Who's the Victim?

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: It’s something Dame Sue Grafton talked about all the time—how the
most neglected character in mystery novels is—the victim.

And the wonderful Dick Belsky, a reporter and editor of infinite renown who has now taken on fiction as a second brilliantly successful career—has been thinking the same thing.


MURDER IS NOT ALWAYS EQUAL--
IN THE MEDIA - OR MYSTERY FICTION
By R.G. Belsky

“Everybody matters, or nobody matters.”

That’s the famous credo of Harry Bosch, Michael Connelly’s wonderful and long-running LAPD homicide detective - and it really is a noble and laudable concept.

Sadly though, it’s not always true.

Not in real life police murder investigations.

Not in the media, where I worked for many years covering murders at the New York Post, New York Daily News and NBC News.

And not even in mystery fiction, where I write a series these days about a TV journalist named Clare Carlson.

My new book BELOW THE FOLD takes a hard look at the issue of how the media covers different murders in different ways. Sure, every human life is important. But the ones we hear about on the news are often decided by a set of rules sometimes cynically referred to as the White Blonde Female Syndrome.

Sex sells. Sex, money and power. That translates into big ratings numbers, which translates into more advertising dollars. Those are the only kinds of murders worth covering, Clare - a TV news director in New York City - explains at the beginning of the book.

But sometimes a journalist’s human instincts take over and he or she ignore those rules to do what they believe is the right thing, the moral thing - instead of just going for the obvious sensationalistic news appeal.

That’s what happens in BELOW THE FOLD (a newspaper term for a story not considered big enough to make the front page headlines) when Clare begins investigating the murder of a homeless woman on the streets of New York City named Dora Gayle. Dora Gayle isn’t sexy, rich or powerful. She’s really just a “nobody” the people in the newsroom tell Clare, who question why she even cares about this seemingly un-newsworthy murder.

But Clare discovers that the homeless woman was once a beautiful, brilliant college student who dreamed of writing poetry and great literature.

She finds a haunting picture of the woman as a 22-year-old where she looks happy and full of life and still dreaming of the wonderful things she had to look forward to in the life ahead of her.

And Clare eventually finds herself identifying with Dora Gayle - not just as a news story, but as a person.

Oh, and Dora Gayle does turn out to be helluva story too.

I think this is a valuable concept for us to follow in writing mystery fiction, as well as in real life media and police coverage of murders.

Not too many mystery novels are about homeless people or people living in rundown housing projects or even ordinary people living ordinary lives which don’t seem that interesting on the face of it.

But - like Dora Gayle - everyone has a story, when you dig down deep enough to find out the facts about them.

And, to paraphrase Connelly, everyone can matter.

I learned this lesson a long time ago when I was a young journalist at the New York Post, where we had a veteran police reporter who would check out EVERY murder that moved on the police wire, no matter how unimportant it appeared.

I use a fictional version of this in my book, but I can still remember actually sitting there next to him while he would call up the cops and ask questions like: “Tell me about the body of that kid you found in the Harlem pool room - was he a MENSA candidate or what?” Or, “The woman you found dead in the alley behind the housing project - any chance she might be Julia Roberts or a member of the British Royal Family?”

I once asked him why he even bothered since these murders were never going to be anything worth covering in the newspaper.

“Hey, you never know,” he said.

In my book, I follow that advice as I have Clare Carlson check out the homeless woman’s murder, which turns out to be linked to long-buried secrets involving rich and powerful figures - and it surprisingly explodes into a sensational headline story for Clare and the TV station.

Of course, not every murder can be covered equally in the media.

Or in mystery fiction either.

But do we sometimes focus too much on the sensational, high-profile crimes - and ignore the lost lives around us that might be just as important?

It’s a question that every reporter has to struggle with in the fast-faced media world we live in today.

What do you think?

HANK: It’s so fascinating—which victims get press attention versus the ones who don’t. Do you notice that? What do you think about that? What do you think about why?
And do you realize--it may be that "below the fold" becomes a baffling anachronism? Do you still read the paper paper? I sure do!


R. G. Belsky is an author of crime fiction and a journalist in New York City. His newest mystery , BELOW THE FOLD, is being published in May 2019 by Oceanview.
It is the second in a series featuring Clare Carlson, the news director for a New York City TV station.
The first Clare Carlson book, YESTERDAY’S NEWS, came out in 2018.
Belsky previously wrote the Gil Malloy series - THE KENNEDY CONNECTION, SHOOTING FOR THE STARS AND BLONDE ICE - about a newspaper reporter at the New York Daily News.
Belsky himself is a former managing editor at the Daily News and writes about the media from an extensive background in newspapers, magazines and TV/digital news. At the Daily News, he also held the titles of metropolitan editor and deputy national editor. Before that, he was metropolitan editor of the New York Post and news editor at Star magazine.
Belsky was most recently the managing editor for news at NBCNews.com. His previous suspense novels include PLAYING DEAD and LOVERBOY. Belsky has been nominated as a finalist for the David Award at Deadly Ink and also for the Silver Falchion at Killer Nashville, He also was a Claymore Award winner at Killer Nashville.