Author Louise Candlish on 6 Older Characters Who Break the Crime Fiction ‘Gray Ceiling’
When assembling my cast of young characters for my latest domestic suspense, set among London’s renters, I took one look at Pixie (Gen Z opportunist), Maya (millennial activist turned trad wife), Daniel (bounce-back thirtysomething living in his mum’s spare room), and Stella (media nepo baby), and decided I’d prefer not to inhabit their heads for a year of my life. Instead, I’d observe them through the prism of a wise senior. I’d give her a friendly name—Gwen Healy—and make her the author of a book within my book, A Neighbor’s Guide to Murder.
Fast forward to ‘The end’ and I find I’ve been cohabiting with one of the most challenging characters I’ve ever created. Yes, Gwen’s seven decades of life have made her wiser (wry too; she is quite the font of sardonic put-downs), but also more complicated. Much more complicated.
How can this be, you may ask? Shouldn’t it be freeing to let a pensioner run amok in a psychological thriller? Aren’t all bets off when your protagonist has reached the age of giving fewer f*cks than the rest of us? Quite the contrary, I would say. For Gwen has all the emotions of her younger counterparts – social ambition, loneliness, unrequited desire, to name but three – only hers have been left to fester for longer. Which makes her a very dangerous neighbour indeed…
Here are six of my favourite senior characters in crime and psychological fiction:
Jane Marple
In spite of being old enough in her first fictional outing to sport snowy white hair and a face full of wrinkles, Agatha’s Christie’s iconic sleuth continued to appear in mysteries for the next 46 years—so we won’t hazard a guess as to her age in Sleeping Murder when she finally bids us adieu. Her superpower of invisibility has been much discussed—without being treated as part of the furniture she wouldn’t be able to eavesdrop nearly so effectively—but I also love her sharp comments about the generations. ‘The young people think the old people are fools – but the old people know the young people are fools’ is one of my favourites.
Equally of the view that the young and foolish go hand in hand is conman Roy Courtnay—though he feels much the same about his ageing mark Betty, who he plans to fleece of her fortune. Aged over eighty, Roy is proud to ‘pass for seventy’ and Searle’s peerless prose brings his decaying features wincingly to life: ‘a florid face on which the tributaries of blood vessels map a complex topography’ (we’ll overlook descriptions of his morning ablutions…). In short, he’s an appalling, heartless, morally bankrupt old fogey—prepare to join legions of previous readers in praying that Betty will get the better of him.
Susan Ryeland
On the gentler end of wicked sits late-midlife tennis supremo Stan Delaney, who finds himself the prime suspect in a police investigation when his wife Joy vanishes. The couple have a volatile relationship history and he bears scratches on his face from their most recent fight. Never mind that cuckoo-in-the-nest Savannah—closer, latterly, to Joy than any of her four grown-up children—has coincidentally gone to ground. As rich and layered as red velvet cake, this is Moriarty at her best, entirely clear-eyed about the regrets and demands of later life.
Mrs Boynton
My second entry by Agatha Christie, whose warm-hearted detectives are mere counterpoints to some seriously evil villains – or, in this case, victims. Described as a ‘monstrous, swollen female Buddha’, Caroline Boynton is nothing short of sadistic in her torturing of her ‘loved ones’, and it is one of them, we gather, who is responsible for her murder, set up in the very first line. ‘You do see, don’t you, that she’s got to be killed?’ A reasonable response to a lifetime under the thumb of this despicable matriarch, but what a shame that of all the hotel rooms in all the towns in all the world, Hercule Poirot has to walk under the window of this one and overhear.
I always remember the tagline on the poster for Notes on a Scandal: ‘One woman’s mistake is another’s opportunity’. It’s natural to associate opportunism with the young and ambitious, but how witheringly Heller reminds us that we dismiss older women at our peril. In her final year before retirement, history teacher Barbara befriends bohemian colleague Sheba and settles into a ringside seat for the younger teacher’s affair with a student. As for the resulting scandal, well, Barbara may or may not have helped it on its way… She’s many things, our Barbara, just don’t call her a ‘jowly old biddie’.
Discover the Book
From internationally bestselling author Louise Candlish, a witty psychological suspense novel in which an older woman’s suspicions about her charming new neighbor ignite a dangerous spiral in their luxury apartment building.
In Columbia Mansions, secrets don’t stay behind closed doors for long.
It’s rare for a room to open up in London’s storied Columbia Mansions, and lonely Gwen is thrilled when her neighbor’s new subletter, Pixie, brings a friendly breath of fresh air to its stuffy halls. Their unexpected bond soon becomes the bright spot in Gwen’s quiet life. But Gwen can’t help noticing cracks beneath Pixie’s cheerful surface—especially when it comes to her questionable financial arrangement with her live-in landlord, Alec.
As suspicions mount, Gwen’s protective instincts go into overdrive, triggering a dangerous chain of events no one is prepared for. The last thing Columbia Mansions wants is a scandal on its hands … Let alone a murder.
