Abstract
Primal. Virgin Books, 2009, 384 pp., US$10.86 (e-book).
Caballito. Hard Nut Books, 2012, 210 pp., US$9.99 (e-book).
The Hitchhiker's Child. Hard Nut Books, 2013, 239 pp., US$9.99 (e-book).
Whodunit novels always used to be about crime, usually murder. One of their appeals was that after all the clues and “red herrings” the author could use some device or other at the end of the book—usually a confession—to reveal who really was the culprit. By comparison, a whodunit revolving around mistaken or confused paternity suffers because there can never be a convincing revelation at the end. A blood-test can be engineered that proves who wasn't the father—but there can be no test to prove beyond doubt who is. Any “confession” is dissatisfying because the reader knows that neither the father nor even, as we shall see later, the mother can be certain of the truth anyway. Then along comes DNA testing and everything changes. Uncertainties about paternity and the sexual events that led up to that paternity can suddenly be resolved. I became hooked on thinking up scenarios, an obsession I owe to my evolutionary past.
From 1981 to 1996, I was Reader in Zoology in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Manchester, England, and in the final decade of that tenure my main research interest was the sexual biology of humans and other animals. My approach was evolutionary and hovered somewhere between biology and psychology. Several scientific papers came from my lab during this time, and just before the members of my group went their separate ways, I also published an academic book, Human Sperm Competition, which I co-wrote with my former student, Mark Bellis. Then in 1996 I went my own way too, leaving academia to indulge a lifelong passion for writing. But I couldn't abandon my evolutionary past—not that I tried—and found myself trying to bring the evolutionary approach to a wider audience than I had managed as a scientist.
My first non-academic book, Sperm Wars (1996), combined fiction and science and was essentially a popularization of my earlier co-authored tome. Now translated into 26 different languages—the latest being Turkish, giving the book its first primarily Islamic audience—Sperm Wars made the best-seller lists in countries as different as Britain, Germany, Poland, China and Japan. All of which seems to show that an evolutionary approach to the human condition can be appreciated by an audience that stretches far beyond Western academia.
It was a short step from writing Sperm Wars to writing a whodunit. Human sperm competition centers on the causes and consequences of a woman having sperm from two or more men inside her reproductive tract, which inevitably leads to paternal uncertainty. So although the main thrust of Sperm Wars was evolutionary—the impact that sperm competition had on the shaping of human sexuality—the subject matter also provided the perfect background for creating plots for sexual-whodunit novels.
I have published three novels so far: Primal (2009); Caballito (2012); and The Hitchhiker's Child (2013). Each of them, as described later, took its inspiration from the wider field of evolutionary psychology. But each of them also has a sexual-whodunit thread.
In Primal, a series of apparent accidents strands a group of university staff and students on a remote and uninhabited Pacific island and strips them of everything they had previously taken for granted. The group takes a year to escape and by the time they return home all the women are either pregnant or have a baby. With paternity uncertain in every case, DNA tests are performed. But when initially it proves impossible to identify the father of one of the children, the whole misadventure is thrown into new relief—and not until the paternity issue is resolved do all the other misfortunes that befell the group slot into place.
In Caballito, a teenage girl begins to investigate the death of the father she never knew. Officially he committed suicide but she suspects murder and delves deeper. As she collects information about the man and his various traits she begins to doubt that he could be her father. Either that, or her supposed mother could not have been her mother. Not until her parentage is resolved does the truth about her potential father's death emerge.
Before DNA testing, one way a sexual whodunit could have tried to offer a solution was for the mother to claim that she only ever had sex with one man. But, as The Hitchhiker's Child shows, such a claim in fact proves nothing about paternity. As the story unfolds, four women each claim total fidelity to their partner, yet each produces a child fathered by another man. Two of the women, including the hitchhiker of the title, could simply be lying. Another could have been too drunk to know what happened on the critical night. But in the fourth woman's case, her conceiving to the biological father really does seem to be impossible: they never met. There is a fifth conception too, and that also seems impossible: a lioness in the Kalahari Desert that the narrator—a research zoologist—discovers conceived to a lion that never got within 20 kilometers of her. With lives and livelihoods at stake, the narrator and his research team have no choice but to try to solve the mystery of these conceptions. And when they do, they uncover a situation with far reaching consequences.
Although all three of my novels contain a thread or two of sexual “whodunitry”, that is not their only element inspired by evolutionary psychology. The field has illuminated such a broad range of the human experience that almost any research paper could be fodder for a novelist. I have already described in this journal (Baker, 2011) how Primal was shaped by evolutionary science. How much would a group of young people, stripped of everything and marooned on an island, revert to primate instincts? More specifically, which species of ape would they most closely resemble? All questions and answers were driven by theories that have been generated within evolutionary psychology and biology.
In a way, Caballito continues the Primal theme, though this time taking its inspiration from the anthropological rather than the primatological branch of evolutionary psychology. The narrator, a young anthropologist, discovers two handwritten pages, which he deduces and hopes are part of an unpublished autobiography by an Edwardian woman who for 50 years lived among a stone-age Amazonian tribe. Obsessed with discovering what the woman had witnessed, observed, and maybe suffered, he sets about trying to track down the rest of her manuscript. When he does, we learn bit by bit not only about the behavior of the Amazonian tribe but also what happened to the woman and her descendants when she returned to civilization.
