War and Remembrance in Crime Fiction

From battlefield poetry like “In Flanders Fields” to modern blogs about war experiences, the written word is our most enduring way to climb into the experiences and effects of war. Non-fiction accounts begin even before the conflict ends, in battlefield reports and letters home, and military if not popular analyses are produced seemingly forever more. Literature in other forms goes in and out of fashion, and crime fiction takes its turn.

We all know of John McCrae, who wrote that most iconic Canadian poem still recited in schools and now sung at Remembrance services nearly a hundred years later. But how many remember the many other trench poets, from Canada and other nations, who recorded the brutal truth of war with words of power and beauty that, when widely read by the non-combatant public far from the Western Front, helped force an end to firing squads as the punishment for shell shock, and may have hastened the end of the war?

Their leaders were unquestionably Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. The latter was killed before he could see what change his words had wrought in his society, but his work is taught in first-year English classes every fall across this country and continues, nearly a hundred years after his death, to influence discussions of war and human conflict.

In longer works, there are many general novels that touch on the war in some aspects. One in particular shows the changing public attitude to war. Lucy Maud Montgomery wrote the last of her ‘Anne of Green Gables’ books during and immediately after WW1, about Anne’s children growing to adulthood during those years of patriotism, gritty reality, and overwhelming losses. Rilla of Ingleside was published in full in 1921 and considered a realist account by those who had lived through the war years in Eastern Canada. 

When it was republished a few decades later, five percent of the book - mostly dealing with the first world war as it was experienced in rural PEI families- was edited out to make it more suitable for a new generation of young female readers, who were assumed not to be interested. Fifty years later, fashion having changed again, Rilla was republished in its original form, and helped a new generation, mostly of young girls, see those parts of Canada’s history as more than bare words on the pages of a history textbook.

Literature, including popular fiction, helps both those connected to war and those removed from it to understand and process its pain. It breathes life onto the pages of history.  Crime writers who have integrated wars and their effects include

Dorothy L. Sayers gave her sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey,  a recognizable and compelling case of what we now call Post-Combat Stress Disorder, but during and after World War One was known as shell shock. 

Helen McInnes, whose post-war thrillers included hunts for Nazi-looted treasures, and even for Nazis, had a closer connection to World War 2. Her third novel, Assignment in Brittany (1942), was required reading for Allied intelligence agents who were being sent to work with the French resistance.

Enid Blyton, whose Adventure children stumbled into a cache of religious and cultural treasures in The Valley of Adventure, introduced generations of children to Nazi art looting and the lingering effects of that war in Europe.

Andrew Martin, whose Jim Stringer novel, The Somme Station, takes us into the heart of a WW1 battlefield.

James R. Benn, whose Billy Boyle is a brash young Boston cop brought to Europe by his uncle Ike (yes, that Ike) to be a special investigator in theatres of war, looking into crimes too sensitive for local police forces, introduces mystery readers around the world to the command and complications of the American Army in WW2.

Mary Jane Maffini's Camilla McPhee novel TheDead Don’t Get Out Much is at once a lively chase and a heart-tugging tale of an older friend’s hidden WW2 history.

Carola Dunn's 1920s sleuth, Daisy Dalrymple, traces a connection between the Great War and the bodies found in a shallow grave in Epping Forest, in  Anthem for Doomed Youth, whose title is taken from the famous poem by Wilfred Owen, the World War One trench poet.

These are only a few of the many crime novels of the past century that deal with some aspect of some war. Every one brings war and its effects to life for readers of every age and interest level. While none of those listed here deal with the ongoing Iraq or Afghanistan wars, or other current conflicts around the globe, I'm sure they're out there. You'll find them if you look.


Crosses photo credit to Neil Zeller Photography, Calgary

Reading My Grandmothers

Part One:

I don't actually know what my grandmothers read when they were girls, or adults. If I saw either of them more than a handful of times in my life, I don't remember. We were, and are, a peripatetic family with scant overlaps between geography and generation. To help me understand the influences that shaped my grandmothers, I want to read books that they might have read, see words and learn stories that might have helped shape them as my childhood reading shaped me.. But figuring out what those books are could be difficult.

Although I've sought out some 'early' books for children, such as E. Nesbit and Lucy Maude Montgomery, I'm not at all sure I've covered anything either of my grandmothers would have read. My godmother, the youngest daughter of my English grandmother, sent me my first copies of Little Women, Five Little Peppers, and Heidi, though, so maybe I have, without realizing it, joined a century-long chain of women related by both blood and books. But how would I know?

What books did they learn first to read? To what books did they turn for escape? What information do I have as a starting point?

One grandmother died when I was a child, not quite before I learned to read but long before I began to wonder what other people were reading. She was born in 1892 in England; in middle age, after World War 2, she immigrated to Canada, living mainly in small towns around the Prairies and eventually dying in northern Alberta. When I was around ten years old, she came to visit for several weeks; I felt I knew her after that but she died not many months later. It was impractical to take me along to her funeral, half a country away. Any books among her deathbed possessions were dispersed.

My other grandmother, born in 1904, lived well into my adulthood but I hardly knew her. Most of her life was spent in the same farmhouse, only a few miles from the land on which her father settled a farm. As a farm wife looking after a large family, garden and livestock, she likely had little time for reading. During our rare visits I never saw her with a book in her hands. The only ones I ever found in her house were mainstream novels from the 1950's, left behind from my mother's adolescence. Not that reading Pearl S. Buck wasn't a gateway to a wider world, but it did not leave any connections to that grandmother.

My grandmothers' childhood reading was unlikely to have covered all the same books, or maybe any at all, due to geography and patterns of human settlement.

My English grandmother attended a school in Hammersmith, which by then was functionally part of the city of London, England. Her immediate environs had been continuously settled for hundreds of years and contained any number of well-staffed schools for both boys and girls, many purpose-built of stone and brick construction, as well as lending libraries, bookstores, and a substantially literate population.

My Scottish-Canadian grandmother went to a new-built one-room schoolhouse, isolated on the prairies near Melfort, Saskatchewan. Melfort at the time had a population of around five hundred people, including a fair number of older settlers whose literacy was limited to the signing of their name. The school would have had maybe twenty students. Her first teacher was a Mr. John Houston. Although I cannot say with any certainty that he never expanded his pupils' reading opportunities beyond the provided textbooks, it is unlikely he was well versed in the current state of literature for girls.

 This question needs more exploration. When I have some likely titles in hand, or possibly just some concrete information from the surviving children of those deceased grandmothers, I'll post on this subject again.