Puzzling together a mystery
British crime writer Elena Forbes is musing on the phone about the best way to dispose of a corpse.
“In our country, we’ve had serial killers dispose of their victims by chopping them up because it’s a rather practical way of dealing with them,” she says calmly.
“And,” she adds pragmatically, “if you think about getting rid of a dead body, it’s probably the sensible thing to do.”
The topic is gruesome, but in discussing it, she’s exercising an almost academic detachment. Nevertheless, this is Elena Forbes — one of the most innovative of the new wave of British crime novelists. So you can expect her to offer her own imaginative variation on such matters. And she doesn’t disappoint in her latest novel, Jigsaw Man, now out in Canada from Spiderline.
Detective Inspector Mark Tartaglia — the likable but fallible cop whom we first met in her debut novel, Die With Me — is investigating the discovery of a body in a burnt-out car. It consists of body parts — but not from a single victim. Rather, they come from four different people.
Forbes delights in weaving tantalizing puzzles. But where did she get the idea of a serial killer who mixes up the body parts of his victims?
“Well,” she says reflectively, “it made complete sense to me that this is what he would do in terms of his character.”
That’s all she’s prepared to say about the peculiar psychology of her murderer. Besides, it’s often difficult for her to pinpoint the genesis of a particular story.
“I usually have no idea,” she says, chatting from her home in Southern England. “It may seem very odd but these little tiny bits sort of come into my mind …”
And eventually they knit together into another of her critically praised crime thrillers. But Forbes also is heavily into character and place. That’s why her cop protagonist, Mark Tartaglia, continues to fascinate her.
Jigsaw Man opens with Tartaglia awakening in the bedroom of a London hotel after a drunken one-night stand — and those early paragraphs are enough to remind us how messed up he can be about women.
He staggers into work, only to find himself back at the hotel a few hours later because of the brutal strangling there of a young woman who shockingly turns out to be known to him.
As he proceeds to investigate two crimes — the hotel murder and the body-parts riddle — the novel offers plenty of glimpses into this cop’s complicated psychology.
He’s a character who nudged his way out of her subconscious, making a minor appearance in another book that never saw publication. But Forbes was so smitten by him that she didn’t want to lose him.
“So he just grew,” she says. “And when I started writing Die With Me, he was the main protagonist.”
But Tartaglia also proved to be a flawed hero — a cop who bends the rules to get what he wants, believes that the end justifies the means and that his own moral code can transcend the law.
“He’s not tortured about it at all,” his creator admits. “But he has some wonderfully heroic characteristics.”
Writing, for Forbes, seems part of the natural order. Her father was actor-screenwriter C. Scott Forbes — “I grew up in a house where writing was the normal thing to do, so I always knew I would write at some point. And when these ideas are buzzing around in my head, they’re so compelling that I have to sit down and write them.”
And a lot of her creepiest ideas come to her in the bath.
“It’s the most inspirational place — the bath. I’ve never understood people who take showers.”