In January 1999, my view changed on how the earliest human societies behaved sexually. I had been invited to lecture at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science at Anaheim, California. My role was to compare the sexual behavior of women in twentieth-century Britain with that of their counterparts in certain Amazonian tribes. Until that symposium, I had always supported the traditional view that the earliest humans were little different from the modern: outwardly monogamous but open to infidelities that they strove to keep secret. But as I listened to my fellow speakers describing the behavior of tribe after tribe from lowland South America, I slowly accepted that there was a much more likely alternative. And that alternative is the behavior I gave to the otherwise fictional tribe around which Caballito revolves.
I made this decision about human sexual ancestry too late to develop in my academic work. But as a novelist I found the thesis a goldmine of images and ideas. Caballito is a story of a clash of cultures and prejudices. It is also a story about ancient instincts battling with modern morals, exactly the sort of conflict that many of my former colleagues in the evolutionary field continue to explore. Maybe my continuing fascination with such questions simply shows that I haven't totally let go of my past - once an evolutionary scientist, always an evolutionary scientist. But I also hope that the questions the novel raises and the answers it suggests say something of interest to those still active in research.
Both Primal and Caballito drew their inspirations from large fields within evolutionary psychology; fields that have generated a multitude of scientific papers. In contrast, The Hitchhiker's Child was inspired quite literally by a single paper that came from a different branch of evolutionary psychology: experimental. The paper concerned was published in this journal, Evolutionary Psychology, but I cannot give the reference nor name the scientists here without creating a massive spoiler for anybody who does happen to read the book. Full credit and reference though is given at the end of the novel.
The apparently impossible conceptions in The Hitchhiker's Child trigger a variety of recriminations on the women concerned. The suspicion of infidelity is, after all, one of the commonest causes of domestic violence, as a number of studies have demonstrated. But the violence and confusion generated by the conceptions in The Hitchhiker's Child are not the only consequences of interest to evolutionary psychologists. Another is the dilemma of what a researcher should do when the only way to answer a question of potential social significance is to perform an experiment that most people would say is ethically unacceptable.
In the book the narrator and his research team gradually find themselves pushed into a situation in which the only way to exonerate a few potentially innocent women (and a man) and prevent further injustice to others in the future is to solve the mystery of the hitchhiker's child. Yet the only way they can do so is to carry out an experiment that is so unethical it would be academic suicide for them all, though being based in the remote Kalahari does have its advantages when trying to hide what they are doing from the academic world.
Although my inspiration for The Hitchhiker's Child came from a published paper by others, I do feel a personal involvement. Partly this involvement is academic—I would like to think that some of my own research laid one of the foundations for the idea—but partly it is also from guilt. A few years ago now, I was asked to give my “expert” opinion on a piece of evidence in a court case. For obvious reasons I cannot give any details that might identify the specific case, but the essence was as follows. A man and his pubertal daughter both vigorously denied any form of sexual contact, yet a paternity test showed that the man was indeed the father of the daughter's child. In his defense, the man could suggest only one way that his daughter could have conceived to him, and I was asked if I thought this method of conception was possible. At the time, while stressing that nobody could say the father's suggestion was totally impossible, my opinion was that it was most unlikely. Other experts were of the same opinion and the man was jailed. Even today I would say the same about that particular means of conception, so would most. But, while writing The Hitchhiker's Child, I realized that there was an alternative and became haunted by the thought that I might have contributed towards an innocent man being jailed. It is far too late for the real cause to be proved either way—but I now think it possible that father and daughter may have been telling the truth.
After The Hitchhiker's Child was published early in January 2013, I contacted two well-known journalists with whom I have worked in the past and whose work I greatly admire. My suggestion was that they bring the method of conception at the center of my novel to a wider audience, maybe even start a campaign for it to be taken into account in such cases as the father and daughter above. I was of course hoping for publicity for my book, but I was also hoping that an article by either of the journalists might alert a wide audience to the social and legal implications of this so far ignored idea—an idea moreover with the potential to avert miscarriages of justice and to provide wrongly accused men and women, disbelieved by partners or lawyers, with a means of vindicating themselves. But both of my journalists said the same thing: “Bring me proof that this actually happens, or at least put me in touch with someone who claims to be a victim, then there might be an article in the idea.” Of course both were right to be cautious—but it means the situation is a stalemate, which returns us to the researcher's dilemma.
Without real proof nobody is likely to believe that such conceptions occur, nobody is likely to claim they are a victim for fear of ridicule, and criminal courts are unlikely to take the possibility into account. Yet “real” proof can only come from the unethical and unpublishable experiment described in the novel. Which means that for the moment, no matter how many men and particularly women really have suffered the same fates as those in The Hitchhiker's Child, the possible explanation must remain confined to the pages of fiction—and to a suggestion by scientists in an article in Evolutionary Psychology.