Second Bite: A Crime Novel

After my first novel The Wastings was published I received this letter from ‘Inspector Morse’ author Colin Dexter:

456 Banbury Road, Oxford
Dear Don,

A very brief line to say how much (yes!) I enjoyed and admired The Wastings. So did my wife. So did my daughter.

A lovely idea and beautifully written work. You’ve made a splendid debut in crime fiction. More please!

Good luck with your opus secundum.

Colin Dexter’

I subsequently published my second work of fiction, my ‘opus secundum’, which, coincidentally, is titled Second Bite. It’s the kind of sex and violence stuff that you’d pick up at the airport and leave on the plane after a long flight. I’m not sure that I would have wanted my mother to read it! It is available as an e-book from Amazon.com for $US 9.99.

Based on a true crime that has never been solved, ‘Second Bite’ explores the warped sexual fantasies of the prime suspect and the extreme stresses on the murder team which nearly result in the death of leader DCI Paul Perry; the early use of DNA profiling; police entrapment; romance and a continuous search through a labyrinth of luck and dogged detection that takes us from England to Australia to New Zealand to arrive at a shocking and violent conclusion.

Here are the opening paragraphs:

Part One

It begins on Monday 11 November 1985

1.
He came at her suddenly from the bushes, moaning and blathering, eyes wild and staring, their irises isolated in whiteness like a terrified horse. He grabbed at her coat with a filthy, blood-stained hand, plucking at her sleeve with long, thin fingers. His clothing, a light, cream, woollen track suit mired in mud, clay, grass streaks and monstrous gobs of blood was in disarray, flecked with small leaves and grass and torn in small nicks as if it had been caught momentarily on barbed wire or thorns.

Shocked and apprehensive she sought to pull away, staggering backwards and almost losing her balance as her dog, a whimpering spaniel, circled, loosely winding its lead around her ankles.
The man tottered away, shuffling sideways across the gravel path; as he did so he pointed towards the light screen of bushes and he croaked, in a half demented voice, ‘In there, in there, I slipped, an accident, I didn’t mean… oh she’s so disgusting…’

Maureen Caswell, still stunned by this shattering turn of events on what, just moments before, had been a leisurely late afternoon stroll on Thames Glebe with Charlie, her spaniel, watched the man as he stumbled down the green bank towards the river where, crossing a low-tide beach of mud and shingle he immersed himself fully, to reappear with a howl of despair while spastically dousing his head with handfuls of river water and scraping at his clothing, face and hair to rid himself as quickly as possible of the awful mess that mottled his body.

The dog had freed Maureen and now sat beside her, whining softly, as she took stock, the automatic disciplines of analysis and preparation for action already working in her mind. Maureen was no ordinary middle-aged, city-dwelling, office-working woman; she was a nursing sister of many years experience in the big London hospitals, accustomed to making triage decisions in response to the butchery of accident and emergency. She’d seen it all: faces in shreds from drunken attacks with broken bottles at closing time; fractured bones of car collisions poking raggedly through skin; eyes gouged, ears ripped, knife wounds … no, it was not what she’d just seen that stopped Maureen Caswell in her tracks, it was the suddenness of an event completely out of context.

Now he had moved from the water and sat on the Thames bank, his head in his hands, swaying backwards and forwards like a lonely child and spasmodically shivering in the cool breeze of late autumn - she suspected it was more from trauma than from cold despite his sodden track suit which clung heavily to his humped shouders. She half moved towards him but stopped, reflecting.

‘She’s so disgusting…’ he’d raved.

She turned away and stepping off the path, gingerly pushed her way through the shrubbery to the grassy bank which lay away from the river and ran quite steeply for a few metres until it met a dense screen of thorn bushes and mature trees beyond which a natural darkness was already deepening as early evening advanced.
Something gleamed whitely at the base of the bushes. [End of extract]

If you would like to purchase a hard copy of Second Bite please contact me at donovan@ihug.co.nz

© DON DONOVAN
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Bang ‘em Up For Longer or Let ‘em Out?

Should crims stay banged-up longer for their transgressions? We, the voters, have repeatedly said that we want them shut away for longer but when I lean towards tougher punishments two things bother me. First: I have always shuddered at the very idea of imprisoning offenders who have not physically harmed anybody and are unlikely to. Why do we lock up embezzlers, fraudsters, bigamists, ‘white collar’ criminals, or robbers of intellectual property? If they aren’t the kind of people who serially kill, chop up neighbours’ faces or rape why on earth do we put them in prison? They’d serve much better sentences working off their crimes and paying back society by earning money, under supervision, most of which could go into the public coffers.

I wouldn’t mind betting that the non-threatening criminal fraternity could, by the sweat of their brows or the machinations of their brains, actually generate sufficient income to pay for the costly incarceration of their violent colleagues: there’s a thought for the Corrections Department.

Secondly, and much more importantly, I can’t escape the feeling that every time a lusty youth rapes an eighty-year old woman, or a bunch of teenagers invades a home and beats up its occupants to produce a net short term gain of a walkman and the contents of a piggy bank, Society - that’s you and me - have failed.

I can remember a time when violent crime was so amazingly unusual that if one occurred it took up the front page of the national newspapers for days on end. So what has changed in a lifetime? We’ve copped out, that’s what. The majority has failed to control the minority and we’re in such a sea of politically correct tiptoeing through individuals’ ‘rights’ that we now opt for the criminal rather than the victim.

Criminality starts in the family and grows in the schoolroom. From life’s outset, parents have got to be tough on their children when it comes to right and wrong, honesty and respect for neighbours. Before the little ones ever reach kindy or school they have to know that teachers are to be respected. Thereafter those teachers must be given the teeth, by parents’ consent and legal permission, to exert their authority. Tolerance of transgression at the nascence of discrimination (four or five years of age?) should be zero, and reinforcement of that regime should never be negative. Punishment should fit the crime so that the offender is left in no doubt of his/her place in a strict but compassionate society.

Above all work should be found for everybody of work age even if that means making able bodied people work on government schemes which they might not like. (You’re listening to a man who spent two reluctant years in the armed forces and only afterwards learned how valuable it was).

Work is important not only because it produces wages and, one hopes, job satisfaction but also because it is an absorption; people who do a hard day’s work find themselves so tired at the end of the day that they have neither the energy nor the inclination to do a warehouse or mug a fellow citizen.

Sure, there will always be the criminals who like to kill and maim for the fun of it. We’ll never get rid of them; they’re sick of mind. But, my way, they’ll be easier to find and one suspects that there are really so few of them that we could afford to lock ‘em up and, as they say, throw away the key.

© In text DON DONOVAN. ‘Prisoners Exercising (after Doré)’ Vincent van Gogh
donovan@ihug.co.nz
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