato truck that disgorges a corpse
in Frenzy (1972). Hitchcock also used a confined and
perpetually moving stage to enclose and intensify the dramatic
situation, as in The Lady Vanishes (1938) (not to be confused
with Lady on a Train), which involves the disappearance of an
elderly railway passenger, and in Lifeboat (1944), a drama of
treachery and survival on a WWII lifeboat.
Lifeboat is one of the best of the "suspense at sea" films.
Though an obvious setting for drama, it is rarely the backdrop for
mystery/suspense, outside of the military thriller (The Hunt for
Red October, et al.) Two of the better ones are Dead Calm
(1989) and The Last of Sheila (1973). In the former, a
bereaved couple on a private sea voyage picks up what appears to be a
shipwreck survivor and find themselves at the mercy of a psychotic
killer. The latter, co-written by Psycho star Anthony Perkins
and composer Stephen Sondheim, is also set on a private cruise; a
director assembles a group of film folk and reveals that they've been
summoned to play out a real-life whodunit in order to discover which
of the passengers was his wife's killer.
Mayhem in motion wrought by lovers on the lam is often based on
fact. Bonnie and Clyde (1967) is a stylized and highly
romanticized dramatization of the criminal career of Bonnie Parker
and Clyde Barrow. Director Terence Malik's debut film,
Badlands (1974), was an eerie interpretation of the Charles
Starkweather/ Caril Fugate crime spree of the fifties. Following the
television feature, Duel, which pitted a lone driver against a
murderous Mack truck, director Steven Spielberg took on his first
theatrical feature, Sugarland Express (1974). Based on actual
events, the film's lovers are a desperate mother and the husband she
springs from jail; the two hijack a police car and set out to reclaim
their son from foster care. As with Bonnie and Clyde, Sugarland
Express poses the suspense of the manhunt against the humorous
and violent getaway of the hunted. Another offering from 1974 --
quite a year for films in this category -- was Robert Altman's
Thieves Like Us, which was a remake of Nicholas Ray's debut
film, the far superior They Live By Night.
When the action is confined to a moving vehicle, there are
specific challenges to the storyteller: how to exploit a relatively
limited area without exhausting its possibilities too soon, thus
diminishing the tension. This challenge often compromises the success
of "peril on the plane" dramas. An airplane interior simply does not
present the mazelike structure necessary to keep the plot rolling,
and such films often resort -- as did the hijack drama, Passenger
57 (1992) -- to moving the plight away from the flight. Air
Force One (1997) was able to make this situation work because the
commodious and complex setting allowed the film to transfer the
Die Hard formula into the President's plane.
On the other
hand, "terror train" dramas offer a more accommodating setting for
mystery. In Lady on a Train (1946) -- based upon a story by
Leslie Charteris -- a woman passenger cannot convince her fellow
travelers that she witnessed a murder on a passing train. In
Runaway Train (1985) -- based on a screenplay by Akira
Kurosawa -- escaped convicts jump a train only to find themselves the
hijacked, rather than the hijackers when the train careens out of
control in a remote region of Canada. The Narrow Margin -- the
1952 version, not the less suspenseful 1990 remake, Narrow
Margin -- is a truly scary cop-and-protected
witness-under-siege-on-a-train saga. But one of the best of this
category is an underrated 1974 film, The Taking of Pelham One,
Two, Three. Directed by Joseph Sargent, best known for The
Marcus-Nelson Murders, a pilot for the TV cop show Kojak, this is an intense and intelligent heist/hijacked subway drama that cuts
from the negotiations of the cops above ground with the thieves
fleeing with their hostages on a subway below. Great closing shot,
too, as anyone who has seen the film will agree.
But, because of its unrelenting movement, few films can equal the
1994 film Speed for mayhem in motion. The deceptively routine
set-up -- a foiled bomber rigs a bomb on a city bus to engage when
the bus reaches 50 MPH and detonate when the speed drops below fifty.
