Michelle Spring

• Born: 1951
• Place of Birth: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

TYPES OF PLOT: Private investigator; psychological

PRINCIPAL SERIES: Laura Principal, 1994-2001

Contribution

Michelle Spring began her writing career with Every Breath You Take (1994), which introduces Laura Principal as a private investigator. She followed it with four other novels that concern Principal’s forays into crimes in and around Cambridge, England. Her sixth book, The Night Lawyer (2006), a suspense novel, dispenses with Principal and focuses on Eleanor Porter's efforts to become strong and independent. Her seventh book, The Arvon Book of Crime Writing, was published in 2012. 

Most readers find Spring’s Laura Principal series well crafted, readable, and imbued with a strong sense of place. Spring places Principal, a contemporary woman and a former history professor, confidently in Cambridge, where she moves through an intricate plot realistically searching for answers. Her compelling investigations, which make the most of the English countryside in and around Cambridge, have been compared to those of ’s Inspector Morse in Oxford. Like Morse, Principal’s investigations frequently uncover the dark side of existence beneath a cultured, refined facade.

Spring was nominated and short-listed for her first novel for two awards, but for In the Midnight Hour (2001), she was awarded the Arthur Ellis Award, given by the Crime Writers of Canada for the best novel of the year. She is one of six novelists who make up the Unusual Suspects, a group of mystery writers who entertain audiences in Britain, Canada, the United States, and Europe with their commentaries on crime fiction. Spring was selected by the London Times as one of the twentieth century’s one hundred masters of crime.

Biography

Michelle Spring was born Michelle Stanworth in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, in 1951. She was raised in Victoria on Vancouver Island and began reading Nancy Drew books at the age of six while she was ill with tuberculosis. While quarantined in the hospital, Stanworth’s father stole up the fire escape with food and books for her to read. When she was eight, she fainted from the pure excitement of reading a mystery and was forbidden by her mother to read crime stories. However, as an adolescent, her interest in crime deepened with reading the works of authors such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Daphne Du Maurier, Shirley Jackson, Dashiell Hammett, and Patricia Highsmith.

In 1969, Spring moved to England, later becoming a professor of sociology at East Anglia University. In her career in the classroom, which spanned more than twenty-five years, she pioneered the somewhat radical investigation (at that time) into the inequity of teaching based on students' gender. Her investigation revealed that elementary school teachers were more attached to their male students and were more concerned with them and their abilities than their female students. She discussed the findings and implications of her research in a book on gender and schooling. She later authored feminist books about reproductive technologies and political implications and coauthored an introductory sociology textbook. Spring has also lectured in the social and political sciences at Cambridge University.

While at East Anglia University, Spring had tried repeatedly to write a more serious book but could not get started. However, she was stalked by one of her students, who became violent, and soon after, even as she was about to give up the idea of writing, the first chapter of Every Breath You Take fairly wrote itself. Surprised that she was writing a detective novel, she came to understand her need to write about the traumatic stalking episode and her need to write stories as a means of coping with the violence in the world. She wrote Every Breath You Take using the name of Michelle Spring and was pressed by her publisher to write a series.

Analysis

Michelle Spring’s private detective novel follows the example of Sue Grafton, whose books feature female private investigator Kinsey Millhone, rather than that of hard-boiled writers such as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Spring’s writing is more “soft-boiled.” Her series’ main character, Laura Principal, a former academic turned private investigator, runs Aardvark Investigations with her professional and personal partner, Sonny Mendlowitz. Mendlowitz oversees the London office, while Principal runs the Cambridge branch.

In many ways, Principal is a woman of the 1990s in that she struggles to balance her life between sleuthing and spending time with her long-time friend, librarian Helen Cochrane, and her lover Mendlowitz, who has two young sons. Principal, an intense and thorough investigator, and Cochrane are co-owners of Wildfell Cottage, a remote spot the two visit occasionally on weekends to wind down from work. She shares a flat with Mendlowitz in London, and he frequently visits her in Cambridge. She plays the saxophone, exercises regularly, and is in good condition.

Laura Principal is not based on any individual nor on Spring herself. Principal is athletic, an excellent driver, and fairly capable of taking care of herself. Spring has carefully created an admirable female private investigator who is seldom judgmental, unwilling to jump to conclusions, and whose generous spirit allows her to look for the good in everyone.

Every Breath You Take

Spring’s first novel, Every Breath You Take, introduces Laura Principal, who investigates the murder of art teacher Monica Harcourt, who had bought a third-part ownership of Wildfell but was bludgeoned to death before she could move in. Principal sifts through possible motivations of those who knew Harcourt and finds none. As she perceives the villain is a man who had stalked Harcourt, she understands the danger she and Cochrane are in because of their friendship with Harcourt. Harcourt was killed by an unstable man who had erroneously presumed her to be a lesbian.

Principal is a well-developed character who lures the reader in to discover her thoughts and inclinations as she conducts her investigation. Essentially an introduction to Principal, the first-person narrative provides insight into Principal’s mind, her values, and her past, particularly the protracted, painful period during her father’s slow death that continues to haunt her.

The story of a stalker, Every Breath You Take, progresses through Principal’s tracking and confronting suspects about histories, alibis, or secrets as she places her own life in danger through her doggedness in following clues or her instincts. Although she ferrets out suspects who appear to be the stalker/killer, the villain turns out to be an unsuspected and unknown person, maintaining the chilling undertone until the very end.

