A River Runs Through It

One of the most famous stories of this sort is, of course, Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile, written in 1937, and featuring the inestimable Poirot — such a famous character that despite being a piece of fiction, he received an obituary in The New York Times on his “death” in 1975. The death — or actually series of murders — that happen during a river cruise upon the Nile, and are eventually solved by Poirot are interesting in many ways, as it involves the social and economic connections between the various characters, the geography of the cruise ship, and the fantastic beauty of a Nile river cruise and excursions on land. The river is a character in itself, adding mystery and beauty to the story, as well as cordoning off the scene of the crime. It acts as the barrier limiting the cast of actors, and the tools that could be used to commit the crimes. Like many other Poirot mysteries located in isolated locations in the English countryside, or on the Orient Express, a sense of isolation is created, adding a sense of claustrophobia from being in close quarters with a ruthless murderer but also trapping the murderer in close confines with the brilliant detective that will solve the case.

The river as a source of crime, or discovery of crime, is vividly present in Lustrum, the 2009 book by Robert Harris, second in his trilogy about the life of the Roman statesman, Cicero. The book begins with the discovery of a corpse fished out from the Tiber River, showing all the signs of a ritual murder. It is 63 BC, Cicero is at the height of his fame, but the Republic of Rome is tottering upon the pedestal of its own success. Julius Caesar is hungrily, ambitiously gathering power while the Senate is a place where aristocrats fight to maintain their dominance while the lower classes look to other people like Cicero, who would champion their cause. This is not a traditional detective story, but more of a political thriller, and the river, the murder, and the mysteries that are unravelled as the story spins out, show how chaos lives in the heat of a city which various political players had carved out as their spheres of influence, and how that chaos can bring everything crashing down.

Sherlock Holmes seems to be the exception. We associate him with 22B Baker Street, with London and all its bustling and bursting urbanity. But in the two new Sherlock Holmes movies, the rivers assert themselves. Whether it is the action at the banks of the Thames, the surreptitious plot and hidden motives, they are all revealed by sleuthing along the river. It is the site of secrets, of oddbods — giants and pygmies — and industry. Only the river provides escape, the clues, or safety (for Dr Watson’s wife) and in the end, closure, as Holmes and Moriarty struggle and fling themselves to their apparent deaths from a high crag into the roaring depths of a river many hundreds of feet below.

In the American series, The Killing, adapted from the Danish television series Forbrydelsen, water is ever present. Set in the city of Seattle, in the American state of Washington, the cinematography makes excellent use of the lakes, the rivers and the approach to the ocean. The victim in the first series is discovered in the boot of a car driven into a lake and the political battle for the seat of mayor involves key financial backers interested in a waterfront property. As the two primary characters — Sarah Linden and Stephen Holder — investigate the mystery there is shot after shot of the land barely above the water. Throughout the series, the screenplay and the cinematography compete to give the viewer a feeling that everything is just a little under water. There are secrets there, but nobody really knows what they are. The series moves slowly to raise the dead, and it is a bit like the reverse of Atlantis sinking into the sea. Here a city rises from the murky depths, slowly revealing itself, and nothing is quite the same afterwards.

One of my favourite uses of rivers and waterways in fiction has been in Mike Carey’s Felix Castor series. Set in an alternate reality London, this is a place where the ghosts (and the werepeople, succubi and all the rest) started coming back from the graves since the year 2000. The cause is never really explained, but the changed reality creates a great demand for people like Castor, who have a talent for exorcism. The first book in this pentalogy is titled, The Devil You Know, and is fantastic mix of genres: fantasy, noir and detective fiction, with Castor as a sleep-deprived bloody-minded exorcist turned detective trying to figure out the haunting of a building for his rent money. He soon finds that he is trying to figure out the details of a most unlikely crime: the murder of a ghost.

Carey revels in his mastery of obscure details, and in bringing “realism” to the weird fiction that he is writing. In the case of ghosts, demons and weird, one attribute that he brings to the fore is the mythical reluctance of dead to cross water. This changes the geography of the London he inhabits, ferries have become zones of safety — havens from the risen dead — and waterworks criss-cross the city like arteries in a corpse to create a map that Castor works over and has to decipher in various ways throughout the books in the series.

Considering how much water plays a role in our lives it is interesting that it is only a few detective fictions that engage with it in depth — so to speak. Maybe it is because the physicality of evidence is one of the key issues when it comes to detective fiction, and water is the obscurer, the destroyer of evidence. It is only in the works of people like Carey where the water is the evidence, at times. Nevertheless as our forensic techniques improve, and as rising sea levels inevitably increase the role of water in our society — and in crime — we will find new authors looking at the river as a criminal, as the scene of the crime, as the repository of clues, and maybe as a detective in its own right.