The acceleration never drops; the film is in such a state of
perpetual motion that it becomes a homage to the very concept which
sets the motion picture apart from its embryo,, photography. Movies
move. In Speed everything is set in motion, a collapsing
elevator, a car, a bus, a subway train; a bomb's aftershock sends a
body flying through the air, a wheeled platform is released from a
moving vehicle and guided underneath the moving bus; the rescue is
effected by transferring passengers from one vehicle to another while
both are in motion. The summary "What a ride!" was never more aptly
applied to a film.
Lastly, and for laughs, I would be remiss if I did not mention
what has to be the funniest "murder" ever committed on film. In Jim
Jarmusch's 1991 anthology film, Night on Earth, five cabbies
in five different cities pick up an odd quintet of passengers. In the
Rome episode, the Italian comic Roberto Benigni is the ebullient
cabbie who picks up a priest and decides to use the opportunity to
make his confession regarding certain sexual exploits involving a
pumpkin patch, his sister-in-law and a sheep named Lola. While
Benigni rattles off the particulars of his carnal escapades, the
hapless priest convulses and expires from shock.
Lethally funny. You may die laughing.
© Jane Rubino, 1997. Jane Rubino is the author of Death of a DJ (Write Way, 1995) and Fruitcake (Write Way, 1997).
Getting There Is Half the Fun
by Marian Babson (London, England)
"I've never been on a train, what's it like?" I stared
incredulously at the woman who had asked me this upon learning that I
had travelled to the mystery convention by Amtrak. Never been on a
train? How could this be possible?
Then I realised that I was in the heart of Middle America, the
"flyover zone." People here drove their cars or flew to their
destinations. To many of them, the great gleaming Transcontinental
trains were as strange and alien as dinosaurs, survivors of an almost
prehistoric age, racing across the landscape to disappear into the
distance. Behind their lighted windows they carried their own private
worlds, where any number of dramas might be going on -- and often
are.
"I'm sorry the train was so late," I apologised to the friend who
had met me at the station. "It's because of the boa constrictor that
got on at Minneapolis." (I hadn't seen it myself -- or I'd have
beaten the train to Spokane. I heard about it in the dining car --
the nerve center for all the gossip aboard.) it seems the snake's
owner had carried it on board in a plastic sack, went up to the
observation car to enjoy the view and settled his pet in the seat
beside him. As two conductors walked past, one did a double-take and
said to his colleague, "Look what this one's got, man!" How do you
throw a man with a pet boa constrictor off a train? That's right:
very carefully.
I haven't used American trains for a setting yet, but in Fatal
Fortune, I took full advantage of the vast European network of
trains and ferries, whose beautifully dovetailed schedules allow a
passenger to board a train at Luxembourg in the early evening and
arrive at Ostende in time to connect with the 2 a.m. ferry to Dover.
I had done the journey myself (don't ask!) and it turned out to be
excellent background material when I put my heroine through all the
drama and trauma of it as she fled from the villains with her
non-English speaking young nephew.
Since I don't fly if I can avoid it -- and I can usually manage to
avoid it -- my Atlantic crossings are by ship, a leisurely way to
travel and one which means I arrive untroubled by jet lag. It also
means I collect far more material than I could ever use. "Getting
There Is Half the Fun..." used to be the slogan of a great shipping
line. They could also say, "and More Than Half of the Adventure...";
circumstances only hinted at it the fine print on the tickets under
the subheading, "Acts of God," for which the shipping line cannot be
held responsible.
Foremost is the weather. There's nothing like sailing through the
tag-end of a hurricane for a few chills and thrills, while shipboard
life tries to carry on as usual. I treasure the a memory of a
performance in the theatre with a Welsh soprano lurching back and
forth across the stage, as the ship tilted from side to side,
shrieking defensively, "I am not drunk!" (Actually, she was, but if
the sea had been calmer, she'd have got away with it.)
Then there are all the bomb threats. Suddenly the public address
system calls cryptically: "This is a crew announcement only: Search
routine. Search routine. Search routine." And you know. ("Someone
rang New York office after we sailed and said, 'Expect a bomb'," my
cabin stewardess said cheerfully when I backed her into a corner
about it next day. "So, of course, we had to search.")
