Birds of Feather

Sara Johnson, 1st Sunday

 

‘Chirp-chirp-chirp. Cackle. Wheeze. Squawk.’ This is the opening line of Chapter 12 in Molten Mud Murder, my first Alexa Glock forensic mystery. Alexa muffles the dawn cacophony by burrowing under her pillow.

I heard a similar sequence of calls, followed by a chortle, chirp and a throat-clearing aaggggh the first morning my husband and I spent at Cooper’s Beach on the North Island of New Zealand. Unlike Alexa, I jumped out of bed and ran to the window. I was unable to find which bird sounded like a broken cuckoo clock and later asked the neighbor.

“That’s a tūī, luv,” he said. We stared up into the tall pōhutukawa tree. This time I spotted the glossy blue-green bird. It had a funny white pom pom at its throat. “Going after the nectar. They can be really scrappy bullies.” Then he crooned a folk song he remembered from primary school.

“When the Tūī sits in the Kowhai tree
and the sun tips the mountain tops with gold
when the Rata blooms in the forest glade,
and the hills glow with sunny tints untold.
I love to roam through bush and fern
and hear the Bellbird sing
and feel the touch of the wind on my face
while the joy in my heart does ring.”

                                'Tui in Flame Tree' by Jane Galloway

I heard this amazing vocalist (the bird, not the nice neighbor) in many places over the next nine months. The widespread and endemic tūī can mimic human words. One legend proclaims the Māori kept them in cages and trained them to give welcome speeches. Tūī have the ability to sing two different notes simultaneously and discordantly. (Ouch!) The adorable white tufts under their chin are specialized feathers called a poi and are used to attract mates.

Other birds show up in Molten Mud Murder, which is set in the Rotorua area on the North Island. Alexa and recurring character Detective Inspector Bruce Horne share their first meal together at Alexa’s tiny rental cottage on the banks of the Kaituna River. (The final photo in today’s post is my husband and I rafting on the exuberant Kaituna!) They sit on the porch eating carrot cake (don’t get me started on the to-die-for carrot cake in New Zealand cafes) discussing the night sky of the Southern Hemisphere, which is unfamiliar to American Alexa. A high-pitched screech makes her drop her fork.

Horne laughs. “It’s a ruru.”

“A what what?” Alexa asks.

“Our only surviving native owl,” he said. “It’s a good one to hear. The Māori knew when they could hear a ruru that no enemy was approaching.”

Some Māori consider the ruru as a messenger between the physical world and the spiritual world. While I write, I listen to a New Zealand songwriter known for his work towards the revival of Māori culture. Hirini Melbourne’s short song entitled “Ruru,” sung in te reo Māori, is lovely and haunting. I could not find an English translation, but Melbourne introduced the song this way, “This is a song about birds...about owls. The owl is a bird that scares many Māori. The Pākehā knows this as an intelligent bird. To some Māori as well, it is the guardian of their families.”

I’ve written to my best ability when I make myself laugh or cry or feel afraid. The latter is what happened when I wrote the opening of Chapter 15 which introduces a third native New Zealand bird: There was a dead bird in the cottage, right in the entry, its wings spread in a feathered fan behind its little body, arranged just so.

Alexa knew there was no dead bird in her cottage before she left. It’s cold and stiff. Rigor mortis is maximum. Someone left it in the cottage while she ran an errand. She stiffens, like the bird, and searches the rest of the cottage. There’s a scary shower scene where she has to whip back the curtain. The police officer who later investigates the incident recognizes the bird.

Pīwakawaka,” he said. “Or tiwaiwaka. Māori have lots of different names for fantail.” He adds, “You know, in Māori culture, a fantail in the house is an omen of death.” Alexa has an uneasy night, long in tooth and full of Māori warriors and angry birds.

My husband and I met fantails on our many hikes. They are acrobatic fliers and use their fanned feathers to change direction quickly while hunting insects. They aren’t shy and sometimes approached us, ‘cheet cheet cheeting,’ landing a tree away and spreading their tail feathers. “Pick a card, any card,” they teased.

