Output details

A Missing Person’s Inquiry

Commissioned for a crime-fiction anthology, ‘A Missing Person’s Inquiry’ is a pastiche detective story of a young boy in denial about his mother’s death who immerses himself in the investigation of her “disappearance”. While the plots of some of Bedford’s short stories and novels had featured crime, this was his first piece written specifically for a crime-fiction publication and readership. At the planning stage, Bedford analysed classic and modern detective novels and stories (e.g. Poe, Wilkie Collins, Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, Ian Rankin) to gain familiarity with the genre and its plotting and narrative formulae and conventions, with a view to subverting them for the purposes of pastiche. In addition, Bedford studied several essays and articles by literary critics and practising crime writers, discussing the traditions and evolution of the detective-fiction genre. Taken together, this background reading and analysis formed a survey of the genre which contributed to this story.

In considering questions of style and register, as well as narrator-perception levels and the narrator-reader relationship, Bedford studied several novels written for adults but told from the viewpoint of a young child character, to see what approaches other authors had taken. The children’s detective kit which the protagonist uses was based on one Bedford had as a young boy in the 1960s. To ensure the contents of this game were authentic, Bedford researched more contemporary examples online and in shops. There was no need for exact authenticity of “police procedure”, as the mother’s death was non-suspicious – the only investigation being the one conducted by the boy; nevertheless, Bedford studied police/detective television dramas and documentaries to ensure that his amateur sleuthing was at least modelled on professional investigative and forensic practices.