With All Due Respect to Agatha and Angela
I trust that it’s needless to say that the shooting incidents of the last couple of weeks in the States have rightly refocused the attention of many Americans–though not enough Americans–on gun violence.
I can offer you a few non-politicized, undeniable facts, thanks to the work of the independent nonprofit news organization called The Trace.
- Each year in the United States, a firearm is used in close to 500,000 crimes.
- The headlines and news stories we normally read refer to only some 2 percent of the gun deaths actually occurring here.
- At least 14,611 Americans were killed in 2018 by guns, and that excludes suicides.
- That’s actually a 7-percent drop over 2017, in which there were 15,658 non-suicide gun deaths.
If you’d like more specifics, here’s a good article with charts. The gun lobby in this country has suppressed the kind of research that develops this information. You may find it illuminating.
My provocation for you today is about homicide in literature–and, of course, associated entertainments, but let’s focus on books because that’s what we’re about here.
We have a long, long history as writers and as a publishing industry, with crime fiction. And I’ll confess that I’ve never liked that vast set of genres and sub-genres. That’s a personal bias and I want to be sure that I present it to you so you can count out the correct number of grains of salt.
I find crime repulsive and criminals disgusting. I revere the best of our police forces in real life–what shows of heroism we’ve seen in tactical responses to the recent inexcusable attacks! But if I never read another police-procedural again in my life, that will be just fine. I find quirky detectives ridiculous and I simply won’t watch or read something that involves one of these sleuths “coming out of retirement for one last case.” Like cowboy westerns and doctor shows, I really wish we could give this whole thing a rest.
However, I can also assure you that I see murder-mystery writing as one of the most demanding challenges of the canon, not least because readers seem so obsessed with finding flaws and guessing culpability–and the ways and means of taking human life–despite the author’s best efforts to conceal things.
And among the crime-writing authors I know, the cozy mystery folks are among the hardest-working, best-organized, most assiduously conscious fiction writers I’ve ever encountered. By that, I mean that they know their stuff, they know how they make it, and they know what works and what doesn’t with a precision that would make a literary writer weep.
So please understand that my comments here today are in no way, shape, or format meant to suggest that our crime-fiction and particularly cozy-murder writers are anything but superb professionals and great people. If you write this literature, do not feel criticized here. In fact, please, help us think about this with your experienced head.
What I do think we need to ask ourselves is how much crime fiction and especially the more genteel, soft elements of that world may be fogging over the actual horror of death–in a world now far more weaponized and angry than it was when these genres and traditions were originally developed?
