Free The Line Up by Otto Penzler

was profoundly empathetic. Archer himself says at one point, “I hear voices crying in the night, and I go see what’s the matter.” I loved that about Archer: his inability to remain silent or inactive while another was suffering. It has always seemed to me that empathy is one of the greatest of human emotions, the capacity to feel another’s pain as one’s own and, as a consequence, to work to take that pain away. For me, evil is the absence of empathy.
     
    The Irish philosopher-politician Edmund Burke once wrote, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” At some level, that is what the best of mystery fiction is about: the refusal of good men and women to do nothing in the face of evil, even at considerable cost to themselves, because a failure to intervene makes one complicit in what occurs.
     
    Macdonald’s novels are also fascinated by the idea of the sins of the fathers being visited on the sons, of one generation suffering for the sins of its predecessors. Macdonald understood that suffering is frequently not earned or deserved. People suffer through no fault of their own. They suffer because they are vulnerable or oppressed. They suffer because they are in the wrong place at the wrong time. They suffer because they are the wrong color, or creed, or sex. They suffer because they can be made to suffer.
     
    It seemed to me that there was a distinction between the outlook of Macdonald (and some of his peers) and that of certain British crime writers of a similar vintage. If one reads the classic “Golden Age” British crime novels, one again and again encounters individuals who suffer and die because they are bad. Few nice people die in Agatha Christie’s novels. Most of them are adulterers, or thieves, or blackmailers. They bring their deaths upon themselves. We are not asked to feel pity for them or empathy. Their killers have to be found and punished as a matter of social order rather than because the murders they have committed diminish us all as human beings, or as an effort at recompense for the deaths of innocents. Even Dorothy L. Sayers, whose awareness of a moral universe ruled by God could hardly be in doubt, is not immune to cold-heartedness. In The Nine Tailors, death comes to a thief in the form of divine retribution. Even God is not merciful in the face of criminal behavior.
     
    I think that something of Macdonald’s intensely humane view of people and how they suffer influenced my reaction to Belinda Pereira’s death. As a consequence, the novel on which I was working began to change. Its central character, the private detective Charlie Parker, became a being defined not simply by anger and the desire for revenge, but by his own sufferings. Because he has suffered, he is unwilling to allow others to suffer in turn. It is his capacity for empathy that ultimately ensures he does not destroy himself with selfishness and grief, or allow himself to be destroyed by the man he is hunting, the killer of his wife and child.
     
    The novel had always begun with its prologue. That was the first part of it I wrote, and although it went through many revisions, the essence remained the same. I wanted to write about a man who loses everything and who struggles to survive, to remain human in the aftermath. There was a kind of awful liberation, I thought, in having one’s worst nightmares come to pass. Once someone had endured loss on that level, it seemed to me that very little could ever hurt him to a similar degree again. I gave him the name Charlie Parker because I liked the connotations of flight, freedom, and spirituality that came with the nickname Bird, the moniker given to the jazz musician with whom he shared this name, especially for a man so mired in mortality. In subsequent novels, the nickname was largely dispensed with. I didn’t want readers to think it was a gimmick, because it was not meant to be.
     
    Yet Parker was still in the process of being