Unintended Consequences as Inspiration for the Crime Writer

Jeff–Saturday

 

Earlier this week, in connection with the release of my latest Chief Inspector Andreas Kaldis novel, I published a more expansive version of this article in CrimeReads.  But as last Saturday’s post commemorated Jeffrey Siger Blatant Self-Promotion Day, I have removed similarly slanted material from this version of that article and added a paragraph or two.

 

We’re all likely aware of examples of the law of unintended or unexpected consequences—when an unforeseen benefit, drawback, or perverse result flows from a purposeful societal policy or individual action.

 

For example, on the benefits scorecard, the longtime pain reliever aspirin gained new purpose when found to help prevent heart attacks, and of course, there’s the blood pressure drug that found an entirely new purpose and worldwide fame as a little blue pill called Viagra.  

 

In the drawbacks category, there are many examples of societies introducing animals or plants for purposes of food (rabbits in Australia), decoration (kudzu in the US), or pest control (European starlings in North America and Cane Toads in Australia), that now terrorize the local flora and fauna.

 

To me, as a crime writer, the most interesting are the perverse.

 

Barbara Streisand once sued someone for posting a photo of her home online. Until bringing that lawsuit only six people had accessed the file (including her lawyers), but the lawsuit triggered 420,000 visits.  It’s now known as The Streisand Effect. 

 

Then there’s The Peltzman Effect, where the introduction of a safety measure encourages some to take risks they would otherwise not undertake but for the confidence gained by complying with the new measure…such as wearing a bike helmet.

 

The Cobra Effect is more diabolical. The story is that when the British faced a plague of deadly cobras in Delhi the government offered a bounty for every dead cobra.  It worked so well that entrepreneurs began breeding cobras just so they could kill them to claim the reward. When the government realized what was happening, it ended the rewards, causing the cobra-breeders to free their snakes, thereby making the situation worse than before the bounty program. 

 

History is replete with seemingly simple solutions to complex problems yielding surprises; at times good, at times not, yet all capable of spawning another serendipity––fertile inspiration for a crime writer’s plots, twists, and characters.  

 

The unintended/unexpected are essential elements of mystery writing, firing up drama and burnishing pace.  The tricky part is finding the right setting for bringing it all together.  On that score I’m blessed to base my work in Greece, for since the days of the ancients, confronting unintended consequences has played a seminal role in Greek life, be it enduring the wrath of the gods, unpredictable nature, plundering pirates, parades of conquerors, wars, plague, or poverty.

 

For my new novel, One Last Chance, I needed a venue capable of supporting a story line driven by unthinkable acts perpetrated by the powerful upon the weak.  To me, place serves not just as a locale, but as a character essential to the telling of the tale.   Place plays a central role in my work, with Mykonos, Athens, Patmos, Mount Athos, Tinos, Sparta, Mani, Delphi, Santorini, Lesbos, and Naxos all having lent their unique magic to Kaldis adventures set in their respective locales.

 

I found what I was looking for in the mountainous, rugged eastern Aegean island of Ikaria–ironically named after the unintended consequence of mythical Icarus perishing off its southern coastline after flying too close to the sun on wax wings.  But that was just the beginning of the island’s experience with unintended consequences. 

 

It’s mountainous rocky terrain, brutal winds, unwelcoming ports, and reputation as the poorest island in the Aegean had it ignored by all except plunderers, forcing Ikariots to endure a rigorous, independent subsistence lifestyle if they wished to survive.

 

And survive they did…in what may be one of the most dramatic unintended consequences of all time.  Ikaria struggled for eons simply to endure, but now boasts an international reputation as one of the world’s five Blue Zones where its hardworking population lives exceptionally long lives–attributed to a subsistence lifestyle built around homegrown produce, goats, olives, homemade wine, fresh air and water, abundant seas, rigorous physical activity, naps, and a decided lack of stress. 

 

Permit me to repeat that last category: a decided lack of stress.

 

Males and females live ten years longer than their compatriots elsewhere in Greece, one in three Ikariots live into their 90s, and many live to be centenarians.

 

Permit me to once again repeat that last category: a decided lack of stress.

 

That’s aspirational, life-changing inspiration if ever I saw it.  I’ve decided to go for it.  Right after I meet this deadline…and the next one.

 

––Jeff

 

 

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The Cobra Effect

Annamaria on Monday

Last summer Michael posted a blog called UnintendedConsequences, in which he cited a new South African law that was supposed to cut down on trafficking of young children, which had the unintended result of slicing into South Africa’s share of international tourism.  I was intrigued.  And being the nerd I am, I researched.

Lots of times it seems, good intentioned people trying to fix a problem end up creating another one. 

