The Third Person: Writing in the Aftermath of a Home Robbery

At my desk in the office at the bottom of the garden, under a jacaranda tree, in one of the most violent countries in the world, I write a murder mystery series set in a pretty village in the Cotswolds, in England. In real life, the Cotswolds is a place where the murder rate is close to zero. A local news article “Rise in violent crime in Cotswolds” tells us that there was one homicide—a category which includes both murder and manslaughter—in the year 2022. In the previous 12 months, there had been none.

In our books, life in the Cotswolds is far more perilous. Under the pen name Katie Gayle, my co-author Gail Schimmel and I have killed off a dozen or so people in six books and counting, in a popular genre called “cozy mystery.” Think Murder She Wrote, or the books of Agatha Christie or Richard Osman.

A defining characteristic of this genre is the absence of graphic violence, grit and gore. When bad things happen, they happen off-page, out of sight, and with a certain delicacy. The victims are more often than not pushed off hilltop walking paths, or drowned in picturesque lakes, or bonked on the head in the heat of the moment with heavy domestic objects (a frying pan, a doorstop). When readers meet them, the violence is over. Some of the victims are long dead, but recently discovered. The crime is solved not by the police, but by an amateur sleuth—in our case, Julia Bird, a practical, wise woman of 60+—using instinct and good old common sense. Thanks to her efforts, justice is served. 

I forget exactly what I was writing that morning, a year ago—perhaps Julia was taking a walk through the soft green of the spring woods with her chocolate labrador, or on her way to her volunteer job at the local Charity Shop where she might happen upon a useful clue—when a man appeared at the door of my office with a gun. 

I had heard the garage door open, and my son’s footsteps, and his voice: “My mom’s in there.” When I looked up, he was standing at my door with another man, who I took for a friend until I saw that he was older, and he was holding my son’s arm tightly, and he had a gun. Three more men jostled nervously behind him. 

Because I don’t live in a village in the Cotswolds, but in suburban Johannesburg, I said to myself, quite rationally, “Ah, okay, so this is how it goes down. An armed robbery. It’s finally happening to us.” I know dozens of people who have been robbed, carjacked, mugged, scammed, and held up, but other than the cellphones pickpocketed from my kids at clubs and festivals over the years, we have largely dodged the odds for decades.

The man cut to the chase: “Do you love this boy?” 

I assured him in a voice so calm I didn’t recognise it, that yes, I love the boy. 

“Where are the guns… the safe… the money?”

We own neither guns nor a safe full of cash—I wondered briefly if everyone else had such things, and if our oversight in this matter made things better or worse for us—but I assured him that I would give him whatever else he wanted.

And I did. 

I gave him the wedding ring off my finger. All my “good” jewelry, my mother’s and my grandmothers’, none of which I ever wore, because who, in Johannesburg, would be so foolish as to wander about in gran’s amethysts? Instead, I tucked the little sack of treasure into the corner of a high up cupboard in my bedroom, and when the moment came, I climbed on a stool and handed it over at gunpoint. I feel there’s an edifying lesson there, or an inspiring meme about wearing your good bra and lighting the Jo Malone candles, but that’s not the point I’m here to make. 

They took phones and laptops. Passports and bank cards. A crappy television. My RayBans. The saxophone my husband has played in dozens of bands since he was 17. Oh, and our car, which the boy had been driving when they followed him into the garage and held him up.

Because we were mostly face down on the carpet while the men ransacked the place, other absences went unnoticed, and months later, when we’d ask each other, “Have you seen my black coat… my torch… the backgammon set…” (That last, in a smart leather case, was a disappointment, I’m sure).

*

The trauma counselor had me look at a point on the wall next to her and give a brief account of what happened on that day. I was to tell it fast, without dwelling on details, and I was to tell it in the third person, as if it had happened to someone else. 

This intrigued me. One of the most defining choices you make as a novelist is that of the narrative voice, or point of view. It’s the perspective from which the story is told. Each narrative position brings with it its own problems and possibilities. 

The voice that comes most naturally to me as a writer is the close third person. The best way to describe it is as if the protagonist has a camera on her shoulder, showing the reader the action. It’s not the protagonist herself talking (that would be first person), but it is the protagonist’s view of the world. 

The close third person is, in many respects, a terrible choice of narrative voice. It’s one that causes me no end of trouble. It has all the disadvantages of the first person narrator—you can only see what your protagonist sees, think what she thinks. It means your protagonist has to be in every scene, and has to find out anything that happens “off stage” through investigation, conversation or some other means. 

The close third person also lacks the advantages of the more traditional omniscient third person narrator, who resides outside of the action, who can travel through space and time, who can get into anyone’s head, who knows what everyone in the story knows—and sometimes more. 

I’m not cut out for all-knowing omniscience. Or for the constant spotlight of the “I.” The close third’s slanted intimacy, the feeling of being almost inside the protagonist’s head, but a little detached, works for me.