Alexa Glock uses forensics to solve crimes. In Molten Mud Murder she wonders if she can lift a fingerprint from the bird to identify the gift-giver. Her wondering is of course my wondering, and during the research for Molten Mud Murder I read a 2015 BBC science article entitlted “Fingerprints ‘breakthrough’ for wildlife crime investigators.”

From the article: A team from Dundee (University of Abertay, in Dundee, Scotland) has been able to recover fingerprints from the feathers of birds of prey, which are under threat from illegal poisoning, shooting and trapping. If the birds have been handled, the incriminating marks could help police to identify the suspect.

Alexa, whose bedtime reading alternates between romances and scientific journals, geeks out over the article. It reveals that red and green magnetic fluorescent fingerprint powder was the key. She hightails it to the lab, the fantail – dubbed Fanny – riding shotgun. After dusting the bird’s small breast, she turns off the lights and turns on the UV lamp. You’ll have to read MMM to see what wonders are revealed.

The avifauna of New Zealand is vast and enchanting. Kiwi, robins, kaka, kererū and gannets help me tell stories in subsequent books. I’ll leave you with the lyrics of another Hirini Melbourne (photo below)  song and in hopes that your May is fair and peaceful.

‘Riroriro’ by Hirini Melbourne (1949-2003)

Whakarongo ki te riroriro, riroriro, ka mahi kai māhau

Rere riroriro rere rere runga kōhanga

Huri te uru hauraki hauraki 

He tohu kuraraki

Listen to the chattering of the grey warbler, and go and plant your food garden
The grey warbler makes her nest
If the entrance faces to the north wind,  
it is a sign the summer season will be fair and peaceful

Until next month, friends, 

Sara Johnson, 1st Sunday

The Hungry Ghosts

Sara E. Johnson -- special guest

We are excited to welcome Sara E. Johnson back to the blog. Her Alexa Glock series, set in New Zealand, is a Murder is Everywhere favorite and she has new secrets to share from her upcoming release, The Hungry Bones. Welcome Sara!

I am happy to be back with Murder is Everywhere. Thanks, Wendall, for asking me to visit. My fifth Alexa Glock forensic mystery, The Hungry Bones, comes out in June.

 

Coming June 11.

 

The setting is a charming former gold-mining town on the South Island of New Zealand.  

 

Arrowtown, New Zealand

 

Alexa, a traveling forensic investigator (most towns in New Zealand are too small to have any CSI), is called in when a skeleton is discovered in an unmarked grave. Alexa's specialty is teeth.

 

She'll analyze the strontium isotopes in the enamel of the skeleton's molar to determine where he spent his formative years, but that's another very cool story. This story is about gold and ghosts.

 

The Arrowtown area gold rush began in the 1860s. Most of the miners were English, Irish, and Scottish. By 1862, fifteen hundred miners camped beside the Arrow River. 

 

 

As soon as the river and surrounding area was deemed barren, the European miners rushed off to other goldfields. Chinese miners were recruited to keep the economy going. By the 1880s, there were five thousand Chinese in the Otago region, almost all men. 

 

Chinese gold-miners in New Zealand

 

The Europeans miners mostly stayed in New Zealand. (Gosh – they had come all that way!) The Chinese considered themselves visitors. Their goal was to make money and return home. They did this in one of two ways: Strike it rich, buy a bowler hat, and sail to Hong Kong on a steamer ship. The second ticket home was to sail on a corpse ship.

You heard right.

There's a Chinese proverb: Falling leaves return to their roots. The Chinese believed that after death, the soul hovers over the grave until he is home. Many of the miners, of course, never struck it rich or made it home.

 

 

Hence – the corpse ships. Chinese benevolent societies arranged the ships. If you paid in advance – most miners or their families did to avoid the calamity of being abandoned – you were guaranteed a trip home if you died. The first corpse ship, Hoihow, set sail in 1883 with the remains of 286 miners. Members of the Cheong Sing Tong society had painstakingly exhumed them from graveyards all over Otago, including Arrowtown. They defleshed (if necessary) and cleaned every bone and bagged them together in calico bags. Then they enclosed the bags in zinc boxes covered with wood. Tiny coffins. 