But then there are the times when the curative action not only fails to solve the problem, but makes it worse.  The term for this variety of unintended consequence is The Cobra Effect.

The name comes from a story about British colonial rule in India.  During the Raj, the District Superintendent of Delhi was concerned about the number of venomous cobras in the city.   He had a good idea.  Put a bounty on them.  Pay ordinary citizens for bringing in dead snakes.  It worked.  For a while.

But then, to keep the dead-snake payments coming in and to make them easier to earn, folks on periphery of the city started breeding cobras, killing them, and presenting them for the reward.   Outraged at the “cheating,” the government cancelled the program.  The breeders no longer had a use for the baby cobras, so they released them.  In the end the number of cobras in Delhi was increased by several orders of magnitude.

Colonial governments seem to have been particularly guilty of this form of arrogance and superficial thinking.  The French did the same thing in Vietnam—with the twist that their actions created the problem in the first place:

They wanted to change Hanoi into the Paris of the Southeast Asia.  That meant more than broad boulevards, baguettes, and outdoor cafes.  It meant indoor plumbing and of course, sewers.  Those sewers became a fabulous breeding ground for rats.  All too soon, the city was being overrun with them.  They were coming up through the toilets in the European section of town.  And at a time when the white population was terrified of bubonic plague.  YIKES!

The government hired exterminators—employees whose job it was to go down into the sewers and kill rats.  But the critters were so out of hand, the civil servants could not put a dent in their population.  The rats were breeding like—well—rats.  I guess Monsieur Le Frenchman-in-charge had not heard about the cobras in Delhi.  He did what seemed logical to him—he put a bounty on rats.  Payment was made for rat tails.  You can guess I am sure what happened next—people were soon breeding rats.  On top of which, people were not bothering to kill the rats they caught.  They just cut off their tails.  Tail-less rats evidently still remained attractive to the opposite sex.  And reproduced.  And so it went.

And so it goes.  In 2007, the commandant of Fort Benning, Georgia had a different critter to deal with—wild pigs.  If only he had Googled “unintended consequences,” he would have known what not to do.

Fort Benning is a huge place—bigger in geographical area than Atlanta.  With lots of wooded areas where the piggies could hide out and breed.  How cute!  NOT!  Here’s the thing about wild pigs—they dig up everything, they eat almost anything, they will chew what they can’t really eat.  They were destroying government property for heaven’s sake.  Kill them!  Bring in their tails, and we will pay you $40 each for them.   It took a while and a wildlife biologist to figure out why the piggy population then began to increase.

Oh, there were a few miscreants who bought tails from the local game butcher and turned them in.  But that could not account for the ballooning numbers of pigs.  Observers of nature know that what makes a wild species increase in numbers is a bigger food supply.  Once they started looking for it, they found it.  The hunters were putting out slops—tons of it—to attract the pigs and make them easy to find and slaughter.   All that food not only made the local population more fecund. 

Word got out to the porkers in the surrounding counties.  There was free lunch at Fort Benning.

In addition to the Cobra Effect, there are some other fascinating and disgusting sub-categories of unintended consequences:

The worst example of a colonial governments’ stupidity is the brutish and heartbreaking Leopold II’s severed hand policy.  In the Congo, the colonial wealth came from rubber production.  Failure to meet quotas carried the death penalty.  To prove that those who “shorted” the government had been executed, the overseers were required to turn in their severed hands.  To prove how well they were complying, the soldiers went about randomly chopping off people’s hands, rather than working to increase production in a way that might actually work. 

Blowback occurs when a government arms an ally, who then switches sides and joins the enemy.  For example when the USA and Saudi Arabia supplied insurgents in Syria, only to have them join with Isis, taking the weaponry with them.

Campbell’s Law refers to using a social indicator to track progress, but then using the indicator makes progress worse.  For instance, in recent years in the USA, the federal and state governments have sought to use student test scores as a measure of teacher effectiveness, only have teachers begin to teach students to be better test takers, rather than better educated people.

Perverse Incentives can turn a government program on its head.  The US Endangered Species Act requires a study to be made to find out if a species is endangered by a project.  But the studies take years, during which time proponents of the project build as fast as they can before what they want to do becomes against the law.  My favorite example of this is how the prohibition of a substance drives up the price, making trade in whatever it is an extremely lucrative criminal activity.

On the lighter side, there is the Streisand Effect, named after Barbra, who became so incensed by people trying to photographs her house that she made everyone want to see a picture of it.  Or the fatwa on Salman Rushdie that made The Satanic Verses, a book hardly anyone would have bought, an international bestseller of biblical proportions.

My next book focuses on Islam in East Africa in 1912.  I may need you to prepare a priest hole for me.  I am not sure what I should hope for in that regard.