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The Appeal and Challenge of Writing Crime Fiction
From: Columbia University
| By:
Marianne Wesson |
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, Marianne Wesson, professor of law at the University of Colorado, reflected on the reasons behind the popularity of crime fiction. Is it, she asked, that we enjoy the opportunity to match wits with the author, or is it that we find in these books a way of exploring issues of truth and justice? |
 hy are so many readers drawn to the crime or mystery novel and, lately, to the legal novel? The category of crime fiction includes a wide range of work, not always thought of or categorized in this genre. Thinking of contemporary North American fiction, I would include, for example, A Map of the World, Alias Grace, my colleague Linda Hogan's book, Mean Spirit, Rosellen Brown's Before and After, Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres, and a recent and terrific book by Andri Dubus III, House of Sand and Fog. |
Many things that you wouldn't find in the mystery section seem to me to have many of the qualities of crime fiction, detective fiction or legal fiction. And more canonically, of course, there is always The Scarlet Letter, Fall River (one of my favorites) and, of course, Dickens and Jane Austen, Austen especially because what could be more of a legal thriller than the suspense of waiting to see whether the Bennett family is finally going to be able to survive, despite their legal battles over the Bennett property? |
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The classic answer to the question about the popularity of crime fiction is that it's an opportunity to match wits with the author, to see whether the reader can see around the corner of the plot and guess what's coming before it's revealed by the author. In a review of Agatha Christie, who was said to be the mistress of this kind of crime fiction, a reviewer once said famously that "she passed the bulls closer to her chest than any other writer before or since." He was suggesting that what's exciting about reading crime fiction is the same thing that's exciting about going to a bull fight, that you want to see the bullfighter hold the cape as close as possible to her chest and get the bull's horns as close as possible before she finally veers away. Christie, this reviewer said, was able to do that by giving the reader almost, but not quite, all of the clues necessary to allow the reader to get ahead of the author and guess the ending. The challenge and the fun of matching wits with a skilled author are always part of the charm, the delight and the entertainment of reading these fictions. |
Another charm of this work is an opportunity to see and read about protagonists who hold work at the center of their lives in the way that I suspect almost everyone in the room does. In too much fiction, it seems to me, protagonists--and especially female protagonists--are assigned a job of work, a profession in the same way they might be assigned an address or a suit of clothes, as a kind of an accessory, a shorthand for who they are. But it's not at the center of their lives in the way that work is for many people today, that is, not an accessory, not a fashion statement, but something that you just do all the time, every day, more or less from the time you wake up until the time you go to bed. |
The work is at the center of these novels, and that, I suspect, for many readers forms part of their appeal. On the rare occasions you can tear yourself away from your work to read something, you want to read about someone who has something in common with you, someone who is obsessed by, haunted by, frustrated by and exhausted by her work. |
How does the female protagonist reinforce or subvert the conventions of detective or mystery or legal fiction? It seems to me that two of the more prominent conventions, that is, the loneliness or solitariness of the protagonist and his skill with the uses of violence becomes much more interesting and troubling when inflected in a female voice. |
The struggle for justice and truth
More profoundly, though, I think these works expose us to an absorbing and a desperately serious struggle, and that's the struggle between two competing visions of the law and all of its accoutrements--the justice system, the police. There is a lot at stake here, for it is a defining feature of this nation, more than a common culture or a common language, or a monarch. It's a defining feature of us, one of the few things that we all share--we have a commitment to the rule of law. So of course we are concerned with what the law is, and what it means to live under the rule of law. |
Scholars continue to worry about this question, but tellers of stories can bring this struggle into our hearts as well as into our minds. Is law an instrument of justice and equality? Is it our best hope for the vindication of right over wrong without violence? The civil liberties specialist Robert M. Cover instructed that behind the law there always lies the reality--or at least the threat--of violence. I suppose that's true, but in our ideal vision of the law, the one we want to hold close to us, we cannot shake the profound conviction that this meticulous process will produce justice, even if force (or the threat of it) is lurking in the background. Kings, I suppose, have their armies, too, but that's very unlikely to make a dent in the reverence of those who are inclined to revere their monarchs. We want to believe that the rule of law is one of the best inventions of humankind, even as we have to confess that we too often fail in executing it perfectly. |
Is the legal process a path to the truth? For truth, I think, is another of our obsessions. Again, we want to think so, even though the prevailing academic epistemology which I believe is post-modernism these days, instructs us that if there's anything we can know, it's only the possibility of recognizing that we can't know anything. Even so, even in the face of this pessimism, I think we want to believe that there is a possibility that we may someday encounter the truth and recognize it. But even those who refuse to be pessimistic about the truth doubt that we are going to find it in a courtroom. Still, we keep going there, we keep looking for what we can't find. |
The skepticism about whether the legal process will lead us to the truth is not new; I don't think it's a product of post-modernism. I found the following lines in a very pre-postmodern poem, Carl Sandburg's "The People, Yes." Sandburg is describing a trial and a moment when a witness is required to take the familiar oath that is exacted from witnesses in American courtrooms. Here's how the poem goes:
Do you solemnly swear, before the ever-living God, that the testimony you are about to give in this case shall be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?
