Why do you write crime fiction? Isn't it all just guns, blood, and violence?

Over breakfast, I was chatting with my wife saying how I was dealing with more dead bodies in that morning's writing session.

Her: Why do you write stuff like that?
Me (after I got over my defensiveness): Um, uh… well, cuz… FLANNERY O’CONNOR.

I didn’t even try to explain the blurted remark. She’s heard me wax on about O’Connor before. She is a wonderful patient woman (my wife I mean. Reading her correspondence, I got the sense that Flannery didn’t suffer fools, or critics, much... and would tear a strip off of any one that gave her a weak argument. A writer not to be trifled with.)

But it did get me thinking about why I love writing and reading crime fiction.

I really don’t like violence. The last fight I got into was in Grade 4. And I got my ass handed to me thank- you very much. I stopped watching horror movies in my early 20s because I just couldn't hack the blood and gore. (Haha, hack, get it?) I remember the movie - Cat People, the Paul Schrader remake, where someone gets their arm ripped off. And blood gushes out and out and out… okay, I feel woozy writing this. But I got up, said, ok, enough of that, and left the theatre.

So why in the hell write crime fiction queasy-boy?

Well, did I mention Flannery O’Connor? Oh, I did? Have you talked to my wife?
Anyway, here is what the master said:

I have found that violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace. Their heads are so hard that almost nothing else will do the work.

Now, don’t get me wrong... the crime fiction I write is not worthy to tie the sandal strap of the brilliant and fierce FOC. But her work, and reading other writers I admire, got me thinking about what my characters and stories are telling me. Why am I writing this stuff?

For starters, I learned over the years not to being with, or forcibly inject theme into a story - and thank God I learned it. Because when I look at some of my early work it was all shouting and pointing: hey, over here, major moral lesson!!!
The didactic lessons that I doled out would make Aesop blush. (Dude, a bit more subtly, old Aesop would say. Cuz, he was like from California or some tripped out place. Talking animals? Point made.)

But stepping back from my own crime fiction, I realized that I was pushing my characters into violence. I pushed them into situations where their heads were so hard that nothing else would work on them... and by work, I mean have them show their true character, and if I got incredibly lucky, expose a moment that espouses the human condition.

YES I SAID ESPOUSED THE HUMAN FUCKING CONDITION.

Relax. I say shit like that.

Growing up I read a shit-ton of science fiction and fantasy (you want morality plays? Read a couple of space operas and one dragon slayer to go please.) But I also loved the mysteries, as a kid it was the Three Investigators more than Encyclopedia Brown (because who could figure out that shit?) And later in my teenage years, I discovered a guy named Donald Westlake. In some ways his work was above me, I didn’t really understand what he was doing. But now, as a sort of adult, reading him, and especially his writing as Richard Stark, I was drawn into the darkness, into a place where violence happened, and things changed.

I’ll leave this for now, and say more in the next post.
But to say this is a lead up to what I am trying to do in the crime novels with Luke Fischer.

Thanks for reading, and please comment.

Illustration above by the late and very great Darwyn Cooke - illustrating Stark’s The Outfit.