Through the frosted window
"Missing White Woman" mesmerizing modern twist on the whodunit

Before the introduction of forensics and psychological profiling in crime investigation and crime fiction, there was the “whodunit.” In fact, true crime reporting goes back in time to the 16th century in every country in the world, including the late Ming dynasty that prominently featured “The Book of Swindles” (1612) by one Zhang Yingyu. 

As literacy increased and cheap new printing methods became widespread, pamphlets, broadsides, chapbooks and gimcrack publications about murders and other sensational crimes became widespread. Ballads were also created, with verses posted on walls and lampposts usually glorifying perpetrators’ points of view in an attempt to understand the psychological motivations of crime. The business of lawlessness – from criminals to police and private eyes – has a long history of public interest.

Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes became literary fashion beginning with the 1891 edition of The Strand Magazine and set a high standard in creative crime investigation and reader numbers and loyalty. Agatha Christie came along in 1920 to advance the genre’s more human nature, and from there crime fiction grew and encompassed every socioeconomic sector and category of reader.

True crime led the charge for a hundred years. Truman Capote’s 1966 “In Cold Blood” is the second best-selling true-crime whudunit in history, behind Vincent Bugliosi’s “Helter Skelter,” published in 1977. Norman Mailer’s “The Executioner’s Song” (1979) was the first book in the crime genre to win a Pulitzer Prize.

We began to notice around this time French, Italian and Scandinavian novelists bending the true crime genre into their literary writing, featuring nefarious intention, societal influences and personal relationships into suspenseful puzzles. Offshore crime fiction writers didn’t so much pop your eyes as break your heart, and called it “noir” – a French word for black, characterized by cynicism, fatalism and moral ambiguity.

Notwithstanding my preference for European writers of literary crime fiction in the noir style, a nicely wrought whodunit is always addictive and robs one of sleep. And we have a good one, a peculiar one, for Murder Ink this month with the inflammatory title that surely puts pressure on the author and the publisher to offer up something that snuffs out the social innuendo. “Missing White Woman,” by veteran mystery writer Kellye Garrett and published by Mulholland Books, has the mesmerizing drive of Maurice Ravel’s “Boléro” – an accelerating, pounding intrigue that first appears monotonous before being narcotizing. 

Breanna Wright and Ty Franklin are a new and still unsettled thirty-something couple living in Baltimore. Breanna is an overqualified manager of a stationery store and troubled by her lack of ambition, both professionally and socially. She is also indelibly mortified by an arrest for running a stop sign accompanied by a jail sentence for a baggie of weed the cop planted in her back seat. Ty is an unreliable new boyfriend, a golden boy in an investment firm specializing in cryptocurrency, absent most of the time in Breanna’s bed but leaving a trail of fatuous text messages. 

Garrett has written a slow-burn novel that I soon gave up on as either being too slow for the hollowed-out circumstances she introduces, or a debut novel in a publisher’s mid-list category with modest expectations. But just as I was eyeing another upcoming release, I gave “Missing White Woman” another go to see if I could recover my 80-page investment. I began to see what I believe to be a kind of authorial modern art, something like impressionistic word-painting. Once it’s understood that the narrative was about the feelings and aspirations of an incomplete, mediocre and vague cast, I couldn’t put “Missing White Woman” down.

Here’s briefly what you’ll almost see. First off, you needn’t take as long as I did to realize that Breanna and Ty are Black. And the missing white woman is a comely blonde who we only know as being dead and a cause célèbre on all the required social media. Being black never really comes up except reflexively when Bree was dealing with the police over finding a dead blonde in an Airbnb at 110 Little St. in Jersey City, N.J., at 11 in the morning. 

Ty swirled Bree up for their first vacation together and a tour of Manhattan in-between him working part time at his firm’s Jersey City office. A dream come true for Breanna, save for the dead blonde in the living room of a very posh rental on their second day. And a missing boyfriend. Or is Ty really a boyfriend? And where was he that morning when Bree came down from the bedroom and saw a dead woman lying in a puddle of blood?

Nobody gets excited – the cops don’t seem to care as they go through their unenthusiastic routine. Ty can’t be found, and by some specious logic driven by TikTok and Instagram, he becomes suspect No. 1. 

I could go on about zeitgeist and Breanna’s high-school-friend-turned-enemy (it was she who stashed the baggie of weed in Breanna’s car), and how inflamed social media can get in a matter of hours over something as irrelevant as a dead woman among 241,000 people in Jersey City. 

“Missing White Woman” is a world seen through a frosted glass window, and if that dawns on you (and I may be way off base and the book really is just mediocre), this book is a new kind of whudunit and shouldn’t be missed. As always, ask Maria’s Bookshop for your Murder Ink 15% discount, and screw Amazon. ?