Running for Shelter

Spring’s second novel in the series, Running for Shelter (1996), moves between the decadent London rich and the illegal migrant workers who exist in near forced-slavery conditions. A West End producer who has hired Principal to solve a series of backstage thefts inadvertently introduces her to Maria Flores, a Filipina domestic who asks for Principal’s help collecting money owed to her by a former employer. When Flores goes missing, and the producer denies any knowledge of her, Principal becomes embroiled in the cruelty and violence dealt the undocumented workers who live in the posh homes of the rich.

Spring’s meticulously plotted story carries readers along with Principal’s observations and speculations, and the opportunity to explore the treatment of migrant workers afforded her by the search for the missing girl. Principal’s character becomes honed with each additional novel; Spring shapes her to be a person whom readers can admire or emulate. Spring is committed to including social problems in each book and usually focuses on the dark underside of the lives of privileged persons.

Nights in White Satin

Spring’s third detective novel, Nights in White Satin (1999), pursues the subject of prostitution at Cambridge and college girls who sometimes become entangled in it. The work reflects Spring’s knowledge of the history of prostitution in Cambridge in the nineteenth century, the antagonism it generated between the university and the town, and, more specifically, the dark side still present underneath the sophisticated exterior.

Aardvark Investigations is enlisted to provide security for the May Ball at St. Johns College, and Principal is later hired to find a missing student who was last seen at the ball. The situation is soon complicated by the death of the senior tutor, whose head is shattered by a cricket bat, shortly after he suggests to Principal that the missing student may have been entangled in prostitution.

Nights in White Satin is Spring’s most complex book. It takes many plot twists while sustaining facts about the victim and the police investigation and maintaining suspense that keeps readers interested. The book has a layered feel in that it explores relationships between academic and town elements that involve economic standing and generational differences. The book also has a ghostly aspect in that Cambridge’s past is interwoven with the plot to ensure connections between the past and present.

In the Midnight Hour

Spring’s fifth entry in the series, In the Midnight Hour, concerns a famous explorer and his wife who visit Principal’s house, asking, “Have you ever lost a child?” They proceed to engage her to discover if the sixteen-year-old musician they have befriended is indeed their son, who disappeared on a beach at the age of four. However, Principal is instructed by the father that she should not “heavy” the young man and should only look into his background.

During the investigation, Principal becomes friends with all household members, meaning that they all become suspects at one time or another. The large family provides various plot complications as Spring’s menacing undertone reaches a level as distinct as the family’s emotional violence. Also, as the bleak landscape of the English north Norfolk coast reflects a pain that has never disappeared, the psychological suspense continues until the last shred of mystery is coaxed out.

In the Midnight Hour explores the unrelieved agony of parents whose child has disappeared and the corrosive secrets each family member has harbored for years. Spring moves toward the discovery of a destructive pattern of abuse with a confidence that belies her own preoccupation with her father’s death.

The Night Lawyer

In The Night Lawyer, Spring created a nonseries book about Eleanor Porter's efforts to become a calm, strong, and invulnerable person. Recovering from a breakdown because of dependency on her married lover, who opted to stay with his wife, she has lost weight, joined a karate club, moved into her own house, and taken a job as a night lawyer who ensures the validity of the articles printed in the paper.

Porter is a petite woman who has turned to karate to avoid fear. The fierceness with which she throws herself into fitness training, her work, and her activities are all aimed at quelling painful memories of having accidentally killed her father years ago. However, Porter becomes aware that she is being stalked, is methodically bullied by her neighbor’s boyfriend and his thug buddies, and finds herself being drawn back into her married lover’s latest ruse—and throughout, she is fighting desperately against her vulnerability.

Spring depicts the creepy feeling of Porter being watched and her private space being violated. She describes Porter’s house being broken into, her bed being slept in, her sense of an unseen presence in her garden, and the prickly sensation up her spine when she briefly glimpses her stalker. Spring recounts Porter's deadening fear while walking home alone from work late at night. Little by little, Spring escalates the suspense, pushing Porter closer to the edge of insanity until the final showdown.

Principal Series Character:

• Laura Principal is a former academic who has become a skilled private investigator with her professional and personal partner, Sonny Mendlowitz. She is a strong, intelligent, and independent hero who displays feminist leanings yet shows compassion toward human peculiarities.

Bibliography

Beard, Mary. Review of Nights in White Satin, by Michelle Spring. Times Literary Supplement, 16 July 1999, p. 23.

Block, Allison. Review of The Night Lawyer, by Michelle Spring. Booklist, vol. 103, no. 2, 15 Sept. 2005, p. 33.

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

Gleeson, Annie. “Talk by Michelle Spring, 18th June 2013.” Cambridge Library Group, 27 June 2013, cambridgelibrarygroup.blogspot.com/2013/06/talk-by-michelle-spring-18th-june-2013.html. Accessed 30 July 2024.

Klett, Rex E. Review of Every Breath You Take, by Michelle Spring. Library Journal, vol. 199, no. 4, 1 Mar. 1994, p. 123.

“Michelle Spring.” Bloomsbury Publishing, www.bloomsbury.com/uk/author/michelle-spring. Accessed 30 July 2024.

Stazio, Marilyn. “Crime.” Review of Nights in White Satin, by Michelle Spring. The New York Times Book Review, 11 July 1999, p. 29.