At other times, they can handle it more discreetly and you round a
corner suddenly and discover several crew members in a worried
cluster, who try to look unconcerned when they notice you have seen
them. Later, you spot them looking into the potted plants, twitching
draperies aside to see what's behind them and climbing up to peer
into lifeboats. You know then, too. Sometimes it's obvious before you
even board the ship. When, after having sent your handbag and any
parcels through the X-ray machine, and walked under the metal
detector arch, you find yourself getting a pat-down body search
before you're allowed to set foot on the gangplank, it's pretty clear
indication that the ship has received a serious threat... again.
Death, if not murder, is part of shipboard life. Not with the
dramatic cry of "Man overboard!" but heralded by a coded announcement
over the public address system. Regular passengers know the code word
that signals "Rush resuscitation equipment to" followed by the cabin
number. Later, this may be followed by an appeal for the appropriate
clergyman to report to the Purser's Office. Sadly, by the very nature
of things quite a few passengers tend to be elderly and not always in
the best of health. Two of them died on one of my recent voyages.
Not only the elderly die. There was the tragic story of the
five-year-old only son of wealthy parents who thought he was being
carefully supervised, but it's very hard to keep watch over a lively
child every single moment. The main stairway of the ship is open from
the top deck to the bottom passenger deck, one can lean over and look
straight down for what would be eight or nine stories ashore. The
little boy slipped away from his Nanny and decided it would be great
fun to slide down the banisters. The ship lurched... I'm glad I
wasn't on that voyage. So far, I have set two books on board ships:
Murder Sails At Midnight and The Cruise of a Deathtime.
Although I've never used actual incidents, you can see that ocean
travel provides a wealth of background, enough for dozens of books.
A friend of mine (I think she was a friend) once told me, "I love
to listen to your travel stories -- but I never want to travel with
you." I don't blame her. There are times when I don't want to travel
with me, either, but what choice do I have?
On the other hand, look at all the material I collect.
The Deadly Pilgrim Trail, or, On the Road with Cross, Poison, and Knife
by Sharan Newman (Newbury Park, California)
I suppose the classic example of murder in transit is
Murder on the Orient Express. In that mystery Agatha Christie
had her characters travel through exotic regions and still manage to
have her suspects all conveniently trapped until the murder is
solved. Modern authors can vary the theme by having the murder occur
on a cruise ship or the Concorde, any place that can't be reached
quickly by the outside world and allows little chance for escape.
When I started my medieval pilgrimage mystery Strong as
Death, I was tempted to have all my characters be forced to spend
the winter in the Pyrenees, snowbound in a hostel until the murderer
was uncovered. There were two problems with this. The first is that
Christie already did it; the second is that twelfth-century travelers
were a very hardy lot and didn't tend to hang about waiting for
spring. They just bundled up and set off. Therefore writing a mystery
set on a long pilgrimage presented its own set of obstacles for the
writer, as well as for the pilgrims.
Although until fairly recently most people were born, lived and
died in the same area, there were always those who either wanted to
or had to travel. In the Middle Ages there were a number of people
who traveled widely. Vikings made a living from their journeys, as
well as merchants. Entertainers wandered from place to place, seeking
employment. Upper-class brides were carted off to foreign lands,
bringing with them their maids, priests and other retainers. Eleanor
of Aquitaine not only went on the second Crusade while in her
twenties, she also traveled from Normandy to Spain, crossing the
Pyrenees in winter, to fetch one of her granddaughters to be the
bride of Louis VIII. Eleanor was seventy-eight at the time. Just
looking at the lives of the twelfth century peripatetic clerics, I
was amazed to realize how many times some of them crossed the Alps,
often in winter. If they had business, either of the purse or of the
soul, they packed their bags and set out.
Finding out how twelfth-century pilgrims traveled was much the
easiest research I've had to do in a long time. This was the
beginning of the great age of pilgrimages and there are a number of
guidebooks to the major shrines at Jerusalem, Rome and Compostela.
