Back to Square One

Have you ever wanted a do-over for some parts of your life? Or at least an opportunity to choose a different one of Robert Frost's paths? Many of us, if given the opportunity, can at least dream about it. But dealers in fiction have all the tools at their fingertips to create salad days in a well-established mature character, or at least present a more youthful portrait of their protagonist. Authors do this by writing a prequel.

The word "prequel" is of recent origin. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word "prequel" first appeared in print in 1958. It was used by the well-known Anthony Boucher of mystery writing and Bouchercon fame. He used it in an article in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction when he referred to a specific work. In the 1970s and 80s, it came into wider use when describing movies like The Godfather: Part II, which took place temporally before The Godfather. I knew this word was not listed for any spelling bee in my school.

I really enjoy prequels, because they give the readers an insight into the development of a favorite character. Some readers don't care if books in a series are read in order, but I prefer orderly progression of aging, relationships, and career development.

Undersheriff Bill Gastner is a favorite character of mine in Steven Havill's Posadas County series. In the more recent books, he has retired from law enforcement and Estelle Reyes is the new Undersheriff, but in One Perfect Shot, the eighteenth book in the series, Havill takes us back to a time before the first book in the series took place. We've gone back a decade or so earlier, when Gastner is Undersheriff. Gastner is called to the scene of Larry Zipoli's death, a county road in broad daylight, where Larry has been shot and killed while working grading a road. The case is one that fits Bill to a tee; a dead man in unusual circumstances, no apparent clues, but a puzzle for which the pieces are out there and he will find them and put them together.

In this case, he also has at his side Estelle Reyes, who is on her first day in the job of Deputy for the Posadas County Police. We learn she is gorgeous, which is something not focused on in other books in the series.

The story foreshadows her special intuition and very sharp eyes when it comes to incongruities at the scene of the crime. Bill Gastner is as solid and unflappable as ever, and he walks her through the initial points of good law enforcement.

Kurt Wallander, Henning Mankell's solitary and somewhat morose Inspector is not exactly mysterious, but The Pyramid, which was written after eight earlier books in the series, tells the story of Wallander's beginnings and explains some things about Wallander that we might have wondered about in other books. This collection of five stories explores Wallander's early career as a rookie cop. It also details his relationship with the girlfriend who later became his wife. Some things were predictable: no one could have spent much time with that woman without coming to despise her. She kept Wallander under her thumb, but somehow he still loved her, years after their divorce.

It became easier for me to understand his relationship with his daughter, Linda, and the pattern of self-denigration when he mentions it in the books. One cultural tidbit I found interesting is that when his daughter went to college at 18 years of age, she was considered on her own financially. Really! Where was this man's head? Solving murders of course.

I consider The Chalk Circle Man by Fred Vargas a prequel only in a sense. It was the first in the Chief Inspector Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg series, but it was published in the U.S. after five years and four other books.

Adamsberg is a very unusual but very engaging character. He is somewhat of a genius at getting to the heart of a pattern. He has a distinct intuition about weird events and people. On the other hand, he loves one woman deeply but treats her badly. His main mission in life––besides his work––is to find his Camille and then drive her away. He is now the head of the Paris murder squad.

In The Chalk Circle Man, we get to meet Adamsberg as he is leaving the small town in the Pyrenées where he spent his childhood as a barefoot boy running around the foothills, and where a police inspector once told him he was not cut out to be a policeman because there was no room for wild creatures like him. By this she meant his curious way of solving murder after murder by a combination of uncanny instinct and intuition.

Now, at the age of 45, he has the respect of those around him because of his intuition for solving crime, but as a newcomer to Paris he is still an outsider. His charm is insidious, though, and when strange chalk circles begin appearing on the pavements overnight––all of which encompass bizarre objects––his squad believes Adamsberg's assurance that one night the chalk will encircle a murder victim. And the search for the culprit is on.

Reading this book before the others adds a new dimension to the Adamsberg character that augments the enjoyment of the rest of the series.

Sometimes when I start a new series, I look at the website Stop, You're Killing Me! to check out the order the series' books are written in, and if there is a prequel I read it first. I did this with Cactus Heart by John Talton. In it, David Mapstone, who is a former history professor, has just been hired by the Sheriff's office in Phoenix. His job is to be related to the investigation of cases in which the history of the area is a factor.

His first case begins after the chase of a thug into a warehouse exposed the bones of a decades-old child murder that has little fingers reaching into the present, as well as to the past of some very important people in the city. This early story introduces us to a bit of Mapstone's past and lays a nice foundation for the future books, although they would have been fine without it.

Phoenix

There are history lessons in all of Talton's books that I find fascinating. They are mostly about the evolution of Phoenix from cattle town to the fifth largest city in the country, and about how Arizona has morphed to its present state.

If you were to write a prequel to the mystery that is your life, how far back would you go? I think a person's life in their twenties is the perfect place to start. There is still dampness behind the ears, but it's a decade of great change and usually a time when future paths are set upon. Mankell talks about these years. On the other hand, there are those who think that life begins at 40 (I never met one of these people, mind you)––in which case, some of these prequels are set in the right time.

There Is No Place Like Home

There are places in this world whose names are almost synonymous with misery. Places you would rather not experience, like Outer Mongolia, the Black Hole of Calcutta, the wilds of Borneo, and Siberia. To some, because there isn’t a hope in hell that there would be a Starbucks, the place to avoid is the Back of Beyond. But that is in real life; travelling to these areas by way of fiction is another story altogether.

