Young Women Solving Murders
On a Small Island
Crime Fiction famously casts the setting as a primary character, second only to the person who sets things straight. Generally that person is a male and his relationship to the story’s setting is frequently integral to the plot.
Raymond Chandler’s classic PI, Phillip Marlowe, understands LA and all of southern California as a system and could breathe with it. Dennis Lehane’s, Kenzie & Gennaro knows South Boston the same way, like James Burke’s, Dave Robicheaux knows New Orleans and the parishes around it.
I just finished reading a series with a different twist, or rather three series with the same setting — as strong a character as LA, Southie, or the bayou — and the same different twist on the person who sets things straight. The gumshoe, the crime solver, the moral force who balances an imbalance in each series is a young woman, still learning the territory.
By ‘territory’ I mean both the hauntingly beautiful San Juan Islands, in the Salish Sea north of Seattle, and the inner territory of their personal growth. These crime solvers are figuring out the greatest mystery of all — how to live life — as they routinely out-think the cops.
Who Are These Women?
I started reading crime fiction in the second golden age, the years of Robert Parker, Elmore Leonard — and Sue Grafton, not the first to write a crime fiction series featuring a female, but a trailblazer and definitely one of the most successful.
Kinsey Milhone was an attractive character in part because she didn’t have her act totally together. The fictional younger women of Orcas and the San Juan Islands don’t either. But like Kinsey, they rely on what they do have and to the amazement of all, they get shit done.
I first met Cam (Camille Tate) in, ‘Orcas Intrigue.’ Laura Gayle created her and two women, Shannon Page and Karen G. Berry, created Laura Gayle, their nom de crime fiction. Noticing on the cover that a broken heart was involved, the odds were almost nil that I would purchase and then read this book.
I did of course. I couldn’t resist reading a story set where I live. Darvills, the local bookstore mentioned in the story, had autographed copies. I wouldn’t say that I couldn’t put it down but I read the whole book and thoroughly enjoyed it. Then I read three of the remaining four, in which more murders happen around Cam and she manages to survive and thrive at least a little.
She sees Orcas Island through the eyes of a newcomer and it was a pleasure to share her discovery of the dark night sky away from the city, of Massacre Bay in the evening, and rickety old wharfs poking out into West Sound. She meets people and recognizable Island-types emerge with their distinctive quirks. I was interested.
Then with one book left in the series, I switched to Adele Plank of the San Juan Island Mysteries. Also a young woman new to the island, she does more than manage to survive. She is the center of an eleven-part series (so far) by D.W. Ulsterman that has gradually taken on mythic proportions. I was very sorry when there weren’t any more. She’d become part of my life.
I hoped Bethany Maines’, Tish Yearly would fill the void. I was hooked right away on another set of stories about a place that’s pure and separate yet infected by greed and violence through its inevitable connection to the rest of the world. It’s always crooks from Canada or sharks and scammers from Seattle who find their way in to spoil everything.
Tish made her way from Seattle but she’s no shark. She wants to stay and contribute to the community. In fact, whether or not she can ever be “an Island person” is a question at the heart of her most important relationships.
Righting Wrongs
Righting wrongs is deeper than solving murders. Righting wrongs has a prevent-and-protect aspect to it. Adele Plank explicitly embodies this mind set, which is strengthened by its connection to all the people who have worked overtime to protect the islands before her.
She is not an indigenous person but she has difficult-to-explain encounters with extremely old indigenous people whose values she upholds. She emphasizes her physical development, through martial arts and running. She is drawn to danger in the name of preservation.
Cam’s life does not touch mythic levels, not even close. She’s an attracive and resolute person — but … she does have a difficult-to-explain ‘power,’ which is the power of simply not being seen. It’s not the same as invisibility and it doesn’t sound like much, but it saves her life.
Tish has no super powers — but … she lives with her ex-CIA agent grandfather. They are both smarter than all the local cops put together. Except she’s dating one of them. So is Adele in another fictional universe.
These are stories.
Life here isn’t really the way it’s depicted in any of the series — but … islands have been crime’s off-shore home throughout human history.
There are crooks from Canada and Russia and most of all from the mainland, the other side of a forty-five minute ferry ride from Anacortes, USA. There are also island-born-and-raised crooks and hard cases.
There’s the whole human spectrum — a finite amount of it in a relatively small amount of usable space. You can almost get your arms around it, which might be what most needs protecting.
Adele’s real enemy is development, the ever-present, unending threat of a Really Big Deal. Casinos. Mega-Performance Centers. Casinos. Luxury accommodations. Casinos. Golf. It wouldn’t just change the character of the Islands — the character of the Islands is always changing. It would kill the character of the Islands. The Islands would become Any Place in a world addicted to keeping the good times rolling.
That’s Adele Plank’s work. Camille Tate would not appear to have much overlap with the rough-and-tumble Adele. I think she does. Cam, I’d say, is more of a plodder, which is how wrongs get righted sometimes. Her way turns out to be essential in determining truth and justice, which are not always aligned.
Tish merely busts fraud rings and Perry-Masons several killers. The fraudsters are an alien body and some of the death comes from Hollywood oozing onto Orcas.
I think all three of them would be friends. I look for them sometimes, maybe having coffee at Darvills. Maybe next to me in line at the Co-Op. And then there’s the grandfather — the CIA was the CIA — but … on Orcas he unquestionably helps right wrongs.
What? Why?
New York is the capital of crime fiction, with “over 4887 books set there,” according to Perplexity AI, who reads faster and remembers better than I do. A hard boiled writer named Mickey Spillane started turning out gritty plots in the city right after World War II, beginning with, ‘I, the Jury,’ in 1947. You could feel the mean streets, without the danger.
Evil lurks in small towns too, but not as much. Obviously. The scale frames crime differently. In New York, every crime story has ‘a thousand others like it in the naked city.’ On Orcas, one crime story puts the heart of the islands at risk.
It’s not a direct line from ‘I, the Jury’ to ‘Deadman Island’, but there are less zigzags than you’d think. A few books into the series and Adele Plank is already the agressor. She goes after people, recklessly. By ‘Anacortes Haunting’ she knows she has a problem. That’s the trouble with being a force for good.
Mike Hammer would be cancelled today but his girlfriend Velma wouldn’t. She was smart and tough. A couple generations later, Velma looks a lot like Adele and the San Juans are one place Velma’s granddaughter would check out.
The Pacific Northwest is real, as real as anything gets, as real as a deeply connected regional system can be. Then you’ve got the Ocean and the Salish Sea where it meets the land and holds up a few little islands, specks in the water. Cam, Adele and Tish were each drawn to those specks and as newcomers they went from not feeling the island’s own presence to being all but swept up in it.
The classic PI travels the path less taken. The obvious path to get somewhere is on the mainland, in Seattle, in LA and New York. Little islands off the coast offer an alt-playing field. Velma’s granddaughters are running the business now and the business is truth, justice, and the Island Way.
Tom Nickel writes about new media technologies and other topics he has little if any standing to write about. His work has not appeared in The New York Times, New Yorker Magazine, The New Republic, or the New England Journal of Medicine.
Tom holds a Black Belt in Learning and is a founding Board Member of the African VR Campus & Centre and a long-time supporter of the Khmer Magic Music Bus.
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