 

 

The S.S. Ventnor

 

The next tomb ship was nineteen years later. The S.S. Ventnor sailed from Wellington on October 26, 1902, with 499 skeletons aboard. Seven elderly Chinese men were given free passage home in exchange for attending to the coffins. Somewhere off Hokianga – the far north of the North Island – the Ventnor went down, taking all those hungry ghosts to the bottom of the sea.

 

The Chinese gold miners died twice.

 

Over the next few months bones and tiny coffins washed ashore. Māori members of Te Roroa and Te Rarawa iwi (tribes), who were mystified at the time, respectfully interred them in their urupā (burial grounds).

 

The wreck of the Ventnor was discovered in 2012 and later designated as an archaeological site.

 

Do you have strong feelings about where you want to be buried or have your ashes spread? 

 

 

When I was in New Zealand last year, I visited Opononi, a beach community where a memorial was built, to pay my respects. The names of all 499 miners are listed on plaques. It is a beautiful and haunting memorial. Check out The Hungry Bones, this June, to learn more about the New Zealand gold rush and why one miner did not want to return to his roots. The book is dedicated in memory of the Chinese miners. 

 

---Sara

 

You can find Sara at https://www.sarajohnsonauthor.com

On Twitter/X at @sarajhn 

 

 

 

 

 

Getting the science right: guest post from Brian Price

Brian Price

Pic courtesy of Pixabay

I’m delighted to be a guest on this blog—many thanks to Leye Adenle for letting me have his spot.  I’m a long-term fan of crime fiction and a chemist/biologist.  I’ve found a way to combine my reading pleasure with my interest in science which I hope will be both interesting and useful.

Perhaps I’m a pedant. Maybe it’s my scientific background. But I do like to see crime writers getting things right!  I’ve no problem with alternative realities in science fiction or fantasy where the normal laws of science are broken.  But in crime novels, I like to see scientific accuracy and sometimes, alas, mistakes creep in.

Rather than sitting here grumbling, or writing complaining letters to authors like one of the “picky-ass readers” Stephen King has described, I thought it would be useful to help crime writers to avoid some basic, common, scientific mistakes.  I set up a website (www.crimewriterscience.co.uk) providing tips on poisons, weapons, explosives and other topics and was then encouraged to develop this into a full-length book. The result is CRIME WRITING: HOW TO WRITE THE SCIENCE, published in the UK by Studymates this month.

The book covers a range of scientific topics relating to crime and assumes no scientific background on the part of the reader.  It starts with how poisons work and the effects of specific toxins and dispels some myths along the way (nothing is instant and cyanide does not make you blue, for instance).  

It looks at knocking people out (don’t bother with chloroform, and trying to inject someone in the back of the neck to produce instant unconsciousness won’t work either). I cover explosives and fires, without giving too much away as I don’t want to end up charged with assisting terrorism, and I describe the basics of firearms which are often misdescribed by non-U.S. writers (a 38mm handgun, anyone?) or shown inaccurately on screen.  Blowing someone backwards through a window with a shotgun while remaining stationary yourself breaks the laws of Newtonian physics (as well as the window) and you can’t actually “silence” a revolver.

Getting rid of a body is not as simple as is sometimes depicted and, despite Dame Agatha’s assertion that Murder is Easy, killing someone is not always that straightforward. Nevertheless, humans are fragile, especially when stabbed or repeatedly bashed over the head, so I try to bring a little biological reality to violence. 

DNA transformed detection and I outline the basics but also point out where it can be misleading—the fact that someone left DNA at a crime scene doesn’t mean they are the villain: the when and the how are critical.  I mention some exciting developments in forensics and also point out the drawbacks of some long-accepted forensic techniques.

The book isn’t a practical guide for a would-be murderer, divulging arcane secrets from the laboratory which will enable someone to poison a rival with a houseplant or make a bomb from shaving cream and cocktail cherries.  

Run!
Pic courtesy of Pixabay

I don’t name and shame authors—I respect crime writers too much.  But I do point out mistakes I’ve come across without identifying the source. I also point out where someone has got something right (referring to tobacco tar stains rather than nicotine, for instance).  

