She’s in bed, in a hotel room somewhere. From the look of it, Margaret guessed that the hotel was in Europe. The young mother is smiling, perhaps laughing, and both her boys are in bed with her—only they’re under the covers. All you can see of the boys is their bare feet. She thinks I can identify them by their feet ! Margaret thought despairingly. Yet she could not stop looking at the photograph.
Or at the one of William as a little boy, playing doctor to Henry’s knee. Or the one where the boys, at the ages of about five and seven, are both dismantling lobsters—William with a certain technical ease and zeal, while Henry is finding the task both gruesome and beyond his abilities. (To their mother, this also demonstrated the boys’ different personalities.)
But the best photograph of the boys, taken near the time of their disappearance, was after a hockey game—presumably at the boys’ school. William is taller than his mother—he’s holding a hockey puck in his teeth—and Henry is still shorter than his mom. Both boys are wearing their hockey uniforms, but they have traded their skates for high-top basketball shoes.
It had been a popular photograph among Margaret’s colleagues in Missing Persons—when the case was still active—not only because the mother was pretty but because both boys, in their hockey uniforms, looked so Canadian. Yet to Margaret there was something identifiably American about these missing boys, a kind of cocksure combination of mischief and unstoppable optimism—as if each of them thought that his opinion would always be unchallengeable, his car never in the wrong lane.
But it was only when she couldn’t sleep, or when she’d looked too often and too long at these photographs, that Sergeant McDermid ever regretted leaving Homicide for Missing Persons. When she’d been looking for the murderer of the youngwaitress in the flying-hamburger T-shirt, Margaret had slept very well. Yet they’d never found that murderer, or the missing American boys.
When Margaret would run into Michael Cahill, who was still in Homicide, it was natural for her to ask him, as a colleague, about what he was working on—as he asked her. When they had cases that weren’t going anywhere—cases that had “unsolved” written all over them, from the start—they would express their frustration in the same way: “I’m working on one of those followed-home-from-the-Flying-Food-Circus kinds of cases.”
Missing Persons
Ruth could have stopped reading right there, at the end of Chapter One. There was no question in her mind that Alice Somerset was Marion Cole. The photographs that the Canadian writer had described could not be coincidental—not to mention the effect of the photographs on the haunted detective in Missing Persons.
That her mother was still preoccupied with the photos of her missing boys came as no surprise to Ruth, nor did the fact that Marion must have obsessed on the subject of what Thomas and Timothy would have looked like as grown men—and what their lives would have been like, had they lived. The surprise to Ruth, after the initial shock of establishing her mother’s existence, was that her mother had been able to write indirectly about what most haunted her. Simply that her mother was a writer —if not a good one—was the greatest shock to Ruth of all.
Ruth had to read on. There would be more photographs described, of course, and Ruth could remember each one. The novel was true to the genre of crime fiction only in that it eventually pursued a single case of Missing Persons to its solution: two little girls, sisters, are safely recovered from their abductor, who turns out to be neither a sex fiend nor a child molester (as one first fears) but a barely less terrible estranged father and divorced husband.
As for the waitress found in the flying-hamburger T-shirt, she remains a metaphor for the unsolved or unsolvable crime—as do the missing American boys, whose images (both real and imagined) are still haunting Detective Sergeant McDermid at the end of the novel. In this sense, Followed Home from the Flying Food Circus succeeds beyond the genre of crime fiction; it establishes Missing Persons as a psychological condition. Missing Persons becomes the permanent state of mind of the melancholic main character.
Even before she finished reading her mother’s first novel, Ruth desperately wanted to talk to Eddie O’Hare—for she assumed (correctly) that Eddie knew something about Marion’s career as a writer. Surely Alice Somerset had written more than this one book. Followed Home from the Flying Food Circus had been published in 1984; it was not a long novel. By 1990, Ruth guessed, her mother might have written and published a couple more.
Ruth would soon learn from Eddie that there were two more, each of them entailing additional casework in the field of Missing Persons. Titles were not her mother’s strength. Missing Persons McDermid had a certain alliterative charm, but the alliteration seemed strained in McDermid Reaches a Milestone .
