The appeal of the procedural is built upon a simple human desire: we love to solve problems, and we love to watch others solve them. Even better when solving a problem feels like revealing a hidden connection beneath the skin of the world.
In a class I teach on the procedural genre, we start with Poe and Doyle and Collins and Sayers and work our way to Mosley and French. We watch the Spielberg-directed pilot episode of Columbo, which is (apologies for the fifty-year-old spoiler) about a murderous mystery novelist. We watch the crass pilot of Law & Order: SVU, studded with homophobia and transphobia, and then we read Carmen Maria Machado’s hallucinatory novella “Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law & Order: SVU.” We talk about the girls with bells for eyes who haunt Machado’s Benson and the doppelgänger detectives Abler and Henson, whose lack of trauma renders them inhuman. We discuss the way viewers who have survived sexual violence, or those who fear it, speak of finding comfort in the show’s promise of responsive law enforcement while recognizing it as brazen copaganda. We read Auden’s “The Guilty Vicarage” and more recent criticism about crime fiction: the old theory of the genius detective as righter of wrongs and restorer of order, and newer interpretations that highlight the conservatism of the form. This is the darker side of the procedural’s temptation: how seductively it can align us as readers or viewers with the moral cleansing the detective promises.
My first crime novel, Killingly (coming out in June!), is less a whodunit than a howdunit and a whydunit. It’s a historical novel, set in 1897. In writing it, I found a new way into the joy of investigation that drives the procedural: not to solve a crime, but to puzzle out real facts that bring a mystery to life and fit a story into their constraints. Historical research requires its own procedures. Following a citation to the next source, paging through paper-clip-rusted documents in manila archival folders, constructing careful search queries that drop you into online subcultures you might never have stumbled across otherwise. You bless train lovers who’ve posted old rail timetables, collectors selling period-appropriate Boston police belt buckles on eBay. First you’re the detective, sifting through evidence; then you’re the storyteller, solving the narrative problems that evidence produces.
I learned about the missing girl when I was a grad student, working as a research intern at the Harry Ransom Center, a marvel-filled concrete building where UT Austin has turned oil and gas money into a world-class collection of rare books and manuscripts. (For the most delightfully nerdy procedural ever, which presents a funhouse mirror version of the drive to acquire literary treasures, see one of my favorite novels, A. S. Byatt’s Possession.) I didn’t find the girl’s story in a manuscript box; I was doing research for a patron with a genealogical query, skimming desperately through the New York Evening Journal on microfilm. LED TO DEATH BY HER CHILD OF FANCY, a headline blared, and I yanked the dial on the microfilm reader to a halt. A student named Bertha Mellish had disappeared from the campus of Mount Holyoke College in 1897, and three years later, her family’s doctor was giving long, speculative interviews about her fate to a Hearst paper. This was, frankly, too weird not to pursue.
I visited Mt. Holyoke’s Special Collections, which holds a small amount of material about Bertha’s disappearance, along with her classmates’ scrapbooks and letters. I’d attended Smith, another women’s college only a few miles away, but I learned quickly how different the schools had been in their early days. Most importantly, the girls at Mt. Holyoke didn’t bring maids with them, which meant the fictional companion I’d begun to imagine for Bertha had to be a student. And she had to have a secret, something that endangered her, as well.
Initially, I set myself an impossible task with this book. I created this central fictional character, and I wrote toward an ending that, if it happened, was not documented—but otherwise, I tried to stick to all the known historical facts. It was a kind of constraint. I wanted to set myself problems to solve, as if shifting between multiple perspectives with an active narrator guiding the action wasn’t complex enough. Eventually, I realized I needed to make small adjustments, to stop being so strict about the known timeline.
To show how research can feel like detective work, here’s an example of one of those changes. In real life, Bertha’s sister and the family doctor were called to Florida to identify a living girl who might be Bertha. That trip offered plenty of texture and detail, but its length and placement slowed the action too much. I chose to raise the stakes and tighten the pace by having Florence and the Doctor travel a shorter distance to identify a body, instead.
Like a detective, I drew a radius around Killingly, the resonantly-named town in Connecticut where Bertha grew up. I needed a train line that ran near water, between two points in New England, and a small town along that train line. Poring over those wonderful old train schedules and Google Maps, I chose Auburn, Massachusetts—perhaps partly because my mom lived in a different Auburn for a time as a kid. To figure out who might escort my characters to see a body, I needed to determine what sort of policing the town had at the time. Skimming through A Historical Sketch of Auburn, Massachusetts, from the Earliest Period to the Present Day with Brief Accounts of Early Settlers and Prominent Citizens, the name “Mellish” startled me awake.
Bertha’s father John and his siblings had grown up in a nearby Massachusetts town; I’d forgotten. But I hadn’t known that George Mellish, Bertha’s wealthy uncle, lived in Auburn with his wife for years before moving to New York City. In 1897, the empty house he still owned at the center of town was serving as the town library while a new city hall was constructed. The family connection would make the local authorities solicitous; it would explain why the police of a tiny town across state lines would immediately think of Bertha Mellish when they found a girl floating in a local pond.
But I still had to figure out where the good citizens of Auburn would store an unidentified body. I’d learned that the town had a constable or sheriff, likely no dedicated police building, and certainly no police morgue. Here we enter the land of disturbing search terms: things like “nineteenth century America burial practices,” “1890s morgue police,” and “storage for dead bodies 1890s.”
That’s how I discovered the suitably grisly concept of the holding tomb.
Auburn’s cemetery had one, as did any place, I imagine, where winter would freeze the ground too cold for digging. The dead had to rest somewhere before they could be interred. In pictures online, the holding tomb looks dignified and silent, like a little mausoleum. Heavy stone. You wouldn’t guess it was just a waystation. I think of this novel as New England Gothic, and through historical research, I found exactly the right details to flavor this scene—details I could never have imagined.
I put Bertha’s sister and the doctor at its dark doors. I walk them inside to see the body. And afterward they too have to rest somewhere, before catching the train back to Killingly. So for a few hours they sit by a fire in Bertha’s uncle’s empty Auburn house, and they talk about a secret that drives the book—a conversation I’d once drafted to take place on a train back from Florida. It’s much better this way. I solved the narrative problem, and I felt the radiant satisfaction I experience as a reader of procedurals, putting the pieces together alongside the detective.
I will almost certainly write a more traditional procedural in the future; I can’t help but love the form. On the classic D&D alignment chart, I’m resolutely lawful good, an orientation that rubs awkwardly against my distress at the profound injustices of our legal system. No matter how much skepticism I’ve learned about the institutions of policing and prosecution, I’m still disposed to find stories of investigation comforting.
In a time when the suggestion to “do your own research” has been poisoned by bad-faith misinformation and conspiratorial violence, when any cop show can feel slick with denial about the realities of policing in the US, historical research can offer a crime writer their own experience of investigation. Historical research is freighted with its own profound ethical questions, of course; it’s the opposite of escapism to learn the depths of atrocity that have shaped our cultures, or to trace the heartbreaking surges of resistance to atrocity. But by staying grounded in the real, writers can preserve nuance and build compelling plots. We can engage the past to examine the present.
***