I hope that the book will be useful to crime writers and fascinating to crime readers.  If it helps, I’ll be delighted—and I’m happy to assist further if needed.

Brian Price

brian@crimewriterscience.co.uk

Brian Price is a chemist and biologist who retired from the Environment Agency in 2016. He is the author of CRIME WRITING: HOW TO WRITE THE SCIENCE and runs a website offering tips on science for crime writers (www.crimewriterscience.co.uk). He is an avid reader of crime fiction and has also written a number of short stories, one of which was a runner up in the Weston-super-Mare Literary Festival 2019 and another was short listed in the Chorley Writers Circle competition in 2018. He taught science and technology courses for the Open University for 26 years. Previous books include P FOR POLLUTION and C FOR CHEMICALS (with Mike Birkin)

The spy within

Michael - Thursday

Everything is connected. Credit MIT.

If we are murderers, we are our own worst enemies. Everything we own is set on giving us away. If we touch something with our hands, our fingers leave prints that can lead unerring back to us. If we wear gloves, the material gives off particles that may be traced. Our shoes leave characteristic imprints. And, of course, our DNA is the ultimate traitor—it points the finger directly at us.

The saving grace about all this is that in order for any of this to be useful to the police, they must have a suspect in their hands. Then they can match fingerprints, test glove fibers, investigate shoes, and even, given plenty of time, match DNA.  In fact these spies actually can be on the side of the innocent—when they don’t give the hoped-for match. Several convicted murderers and rapists have been freed after lengthy periods in prison after DNA tests exonerated them.

But all this was before the computer technology age. Now we have collected a lot more spies to carry with us. Some of these tools that we now enjoy and regard as indispensable have made the criminal's life almost impossible. Any email sent, any website searched, any cell phone use, all of it leaves electronic fingerprints that are difficult to erase. And the use of the internet provides a road map that can be traced to the person—much more helpful that the classic passive tools.

Last week the Washington Post reported on the case of Brittney Gargol. As she and her girlfriend, Cheyenne Rose Antoine, readied for a night out on the town, Cheyenne took a selfie and Brittney posted it on Facebook. Then they were off, set for a good time. Apparently during the night they quarreled, it got out of hand and they fought. The next day Brittney was found strangled. A belt was found nearby, and the police believe that was the weapon used to kill her.

Meanwhile, Cheyenne, set up an alibi.  She posted messages asking Brittney if she was okay, did she get home all right? Her uncle told the police that the two of them had gone for an early walk together when she got home around dawn.

Two years past while various bits of evidence came to light. A person approached the Gargol family and told them that, while drunk, Cheyenne had admitted to a fight with Brittney and to choking her. The police became suspicious of the uncle’s story. When they checked the surveillance cameras that covered the area along the river where he was supposed to have walked with his niece, there was no sign of them.  Later he retracted his statement.  The police also investigated the traces that Brittney’s phone had left as it pinged wifi signals that night. The positions and times were consistent with the murder location and estimated time of death.

The incriminating selfie.

But the most damning piece of circumstantial evidence was the belt. It appears in the selfie that they posted the night of Brittney’s death (at the bottom left). Faced with the overwhelming evidence, Brittney confessed and pleaded guilty to manslaughter. Last week she was sentenced to seven years in prison.

The business research company Gartner estimates that 8.4 billion devices were connected to the Internet worldwide in 2017, and the number is growing rapidly. Andrew Ferguson, a University of the District of Columbia law professor, called this the era of ‘sensorveillance.’ While privacy groups are understandably concerned about the implications, it’s a boon for detectives and forensics. Jonathan Rajewski, a digital forensics instructor, claims that: ‘Ninety-nine percent of crime will now have a digital component. We have these little sensors all over. We're wearing them and they're in our homes.'

The fire at Compton's house

Sometimes they are even inside us. An Ohio man, Ross Compton, has been charged with arson and insurance fraud after claiming he woke in the middle of the night to discover his house ablaze. He threw some valuables into a case, threw it from the bedroom window, and escaped leaving his pet cat to perish in the blaze. Police were suspicious and obtained a court order to get the data from his pacemaker. It showed that he was awake when he claimed he was asleep, and that his stress levels were not consistent with his story. Some rather more conventional forensics established that the fire had started in a number of places, and that there were gasoline traces on his clothes!

