When I started writing the eighth installment in my private eye series, on Aug. 27, 2019, not in my wildest dreams did I think more than five years would pass before publication, or that I’d have a global pandemic to blame for the delay.
Nor could I have envisioned that something called COVID-19 would become a central theme of that still untitled book.
To be fair, that early draft featured medical malfeasance in a hospital setting. But once the coronavirus arrived, and the pandemic hit and worsened, it was clear—to me, anyway—that I had a lot of rewriting to do.
“Every writer who’s writing about contemporary times has to make that decision: Are they going to mention COVID?” Ian Rankin said in an interview last year with Barbara Peters of the Poisoned Pen Bookstore about his 2022 John Rebus novel, A Heart Full of Headstones (which includes a pandemic timeframe). “Will the book be set in the time of COVID? Will we just ignore COVID?” My decision was easy: the pandemic had to be part of my book.
But not every writer shared that sentiment about their work. On message boards and in conversations, more than a few fellow authors made it clear they had no intention of mentioning the virus or the pandemic in their writing, as they desired nothing more than to put such a horrible time behind them as soon as possible. (A prominent exception was Michael Connelly, whose November 2020 Mickey Haller novel, The Law of Innocence, was one of the earliest books published that acknowledged the pandemic—the novel ends with Haller preparing to shelter with his ex-wife and their daughter.)
Where the “Never mention COVID” crowd was concerned, I appreciated their position but couldn’t share it. For me, creating a story or novel taking place in or around that time without mentioning the pandemic was equivalent to setting a tale in 1942 without bringing up World War II or writing anything in the year or two after 9/11 without referring to the terrorist attacks.
My first stab at addressing the coronavirus in fiction was “Finders Keepers,” a short story set in the earliest months of the pandemic featuring my protagonist Andy Hayes, a former Ohio State and Cleveland Browns quarterback turned private eye. In that tale, published in the sadly defunct Tomorrow and Tomorrow literary magazine, Hayes helps a hospital administrator who foolishly attempted to settle a loan shark’s debt by selling ventilators to the highest bidder.
As I explored pandemic themes in that story, I slowly returned to my novel-in-progress and rewrote vast swaths to put a crime related to COVID-19 front and center. In Sick To Death (Sept. 10, Swallow Press), set a few months after the worst of the last surge, Hayes is asked to investigate an unsolved hit-skip accident that killed an ICU nurse who worked with patients sick from the coronavirus. As Hayes asks questions, he slowly determines he might be looking at more than a mishap.
I fully expect the pandemic to inform more and more works of fiction, mysteries and otherwise, as time passes. Until then, here are seven other crime novels that incorporate COVID-19 within their pages.
The Paleontologist, by Luke Dumas
Dr. Simon Nealy, a curator of paleontology, returns home to Pennsylvania and takes a position at the Hawthorne Museum of Natural History, a move fueled by a breakup and the death of his caretaker aunt, Colleen, from COVID. It’s a fraught decision; As a boy, Nealy’s six-year-old sister, Morgan, was abducted from the museum when she was supposed to be in his care, and the ensuing guilt Nealy experiences is crushing. This supernatural thriller is set against the backdrop of the pandemic, with the museum closed when Nealy takes his new job.
“Not everyone wants to read about COVID but it was really exciting for me as a way to build the setting,” Dumas told novelist Julia Bartz in an interview. That setting wouldn’t have been as easy without the pandemic, he added.
“The idea that this museum is closed, and because it’s having financial challenges there’s no maintenance going on, it’s sort of falling apart, it just helped create this sort of gothic atmosphere and a setting in which Simon would find himself alone a lot in a dark museum working late nights.”
Go Find Daddy, by Steve Goble
In Goble’s third novel featuring Ed Runyon, a rural Ohio sheriff’s deputy turned private eye, a police officer is found murdered and there seems little doubt who did it. Investigators immediately zero in on Donny Blackmon, a cop-hater on whose property the officer’s body was found. But Donny’s daughter believes him innocent and hires Runyon to find Donny before the police do. Goble set the Shamus Award-nominated novel toward the end of the pandemic, based on his desire to position his books as close to “today” as possible. COVID skepticism ran strong in rural Ohio, and Goble illustrates this at several points, as when a man Runyon encounters with a terrible cough insists he doesn’t have the virus. “It ain’t COVID,” the man declares. “That’s all bullshit.”