And now here I was in the trauma counselor’s room, telling my robbery story in some therapised version of the close third person, speaking fast, as instructed, without explanation or elaboration. 

She walked into the house with him behind her…

They took the boy…

He told her to lie down…

I offered none of the details that a novelist would ordinarily linger over and polish, or work for effect. The way the robbers stepped politely over the sleeping dog on their way into the house. The peculiar feeling of a shared objective with my captor, working together to get this thing done quickly. His heavy work boots – all I saw of him, as I kept my head down to avoid seeing his face. The heft of the little drawstring velvet pouch of rings and necklaces in my palm. The weird sense of time, and the wondering—are we halfway through this yet, maybe even three quarters? The hyper-vigilant listening, the gratitude for every minute without the sound of a gunshot. 

He pointed… 

She nodded…

They left…

In a couple of minutes, the tale was told. It sounds kooky, but I’m not averse to a bit of kooky in extremis, and it seemed to sort of work. My words raced, relating the events, but for the first time, my heart did not. I was detached from my own story.

Gradually, we begin to feel calmer. Family, friends and neighbors hold us with their bountiful love, care and food (even in trauma, a young man welcomes a lasagne). We go again to the trauma counselor. We sleep a little better. There’s less weeping. Less forgetting of words, appointments, pots on the stove. I no longer feel as if my veins run thick with cortisol soup. 

You might call it healing.

*

In a murder mystery story, the discovery of a second body brings new information. It provides fresh clues and opens up the investigation in surprising new ways. It discounts certain potential suspects and brings others to the fore. It tells our sleuth something she didn’t previously know.

Two months after our robbery, on a warm summer evening, I returned home from a poetry club meeting, buoyed by words and friendship and a glass of champagne, to find my husband standing outside on the veranda waiting and pacing. 

“J is dead.”

I knew from his face that there was more.

“He was killed. In a home robbery.”

Not far from where we live, in a suburban home on a tree-lined street, a gentle, brilliant man, a poet, a writer, a husband and father, had been stabbed. 

The cortisol soup came sloshing back. My son sat with me on the step. We hugged each other and sobbed, my boy and I. All the holding-it-together, and the could-have-been worse, was revealed as naïveté, as foolishness. Something in us broke, possibly forever.

If the second body tells our fictional sleuth something useful that she didn’t know before, this second, devastating real world crime told us something horrifying, something intolerable—that we are not safe. That no one is.

It told us that the world is even more terrible than we had imagined. What we had tried to pass off as a random, isolated incident, was in fact one stitch in a great fabric of violence. This was the way the world was—vile and brutal and not to be trusted.

It told us that the close third person recounting was wishful thinking. There is no safe distance at which to observe. This was, and always would be, a first person encounter. 

I was held up. They pointed a gun at me, and worse, much worse, at my beloved child. 

J was killed. His children lost their father.

The same is true of every one of the too many victims of violence. Each one, the I in their story. Each someone else’s beloved my.

I write this on the one year anniversary of the robbery. My boy is studying in Amsterdam. I miss him like a phantom limb, but I am pleased he’s there. I’m still here in the ‘burbs, in the peculiar middle class South African space of being both comfortable and deeply uncomfortable. I walk the parks and pavements daily with the elderly stepped-over dog, feeling mostly safe, always vigilant. 

I no longer work in the little office in the garden, with its window overlooking the bird table where crested barbets eat papaya. It had been my haven since the busy days of a house full of children, a place where I’ve written hundreds of articles and books, but since the men with the guns, I haven’t felt calm there. I hope to go back one day. In the meantime, I work as an itinerant, in the tv room, or at the kitchen table, sometimes in another city, writing improbable tales of death in the Cotswolds, for a British publisher, for English and American readers.

It’s only because of their sheer implausibility that we can invent these curiously delicate yet alarmingly regular deaths in fictional country villages (let alone the successful investigations by a woman of a certain age). Readers and writers know it’s a set-up, a trope, a fantasy. In real life, those people are safe.

Where I live, no one is truly safe and violence is never off-page. It’s in your own car or house, or on the street, or in the park. It’s in your head. A clever elderly lady and her labrador are not going to solve a crime, or prevent the next one, and neither, in all likelihood, will the police. I live with a deep sense of vulnerability, and an intimate knowledge of danger. Many people in my country live much closer to that knowledge than I do.

There’s nothing cozy about violence in the real world. Perhaps packaging up the unthinkable as such is a way of acknowledging the horror of the world, while keeping it at a distance—the distance we experience in the third person, or the trauma counselor’s office. The inevitable tragedy of life is wreathed in natural beauty, and community, with a cat on its knee and a cream scone at hand. Someone does come to save the day. Bad people are punished, or repent. Good people are rewarded. Order is restored and justice is served. Our deepest, primal longings are fulfilled. On the page, at least.