Chinggis Khan Hotel

When I first picked up Michael Walters' book The Shadow Walker, I was immediately transported to Ulan Bator and my first reaction was to flip to Google Earth to see where this was and what a city located on these steppes would look like. This is one of the least populated areas of the world. This mystery was a gripping tale that was as much about the far reaches of Mongolia as it was about the story. An unusual protagonist, Nergui, who, along with the head of the Serious Crime Squad, Doripalam, solves the case of the murder of a British geologist whose body was found in the city's best hotel, the Chinggis Khan.

In the second in the series, The Adversary, Nergui's case takes him further out into the steppes as he tries to find connections between the disappearance of a young nomad boy and the death of his mother, and the country's most powerful crime lord, whom Nergui has been after for years. Aside from the setting, the characters themselves are so intriguing that they are memorable. It is not the 87th Precinct. Instead, you have a police crew that is trying to help Mongolia into the 21st century. The land is free of Soviet influences, but unable to master freedom without pervasive corruption. Nergui sometimes feels like he is operating with one hand tied behind his back. He can do all that is possible for ordinary crimes, but organized crime is off limits.

I have not come across a murder mystery written about Borneo, but Graeme Kent has a new book that transports the reader to the nearby Solomon Islands. This is a new series featuring Sergeant Ben Kella, a touring government police officer who was also the aofia of his tribe, a man chosen by the spirits to keep the peace. He joins forces with a young newcomer to the Islands, Sister Conchita, who has just been appointed to help the priest at the mission. The islands are a British territory and Kent enlarges on the ambiance and the history of the progress of the area towards independence. Sergeant Kella has been educated both in Sydney and London, where he took a Master's degree. He even did a little police training in Manhattan.

Some of the locals still feel the yoke of colonialism and the feeling is that the British would prefer to restrict the education of the islanders so that the better jobs can be saved for non-islanders. In Devil-Devil, an elderly man has been killed and Kella must investigate and solve the crime without causing bad feelings and enmity among the different generations and the different tribes. On this island where the crime took place, there lived 13 different clans, each speaking its own language. It was a powder keg. Kella and Sister Conchita walk a fine line inexorably to the solution and I can't wait to read more about this pair.

I have heard about the Black Hole of Calcutta most of my life without realizing where it was exactly. The Black Hole of Calcutta is a cell in the jail of a British fort in Calcutta, now known as Kolkata. In the middle of the 18th century, British and Indian troops fought at this fort. A reported 146 defenders of the fort were driven into the small cell and many had suffocated by the next morning.

I have encountered only one writer of mysteries that take place in this city, now becoming better known as Kolkata. Are we becoming more politically correct, as we now speak of Mumbai and Kolkata, or did they change their names from Bombay and Calcutta? Satyajit Ray, better known as a filmmaker, wrote a series of stories that were collected in The Complete Adventures of Feluda. These are short stories about a young amateur detective who is really a renaissance man who can do almost anything. He is well-versed in the martial arts and is a marksman. He reads about photography, geometry and anything that can help him solve crimes. He gets more adept at crime solving as the stories progress. In the Royal Bengal Mystery, you see some elements of a Sherlock Holmes influence.

Being banished to Siberia reminds me of the nightmarish tension of the Cold War in the 1960s and 1970s. The name "Siberia" means "sleeping land," and for a thousand years, while Europe and Asia developed, Siberia slept. It was five million square miles and could swallow all of Western Europe and two USAs. It is covered by taiga (forests) and animals, vast deposits of minerals and more. It is a land of perpetual winter, where the temperature on a good day is forty below. In A Cold Red Sunrise, Stuart Kaminsky's Russian detective, Porfiry Rostnikov, a dogged, intense Moscow police Inspector who occasionally gets on the wrong side of the KGB, is sent on a case to this area of tundra and snow.

Tumsk, the town where Rostnikov and his partner are sent, was built around a weather station. This place had not resisted change; it had not even been threatened by it. It was a collection of a few houses and government buildings. A Commissar from Moscow had been murdered while investigating the death of the daughter of a Russian dissident who had been exiled to Siberia. The exile in question was a brilliant doctor whose situation had gained some press in the West and the authorities want a quick resolution to the problem.  And, of course, Rostnikov obliges as always.

We might differ in our opinion about what constitutes the Back of Beyond. I have felt at times that it is where I live, because we have no bookstore, but there are more backward places. In Steven Havill's Scavengers, the story takes place in the New Mexico desert near a town called Maria. Ex-Sheriff, now livestock inspector, Bill Gastner describes it as having lain comatose since the day Coronado walked through.

This story is the first one in the series that features Estelle Reyes-Guzman as the new Undersheriff. She is called to the isolated desert area because first one body, then another, is found dumped in this desolate area. Reyes-Guzman is as sharp as a tack. She sees small discrepancies and details that help her solve these mysteries in a relatively short time. These stories have an excellent pace as well as a good sense of place. Havill makes me want to visit this area. Even though it is bleak, he makes it sound out of the ordinary.

When I close this kind of book, I am really happy to be where I am, having enjoyed a glimpse of life in places of nightmares for some, while I am either warm and cozy or cool and content in my own chair.