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And one of the most conventional of wisdoms is that, in the majority of cases, if a woman is murdered then the husband or lover is the likeliest culprit.
That might hold true in life, but in fiction it’s another story. Part of the writer’s brief is to hint at many possible suspects, throw big fat red herrings along the trail and play with misdirection.
All of those elements are at work in Martinez Campbell’s new novel, It’s Always The Husband (St. Martin’s Press), which is set in the fictional New England college town of Belle River.
But the mystery, while important, is not the sole focus of Martinez Campbell’s writing; rather, it’s the relationships between the three women who are the main characters.
“I was interested in the intersection between women’s fiction and crime and thrillers,” Martinez Campbell said in a phone interview.
Although she has written police procedurals featuring a New York federal prosecutor named Melanie Vargas, this novel about three women who become caught up in a terrible tragedy, with the narrative toggling between the past and present, is a more complex creation.
“This is a different, richer experience and more character-driven,” Martinez Campbell said. Her influences weren’t necessarily other crime novels but such piercing examinations of class as Wharton’s The House of Mirth, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and the 19th-century English novel, with its acute dissection of social dynamics, status and mores.
Martinez Campbell grew up in Connecticut, graduated from Harvard College and went on to get her law degree from Stanford. After working in New York, she moved to Hanover 10 years ago with her husband and taught criminal law at Vermont Law School in South Royalton until leaving that position a few years ago to write full-time. She now lives in Lebanon, but wrote much of the book at the Howe Library in Hanover.
“I’m not one for writing in coffee shops,” she said.
Martinez Campbell had always been interested in writing, and although the law requires the ability to write scholarly, lucid prose, it obviously wasn’t the same as creating characters out of whole cloth.
The novel follows Jenny, Aubrey and Kate, freshman roommates at Carlisle College in Belle River. Despite remarkably dissimilar personalities they become inseparable. When a tragedy occurs, they are bound together in a conspiracy of silence. Over the course of time they take separate forks in the road, until they are confronted 20 years later by an unexpected event that resurrects their past.
The Carlisle setting — elite college near the Connecticut River — might sound like Dartmouth, but Martinez Campbell said, quite firmly, that that is not the case. The story of the intense rivalries, jealousies and insecurities that can exist among students in the upper tier of American colleges and universities came more from her own experience at Harvard, which had both its high and not-quite-as-high points.
“Where (the novel) is more locally focused is the physical setting: the river flowing through, the sense of weather, the way the natural world interacts with the characters,” she said.
But living in Hanover, she acknowledged, did “drive home the sense of the relationship between an institution and a town in a college setting. … It’s a really good setting for a crime novel.”
What she wanted to write was a narrative in which the crime “arose out of a personal relationship,” so that the seeds of the crime(s) are rooted in events of long ago, and in the characters’ own foibles and their relationships with one another. The “town and gown” phenomenon is part of the story.
Martinez Campbell did say that while the majority of the response so far has been positive, she has heard or read that some people find some of the characters unlikable. That’s an assessment, she said, that seems to apply largely to female characters.
There’s pressure on writers to make the heroine or heroines of their crime novel or thriller “likable,” she said. They have to be Everywoman protagonists, she said, instead of fully-rounded individuals with the usual assortment of flaws, virtues, weaknesses and strengths.
Look at television, film and novels, Martinez Campbell said: “There’s all these dark male characters and everyone loves them.” But she’s determined to press on with writing complex women.
She is at work on her next novel, which takes place again in Belle River but centers on two sisters and a murder. More than that she will not reveal.
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Nicola Smith can be reached at nsmith@vnews.com.