Little lies, harmless falsehoods

Here was a truth: she loved the little lies she told as a detective, the license it gave her to nudge people along with harmless falsehoods ...

Laura Lippman, Butchers Hill

Laura Lippman

While reading the Laura Lippman mystery Butchers Hill, I thought the novel revolved around unwanted children, children born to parents incapable of taking care of them, foster children placed with people interested only in the extra income those children provided for them, children placed for adoption and a vast system that's supposed to protect such children but somehow doesn't.

Having finished the book and having had time to think about it, I would say the novel is more deeply about lies, and not just the lies that adversely affect the lives of these children or that result in the murders the detective investigates.. Lies lie everywhere in Butchers Hill, more plentiful than the literary references (Jane Austen, Anne Tyler, Rudyard Kipling, James Cain, etc.) Lippman sprinkles throughout the novel.

Early in the book a woman hires Tess Monaghan to find another woman. It turns out the second woman is actually the first woman by her original name. She explains she was just testing to see how a good a detective Tess is, but the lie infuriates Tess. How dare her client lie to her! Yet, as the above line from the novel illustrates, lying is how Tess does business, how she extracts information. She even enjoys it. Her "little lies" are whiter, she believes, than those of others, those lies that make her job more difficult.

She tells her client at one point, "The truth may set you free, but it doesn't get you much in the way of information. Trust me, when we start looking for your daughter, you're going to appreciate what the right lie can do." And yet Tess supposedly dedicates her life to discovering the truth.

One finds this all the time in television crime dramas. Cops and detectives lie to suspects and witnesses in their pursuit of the truth. Good lies are justified, it seems, when they expose bad lies.

This is not just something we find in fiction. Former FBI director James Comey famously said, "Good people lie. I think I'm a good person, where I have lied." Andrew McCabe, former deputy director of the FBI, is being prosecuted on charges of lying to investigators. It seems obvious that others in the FBI have been lying with regularity. Perhaps the agency's name should be changed to the Federal Investigation Bureau, or FIB. Meanwhile people are going to prison for lying to the FBI.

Everyone, it seems, thinks their own lies are somehow less serious than the lies told by others. Lies told by a spouse, a child, an employee, a salesman or a friend rank as a major offense, perhaps even unforgivable, while we regard our own as white lies, little lies, harmless falsehoods.

That's the truth.