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.

I Me, Her She

 Michael - Alternate Thursdays

One of the things an author has to decide is the voice that tells the story. It’s often quite a hard choice. If one decides on first person, that means that the main character or protagonist herself is going to tell the story. It has plusses and minuses. Among the plusses are that the protagonist is in action on every line. She is saying what she did or is doing (if one opts for present tense) in every sentence. Right away that points out a disadvantage. If she is telling the story in the past tense, we know she survives to “tell the tale”. (That’s not a huge disadvantage though because protagonists usually don’t get killed off during a story anyway no matter how long the odds of them surviving.) The important thing is that her voice is the voice of the story and that feeds back strongly to character. Everything relates to her.

So is this a great way to develop character? Yes, as long as one’s careful to avoid tropes. A classic is: “I looked in the mirror and saw a pert face with wrinkles starting to develop around the eyes.” Rather let the reader imagine her, and let her age develop from other background information. Readers are smart. They don’t need to be told everything and can get bored if they are.

From the point of view of a mystery story or thriller, a disadvantage is that you can only tell what the protagonist has seen or experienced herself. Often tension is built by seeing the bad guys getting close or betrayals taking place. You can’t do that in first person. Also, since everything is in the protagonist’s voice, it better be a voice that the reader is prepared to listen to for the whole book.

When Stanley and I started our stand-alone thriller Dead of Night we decided we were going to try for first person. We also decided to use present tense, hoping that the immediacy and strong voice of the protagonist would help carry a thriller. We were also keen to try something new and stretch ourselves from our third person past story telling of Kubu. It didn’t work for a variety of reasons that we didn’t completely understand. First, to be in your character’s head for the whole book, you need to know the character really well. For us, this was a new character and being pantsers we like things to develop as we go along. That's hard to do in first person with a character you don’t know. Stan volunteered to write a few chapters about her background and see where that went. It ended up as a separate novel – Wolfman. After that we certainly knew Crystal Nguyen better and although we dropped the present tense, we wrote the whole book in first person.

Our editors were not delighted. Basically, it didn’t really work. We rewrote the book, but still Crystal’s voice as narrator didn’t seem to ring entirely true. Eventually, at our editor’s request, we took the “nuclear option” and rewrote the whole book in third person close. That means that the narrator follows the character page by page but is still observing, not telling the story in her voice. That approach worked much better, and that’s how the book was eventually published.

Afterwards we thought about why this particular book caused us so much trouble, even after we got to know Crystal really well. We came to the conclusion that perhaps it was too challenging for two people to be inside one person’s head at the same time, which is what we were trying to do. Narration has to be in a consistent voice too, of course, but if one thinks about it, the narrator is not a person, not a character in the story. So the voice must be seamless, but the internal thoughts behind it can vary somewhat.

We have written a few short stories in first person, but our way of writing short stories together is quite different from our novels. For a short story, one of us writes the whole first draft and then sends that to the other for edits, comments, suggestions and so on. Thus the voice is really one author’s voice not the voice of two authors writing together.

For example, The Ring is a short story we wrote for the Crimefest anthology Ten Year Stretch. I was intrigued by the informal recyclers who operate in Johannesburg (and many other cities around the world). On the day when a suburb puts out its garbage for collection, they appear early and sort through it for bottles and cardboard and any usable items that the suburbanite no longer wants or needs but that they can use or sell. These are then loaded onto homemade trolleys and dragged to where they can sell the items.

I wondered how they thought about their informal jobs and chatted to one who filtered my rubbish where I was living at that time. Afterwards, I wondered how he would react if he discovered a body in the bin? Or better than a whole body, what about a chopped off head? I never had any doubt that the story should be in first person. I didn’t want to describe his reactions, or what he thought of the police. I wanted him to show us himself. It seemed to work pretty well, and received a positive reaction from the editor and readers of the anthology.

If you would like to read it and judge for yourself, you can download it HERE as a pdf from our website. I’d love to know what you think. Would it have worked as well in third person? And while we’re on the subject, if you’re a writer how do you choose between I Me and Her She?

Writing Mysteries While Gaza Burns?

 Ovidia--every other Tuesday

The skies are peaceful here in Singapore right now, but we're well aware that's far from the case elsewhere in the world right now.

Singapore has committed to contributing over half a million dollars in humanitarian aid to Gaza, but that feels like so little. What else can we do? This island is about one-thirtieth the size of Israel, and if even world powers like America and the UN can't extract a fair agreement on sharing land, water and tolerating differences what can we, on the other side of the planet do?

What can anyone do?

I suspect that's what we're all trying to figure out--some of us by writing books and things like this. Writing murder mysteries while people are being massacred in their homes and hospitals might be today's version of fiddling while Rome burns. 

But let me point out that Nero was likely finger strumming (not bowing) an instrument closer to a ukulele or guitar than a fiddle. That makes no difference to the fate of Rome or of Nero--the image that's come down to us via writers like Suetonius, Shakespeare, Samuel Pepys and Samuel Johnson. So maybe writers can do some little good?

Trevanian's Shibumi,  no longer reads like a farcical take on the action-spy genre.

Trevanian (Rodney Whitaker, once a fierce supporter of Israel) said of Shibumi, thirty years after he wrote it: "Nicholas Hel... would have wished the current rational leaders of Palestine all good fortune in negotiating towards peace with justice",

But writers aren't always listened to: Robert Musil wrote of the "tortured relationship between writers and mass politics, literature and radicalized societies" as he watched the rise of Nazism:

[from : February 1933: The Winter of Literature by Uwe Wittstock, translated from the German by Daniel Bowles.]

“Life goes on”—even though, each day, hundreds are killed, imprisoned, beaten up, et cetera. This is not frivolity, but is rather to be compared to the helplessness of the herd that is slowly pressed forward while those at the very front go to their deaths. The herd sniffs the air, senses what is happening, becomes uneasy, but has no stored psychological response, has absolutely no defense against this situation,"

It feels like we in the global herds are sniffing now, uneasy over Putin's assault on Ukraine and Narendra Modi's approach (explicitly inspired by Nazism) to handling "enemies of the people" in India.

I don't know enough about any of this to say anything useful, but I'm trying to learn by reading Maria Stepanova's poetry in translation, following Galina Yuzefovich's English language podcast The Naked Pravda and Mikhail Shishkin's articles (especially on the 2022 invasion of Ukraine) and novels.

And there's Anuradha Roy's novels and articles--last year she said,  

"We are perpetually in turmoil—a state of debate, worry, anger, and confusion…. Formally there is no censorship of written work, but the atmosphere of constant anxiety within a whole community of reading and writing people, a sense of there being violence in the air we breathe, is equally undermining,"

With this overload of real life horrors, what are mystery writers to do? I think the only thing we can do is go on writing.

In the best mysteries (according to Dorothy L Sayers)  "you find a world of people having their roots in time and space and a life which extends beyond the limits of the immediate problem. Larger issues are at stake than the precise method by which the arsenic is administered"

We aren't writing (just) puzzles or thrillers or moralising tales with happy endings. 

Yes, we may be offering escapism and comfort reading but we're also giving readers a chance to try on possible reactions to the worst life throws at them--and hinting that they might rise to throw something back at life.

Like fables and fairy tales mystery stories tell of the possibility of justice and happy endings. 

And most important, though death is always lurking and people can be bloody horrible, mystery writers remind us that individuals matter. And that we are individual moral creatures who can make choices that can make a difference.