No, I don't.
I can tell you what I saw and what I heard, and I'll swear to that by the ever-living God. But the more I study it, the more sure I am that nobody but the ever-living God knows the whole truth.
And if you summon Christ as a witness in this case what He would tell you would burn your insides with the pity and the mystery of it.
(from "The People, Yes," Carl Sandburg, 1936)
Now there's an oath I would like to hear a witness take in a courtroom someday. We who work in classrooms and courtrooms know that the truth will elude us again, and yet we cannot stop looking for it. So in our books we document our continued and ardent and doomed courtship with the truth, that cycle of illusion and disillusion that characterizes all of the most enduring love stories. |
In the law, we and our characters look for the truth; sometimes in the end we find it, but often we only encounter corruption, greed and lies. And yes, what we find is that our insides burn with the pity and the mystery of it. Even romance novelists know that doomed courtships are far more interesting than successful ones, and that's part of what keeps us coming back for more. Even if, as writers, we don't succeed in burning your insides with the pity and the mystery of what we are telling you, we can perhaps hope, at least, to warm them up a little bit. |
This quest for justice, for truth, for the true nature of law might be pursued by reading nonfiction books about law, works of journalism or scholarship. And yet, at times, that's not what we want--we want a story. I think we seek out stories about the law in part for their particularity, for their texture, their invocation of sights and sounds and tastes and smells, and the terrifying or thrilling brush of a sleeve against a bare arm. |
We live in an age of theory, where everyone from political candidates to academics seems to shun particularity and embrace generality and abstraction. The law especially could sometimes be characterized as a machine for wringing the particularity and the locality out of a situation so as to enable its placement in the proper legal category. Works that encourage our resistance to this process can replace the flesh that the study of law has torn off our imaginations. |
Charles Reznikov: lawyer turned poet
The patron saint of this proposition, I'm suggesting, must surely be Charles Reznikov, a man who was, by many measures, a failure as a scholar. Reznikov was a lawyer educated at the NYU Law School shortly after the turn of the century. He did well as a law student and he got at that time quite a desirable job working for Corpus Juris Secundum, which, in those days before Westlaw and Lexis and capable search engines, was a series of digests in which cases were read by editors like Reznikov. Then certain legal propositions were extracted from them and numbered and placed in a highly organized numbering system, so those who wanted to see what cases had been decided on certain of the numbered propositions could go straight to that number in the index and read a digest of the case. |
Reznikov's job was to read these cases and to extract from them the abstract propositions that could then be numbered, digested and placed in Corpus Juris Secundum. He was hopeless at this work. He struggled to produce his weekly quota of digested cases, assigned numbers to the abstractions that the cases were supposed to stand for, but the detail and the pathos of the stories that he was supposed to be digesting slowed him down further and further until he finally had to stop altogether. One report I read said that the case that finally put an end to his career as a scholar was the case of a woman who went out one morning to get a mackerel for breakfast for herself and her husband, came back, found that her husband had not done the things that he was supposed to do in her absence, and assaulted him with the mackerel. I think it was the texture and the smell of that mackerel that stopped Reznikov dead in his tracks and made him realize that assigning a number to this case was going to leave out something essential about what had really happened. |
He worked more and more slowly, and he was eventually fired. But out of his career as a piecework scholar grew a new one: he became a noted poet, transforming the raw material of the law into poems of great wit and clarity. And his masterpiece, Testimony, was a two-volume collection of poems based on cases that he had discovered while reading law reports. He was a very bad scholar but a very good poet. His refusal or inability to ignore the particularities, even while struggling to understand and articulate the grand principles that guide us, is another part of the enduring appeal of fiction for lawyers. |
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