In the Shadow of Jane

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Jane Goodall has been much on my mind since her passing on October 1st. As a teenager, I first read about Jane in the copies of National Geographic Magazine that I shared every month with my grandmother. 

Those articles in Nat Geo sparked an interest in Africa and in animal behavior. I read Louis Leakey, the Kenyan-British paleontologist, anthropologist, and archaeologist who first sponsored Goodall's work in Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania (Tanganyika as it was then,) books by the Austrian zoologist Konrad Lorenz, who is considered to be the father of ethology (animal behavior,) and those articles and books led me to read Darwin's The Voyage of the Beagle and The Origin of Species. (I think I still have my tattered paperback copies of both of those books. 

I found it fascinating that Jane, a young woman of twenty-three from Bournemouth, had accepted an invitation to visit a friend's family's farm in Kenya. Once there, she got a job as a secretary and on an impulse, telephoned Louis Leakey, with whom her friend was acquainted. She wanted to talk to him about animals. He wanted a chimpanzee researcher. Leakey hired her as his secretary, but he had another purpose in mind. Three years later he sent her to Gombe Stream National Park, where her groundbreaking work would establish her as the first of the great female primate researchers.

In 1971 Jane Goodall published In the Shadow of Man, the story of her time in Gombe. At the time, I was nineteen and had already failed spectacularly in my first try at university, where I'd enrolled as a history major. But reading about Jane, some spark was lit and I began to wonder if I could, in some small way, follow in her footsteps. By the time I transferred a year or two later to the college that would become my alma mater (go Roos!) I'd decided to major in biology, specializing in animal behavior.

Even though a career in zoology was not ultimately to be my path (another story!) I did graduate with a hard won bachelor of arts in biology, and even more importantly, a very good liberal arts education. It's this I credit with any degree of success I've had as a writer of detective novels. It taught me to think rationally and critically, to love research, and to stick with projects. Some of my journey, however winding, must trace back to that teenage girl pouring over Jane's accounts of her adventures. 

Dear Reds and readers, has there been someone in your life who inspired you to take a road you might not otherwise have followed?

P.S. Speaking of research, I went down a serious rabbit hole reading about the Leakeys–Louis and his son, Richard. What wild and adventurous lives they led–I highly recommend looking them up!

 

MISSING: ONE STORYLINE.

RHYS BOWEN:  I really enjoyed Lyn Squire's first book with a mystery about Charles Dickens. Now he moves to another prominent Victorian and a mystery surrounding Charles Darwin.  But this story did not just fall into his lap, as he explains here. Welcome Lyn:

  LYN SQUIRE:

Having proudly sent my first book off to the publisher, I was itching to get started on the next.  My protagonist, Dunston Burnett, a diffident, middle-aged, retired bookkeeper, was raring to go.  And my theme for the three-book series – the tension between Dunston’s limited sleuthing skills and the complexity of the crimes he encounters – was firmly established.  All that was missing was… the storyline.  

             I had apparently used up my inventive quota on my first book, so what was I to do?  Draw on events in your own life, you might say.  Good suggestion.  But sadly, my twenty-five years traveling the globe as a World Bank economist did not bring me into contact with a single crime scene or murder investigation, nothing to set the little grey cells churning.

             What else could I do?  Learn from the greats, you suggest.  Yes, should have thought of that.  Arthur Conon Doyle!  All those ingenious Sherlock Holmes’s stories.  He’s my man.  And there, in his autobiography, I found his advice to would-be mystery writers: The first thing is…  Aha!  Here it is… get your idea.   Yes, but how? 

Would reading everything I could about prominent figures and major events in Victorian England, the setting for my series, help?  Many books later, I was an expert on the Corn Laws, Ragged Schools, the First Boer War, and other hot topics of the nineteenth century, but otherwise still idea-free, not a spark of inspiration, nothing.

Nothing, that is, until I read a biography of Charles Darwin.  Charles Darwin?  What, you ask, can England’s foremost scientist of his day possibly have to say about murder?  As those of you who have read The Origin of Species know, the words murder, crime, victim are nowhere to be found in the book’s seven hundred pages of facts and figures.  So what help could he provide? 

A lot, as it happens.  Did you know that Darwin was bombarded with scathing reviews, blistering editorials, and crude cartoons from believers in God’s creation of man?  Could this avalanche of rage and disgust have escalated into something more malicious?   Mmm, sounds promising.  And did you know that Darwin and his wife were first cousins?  And that in the nineteenth century, offspring of such marriages were thought to suffer infertility?  Was there an idea here?  A couple denied the joy of grandchildren by some cruel tragedy?  Yes!  I finally had the pegs on which to hang my second story. 

Fatally Inferior recounts the consequences of two events: the abduction of a member of Darwin’s family, followed a few days later by a ransom demand – renounce your blasphemous theory in The Times or the hostage dies; and the death, or so it seems, of a former maid birthing a son in a London workhouse.  Apparently unrelated incidents, you might think, yet they converge in a vile act of vengeance: a hellish torture for the victim; the perfect revenge for the perpetrator.

Charles Darwin makes only a few fleeting appearances in Fatally Inferior, but without him, the second book in The Dunston Burnett Trilogy would never have… evolved, as the great man might say.

RHYS: Any suggestions for a juicy Victorian murder for Lyn's third book?