Carol O'Connell

• Born: May 26, 1947
• Place of Birth: New York, New York

TYPES OF PLOT: Police procedural; psychological

PRINCIPAL SERIES: Kathy Mallory, 1994-2016

Contribution

Carol O’Connell’s first novel, Mallory’s Oracle (1994), was very well received by readers and reviewers, lauded as a completely new mystery with an original character, and nominated for an Edgar Award. The novel combines elements of many genres, crossing the police procedural and the cozy mystery with contemporary intrigue and a gothic air. Mallory’s Oracle reinvents the mystery genre, partly by creating a character who is almost too dysfunctional not to be real. The plot has many twists and turns, drawing disparate events or random details together and weaving them into a complex storyline that moves toward an inevitable but unpredictable conclusion.

Kathy Mallory is an innovative main character, engaging and perplexing at the same time. This causes the reader to wonder about her, trying to divine what is going through her head or why she did something. Even as the series progresses and more of her background is revealed, her character remains an enigma. Therefore, O’Connell’s novels featuring Mallory are always compelling and fresh, the last one as gripping as the first.

Biography

Carol O’Connell was born May 26, 1947, in New York to Norman O’Connell, an accountant, and Berta O’Connell. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Arizona State University and trained as a painter at the California Institute for the Arts. She lived as a surrealist painter for several years in Greenwich Village, supplementing her income with such freelance jobs as copy editing and proofreading.

In her forties, O’Connell turned to writing. She made many submissions to American publishers without much luck, finally deciding that she might have a better chance with British publishers. The character of Kathy Mallory was born in a manuscript called “Whistling Dogs,” which was not specifically about Mallory but rather about a police officer named Louis Markowitz. O’Connell has said that both characters were so strong that they were at odds. She sent this manuscript to Hutchison, the publisher of one of her favorite writers, Ruth Rendell. This first manuscript was turned down, but the rejection letter was complimentary enough to give O’Connell some direction and encouragement.

O’Connell was forty-six years of age before she finally succeeded as a mystery writer with a second manuscript sent to Hutchison, this one with Kathy Mallory as the primary character, investigating the murder of her foster father, Louis Markowitz. Publishers immediately recognized the manuscript as an imaginative and engaging work, garnering interest on both sides of the Atlantic. At the Frankfurt Book Fair, it sold to Dutch, French, and German publishers. It was also sold for $800,000 to an American publisher, who published it as Mallory’s Oracle.

It may be that O’Connell’s past struggles have made her conservative, for she treats writing as both a calling and a commitment. She works more than eight hours a day and published a new book every one to two years throughout the late 1990s and through the 2010s. They are all written to the same caliber and level of innovation as her first one.

Analysis

Mallory’s Oracle is both a traditional mystery and a psychological thriller in which the investigator tries to figure out the killer's motives and understand the crime from the killer’s perspective. The reader becomes intrigued trying to determine Sergeant Kathy Mallory's motivations, who is stalking the suspect. O’Connell’s work is noteworthy for its compelling characters, who have the depth and grittiness that make them resemble real-life people.

Mallory is socially dysfunctional, even perhaps sociopathic, and a genius with the face of an angel and an ability to draw people to her. To her friends, there are two sides to Mallory: the lost child and the vengeful police officer, two personas that may seem at odds but are perfect complements. Her friends are both charmed by her and afraid of her, and they find it difficult to predict how she will react or know what she is thinking.

Charles Butler, the one character in the series who could be called noble, seems to stand apart from the action, almost as if he represents the reader. He is often accused of being gallant or “born in the wrong century.” At the beginning of the series, he makes a living by investigating unusual talents and debunking the paranormal. The perfect foil for Mallory, he partners with her professionally and balances her on a personal level with his optimistic point of view.

Louis and Helen Markowitz, Mallory’s foster family, play a significant role in the series, although Louis is a widower who dies in the first novel. The couple acts as Mallory’s conscience, lurking in the background and stopping her from acting inappropriately so that she can interact in polite society. Because Mallory is most likely a sociopath, she can clearly understand what motivates criminals. This trait also allows her to blackmail people for the information she needs to find the answers. Mallory lacks a real conscience, but she is not without feeling. However, her intense and uncontrolled feelings resemble those of a young child or a wild animal. As opposed to struggling in a male-dominated world, she dominates it, drawing men to her even as they realize she is using them. In a real sense, she is a femme fatale. She is a gifted liar whose philosophy, learned at Louis Markowitz’s knee, is “Everybody lies,” and who knows how to figuratively cut the truth out of people.

