I’ve been thinking recently about crime.
“D’uh huh,” you say. “You write crime fiction. Shouldn’t you be doing that every day?”
These thoughts aren’t about putting words on paper, but about the nature of crime itself.
More specifically, the link between the fiction of our genre, and actual crime. It’s been on my mind. A lot.
Don’t misunderstand me, I’m not talking about causal links. I don’t believe violence in video games and films begets actual violence. There’s enough evidence of people enjoying escapism in these forms who don’t turn out to be murdering psychopaths that I feel pretty comfortable dismissing that particular theory.
Thanks to Bill Watterson for his brilliance
But we’d be fools to read and write crime fiction without at least acknowledging the horrors from the printed page starkly reflected in the world around us.
I was captured by these thoughts in the days following the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in the US and I wondered (hoped) if the idea might lose some timeliness before I could complete this essay. Unfortunately, before I even started to put these words on the screen, I saw news that there had been another school shooting in Alabama.
And almost undoubtedly, there’s been at least one more by the time you’re reading this. I sincerely hope not, but I won’t be betting against it.
It makes me feel like I’ve got two separate halves of me residing in the same body.
I can read Karin Slaughter, Ian Rankin, or Caroline Kepnes and find myself lost in the words, the characters, the situations, no matter how horrifying they may be, and I don’t bat an eyelid.
But I only have to see the words ‘school shooting’ on my Twitter feed and a black hole opens in my gut threatening to turn my physical being inside out.
I can rationalise with the best of us, convince myself that I’m not a contributing factor to the horrible things that people do to each other, but I wonder: do my actions (what I read and write) tacitly condone it?
And, if not condoning, then do my literary preferences not, at the very least, demonstrate a selfish and thoughtless disregard to the victims of real crime?
If I thought for one minute that it would change things for me to not write these stories that seize my mind and my spirit, I’d stop in a heartbeat.
I’m not naïve enough to think that I can conjure up influence of that sort. On the other hand, I also can’t accept that there’s not a part that we’re playing in this particular show.
So, what is the connection between the stuff of our imaginations and the tragic stories that litter our newsfeeds? And what responsibility do we have as authors and readers to stop those that choose to commit horrific acts?
There’s been discussion about a recent attempt to acknowledge this responsibility: the creation of a literary award for crime fiction that specifically excludes violence to women.
One side of the argument goes: It elevates the conversation about violence towards women, that it is unacceptable, and that the conversation will help to improve the reality for the many women who suffer each day.
The other side: Surely all violence is unacceptable, regardless of gender identity? And by the way, painting over fictional violence towards women—towards anyone—in crime fiction is so unrealistic that all such work should be classified as fantasy and therefore misses the point somewhat.
Such is my life, and brain, that I can see both sides of this discussion, but I tend to fall with the nays on this one.
By the logic that removing a certain type of violence from literature solves that same, very real problem, then surely we can just ban all violence in consumer entertainment and be done with it. Problem solved, right?
I’m not convinced that limiting their reading material to Archie comics and Mr. Men books would have fundamentally changed the Zodiac killer. Or the Unabomber. Or the kids who shot up Columbine High School.
It’s not that simple.
Whitewashing over violence on the page may screen the problem for a small slice of the reading public but, in a perfect example of the law of unintended consequences, at the same time it barricades them from the solution. It removes the chance to see the other side of the battle-between-good-and-evil coin.
The heroes. The light in the darkness. Their yin to the bad guy’s yang.
Hope.
When the world seems too bleak our fictional heroes, who struggle in the grimy darkness against external threats and internal demons, give us hope that a better day lies ahead.
In their unique ways, our fictional heroes remind us of the good we can see. Do. Be.
For while they say there is a murderer inside each of us there’s also a hero.
And good, honest crime fiction, no matter how dark, reminds us of that.
Kinsey Milhone and Sara Linton echo the power and potential of Emma Gonzalez.
Matt Scudder reminds us that it’s never too late to change and, no matter how low we may have sunk, there’s still a chance to improve.
When all is lost and everything seems hopeless, John Rebus encourages us to keep going. Not because it’s the only thing to do, but because it’s right. And noble. And honorable.
So we keep going. Step by step if we must, making progress where and when we can, holding tightly to hope along the way.
Our responsibility is to mirror our heroes who endure more than we think possible and keep leading us onwards.
In fiction, and in reality.