Say "Murder" and Smile: Group Photos in Glass Onion, Last of Sheila & Rising Tide

Murder disrupts a reunion of sixty-somethings who've retreated to the same beach house since they were teens.

That's the premise of The Rising Tide (Minotaur, 2022) by Ann Cleeves. The author sets up the situation from different points of view, involving us with tensions among friends that will lead to the crime. Cleeves kept me turning pages and guessing wrong through to the end. Her detective Vera Stanhope is a charismatic character, the rare detective who seems to enjoy what she's doing. As often happens in novels by Cleeves, our sympathies are engaged even more in the detective's seconds. Junior officers Holly Clarke and Joe Ashworth bring this novel to an especially strong conclusion.

But it was page 129, when Vera shows Holly and Joe a photo from the 1970s, before I was moved to write in the margin I'm enjoying this! Not that I liked the preceding pages less, but that the photo snapped layers of time into focus at a glance, ramping up the energy of the story. 

Because a similar photo is important to the recent film The Glass Onion, I will veer away from Vera to consider the group photo as a trope of crime fiction.

Group Photos in Rising Tide and Glass OnionLooking at the photo in Rising Tide, Joe recognizes the "short, skinny one" who became both a TV celebrity and a murder victim, observing, "He'd have been bullied at our school, looking like that," and guessing that two dour young men staring at the camera would've been "the ones doing the bullying." When the detectives identify a stylish young woman as the one who would later drown in the eponymous high tide at the group's first reunion, Vera speaks directly to the photo, "Eh lass, let's find out why you died."

In Glass Onion, a group of characters now prominent in their fields appear in a photograph taken at a club "The Glass Onion" when they were geeky thirty-somethings. When we see that photo, the friends smiling with their arms around each other, we're already aware of the reasons all of them have to resent "Miles Bron," the man smiling at center. His hand is on the shoulder of the one person who isn't mugging for the camera -- the one he will betray, abetted by the others.

In both Tide and Onion, there's a shiver of irony as we compare the best friends forever of the past with the resentful rivals of the present. In Onion, there's also humor, as the characters' public personae are undercut by this photo of their nerdy and goofy young selves.

Sondheim and the Trope of the Group Photo

A group photo figures prominently in The Last of Sheila (1973), a film that must have inspired Onion's writer/director Rian Johnson. I deduce this because Stephen Sondheim, who co-wrote Sheila with actor Anthony Perkins, is one of two dedicatees of the film.

[In Onion, Sondheim makes a cameo appearance with Angela Lansbury (star of both Murder, She Wrote on TV and Sondheim's Sweeney Todd on Broadway). Onion is dedicated to both Sondheim and Lansbury, "who taught us so much."]

Another clue is that Onion tracks Sheila pretty closely during the set-up. In the first several minutes of both films (after a prologue in Sheila), we see each character receive their invitation to join a millionaire-host.  Characters in both films gather on a yacht in the vicinity of Greece. The host in each movie introduces a mystery-themed party game before the stories diverge.

In Sheila, the host poses his guests on the dock for a photo. He's fussy about who stands where. In the background is the yacht named for his late wife Sheila, killed by a careening car as she fled a party where these same people were guests. As secrets are revealed and recriminations begin, the carefree poses of the photo become ironic.

Sondheim and Perkins also use the photo to tease. The host tacks it beside the score card for his game, remarking that the solution to the mystery is in plain sight. In Onion, we hear the same words spoken where that group photo is displayed.

Any Other Examples?I haven't thought of any more examples from movies or books, but I myself used the group photo for effect in a murder mystery.

My 8th grade students created the story of Under the Surface through improvised encounters between characters. Like Onion and Rising Tide, the premise is a reunion. The characters, in college now, attend a memorial for their friend Lily, who presumably drowned the previous summer, though her body hasn't been found.

We created a group photo for which the actors dressed like kids in summer camp, to have a visual aid for exposition. The audience was close enough to the stage to see the photo while college-aged characters reminisced about summer gatherings going back to middle school days.

Group photo in Under the Surface six years before enmity and murder break up the group. This was the cast for a revival of the play produced when the ones who wrote it were high school seniors.

 

The photo also gave us an eerie and effective tableau for the end. The penultimate scene of the play climaxed in a suicide-murder: the criminal, cornered by his accuser, has doused the cabin with gasoline. He lights a match. "Fire!" a boy screamed off-stage as, simultaneously, the lights blacked out. Running in from behind the audience, the boy drew attention away from the stage where the actors quickly exited.

Lights came up as he hit the stage screaming, "It's the bonfire!" The characters chatted as they entered for the group photo, and, knowing how it will all end, we hear the stirrings of personal resentments "under the surface." They smiled and froze: slow fade.

Irony, pathos, and some classic misdirection: they made a great conclusion.

The group photo is not a murder-mystery cliché -- yet. I recommend the technique.

More Connections

• At least two bits of dialogue in The Glass Onion come from Sondheim's songs for Merrily We Roll Along - "Now You Know" and "Our Time." The show relates, being about the dissolution of old friendships.
• My blogpost Sondheim's Murder Mysteries tells more about Sheila and traces numerous connections between Sondheim and Knives Out, the previous film in the Onion domain.
• See a curated list of links to my reflections on other novels by Ann Cleeves.