The principal story in Missing Persons McDermid details Sergeant McDermid’s efforts to find a runaway wife and mother. In this case, a woman from the States abandons her husband and child; the husband, who is looking for her, is convinced that his wife has run away to Canada. In the course of setting out to find the missing wife and mother, Margaret uncovers some unseemly incidents involving the husband’s myriad infidelities. Worse, the detective realizes that the distraught mother’s love for a previous child (who was killed in a plane crash) has made her run away from the fearful responsibility of loving a new child—that is, the child she has abandoned. When Sergeant McDermid finds the woman, who was formerly a waitress at the Flying Food Circus, the policewoman is so sympathetic toward her that she allows her to slip away. The bad husband never finds her.
“We have reason to suspect that she’s in Vancouver,” Margaret tells the husband, knowing full well that the runaway woman is in Toronto. (In this novel, the photographs of those missing American boys retain their place of prominence in the detective’s monastic bedroom.)
In McDermid Reaches a Milestone, Margaret—who has been “almost sixty, although she could still lie about her age,” over the course of two novels— finally becomes a sexagenarian. Ruth would instantly understand why Eddie O’Hare was particularly impressed by the third of Alice Somerset’s novels: the story concerns the return of a former lover of the sixty-year-old detective.
When Margaret McDermid had been in her forties, she’d been deeply committed to volunteer counseling of young American men coming to Canada to escape the Vietnam War. One of the young men falls in love with her—a boy not yet in his twenties with a woman already in her forties! The affair, described in frankly erotic terms, is quickly over.
Then, as Margaret turns sixty, her “young” lover comes to her— again in need of her help. This time, it is because his wife and child are missing—presumed kidnapped. He’s now a man in his thirties, and Sergeant McDermid is distracted by wondering if he still finds her attractive. (“But how could he? Margaret wondered—an old hag like me.”)
“ I would still find her attractive!” Eddie would tell Ruth.
“Tell her —not me, Eddie,” Ruth would say.
In the end, the former young man is happily reunited with his wife and child, and Margaret consoles herself by once more imagining the lives of those missing American boys whose pictures stare back at her in her lonely bedroom.
Ruth would relish a jacket blurb on McDermid Reaches a Milestone : “the best living crime writer!” (This from the president of the British Crime Writers Association, although it was not a widely held opinion.) And Missing Persons McDermid was awarded the so-called Arthur for Best Novel. (The Crime Writers of Canada named the award after Arthur Ellis, which was the name adopted by Arthur English, the Canadian hangman from 1913 until 1935; his uncle John Ellis was the hangman in England at that same period of time. Subsequent Canadian hangmen took the name “Arthur Ellis” as their nom de travail.)
However, it was not uncommon that success in Canada—and an even more measurable success in her French and German translations—did not mean that Alice Somerset was similarly well known or even well published in the United States; indeed, she had barely been published in the States. A U.S. distributor for her Canadian publisher had tried unsuccessfully to promote McDermid Reaches a Milestone in a modest way. (The third of the three novels was the only one of sufficient interest to the Americans for them to publish it at all.)
Eddie O’Hare was envious of Alice Somerset’s foreign sales, but he was no less proud of Marion for her efforts to convert her personal tragedy and unhappiness to fiction. “Good for your mother,” Eddie would tell Ruth. “She’s taken everything that hurt her and turned it into a detective series!”
But Eddie was unsure if he was the model for the young lover who re-enters Margaret McDermid’s life when she’s sixty, or if Marion had taken another young American as her lover during the Vietnam War.
“Don’t be silly, Eddie,” Ruth would tell him. “She’s writing about you, only you.”
About Marion, Eddie and Ruth would agree on the most important thing: they would let Ruth’s mother remain a missing person for as long as she wanted to be. “She knows where to find us, Eddie,” Ruth would tell her newfound friend, but Eddie bore the unlikelihood of Mario
n ever wanting to see him again like a permanent sorrow.
Arriving at JFK, Ruth expected to find Allan waiting for her when she passed through customs; that she found Allan waiting with Hannah was a surprise. To Ruth’s knowledge, they had never met before; the sight of them together caused Ruth the most acute distress. She knew she should have slept with Allan before she left for Europe—now he’d slept with Hannah instead! But how could that be? They didn’t even know each other; yet there they were, looking like a couple.
In Ruth’s view, they looked “like a couple” because they seemed to possess some terrible secret between them—they appeared stricken with remorse when they saw her. Only a novelist could ever have imagined such nonsense. (In part, it was because of her perverse ability to imagine anything that in this instance Ruth failed to imagine the obvious.)