O’Connell’s books are somewhat different in that the plot always contains two equally compelling mysteries: the murder or crime that Mallory is trying to unravel professionally and the mystery surrounding Mallory—her origins and the forces that shaped her personality. Each novel reveals a major piece of the puzzle: who her mother was, where Mallory came from, why she left her home, what she did on the street, who her father was, how she was found, and how she became a police officer. The mystery around Mallory makes this series so engaging and appeals to the reader at least as much if not more than, the solution to the murder.

O’Connell retains a third-person point of view in her novels but tells the story from the perspective of nearly every character—Detective Riker, Charles Butler, Lieutenant Coffey, and even the murderer—but rarely Mallory.

Mallory’s Oracle

Mallory’s Oracle, published in 1994, contains a mixture of old magic tricks, spirit mediums, and good old-fashioned greed. It opens with the murder of Louis Markowitz and the impact it has on his foster daughter, Kathy Mallory, who is a sergeant with the New York Police Department. She is ordered to take bereavement leave and does not hesitate to do so, starting an investigation of her own and becoming a partner in a consulting firm owned by Charles Butler, a friend of the Markowitz family. Butler has earned a livelihood by identifying “special” talents, advising people on the most productive way to use them, and debunking the supernatural. Their first case together concerns a young boy who may be psychokinetic or haunted; inexplicably, knives have gravitated toward his stepmothers, the first two of whom have died under suspicious circumstances.

In pursuing the mystery surrounding Markowitz’s death, Mallory moves into an apartment building where she believes the killer lives and gets to know the residents (or, in her mind, suspects), including Butler’s aunt. The aunt has made a name for herself as a medium and is the widow of a famous magician who died in a spectacular magic trick gone wrong, an accident that she predicted. The interaction between Mallory and the other residents involves much verbal and nonverbal fencing, with a finale that eclipses all predictions.

The Man Who Cast Two Shadows

The Man Who Cast Two Shadows (1995) opens with the murder of a woman who looks like Mallory, and initially, several of Mallory’s friends assume that she has been killed. Mallory, decidedly alive, resolves to investigate the murder. It becomes a cat-and-cat game with the killer—one stalking the other, one taunting the other.

Charles Butler sheds some light on Mallory’s psyche as he concludes:

And now his eyes took on some pain as he clearly understood their separate roles in this business. Mallory could crawl into the mind of a killer with disturbing ease. She had left the difficult job to him, the job of identifying with a frail human being who had no pathology or defenses in a brutal landscape peopled with those whom Mallory best identified with. . . . And a game it was to Mallory. Murder was the best game.

In a way, Mallory maneuvers her friends as much as her suspects in an effort to uncover the truth.

Charles also builds his own sense of reality, employing a technique learned from his uncle. This former magician talks to his dead wife: Charles starts an imaginary relationship with the victim, who resembles Mallory, and she becomes what he wants Mallory to be, revealing his own growing feelings for her. His compassion for Mallory is only strengthened when it is revealed that when Mallory was a child, the makers of a snuff film had intended to make her their victim. This he sees as a possible reason for her present emotional dysfunction.

Stone Angel

Stone Angel (1997) answers the mysteries regarding Mallory’s childhood, pathology, and even her name. Mallory returns to the town in Louisiana where she grew up and where her mother was stoned to death. In the graveyard in this town stands a stone angel carved in the likeness of Mallory’s mother, and in her honor, it is the spitting image of Mallory. The bayou provides a lush and mysterious backdrop for the story, which starts with a man on the autism spectrum having his hands broken for playing piano, Mallory saving a sheriff’s deputy who had a heart attack, and a faith healer being murdered. The day concludes with Mallory in jail.

The characters are memorable and steeped in Southern culture, including a clever, aging southern belle who does a lot of plotting of her own. The stage is set for determining not just who killed the faith healer but also who was involved in stoning Mallory’s mother seventeen years before and why. Although the details of her early childhood are revealed, Mallory remains an enigmatic character, and even her friends Charles and Riker do not know what kind of retribution she has in mind for the mob that killed her mother.

