Editor’s Note: This article contains mention of sexual assault. Please read with care.
When someone is wronged, who gets to tell their story? Who will bring about justice when the ones who need to be brought before the law are more powerful than their victims? Do individuals have the responsibility to do what they think is right, even if they have to break the law to do so?
UBC Clinical Professor Emeritus in Psychiatry Bill Koch puts the mystery novel’s conception of justice under a microscope in Hired Gun: Uncovering Buried Secrets. The novel takes conventions of genre like the morally grey detective with a strong sense of justice and the femme fatale who fights for power among men of authority, and adds a modern, clinical twist — our ‘detective’ is only a psychologist, and the novel’s women are unable to use their sexuality to achieve their goals.
A hired gun is an expert killer, but the term can also be used in a courtroom context to refer to an expert witness brought in by counsel to sway the verdict. In both cases, a hired gun juxtaposes professionalism and supposed authority with corruption.
Koch draws on his professional background in forensic psychology to craft David Lipman, a psychologist stumbling through life after his wife’s death. David balances work, his concerned adult daughters and a budding workplace romance, all under the shadow of a professional crisis: one of his patients is dead and he’s not convinced the police are right in thinking it’s a suicide.
Before long, another of David’s patients has died. He is then asked to offer his professional opinion in what initially seems to be an unrelated sexual assault trial. Though the three women don’t display any obvious connection at first, the reader is able to connect the morbid dots to the man on trial early in the novel, and any potential twists are precluded by the straightforwardness of this truth. The majority of the book is an uncomfortable meander through the court case — the writing mostly dry, sometimes adding to the plot but usually making for a wearisome read because of the distressing subject matter at hand.
Our perspective jumps primarily between three men; the first is David, on whose shoulders justice rests. The other two men are unnamed, horrible individuals who hate women and blame them for their sexual frustrations. One of these two men, the reader is led to think, must be the killer. We have to wait until the very end to see how it all pieces together, though the final truth offers no great revelation.
David wants to do the right thing. He wants to help his patients and achieve justice when he hears about the sexual misconduct on trial. When he gets his hands on evidence he has no business seeing — which links the two murdered patients with the case that is central to the novel — he has to decide what he is willing to risk.
Koch lays the foundation for a gripping mystery story with Hired Gun. However, the intrigue falls short for lack of suspense, from the largely unoriginal setup of abuse to the bland, ineffective grand reveal. Most of the action is implied, creating a disconnect from the reader. This is no pulp mystery novel with gunfights, priceless treasure or power-hungry gang leaders — all that happens to characters we are attached to is the everyday mundane and the court case. This causes the novel to barely feel like a mystery.
As the nuances of the novel’s three leading men blur together, one begins to question why David is the one from whose perspective the story is told, and what gives him the right to enjoy primary focus in this narrative. Outside of David’s love life and family tensions, Hired Gun is about how Lian Yang has been abused by a patriarchal system, assaulted by a man in power and finds the support and resilience inside herself to fight back.
The story should have been conscious of the fact that the narrative voice is a privileged man of authority, a part of the very system that abuses women like Lian. Just because David disapproves of his co-worker’s crimes doesn’t mean that the character looks introspectively to his own position of authority. Koch does not acknowledge the power inherent in telling one’s own story, even with the few glimpses into Lian’s mind we get from her own perspective.
Koch explores using authority to fix the system from inside, but fails to consider the tradition of smothering women’s voices — especially in contexts of sexual assault — and how this has been used as a means of limiting women’s agency.
First online
Share this article
Submit a complaint Report a correction