Richard Dabate with his lawyers

In Connecticut, police have charged Richard Dabate with the murder of his wife. He claimed that a masked intruder attacked him, took his gun, and threatened to torture him with a blowtorch. When his wife returned from the YWCA, she tried to escape from the intruder who chased her and shot her in the head with Dabate’s gun. Dabate managed to escape, turning the blowtorch on the attacker who then fled.

There was a variety of problems with the story. Dabate’s wife wore a ‘fitbit’, which recorded her physical activity.  It seems she was walking around fine some time after she was supposed to have been murdered, and she posted pictures on Facebook while the supposed attacker was fighting with her husband. Then it turned out Dabate’s girlfriend was about to have a child. His wife carried nearly half a million dollars in life insurance that Dabate claimed within a week of her death. Various other computer searches and sensors connected with the house alarm contradict Dabate’s story. Still, the prosecution don’t have it all their own way. In addition to Dabate's DNA, there are traces of DNA on his recently purchased gun that the police have been unable to match to anyone who might have handled it.

Given all this digital information added to more conventional forensics, how come many murders are never solved? Well, I guess the police have to spend a lot of time looking into it all—hundreds of times as long as the killer thought about the crime. And there is one thing that is common to the three cases outlined above. In each case, the obvious suspect was eventually charged, and the forensics was required to build the case against that person. What if that had not been the case? It never happens in any of the Murder Is Everywhere authors’ books for a start!

My Inspiration? It's criminal curiosity!

Stanley - Thursday

One of the reasons I enjoyed being a moderator on panels at mystery conferences is that I read at least one book of each of the authors on the panel.  More often than not, they are new to me.  In May I'm moderating a panel at Crimefest in Bristol titled Making A Point:  What Are You Trying to Say?  The panelists are Kati Hiekkapelto, Kevin Murray, Timothy Williams, and Robert Wilson.  I've finished Kati's absorbing The Defenceless and Kevin Murray's chilling Blood of the Rose, both of which I highly recommend.  

This week I've asked Kevin Murray to be our guest.  

Kevin Murray

I found out after I had finished reading his book, that he had worked for many years on The Star newspaper in Johannesburg as a crime reporter.  In 1978 he was posted to London to work on Fleet Street.  One day he was waiting in a queue at Victoria Station,standing behind a young lass.  With typical South African friendliness, he started chatting to her. They were married her six months later.  Since then Kevin has lived in England.

Other than his journalistic writing, Kevin has written several successful leadership coaching books.  The first was entitled: The Language of Leaders. and received much acclaim from the literary and leadership worlds alike. For the book, he interviewed the Chairmen and CEOs of 70 top organisations.

His second book on leadership, Communicate to Inspire – a guide for leaders, was shortlisted for the Chartered Management Institute’s Management Book of the Year award, and reached No 2 on the WH Smith management book charts.

Both leaders books have been published in many languages around the world.

Then his roots from the world of crime beckoned, and he wrote his first crime novel, Blood of the Rose, which has a very chilling premise.

I hope that he enjoys the same success in this new genre as another South African crime journalist who left South Africa for Britain and became a hugely successful crime author - the great James McClure.  Given the revelations from Panama this past week, perhaps his next mystery will combine business leadership and crime!

In this blog, he shares where his inspiration comes from, for both genres.  

Take it away, Kevin.

_________________________________

Writers are often advised to write what they know.  This in itself could be a rather troubling piece of advice when you’re embarking on a novel about a remorseless, barbaric serial killer.  But much of the world’s greatest fiction, particularly crime fiction, is driven by fact and the real crimes perpetrated by others, the mysteries that haunt and challenge us.  Perhaps that’s the thrill of crime fiction, the relationship with the darker side of the world.

My own fascination stems from earlier in  my career when I was the crime reporter for The Star newspaper in Johannesburg.    