There are also accounts made by pilgrims who returned and miracle
stories detailing how the saints helped them do so. The best of these
guides is contained in the Codex Callistinus and was written
by a clerical pilgrim named Aymeric Picaud at almost the same time my
characters were on the road. Picaud gave all sorts of advice on what
to wear, what to bring, and most importantly, whom to trust. The
answer was "no one." Picaud warns against rapacious innkeepers,
bandits and shifty fellow pilgrims. This on top of bad weather,
wolves and foreign diseases! The account might have deterred a few
pilgrims from making the trip but it also encouraged them with a
loving description of the town of Compostela and the shrine of St.
James the Greater, the goal of the trip. There were those who might
have even felt the dangers of the journey to be an added incentive,
for they could offer their suffering to God. The stories contained in
these accounts are a gold mine for a writer.
Having people die on a pilgrimage was not difficult. People did
all the time. This was not only from the rigors of the trip, but the
condition of the pilgrims when they started. Many were going to the
shrine to ask for a miracle of healing or, as my Catherine and Edgar
were, to beg for a healthy child. Other people went on pilgrimage at
the end of their lives, to prepare themselves for the next world and,
perhaps, to have one last adventure. Therefore, the problem was the
make death suspicious enough for someone to feel the need to
investigate it. I had to wait until the third death in my party of
pilgrims before it occurred to anyone that there was a murderer at
work. And even then, the murder had to be particularly obvious. After
much consultation with other medievalists, I spitted the body with a
spear and draped it in a church over a sawhorse. Hard to miss, don't
you think? And not likely to be accident or suicide.
The other problem about death on the road is keeping the suspects
from slipping away. Since Christie, among others, had her people
snowbound, I felt I couldn't go that way. Therefore, I finally
decided that the goal of the pilgrimage would be more important to
most of the travelers than the fear of being killed. Since in many
ways a pilgrimage is a metaphor for life, and was commonly used as
such in medieval sermons, the fear of death was only one of many
faced by the pilgrim. And, as they all knew, the death of the body is
nothing to the death of the soul. Also, it was always advisable to
travel in a large, well-armed group. One could wait weeks before
another party came by. Therefore, my pilgrims decided to forge on.
Of course religious fervor was not the only reason for taking a
pilgrimage or I might have been stuck with a very boring group of
saints. Curiosity, wanderlust, the need to get away from bad debts or
a bad marriage motivated many to take to the road with staff and
water flask. Some petty criminals were given the option of going on a
pilgrimage just to get them out of town. One miracle story involves a
priest who went on a pilgrimage as a ruse for running away with a
married lady of the parish. In the story they were miraculously
caught. In real life, one wonders how many people used the trip as a
cover for starting over again.
A journey of any sort is a great change of pace for a writer, as
well, especially when one is doing a series. One can introduce new
characters and put the old ones in new situations. The characters
have to go through foreign lands with different languages and
customs. The opportunities for conflict are endless.
There was one other reason for me to write a book set on the road
to Compostela. I wanted to go, myself. I followed the same route that
Catherine and Edgar took in the book and there are many parts of it
that haven't changed much in eight hundred years. The pilgrim trail
sometime parallels the autoroute and sometimes weaves through
mountain passes still heavily forested. The path, itself, has worn
down in places far below the surrounding land, scuffed and marked by
the feet, sometimes bare, of the pilgrims.
That is the most amazing thing about the route to Compostela and
one reason I'm glad I decided to use it for one of my medieval
mysteries. The history of the pilgrimage hasn't ended. Thousands of
people still walk or bicycle the entire route and their motives are
as varied as those of the medieval pilgrim. Since Strong as
Death came out, I've had several letters from people who have
either taken the pilgrims' route or are planning on doing so. I
heartily recommend it, even if you go by bus or car instead of on
foot. Send me a postcard from Conques or Moissac or Najera. But if
you find any bodies on the way, you'll have to investigate on your
own. One murderous journey is all I care to take.
Buy this back issue!
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