The Mother Archetypes of Crime Fiction

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From CrimeReads:

There are precious few happy kids of loving mothers in crime fiction. Perhaps that’s inevitable, since crime fiction shows us flawed individuals, at times of great crisis. Fiction in general might offer up Mrs Bennet, Marge Simpson, Marmee Marsh, Molly Weasley and Lorelei Gilmore but in the mystery world it’s slim pickings. Until you turn to the dark side, that is . . . True villains abound. With them, though, we also find more nuanced portrayals of mothers, struggling, out of their depth, trying but failing.

I’ve written lots of mothers in the course of twenty-odd novels. My aristocratic lady detective packed her heir and spare off to boarding school after WW1 without a backward glance. In my modern novels, mothers of the protagonists seem to be either dead, overseas or pretty awful. So when I made Donna Weaver, the protagonist of Go To My Grave, the only child of a loving single mother I foresaw fun of a kind I’d never had before, writing two-hander scenes for the pair of them with in-jokes and acts of affection. Then I realized that for Donna to be in true peril as the story unfolds, she had to be alone. I packed her mum off to a wedding expo and we all had to make do with texts and phone calls.

. . . .

Robert Bloch, Psycho

Archetype: Gothicly Evil

Nuance level: zero but who cares

When we finally meet Mrs Bates face to “face”, at the end of Robert Bloch’s 1959 novel Psycho—or more likely of Hitchcock’s masterpiece, which followed it the very next year—it’s hard not to feel pity (once we’ve stopped screaming) but if anyone ever had that coming it was Norman Bates’s mum. Rigid, twisted, domineering, sex-obsessed to the point of paranoia . . . what a piece of work she was. I’m not sure you could get away with such broad strokes now but she’s still a weird kind of joy to behold if you like that sort of thing. And I do.

Lionel Shriver, We Need To Talk About Kevin

Archetype: Disastrously Withholding

Nuance level: off-the-scale

However, Lionel Shriver’s Eva Katchadourian in We Need To Talk About Kevin is something else again. Eva’s character is balanced like a ballerina on a pinhead, now heart-rending, now blood-curdling. Throughout this long novel—and I wouldn’t have it a single page shorter—we’re never sure if Kevin is a pure sociopath, born evil, whose mother busted him while he was still in his cradle, or if Eva is a monster of the worst kind, destroying her own child so subtly she almost gaslights us over to her side. Books clubs disbanded over this novel. Friendships ended. The sliver of ice in my writer’s heart makes me wish one of my books could ruin lives that way.

Link to the rest at CrimeReads