In the mid-80s violent crime was rife in South Africa and there was no shortage of material to feed the imagination of a crime writer.  I often described Johannesburg as the crime capital of the universe. Yet it wasn’t the more lurid or sensational aspects of the criminal act that fascinated me, but the forensic analysis – the careful accumulation and examination of even the most trivial of physical evidence to build, and ultimately solve, a case.  

You have to remember techniques and technology were far removed from the slick, almost mercurial, presentation of forensics we see now, particularly through popular shows such a CSI.  You couldn’t perform a tissue analysis with a smartphone, or find DNA traces with a tablet.  But this was the fascination for me, that a case could turn on tracing a partial fingerprint, discovering the relevance of an item of clothing, or matching ballistics to tie a weapon to the person who fired it. It truly was detective work.

There was one compelling mystery in particular that became the genesis for my novel, Blood of the Rose.  The case?  The Boksburg Suitcase Murder of the mid-late Sixties.  I had discovered this article in my newspaper’s archives while researching a feature I was writing.  It told the story of  how a suitcase containing a middle-aged woman’s decapitated torso was fished from Boksburg Lake.  

The inspiration for Blood of the Rose

Further badly decomposed body parts, including the unrecognisable head, were found in other suitcases.  But the body could not be identified, even after pathologists worked with artists to painstakingly produce a likeness of the victim’s features.  I won’t go into all the details here – they can easily be found on the internet – but it eventually took four years to formally identify the body as that of Catherine Burch.  The final piece of proof?  An expert in the police fingerprinting bureau found a fingerprint on a letter written by Catherine that matched those of her corpse.

When the police went round to interview her husband, he committed suicide before they could get to him, thus closing the case.

As a journalist this case was vital in sparking my interest in forensics, and how the most trivial or innocuous of items can hold the key to unlocking a seemingly indecipherable mystery. Forensic investigation was progressing rapidly and more and more cases, like this one, were being solved thanks to the unique combination of progressive science and human ingenuity. Throw in a large dose of intuition and curiosity and any crime could be solved…eventually. I simply felt compelled to take my interest from the pages of the newspaper into a fictional world of my own creation  – a world where a faceless, remorseless and brutal killer is pursued doggedly by a police team using every clue, no matter how small, to try and break the case. I set the novel in the 80s, but I didn’t leave any bodies in a suitcase. 

This idea gripped me for years and years before I finally got round to writing it. It was my inspiration. 

I have also written and had published two leadership books. The first of those was also born of reading newspaper headlines about CEO’s who lost their jobs because they couldn’t engineer the changes necessary in the companies they led. Those headlines caused me to ponder a question for years before I finally got round to researching the answer and writing up the result. The question: Why do really smart leaders fail? Why do so many struggle to take their people with them? 

I went out to put that question to scores of leaders, and what they told me led me to insights about what it takes to be truly inspiring. I just had to write it.

Having satisfied the need to tell those stories, I am currently engaged in a third leadership book, about the power of purpose in our personal and working lives. A year or so ago I was taken to a special restaurant in a prison in the UK called The Clink. It is an initiative to rehabilitate prisoners by teaching them the  skills of running a restaurant - from cooking to waiting tables to food preparation and restaurant management.  As a member of the public, you can book to experience a unique meal behind bars, and my experience got me asking questions again.

The Clink - a prison restaurant with a difference

I discovered that 60% of prisoners reoffend within a few months of being freed. It seemed to me that prisons were really colleges of crime! Yet, the prisoners who had been given the experience of running The Clink had a reoffending rate of just 6%. They had been given a new purpose, and it had transformed their lives. My new driving question? What effect does purpose have on us as individuals, and what do leaders need to know and do about it to improve the performance of their businesses?

This new book has to be handed in by July, and will be published early in 2017.

Before I have even finished this one, however, a new question is in my mind, and another book is forming.

This time? I saw an article about the daughter of an infamous serial killer in the USA, interviewed 20 years after her father had been captured and sent to jail. Her life had been a misery. My question: What happens to the children of serial killers and is murder in their DNA? 

I can’t wait to get on to that one, and already have an an outline plot and a  working title: The Killing Kind. 

So, newspaper articles are often my source of inspiration, and when allied to my curiosity, cause me to have to suffer a burning question until I can answer it.

What is YOUR source of inspiration?