Eddie Mahler, the lead detective in my debut police procedural THE SILENCED WOMEN, is haunted by his failure in a two-year-old case to prevent the murder of a young woman and to convict the man he knows to be her killer. I wanted to dramatize this sense of failure, but I also wanted to avoid the usual tropes of the troubled detective—alcoholism, divorce, or anti-social behavior.
Instead, as Mahler investigates a new, similar murder in the same location, his sense of failure manifests in a severe migraine headache that lasts throughout the novel.
“Migraine” comes from a French word meaning “half a head,” due to the common symptom of pain on one side of the sufferer’s head. The pain of a migraine is piercing, unrelenting, and can last for hours or even days. Thomas Jefferson, Claude Monet, and Virginia Woolf all had migraines. Lewis Carroll suffered from them, and in Through the Looking Glass, Tweedledum says, “I’m very brave generally, only today I happen to have a headache.” Ulysses S. Grant had a migraine the day he accepted Lee’s surrender. The great nineteenth-century composer, Gustav Mahler, Eddie’s namesake, suffered migraines whenever he rode on trains.
Such headaches can have a profound effect on a person’s mood, perception, and abilities. My novel tells the story of a detective who is disabled by a migraine.
My own twenty-year experience with migraines allowed me to describe the symptoms of Eddie Mahler’s headache, including sensitivity to sound and light, nausea, the characteristic pale face (the so-called “white migraine”), and the dark circles under the sufferer’s eyes (known as “raccoon eyes”). I also knew the onset and progression through the stages of a typical migraine. As I wrote the novel, the headache had its own outline.
One migraine symptom experienced by Mahler that I did not personally endure is a visual hallucination or aura, called a “scotoma”. For this, I read the renowned neurologist Oliver Sacks’s book Migraine. Sacks describes a scotoma as a scintillating or luminous, flickering figure appearing in the sufferer’s visual field. One type, a “negative scotoma,” has an area of partial or total blindness. “A peculiar horror,” Sacks says, “may be associated with a negative scotomata, which may be felt, not just as a failure of sight but a failure of reality itself.”
Here’s a scene from the novel where Mahler experiences a scotoma while interviewing a mother, named Dorothy Knolls, whose daughter is missing:
As Mahler listened, tiny, brilliant flashes suddenly shimmered around the woman’s head. He blinked his eyes, but the flickering lights floated in space, swarming together until they coalesced into an oval bubble in front of his eyes. Inside it was an area of total blindness. Somewhere behind the glaring object that obscured his vision, he heard Knolls still talking.
Mahler understood the thing in his line of sight to be a hallucination brought on by his migraine, and he knew from experience that this thing, this scotoma, would last a minute or two. He could not see past the dancing aura to the woman’s face, but he sensed Knolls watching him. As he looked down, the aura tracked his field of vision. He reached with his right hand through the blind space for the pencil and picked it up, grateful for the reality of touch. He squeezed the pencil tight.
Later Mahler recalls another hallucination.
A year earlier, a migraine started at night while he lay in bed. . . . as he blinked and watched the lights swell and fade, he saw something else, a figure in the darkest corner of his room—crouched, wings folded, head raised to stare at him—an angel.
Throughout the novel, the migraine is described and discussed with specific detail. When my editor first read the novel, she noted that the headache tracked her own daughter’s experience of them.
In some sense, as I wrote, the migraine became another character in the book. Following my own experience, the migraine’s intensity sometimes sharpens the mind, helping Mahler focus on critical insights into the suspects. Eddie’s ex-girlfriend explicitly tells him the headaches have a psychological component stemming from his agony over the killing of the young woman two years earlier. Recognizing the effect of the headaches on Mahler’s performance, the police chief threatens to fire Eddie. In a climactic scene near the end of the novel, a scotoma plays a key role as Mahler is thrust into a violent confrontation with a suspect.
If it succeeds in my novel, the migraine embodies the consequences the detective endures over his perceived guilt and provides an important layer to the characterization.
Frederick Weisel’s debut novel, THE SILENCED WOMEN: A VIOLENT CRIME INVESTIGATIONS TEAM MYSTERY, will be published by Poisoned Pen Press in February 2021. It is the first in a new police procedural series set in Northern California about a team of homicide investigators.
