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New Directions in Crime Fiction
From: Columbia University
| By:
Linda Fairstein |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Does solving a good mystery thrill you? In a panel at Columbia Law School, three successful women crime writers (who are also professional lawyers) discussed the genre of crime fiction and the role of the female protagonist. In this story, Linda Fairstein, chief of the Sex Crimes Unit of the Manhattan District Attorney's Office, considered the recent history of the crime novel and the contributions made by Patricia Cornwell and other writers with a real knowledge of legal and forensic work. |
 think that crime fiction involving women protagonists has taken such an extraordinarily new direction since the 1970s. I would say that there are three major subcategories in the genre: the first of which I would call cozies; the second, private investigation books, in which the character is a private eye (similar to Carolyn Heilbrun's detective); and the third, what I would call procedurals. |
The cozies started with the British tradition of "the body in the vicarage," with a very amateur sleuth beginning to solve them. What was novel about Agatha Christie was that she was doing a tremendous amount of research and scholarship into what were the forensic techniques at the time. Christie was really living within the limits of the kinds of professions that women could have in that day and age, both in England and in the USA. |
The private-eye (or detective) role that came about later reflected a wider range of things that women could assume and do. As a reader I have enjoyed the genre since my adolescence and read heavily in it despite my attempt at scholarship as an undergraduate in the English department of a fine women's college. But it was not until I got into this profession as a prosecutor 28 years ago that both of those sub-categories frustrated me as a reader. Having worked in the District Attorney's office for 28 years, I have never had a single murder case that I've worked on solved by a private investigator when the NYPD was unable to do it, or by an amateur sleuth walking around a churchyard. So it's a little frustrating that the Hamilton Berger vision of the prosecutor who has lost every case in his career is the one that seems to have been assigned to prosecutors from the beginning. |
Procedurals and the legal thriller
Then I discovered something new and delightful: the early Patricia Cornwell books. Post Mortem was the first of them. Cornwell is the only writer that I know of to have won all four major mystery-writing awards in the first year the novel was published. It was a very small print edition in hardcover of 6,000 books by Scribner and sold for what was probably then the hardcover price of $15 or so. Now if you can get your hands on one of those 6,000 copies it will cost you $1,100, so Cornwell did a lot of things for those of us who followed behind her as women who write crime novels. |
Those books were the first that I had come across with a woman character in a procedural category. Patricia Cornwell is not a forensic pathologist, but she apprenticed for years trying to write fiction (her literary fiction was rejected). She has about three books in a drawer that were never published. She made her living as a clerk working in the forensic pathologist's office and the morgue in Richmond, Virginia, and began to find the things that she wrote about. The actual lead pathologist there was, unusually for that time, a woman, Marcella Fiero. Cornwell studied Fiero and began to write about what she was watching. |
That series of procedurals had a strong woman character in a nontraditional role--that character was a professional, and she was solving murders because the bodies in these cases spoke to her--and that opened up a field that is very full and rich today. |
There are many practicing lawyers who write legal thrillers: for example, Richard North Patterson, John Grisham and Lisa Scottolini (who is a terrific lawyer). I still think that Scott Turow's Presumed Innocent, aside from the fact that it's about a murdered sex–crimes prosecutor, is one of the best legal thrillers ever written. I'm always amazed when people say to me, "Why are there so many lawyers writing thrillers?" The ability to communicate well and to communicate effectively is certainly one of the most important skills we need to develop as lawyers, and it is a great pain to me to see how computer–reliant we have become, especially in offices where every motion and every response to every motion is boilerplate formulated and spit out of a computer if we just push the date, place and time of occurrence into it. |
Most of the high–profile cases that my colleagues and I have been involved in prosecuting require that after you've been on trial for several weeks, even for a few months, you sit down and prepare a brief summation using facts, not creative imagination. You need to tell a factual story in a compelling way that will convince a jury that your position is correct. What is exciting to me about this category of fiction--one in which I've lived as a reader for a long time--is that the work we do that so informs these books on a professional level, and the kind of detection that women are involved in doing, are taken to another level altogether as well. |
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