Two for the Price of One

Kim Hays' Sons and Brothers—the second book in her Polizei Bern series—launched earlier this year. Today she's on the site sharing her favorite fictional crime-solving partners and how they inspired the characters in her own novels.

Plenty of well-known mystery novels feature two investigators. Lord Peter Wimsey needs his brother-in-law, Chief Inspector Charles Parker, to supply him with facts known only to the police; Spenser needs Hawke, as Myron Bolitar needs Win, to handle the worst of the violence that crops up in the course of their crime-solving. It’s clear in these cases—and many others like them—that one character is the protagonist, while the other is only a sidekick.

That distinction is less obvious when it comes to police pairs like Reginald Hill’s Dalziel and Pascoe, Ruth Rendell’s Wexford and Burden, or Colin Dexter’s Morse and Lewis. In these examples, the first man is the second one’s boss, an Inspector to his Sergeant, at least at the start of each series. But as readers follow these pairs through book after book, the subordinate develops into a more equal partner.

In my Polizei Bern series, I, too, have a junior and senior police officer working together. Giuliana Linder is a homicide detective in her mid-forties, while the man who assists her with many of her cases, Renzo Donatelli, is a general investigator in his thirties who is as likely to look into car thefts or drug dealing as murder. Even though Renzo is assigned to help Giuliana, I try to give both of them equal attention as characters.

There are lots of advantages to me as a writer in having two people solve crimes together. For starters, two can get more work done than one, which improves the pace of the story. I alternate points of view between my two cops chapter by chapter, with Renzo handling one aspect of the case while Giuliana deals with another. When they update each other on what they’ve accomplished during a morning’s work, I let them summarize events and share reflections, which gives the reader useful information through dialogue instead of a data dump. The two of them can disagree about managing a difficult situation or silently speculate about why their colleague is having problems with the investigation. Their private lives can be revealed when they eat lunch together or grab a coffee—as much by what they decide not to tell each other as by what they do mention. 

The best thing about having two detectives is that it gives me two people to develop into intelligent, appealing, and interesting characters, a man and a woman with complementary skills who are compatible and yet quite different. Giuliana was a defense lawyer for several years before she joined the police, which gives her a special perspective on her cases; she’s also happily married to a freelance journalist who takes primary responsibility for their children and the household. While Giuliana’s children are eleven and sixteen, Renzo’s are preschoolers. His wife works part-time but carries the burden of their home and kids alone, and she resents her husband’s long hours on the job. 

Renzo is a first-generation Italian immigrant who was born in Bern and grew up there but still speaks Italian with his mother; he is more emotional than Giuliana and better at making fun of himself. At times, he also makes fun of the Swiss from his Italian perspective, even though he’s a dual citizen. In this way, Renzo provides me with a good way of making occasional generalizations about Swiss attitudes and behavior.

One of the authors who inspired me to alternate points of view between my two investigators is S. J. Rozan. Her protagonists, Lydia Chin and Bill Smith, are private investigators. Rozan begins her series by alternating points of view between Chin and Smith, not chapter by chapter as I do but book by book: in one book, Chin is the main detective; in the next, it’s Smith. Although both detectives always appear in each story, Rozan’s focus moves back and forth between them from novel to novel. 

Over the course of Rozan’s series, Chin and Smith become romantically involved. This isn’t uncommon for detective pairs: Crombie’s Duncan Kincaid and Gemma James of Scotland Yard eventually marry, as do King’s Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes, Spencer-Fleming’s Episcopalian minister Claire Fergusson and police chief Russ Van Alstyne, and Maron’s Judge Deborah Knot and Sheriff’s Deputy Dwight Bryant. These are only a few of many famous examples of crime-solving couples, going back to Agatha Christie’s Tommy and Tuppence in their first 1922 appearance. 

I, too, couldn’t resist giving my police pair the complication of being attracted to each other, despite their marriages. Such things happen in real life to people who work closely together, and for me—as Giuliana and Renzo’s creator—the twist of a possible love affair is an excellent way to explore their feelings about more than just their criminal cases. It also gives me an intriguing thread that connects one book to the next.

There will always be loners in the fictional world of crime—like Jack Reacher. But to be realistic, novels about the police demand crime-solving partners, and I believe readers appreciate the diversity that two detectives provide. As a writer, I certainly do!

 


About Sons and Brothers by Kim Hays:

Walking his dog along Bern’s Aare river on an icy November night, a surgeon in his seventies is hit in the face and thrown into the river to drown. When his bruised corpse is found, his watch is missing. A mugging gone wrong? The more Swiss police detective Giuliana Linder and her assistant Renzo Donatelli learn about Johann Karl Gurtner, the more convinced they are that his death was not random.

Talking to Gurtner’s family raises as many questions as it answers, but one thing becomes clear: the surgeon’s relationship with his middle son, Markus, was grim. Tracking others who might have had reason to hate Gurtner, Giuliana and Renzo find themselves once again dealing with their attraction to one another and their ambivalence about having an affair.

Behind their investigation, another story has been unfolding. During the year leading up to Gurtner’s death, his son Markus became friends with a former classmate of his father’s from the village where the two men grew up. Unlike the privileged young Gurtner, Jakob Amsler was forcibly removed from his mother at nine and contracted to live and work on a village farm. From Jakob, Markus learns that his father’s early life contains some very odd secrets–secrets that Giuliana and Renzo are now trying to uncover.

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