Crime Fiction: Why Read It, Why Write it

Annamaria on Monday

The two questions in my title today are closely linked.

From the readers point of view, there is a commonly cited answer.  Critics and scholars mostly attribute the enormous popularity of crime fiction to the fact that, unlike real life, the stories provide closure and deliver justice.  In addition, mysteries provoke moral questions: What is right? What is wrong?  How should people deal with the wrong?  When, if ever, is it permissible to break the law or the commandments in order to rectify a societal ill? Etc.  Etc.

From a writer's point of view, these latter questions and other similar conundrums seem to provide real answers to why we choose to write the kind of stories we do.  

We create fictional worlds where people are having to live in unfair, lawless, or even out-and-out life threatening circumstances.  How are ordinary people supposed to cope?  Who might be helpful?  Who might make things worse? How can we tell the difference?  What does it take to survive.

 I don't mean to say that an author always makes these decisions consciously.  Many of us begin with a premise and characters that we think we know and let them loose in a place, and listen to what they have to tell us.  But we all know that we have to put our imaginary friends into trouble.  And to make it get worse before they can make it better.  The most important thing in any story for me - mine or anybody else's - is that the character(s) have to be changed by their experiences.  

As a historical novelist, I also find the tropes of the mystery genre helpful.  I always begin with a time and place that I find fascinating  But I want to weave that history into the story seamlessly. To me it's a huge flaw if a historical novelist treats them as two different topics.  In Gone with the Wind for instance, the reader gets three ages of story and then four pages history and then another page and half of history.  Clunky!  In the extreme!

In writing fiction, I discovered early on that if I pick the right dead body, that weaving comes naturally.  To solve the crime my characters have to think about what life is like then and there.  In Invincible Country for instance, the dead man is a favorite of the dictator Francisco Solano Lopez.  The victim's murderer must be found.  Otherwise an innocent suspect will executed.  To identify the culprit, my characters have to delve into the happenings of that time and place.  In doing so, in their thoughts and in their conversations they tell the reader what life was like in war torn Paraguay in 1886.

Also, for me, writing in a time of war, I can show readers how people of the past stuck together and helped one another they survive.

 

Photo New York Times

Sometimes, I find a hole in the historical record.  That's when the fun really begins for me.  In invincible Country, the missing piece of history is what became of the enormous treasure -gold and jewels - of Paraguay. No one ever found out. There are still people digging around 140 years later, hoping to find it.

My fictional characters not only discover where it was, they learn where it went.