Dave's Fiction Warehouse

Somewhere in the last few months, I came across a discussion of the use of supernatural elements in crime fiction. I can't recall any novel that uses them so overtly, and so well, as The Coroner's Lunch , by Colin Cotterill. In this story of an aging Lao doctor pressed into running the country's only morgue following the Communist takeover of 1975, the supernatural consists not just of the odd hunch and prescient dream, but is an integral part of the story itself. Dr. Siri Paiboun has little equipment and even less training in forensic science, so the aid he receives from the spirit world is fortuitous. Think how it might help the CSI: Miami crew if the ghosts of crime victims were available to offer tips during the autopsy. Fortunately, Cotterill has created a memorable and amusing character in whom such paranormal phenomena do not seem too convenient, and do not obviate the need for conventional sleuthing. When a dog begins behaving oddly, for example, or the mark of a ...

In the James Lee Burke novel "Jolie Blon's Bounce," he introduces a character named Legion Guidry, a man who appears by the end of the book to be, if not the Devil himself, then at least pretty high up in Lucifer's chain of command. Burke has flirted with the supernatural before, with the ghosts of "In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead" and the dead partner who occasionally shows up to offer advice to Billy Bob Holland in "Bitterroot" and "In the Moon of Red Ponies." I mention this because I love this sort of thing in a mystery -- just a hint of the paranormal, an element of mystery that might persist even after the main plot is resolved. Recently I read Ruth Rendell's "13 Steps Down" and it initially seemed that she was hinting at the actual ghost of a serial killer making his presence known to a young man with an unhealthy interest in such things. In the Karin Fossum book I just finished, "He Who Fears the Wolf...