Coincidence and the crime novel

Trish and I write a lot about synchronicity, both here on the blog and in our non-fiction books. But what about our novels? Do we ever use synchronicities in our stories?

Actually, not so much.

It’s tricky for writers. You have to be very careful, because readers usually don’t like it when a mystery is solved by a chance encounter, an overheard conversation, or a mistaken turn on a road that leads to a neat resolution. Readers consider such methods of resolving a mystery as a shortcut, and they feels cheated. They want mysteries solved through cause and effect, not through mysterious, unexplainable circumstances. Right?

But wait. There’s something else here.

The fact is, real life investigators often make use of coincidence in their detective work.  An investigator just happens to get assigned to a case that is suspiciously similar to a case he looked into last year. He takes what learned in that case and is able to solve the new one. If the case had gone to another investigator, it wouldn’t have been solved. Or at least not in such a neat and timely manner.

How many crimes have been solved in this manner outside of cause and effect? Former private investigator Steve Gore notes that if it were not for these kinds of coincidences, many suspects, witnesses, and pieces of evidence wouldn’t be found and crimes would remain unsolved, perhaps even be unsolvable. Except investigators typically call it experience or street knowledge, not chance and coincidence or synchronicity. Yet, another experienced investigator might not have the same sources and experiences.

Here’s a story from Gore’s own experiences:

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“Shortly after I opened my private practice, I was contacted by a criminal defense attorney whose client had been arrested for aggravated mayhem. The victim had been badly beaten and lost part of his ear and underwent hundreds of stitches to repair his torn and slashed skin. The client, like the other three men arrested, denied that he was involved or even present. If convicted, under California law the client faced a mandatory sentence of life in prison.

“The police report said the victim and two women had walked out of a bar and gotten into an argument with four men. The men then assaulted the victim and fled. Police located four men in a parking lot a mile away and detained them. The women were brought to the scene and identified all of them.

“The client, held in the county jail without bail, told me he happened to be in the parking lot when four men drove up. He knew two of them and they began talking. One of the four walked off the lot and into the neighborhood. The police drove up, detained the four remaining men and brought the women to the scene. The client assumed he’d be released right then. He wasn’t.

“Since the three others were claiming innocence, they refused to tell the client who the fourth man was, both because they were afraid he might cut a deal and inform on them and because they were afraid he might take revenge on them for informing on him. However, one afternoon in the jail exercise yard the client overheard the three talking and learned that the fourth man was nicknamed Boo, that he was a drug dealer, that he was about five years out of high school, and that his mother, name unknown, used to live in a pink apartment building on a wide street in Richmond, California.

“I was faced with a number of problems: I didn’t know whether the client was telling me the truth about the event. I didn’t know whether he was telling me the truth about what he claimed to have overheard. I didn’t know whether Boo actually existed and, if so, had really been involved in the crime. And assuming everything the client told me was true, not only were there Boos by the dozen in Richmond, there were dozens of pinkish apartment buildings on the many wide streets in the city’s fifty-two square miles–larger than San Francisco.

“Moreover, there are many of shades of pink and too often what is described as pink turns out to be a shade of red or brown. Beyond that, even if I found the right building, I needed to find someone who knew Boo’s mother, which meant they’d also have to know her son’s nickname was Boo.

“What were the chances of that?

“Even as I sat in the interviewing room at the jail with the client I recalled that two months earlier, when I was still working for the county, I had been to a pink apartment building on a wide street in Richmond looking for a witness. I drove straight out there and spotted a woman sitting on the steps and drinking a beer. I walked up to her, identified myself, and said, “I’m trying to get ahold of Boo’s mother.”

“And she said: ‘Mary moved away about two weeks ago.’

“No reader of fiction is going to believe it.

“And something almost as coincidental: I later found Mary had gotten a traffic ticket in Oakland a few days earlier and the citation showed her new address.

“Over the next few days I drove by that address until I spotted someone out front who matched Boo’s description. He was standing with some men about his own age and selling drugs over the low front fence.

“I showed up the next morning, hoping to catch him still a little groggy and before his crime partners showed up. A woman who identified herself as his mother opened the door. The fear in her eyes suggested that Boo might be the one. I say ‘might’  because it was likely she knew that Boo had been involved in other crimes and that someone, sometime would be coming for Boo. She stepped back and let me in and said, “I’ll go wake him up.”

“I sat him down at the dining-room table, set out my recorder, and the story came out. (The various and contradictory reasons people talk to investigators and confess to crimes is a topic for another time.) He not only admitted to his part and cleared the client, but implicated the other three in a hit by hit, punch by punch, slash by slash account of who did what.

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Good story, right? I’m going to mention it in a talk at the Tallahassee Writers Conference later this month, a talk about synchronicity and writing. How did I get it? Did I have to go interviewing detectives, did I search the Internet with crime and coincidence keywords or detectives and coincidence? No.

Someone sent it to me just as I was starting to put together the talk. It came from a mystery writer actually, Nancy Pickard. She knows Trish and I write about synchronicity, but she had no idea either of us would be talking about it at a writer’s conference in a few weeks. So that’s another example of how things fall together.

Conference speakers…..T&R