Echoes of Mystery
I was reading a book by Jo Bannister called Echoes of Lies. I can't say I finished it because I didn't, but I'm through reading it. Here's what happened: A young man is kidnapped, tortured for two days, then shot and left for dead. As far as the men who kidnapped him are concerned he is dead. They meant to kill him. They shot to kill. They are murderers.
Turns out the men who kidnapped him and tortured him and killed him are the father and grandfather of a little girl who has also been kidnapped and is currently being held for ransom. They have been joined in their efforts by a professional man specializing in torture. At the end (yup, skipped to the end again) the father (who, it turns out, is also the kidnapper) gets off pretty much scot free. The tortured guy lies to the police and refuses to turn either the father or the grandfather into the police. The professional man who specializes in torture, on the other hand, gets beaten within an inch of his life and will go to jail for a long long time--something he deserves, but not, in my opinion, any more than the others.
It's all right, you see, to abandon every moral principle, break every law, treat other people like discarded tissue--innocent people!--as long as it's all done for a child. Now I agree that there are a great many lines that can be crossed in defense of family and particularly a child, who has an innocence the rest of us can't match. But killing an innocent man is not one of them. We're supposed, I think, to ignore the killing part, ignore the fact that it's a twist of fate, not any effort on the kidnappers' part that saves the tortured man's life. The father and the grandfather of the little girl did nothing--not one thing--to ensure that he remained alive.
But, as soon as we know a child's involved, it is no longer murder. It's referred to as 'trying to kill me.' The main male character says it--you tried to kill me. No. They didn't. They killed him. In their hearts and in their minds, they did it. These are lines that can't be crossed. Not for a child. Not for anyone. A few years ago, on the television show, The Profiler, the team surrounded a man, a serial killer. 'Kill him, kill him, kill him,' a mother shouts. She wants his heart to save her son. The man is a serial killer, you could make a case that he deserves to die. But what about the mother? Do you want to know that your mother murdered someone so you could live? What does that make her? And what if you know that the serial killer's killings were to find organs to transplant into sick people? The same thing the mother, in the name of being a good and wondrous mother, wants to do to him. What circumstances make it okay--murder in the name of saving a child?
We do not live in a world that is parent- and child-separate, each one from every other one. While you might sacrifice more for your own child than for another child, while there are some rules that clearly must be or should be or can be broken when it's a child's welfare at stake, you can't kill in cold blood or kill an innocent man, just to save a child. Or at least (because, given, it's always your choice), you can't do it and expect that there are no consequences, that the world just goes on. And there, for certain, ought to be consequences in fiction, particularly mystery fiction. Because mystery fiction in many ways is about how we want to go on, or wish we would go on. And even in some of the darkest mystery fiction, there are codes to be adhered to. Mysteries are about the justice we wish we had in our everyday lives.
When men murder innocent people and walk away, even if we're told that their life is in shambles and they feel like, really, really bad about the whole thing--that's not justice. It's cheating.