MURDOCH GOES DARKER
Maureen Jennings’ newest mystery connects the Toronto detective to the First World War
Let Darkness Bury the Dead Maureen Jennings McClelland & Stewart After a decade of silence, William Murdoch is returning to the printed page — but now he’s older, greyer and sadder.
His younger, bowler-hatted self may remain a fixture of CBC television’s Murdoch Mysteries as he continues to fight crime in late Victorian Toronto. But author Maureen Jennings, whose novels inspired the hit series, has removed him from that milieu for her latest thriller, Let Darkness Bury the Dead, and thrust him into a nation at war with Germany.
She is giving fans an unusually sombre crime thriller — but “it’s hard not to when you’re writing about that time.” In fact, when working on the novel, she was sometimes overcome by emotion.
It’s no coincidence that the new book has arrived within days of Nov. 11. Jennings has deposited her middle-aged Murdoch into the Toronto of 1917 and confronted him with a grisly murder investigation that has unsettling connections to the conflict in Europe — and possibly to his own son, Jack.
“Sometimes you get into a book that’s life-changing in some way,” says the Toronto-based author. “When I actually plunged into this one, it became so heartbreaking.”
Events in her own life intruded as she worked on the manuscript.
“It seemed that people I really cared about were dying over that year. And here I was writing about young men dying by the thousands. Yet I realized I couldn’t have written any other kind of book”
Jennings thought she had laid Murdoch to rest after the 2007 publication of A Journeyman to Grief, the seventh novel in a cycle that had begun a decade earlier. The TV series starring Yannick Bisson had assumed its own distinctive identity. So she felt it was time to retire Murdoch from print and allow him to continue his life on the small screen.
She thought she was done with Murdoch, “but then I thought — I’m not sure about this — maybe I’d like to revisit him.”
“I felt it would be confusing to stay in 1895 because of the success of the show. So I thought of advancing him to a reasonable age.”
Jennings was also increasingly aware of a need to write about the First World War.
“So that’s where I set it — in 1917. Murdoch’s son Jack has gone off to be a soldier and like a lot of these young men he’s suffered shell shock and been wounded. He’s now back home and in a turmoil about his own feelings. I wanted to write about that.”
Murdoch himself is now 56 and a widower, still mourning the loss of his wife, Amy. Thanks to new temperance laws, he’s spending an inordinate amount of time dealing with bootleggers and drunks.
“He’s now a senior detective,” she says. “I didn’t want to make him an inspector because that would have been completely administrative. I wanted him to be very active. ”
But Murdoch is also in continuing anguish over the death of Amy and trying to mend a troubled relationship with his grown son.
“Why do you make him suffer so much?” someone asked Jennings recently. Her reply is that Murdoch’s sorrow is real. “And in this book he’s trying to reconstruct a relationship with his son because they have become estranged. There were crucial times in Jack’s childhood where Murdoch wasn’t there for him.”
This is very much a characterdriven novel. But it is also a mystery thriller filtered through a prism that communicates a strong sense of time and place.
An emotionally fragile Jack has returned to Canada, a survivor of the battle of Passchendaele, where he was gassed and wounded. He seems to have a closer bond with another returned soldier, Percy McKinnon, than he does with his own father. Within 24 hours of their arrival, a young man is stabbed to death in a seedy section of Toronto. Another young man commits suicide. There are two more murders. All the deaths have a common factor — the victims had been exempted from conscription. And Murdoch faces the possibility his own son may be implicated.
The novel makes some disturbing points about what happens to young men who return from the trenches to find an unthinking patriotism still flourishing at home. It’s a situation that enrages a soldier like Jack’s friend Percy.
“Percy is angry and wants to draw attention to the horrors,” she says. “There’s still all this enthusiasm for patriotism but on the other hand there’s the terrible slaughter of these young men. So there was this pot boiling over — even in 1917.”
Jennings did extensive research into aspects of that world. And those drove her to strike out in an unexpected direction when she decided to scatter actual excerpts from some of these documents, as well as samples of her own poetry, throughout the pages of this novel.
“There was something about this book …” Her voice trails off. She tries to explain this need to do something unusual. “I used to write poetry a long time ago, but now it just sort of happened.
“All of a sudden I felt that I was Jack exploring these things — life and death and afterlife and God.”