Given Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s deranged and unhelpful views on autism, this British novel about a detective on the autism spectrum couldn’t be timelier. Tim Sullivan’s The Dentist invites us into the mind of Detective Sergeant George Cross, who has this diagnosis (Sullivan calls it Asperger’s, but that was dropped from the D.S.M. more than a decade ago), and shows how it makes him an excellent detective with the highest solve record at the police department in Bristol. His ability to identify and process patterns, his need for order, his eye for the anomaly, and his obsession with detail are all professionally useful aspects of his personality and intellect. His colleagues can find him challenging because of his obliviousness to social cues, but obviously this man is a valuable member of society, not someone who should be marginalized —or, worse, never have been born.
Don’t get the wrong idea about the title—the dentist is not a sadistic villain out of Marathon Man but a murder victim. Because he is a badly beaten homeless man without any ID, it takes a while for George to determine his former occupation. But his body has some physical signs of a better life before he ended up on the streets, which helps George and his team figure out who he is, which in turn leads to a suspect who admits to bashing the victim in the face.
George’s boss is satisfied that the crime’s been solved, but George isn’t—something doesn’t fit. And when he meets with the adult children of the unlucky dentist, he discovers that another member of the family was murdered years earlier, in a famous case that went unsolved. The way he finally makes all the puzzle pieces fit is a huge treat for anyone who loves a thorny, detailed plot and a detective who refuses to give up until he gets it right.
Sullivan doesn’t sentimentalize George’s disorder; there’s no feel-good character arc where George suddenly starts hugging children or understands the point of smiling. His interview technique is legendary in his department because he can sit in silence forever without feeling uncomfortable, while his suspects rush to fill it. He also benefits from being underestimated—because of his poker-faced affect, people often read him as “slow.” Their mistake.
Several other books from Sullivan’s series will soon be published in the U.S.—you’ll crave more George Cross once you’ve finished this meticulously wrought procedural.
translated by Philip Roughton
If otherworldly, neurodiverse characters intrigue you, there are two other recent mysteries that might appeal.
Mindy Mejia brings back Jonah Kendrick, her psychic detective from To Catch a Storm, in the latest in her “Iowa Mysteries” series, The Whisper Place. Jonah might be described as an extreme empath—he is tormented by images and dreams of lost people in trouble, feeling what they feel. He gets some relief from medication and speeding through the back roads of Iowa, but his life is difficult. He channels this affliction into his work as a private investigator with his best friend, an ex-cop whose relative normalcy gives Jonah some stability.
After the turbulence and action of the previous book, The Whisper Place finds Jonah in a less traumatized, more functional mode and embarking on a promising relationship. Jonah is the series’s most memorable character, an unquiet soul who’s finding his way.
In Arnaldur Indridason’s novel The Quiet Mother, a retired Reykjavík detective named Konrád (Indridason dispenses with last names) is chasing ghosts in the form of two unsolved cases with personal connections: the fatal stabbing of his father, a con artist, in 1963 and the identity of a murdered woman’s long-lost son. The woman had asked Konrád to find the child she gave up many years earlier, but he’d turned her down and is stricken with guilt after she’s killed.
Konrád’s father had a partner in crime, a medium who helped him swindle vulnerable older women and later died from drowning. The medium’s daughter Eygló, who inherited her father’s psychic abilities, joins Konrád in an uneasy partnership to gather information about the deaths of the two men. Since childhood, she’s experienced sensations and visions that lie beyond normal perception; this “gift” has pushed her to the edges of regular society. Konrád doesn’t help by dismissing her insights in his brisk, cop-like way.
The accretion of the stories Konrád and Eygló collect in their search is echoed in the book’s framing device—a Rear Window–type look through the windows of the apartment building where the murdered woman lived. There’s a lot of loneliness, violence, and loss there, and, as we learn from Eygló, the dead are never far away.
Characters such as Sherlock Holmes, Mr. Spock in Star Trek, Adrian Monk, and others paved the way for more finely tuned, better-understood depictions of people on the autism spectrum and even made them stars. Sofia Helin’s indelible Saga Norén in The Bridge and Ville Virtanen’s quietly magnetic Kari Sorjonen in the Finnish series Bordertown would have once been described as high-functioning autistics, though that label has also fallen out of favor. David Mitchell’s accidental detective in Ludwig is probably somewhere between eccentric and the milder end of the spectrum. His agoraphobia and obsessive-compulsive disorder are sometimes played for laughs, but gently.
One of the most striking recent portrayals of a neurodiverse character in a crime show isn’t a detective but a suspect, in Season Six of Unforgotten. I’m not a big fan of the Nicola Walker–less version of this cold-case show (Sinéad Keenan assumed Walker’s role as the unit’s boss in Season Five), but it still chugs along well enough, thanks partly to its large and diverse supporting cast.
Among those that police detectives Sunny Khan (Sanjeev Bhaskar) and Jessica James (Keenan) have in their sights for an unsolved murder is a young autistic man named Marty Baines (Maximilian Fairley), who lives with his homebound mother. Marty is socially isolated, jobless, and in over his head as a caregiver, all of which makes him angry and frustrated. He’s a knotty character, and Fairley, who is himself autistic and a drama-school graduate, is remarkably good at expressing that complexity. High marks to Fairley and casting director Victor Jenkins for letting us see the messy, struggling side of someone on the spectrum.
This kind of broad representation, from George Cross to Marty Baines, can change attitudes and combat the perception that autism is nothing but a tragic scourge.
Lisa Henricksson reviews mysteries for Air Mail. She lives in New York City
