she is committed to another. But this is what makes crime so interesting. It isn’t what people normally do.
It would be nice to believe that cars slow down on the freeway when there is an accident because of the drivers’ heightened sense of caution: everyone sees the flashing lights up ahead, the smoke, the flares, the ambulances, the fire trucks, and hits the brakes so as not to end up in the same condition as the unfortunates currently being extricated from mangled metal. But this is not generally why people slow down. They slow down to gawk, their curiosity piqued.
Why? Because an accident on the freeway is an anomaly, and anomalies interest us. They always interest us: have done from the beginning of time and will do till the end of it.
Brutal murders garner front-page space. Kidnappings, disappearances, riots, fatal auto accidents, plane crashes, terrorist bombings, armed robbery, snipers firing on the unsuspecting…all of this cuts into everyday life, awakening us to the fragility of our individual existences as it simultaneously whets our appetite to
Crime literature gives us a satisfaction that we are often denied in life. In life, we never do know who really killed Nicole and Ron; we only suspect there was a second gunman on the grassy knoll; we are left to wonder about Dr. Shepherd’s wife and Jeffrey MacDonald’s capacity for truth or self-delusion. The Green River killer disappears into the primordial slime from which he rose, the Zodiac killer joins him there, and we are left with only the questions themselves: who were these people and why did they murder? But in crime fiction, the killers face justice. It can be real justice, poetic justice, or psychological justice. But face it they do. They are un-masked and normalcy is restored. There is vast satisfaction for the reader in that, certainly more satisfaction than is garnered from the investigation into and punishment for an actual crime.
For the writer who wishes to explore characters, there is nothing so catastrophically catalytic as the intrusion of a crime into an otherwise peaceful landscape. A crime places everyone into a crucible: the investigators, the perpetrator, the victims, and those in relationship to the investigators, the perpetrator, and the victims. Within this crucible of life’s most monstrous acts the mettle of the characters is tested. It is when characters confront the most serious challenges to their beliefs, their peace, their sanity, and their way of life that their pathology is triggered. And it is the pathology of the individual character clashing with the pathology of all the other characters that is the stuff of drama and catharsis.
Some of our most enduring pieces of literature have a heinous crime as their backdrop. Hamlet’s monumental mental struggle to overcome his conscience and act the part of Nemesis could not occur had the poisoning of his father not happened in a brutal act of frat-ricide. Oedipus could not fulfill his destiny without first killing King Laius on the road to Thebes. Medea would not be in the position in which she is placed in Corinth — an outcast about to be cast out by a nervous Creon all too aware of her abilities as a sorceress — had her reputation as the mastermind behind King Pelias’s death not preceded her. So it should come as no surprise to anyone who reads that crimes continue not only to fascinate writers but also to serve as the backbone for much of their prose.
What a crime does in a piece of literature is two-fold. First, it serves as a throughline for the story to follow: the crime must be investig-ated and solved within the twists and turns of the plot. But secondly and perhaps more importantly, the crime also acts as a skeleton for the body of the tale that the writer wishes to tell. On this skeleton, the writer can hang as much or as little as she likes. She can keep the skeleton down to the bones alone and tell a story that moves smoothly, concisely, and without deviation or decoration to its revelation and conclusion. Or she can hang upon the skeleton the muscles, tissues, veins, organs, and blood of such diverse elements of storytelling as theme, exploration of character, life and literary symbols, subplots, etc., as well as the specific crime-oriented story elements of clues, red herrings, suspense, and a list of time-honored motifs peculiar to mysteries: the hermetically sealed death chamber (or locked room), the most obvious place, the trail of false clues left by the real killer, the fixed idea, and on and on. Thus, her characters can march hand-in-hand in the direction of an ineluctable conclusion, or they can become sidetracked by the myriad possibilities offered to them through means of an expanded storyline and a more complicated structure.
Why, then, would a writer ever consider dabbling in anything else? There is no reason that I can see. For as long as a writer adheres to the notion that the only rule is there are no rules, the sky’s the limit within this field.
This still doesn’t answer the question about female writers’ attrac-tion to crime literature, and it is indeed a question I’ve been asked over and over again by journalists, with a rather tedious regularity.
The Golden Age of Mystery in Great Britain and the Common-wealth — which I would consider spanning the years from the twenties through the fifties — is dominated by women. Indeed, their names comprise a pantheon into whose company every modern writer aspires to join. Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham…It’s not terribly difficult to sort out why women writers throughout the twentieth century endeavored to join this distinguished company: once one woman made an inroad into an area of literature, other women were quick to follow. The fascination with crime writing on the part of females can thus be explained with ease: women chose to write crime stories because they were successful at it. Success on the part of one woman breeds the desire for success on the part of another.
In the United States, this also holds true. But the difference in the United States is that the Golden Age of Mystery is dominated by men and that women are Janet-come-latelies to it. When we think of the Golden Age in America, we think of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, of first-person narratives with tough-guy private eyes who smoke, drink bourbon, live in seedy apartments, and dismissively refer to women as “dames.” They use guns and their fists, and they’ve got ’tude to spare. They’re loners, and they like it that way.
Breaking into this male-dominated world required guts and tenacity on the part of women writers. Some of them opted to write kinder, gentler mysteries in order to offer something more in keeping with the delicate sensibilities of the female readers they were hoping to attract. Others decided to barge right in and join the men, creating female private eyes who were as hard-bitten as the men they sought to replace. Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky proved irrefutably that a female p.i. would be accepted by an audience of both men and women readers, and a score of other female writers began to follow in Grafton and Paretsky’s footsteps. Thus, the arena widened in the United States as well, offering women another outlet for their creative energies.
Creating crime fiction offers writers a vast landscape as broad and as varied as crime itself. Because there are no hard-and-fast rules and because those few rules that exist exist to be broken (witness the uproar over
This volume doesn’t attempt to answer that question. What it does, however, is present for your entertainment a century’s collection of crime and suspense stories by women. What you’ll notice about this collection is that it includes names closely associated with crime writing — Dorothy L. Sayers, Minette Walters, Sue Grafton, and others — but it also includes some names one doesn’t normally associate with crime writing at all: names like Nadine Gordimer and Joyce Carol Oates. I’ve tried to come up with as wide a range of female authors as possible because a wide range reflects my primary belief about crime writing and that is this: crime writing does not have to be considered genre writing. It is not confined to a few moderately talented practitioners. And most importantly, it is indeed something that can stand, will stand, and has already stood the test of time.
One of the greatest sources of irritation to me as a writer is the number of people who stubbornly consider crime writing a lesser form of literary endeavor. Throughout the years that I’ve written crime fiction, I’ve had numerous conversations with people that reflect this very strange point of view. One man at a writing conference told me that he was going to write crime fiction as practice and then, later on, he would write a “real novel.” (“Like making tacos until you can graduate to chocolate cake from scratch?” I asked him innocently.) A journalist in Germany once asked me what I thought of the fact that my novels weren’t reviewed in a highbrow newspaper that I had never heard of. (“Gosh. I don’t know. I guess that paper doesn’t have much impact on sales,” I told her.) Several times people have stood up during Q&A at the end of speeches I’ve given and asked me why “a writer