The mysteries are intertwined, as many such stories are in small towns. Despite Mallory’s ferocious tendencies, everyone is trying to protect her from herself, from the truth, and the killers. Through it all, Mallory has set the scene to find and punish the killers—regardless of the collateral damage. However, she does achieve her end. Always knowing how to exit, she walks off into the sunset, and despite his best intentions, Charles follows her.

Judas Child

In Judas Child (1998), O’Connell took a break from Kathy Mallory and introduced two new characters, Rouge Kendall and Ali Cray. Kendall is a police officer investigating the disappearance of two girls who have been kidnapped, as his own twin sister was many years ago. Ali Cray is a forensic psychologist specializing in pedophiles who enters the picture with a secret of her own.

Running throughout this story is guilt: the guilt of a parent whose child has been taken; the guilt of a psychiatrist maintaining the confidentiality of a repeat pedophile and serial murder; the guilt of a childhood friend used as a lure, or Judas goat, to catch her friend; the guilt of the surviving twin; and the guilt that comes from punishing the wrong suspect. Redemption and forgiveness bring the story to a close.

After Judas Child, O’Connell returned to the overwhelmingly successful Mallory series, publishing Shell Game (2000), Crime School (2002), Dead Famous (2004), and Find Me (2007).

Find Me

Find Me is the story of a serial killer who, over the years, has abducted and killed children along Route 66 as a tribute to the Mother Road. The story begins with a woman found dead in Mallory’s apartment and Mallory nowhere to be found. Ultimately, Charles and Riker track her to Chicago, where she is peripheral to an investigation into a murder. The murder is of a parent of one of the missing children who are presumed victims of the Route 66 serial killer. Charles, Riker, and Mallory then join a caravan formed by the families of the missing children and fraternize with Federal Bureau of Investigation agents who are led by a seemingly incompetent and self-absorbed agent who has a lot of information he is not sharing.

More murders ensue, including the death of a former priest/psychologist who has been counseling the killer, all leading to the abduction of a child, sister to one of the missing children. Mallory uses a pipe and her Volkswagen to ram and impale the killer, leaving the abducted child unharmed in the seat next to him. The story ends with Mallory surprising her long-lost father, who never knew she existed. His surprise is palpable, and Mallory’s response, bizarrely enough, is laughter.

O’Connell continued publishing novels in the Mallory series through 2016. The titles include The Chalk Girl (2012), It Happens In The Dark (2013), and Blind Sight (2016). O’Connell is also responsible for two stand-alone novels in her career: The Judas Child (1998) and Bone by Bone (2009). 

Principal Series Character:

• Kathy Mallory, a New York Police Department sergeant, was a child living on the streets when she was caught stealing by New York police inspector Louis Markowitz, who, with his wife, Helen, raised the girl. There are many facets to Mallory: the computer hacker, the police sergeant, the dutiful daughter, the lost child, the sociopath, and the vengeful, rebellious girl. Mallory (“not Kathy”) is an extremely aloof, even feral, but highly intelligent young woman. She is repeatedly depicted as a gunslinger, sometimes wearing a duster or a cowboy hat, flipping back her jacket to display her gun, or sharpshooting someone’s hand. Her sense of morality was developed during her early years on the street fending for herself and is tempered by the influence of her foster mother and father: Mallory has her own code of honor and conduct, similar to a gunslinger’s ideology with an overall theme of an eye for an eye.

Bibliography

"Carol O'Connell." Penguin Random House, www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/22471/carol-oconnell. Accessed 31 July 2024.

Dubose, Martha Hailey. Women of Mystery: The Lives and Works of Notable Women Crime Novelists. New York: St. Martin’s Minotaur, 2000.

Gaughan, Thomas. Review of Find Me, by Carol O’Connell. Booklist, vol. 103, no. 4, 15 Oct. 2006, p. 32.

Lindsay, Elizabeth Blakesley, editor. Great Women Mystery Writers. 2nd ed., Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2007.

O’Connell, Carol. “The Booklist Interview.” Interview by Emily Melton. Booklist, vol. 94, no. 16, Apr. 1998, pp. 1370-1371

Orr, John. “Interview with Carol O'Connell.” Triviana, triviana.com/books/oconn/carol03.htm. Accessed 31 July 2024.

Shindler, Dorman T. “Mallory’s True Oracle: An Interview with Carol O’Connell.” The Armchair Detective, vol. 28, no. 4, 1995, pp. 440-443.

Smith, Julia Llewellyn. “Prime Time for a Crime Writer.” The Times, 11 May 1994.