“PI novels, to me, often have a strong sense of time and place,” Goble told me in an email. “So I aim for that in my own books.”
What Never Happened, by Rachel Howzell Hall
Obituary writer Colette “Coco” Weber relocates to her home on Catalina Island off the coast of California in March 2020. As the island slowly shuts down, what begins as Weber’s attempt to reset her life grows dark when Weber suspects that deaths on the island may be related to a brutal tragedy in her past. Incorporating COVID was on Hall’s mind even before she began writing the first page of the novel, published in 2023, Hall told Cara Wood of Dead Darlings.
“It was one of the first times in modern history that we had to stay away from each other, for-real-for real, or risk catching the virus and possibly dying,” Hall said. “COVID was the apex experience of isolation, even in a city as big as Los Angeles. And then, add the masks—you couldn’t see people, their expressions. You couldn’t determine if that person is a bandit or simply a guy wearing a mask because of the mandate.”
56 Days, by Catherine Ryan Howard
A couple, Clara and Oliver, have their meet-cute at a Dublin supermarket. They begin dating the same week that COVID-19 comes to Ireland. Facing ongoing separation because of the lockdown, Oliver suggests they move in together. Fifty-six days after meeting, a decomposing body is found in Oliver’s apartment and it’s up to detectives to figure out what happened. Howard wrote the book during the lockdown without telling her publisher what she was doing until she reached 20,000 words.
“And for years, I’ve had this idea for a book, about this couple that meet and you know, fall in love but it’s not what it seems,” she told The Tandem Collective. “And I knew what the truth was and I knew that this book would start with their meeting, like nothing to go in between and then lockdown literally landed in my lap and I thought ‘That’s it!’ and I started.”
Happiness Falls, by Angie Kim
In Virginia, the lives of a biracial Korean American family are changed forever when the father and his son don’t return from a walk at a park. Later, the son, Eugene—who has a rare genetic condition, Angelman syndrome, which prevents him from speaking—rushes home bloody and alone. Narrated by Eugene’s older sister, Mia, the novel follows the family’s efforts to understand what happened and the ensuing police investigation, all of which unfold beginning on June 23, 2020.
Kim started the novel during the pandemic and found it hard to get writing done. But the lockdown also produced a breakthrough, she told Jane Ciabattari of Literary Hub.
“Somehow, imagining a family dealing with a crisis during the same quarantine my family and I were experiencing gave me a way into the story and inspired specific scenes and situations,” Kim said, noting she had friends with autistic children having an especially hard time adjusting to the disruption.
“Once I was done,” Kim continued, “I realized how much elements like wearing masks, the racial tensions involving police interactions, and our society’s changing baselines and expectations not only added to the plot, but reinforced some of the themes I wanted to explore.”
Sing Her Down, Ivy Pochoda
Florida Baum and Diosmary Sandoval, two women in prison in Arizona, receive an unexpected reprieve in the form of compassionate release due to the pandemic. What follows is a cat-and-mouse chase from Arizona to the empty streets of Los Angeles with eerie descriptions of neighborhoods emptied by the pandemic that can’t help but conjure the end of the world. “This is the city people from the future will find when they come to excavate,” Pochoda writes of Florida encountering lifeless Koreatown.
Pochoda began writing the novel in November 2020 and though the pandemic wasn’t then part of the book, it naturally evolved into a plot point. “I didn’t feel initially compelled to write about the pandemic—the pandemic suited the story really well,” Pochoda told Patrick Milliken of The Poisoned Pen Bookstore in a 2023 interview.
Love and Murder in the Time of COVID, by Qiu Xiaolong
At the height of the pandemic in China, ex-chief Inspector Chen Cao is unexpectedly summoned by authorities to investigate a series of murders near a Shanghai hospital. As Chen’s probe unfolds, he makes a decision with huge consequences: he will translate the “Wuhan File,” a diary of life during the Wuhan coronavirus disaster smuggled to him by a friend that will expose the Chinese Communist Party’s complicity in the crisis.
Qiu has said that he initially resisted the idea of writing an Inspector Chen mystery about COVID out of a concern that he would be capitalizing on the tragedy. Eventually, seeing the devastation and suffering caused by China’s zero COVID policy, Qiu changed his mind. No Chinese writer could possibly write the book, so it was up to him. “This part of Chinese history cannot and should not be erased or brain-washed,” Qiu wrote.
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