It’s the detectives, the private investigators and the lawyers who are usually front-and-center in crime fiction, but there are scores of professionals working in the criminal justice system to whom most of us give little thought. There are archivists who manage police records, people who clean police stations, who service their cars, and IT specialists who maintain computer systems. We all know what it’s like to feel unappreciated and undervalued at work. In some, this feeling makes us vulnerable to crossing moral and ethical lines. What knowledge and sensitive information might people in these auxiliary positions have access to? If they did act out, what could they get away with doing before anyone noticed? Line of Duty, the contemporary British TV series, is one of many novels, TV shows and films about corruption that suggest the ideal hiding place for a career criminal is in plain sight, working from within the police service.
Years ago, when I read a newspaper article by an interpreter, I learned that these language professionals are integral to the functioning of the criminal justice system in any multicultural city. Not only had I never given thought to interpreters before, I realised that most people hadn’t, even those who work in the system. I read surveys and academic research papers where interpreters reported feeling invisible. Revelle, the protagonist of my novel, The Interpreter, didn’t become a police and court interpreter in order to commit crimes. Years of feeling unseen and frustrated at how often the criminal doesn’t get caught turns her into a kind of linguistic vigilante, and she starts to deliberately mistranslate witness statements and misinterpret police interviews in order to help convict those she believes are guilty.
Interpreting is a ‘background’ role within policing, but I was able to bring Revelle to the foreground in what I believe is the first crime fiction novel where a language interpreter is the protagonist. It’s a similar approach to the one Jeff Lindsay uses in his brilliant novel Darkly Dreaming Dexter. Dexter, who probably needs little introduction, is a blood splatter analyst with the Miami police, a scientist who occasionally gets to visit a crime scene but is usually quietly working away in the police lab. It’s Dexter’s extracurricular activity—killing bad guys—which drives the novel, and of course he takes advantage of his role within the police system to aid his crimes. In contrast to my Revelle, Dexter wasn’t radicalized on the job, though–we learn by the book’s conclusion that precisely this kind of background role within the police system has always been his destiny.
In Nell Pattison’s The Silent House a shocking murder takes place in the Hunter household, a deaf family, making police reliant on British Sign Language interpreter Paige Northwood to conduct their investigation. Northwood’s links to the family, and the wider deaf community, make the situation extra complicated in this clever spin on the procedural thriller where the detectives are forced to step back.
Before becoming an author, Hannah Morrissey was a real-life police typist, like the protagonist in her refreshing and atmospheric novel, Hello, Transcriber. Hazel Greenlee works night shifts as a transcriber at the local Black Harbor Police Department, typing up police notes and recorded conversations. Isolated in her personal and professional life, Hazel is very much toiling away in the background until she starts to feel too watched, and becomes entangled with both a notorious drug dealer and the lead investigator on his tail.
Like Morrissey, author Sheila Lowe is a graphologist who brings her unique professional experience to her books. In Poison Pen, the death of a Hollywood publicist is ruled a suicide, but the victim’s partner is convinced it was murder. In most crime fiction novels, this is the point at which a private investigator would be hired to look around, but in Lowe’s book, it’s forensic handwriting expert Claudia Rose who gets the job, and she starts by analysing the scrawl of the apparent suicide note.
Though I haven’t yet read The Lies You Wrote, the forthcoming book by Brianna Labuskes, I’m very eager to do so. Labuskes’ novel features FBI forensic linguist, Raisa Susanto, who is called to investigate copycat killings on the anniversary of some heinous crimes. FBI profilers and forensic psychologists get plenty of attention in crime fiction, so I’m looking forward to this rare example of an FBI linguist stepping up to take the lead.
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