Does crime fiction contribute to violence?

By Sandra Parshall
 
Benjamin LeRoy, publisher of the independent press Tyrus Books, worries that the hardboiled crime fiction he publishes may be contributing to gratuitous violence in American society. He is addressing his own concern by moving Tyrus away from offering crime fiction exclusively and introducing  general titles among its 10 annual frontlist publications.

LeRoy said in an interview with Publisher’s Weekly that the change was inspired by the string of mass shootings in American schools and public places. “I look at what we’re doing, what we’re saying. What are we putting out there in the public consciousness?” he told PW. “I’ve always been fascinated with how fiction is a reflection of the times we live in. It’s something I’ve wrestled with: if what we’re publishing, if what we’re putting out there, contributes to this gratuitous violence.”

Based in Madison, Wisconsin, the four-year-old press is a division of F+W Media. It has 60 books in print, and a number of its crime novels have been nominated for and won awards. However, its bestselling book to date, with 20,000 copies sold, is neither a mystery nor crime fiction but a 2011 “literary noir” novel, Untouchable by Scott O’Connor, which explores the impact of a woman’s death on her husband and son. LeRoy wants to diversify still further, while continuing to publish novels about “people who are outcasts, struggling to understand who they are, where they’re going, and what they’re going to do.”

Tyrus recently released Graphic the Valley by Peter Hoffmeister, a coming-of-age novel with an environmental theme. LeRoy says Graphic the Valley has persuaded him to spend more time outdoors enjoying nature. In November Tyrus will publish children’s book author Betsy Franco’s first adult novel, Naked, described as a magical realism fable inspired by the life and death of sculptor Camille Claudel.

This new direction for Tyrus, and LeRoy’s concern about crime fiction contributing to real-life violence, haven’t received much attention in the mystery community. If Tyrus had a bigger footprint in the publishing world, LeRoy’s comments would undoubtedly be the subject of a lot of discussion among writers and editors. But doesn’t he raise valid questions about what we’re doing? Should we ignore those questions just because Tyrus publishes 10 books a year?

Where do you think crime fiction fits into our society? Do novels featuring graphic violence (usually against women) desensitize us to real-life murder? Do cozies that make light of murder persuade readers that killing can be clean and lots of fun, with no lasting consequences?

How much responsibility do writers and publishers bear for the effect of our books on readers?

How being a shrink is like writing a mystery

Elizabeth Zelvin

I’m at a stage in life when about half my friends are reaching retirement age—specifically, those who have been doing the same thing, such as teaching or working for the government, for thirty years or more. Having managed to reinvent myself several times over the course of my adult life, I’m farther from retirement than ever. And that’s okay.

Each new manifestation of who I am and what I do has in some way built on the choices that I’ve made in the past. Without going into all the ideologies and isms I’ve traveled through, or the lifestyle choices and personal roles, I can say that the overall movement has been from writer to therapist to writer. Along the way, I got sidetracked into various publishing jobs in the mistaken belief that they would help me be a writer. (Okay, they did make me a demon editor, which helps.) Similarly, I’ve performed various functions as a social worker and administrator that did not exactly add up to being a therapist. But the heart of what I’ve wanted to do has remained the same.

Writer SJ Rozan talks about the mystery (or crime fiction in general) as one of the great ur-stories in our culture. It is a story of righting wrongs and seeing justice done, and that is why we want to hear it over and over, says Rozan. If publishers and film and movie makers won’t give us good stories, we (the reading public, the media consumer) will take bad stories, so great is our hunger to see things made better, villains caught, safety restored, unfairness exposed and punished, and everything put back in place. We’d like law and order in real life, but too often we’re offered only a tarnished simulacrum. So we’ll take it however we can get it: in the stories we tell and hear.

Therapy is also about righting wrongs. It can’t enforce the law or get wrongdoers, in most cases, to acknowledge and correct their faults. Therapy doesn’t work that way. But to those hurt by the acts and deficiencies of others, it can provide corrective experiences. Those who’ve been rejected and abandoned can experience unconditional love. Those who have repeatedly chosen abusive partners can learn to select and sustain healthy relationships. Those who have internalized harsh parental criticism can come to accept and nurture themselves. It may not sound like an exact analogy for investigating, discovering whodunit, and putting the culprit in the slammer. But in a way, it’s close.

I’ve found that what I do as a therapist—listening—is a lot like what I do (fate and the publishing industry willing) as a writer—being heard. EM Forster’s famous tag, “Only connect,” sums it up for me. In both roles, I am seeking the human connection. I am trying to make contact with another human being, whether it is the client who pours out his or her soul without knowing much about me beyond my capacity for empathy and compassion, or the reader to whom I pour out my own soul and the fruits of my imagination without knowing any more of him or her than their willingness to open my book.

Being a therapist, like being a writer—and a reader—is a way of opening the door to a secret garden. One of the greatest rewards in both is the closeup view I get of other people’s lives. Both legitimate my elephant’s-child curiosity about others’ innermost feelings, passions, and motivations. When I write fiction, I even get to make the other people up, so that I can explore all the possibilities my imagination can reach. At the same time, I make myself vulnerable to every reader who sees my work. That is both scary and exciting. Back in my poetry days, in a poem called “Secrets of the Therapeutic Relationship,” I wrote:

between therapist and client
more tender intimacies are shared
than if we two lay touching on a bed

The same is true of writers and their readers.

Some Like It Hot

Sandra Parshall

Do you take the temperature of the books you read?

I can’t help classifying crime novels by the amount of emotional heat they generate. Some stories have clever plots but require a minimum of personal involvement on the reader’s part. Those are the cool books. Others plunge you deep into the characters’ trouble-filled lives, and “hot” is the only way to describe the experience.

Cozies are, by their very nature, warm to slightly cool. Humor, especially when it borders on farce, has a cooling effect because it distances the story from the real world, where the events surrounding murder are seldom funny. That’s not a knock on cozies and humorous mysteries but an acknowledgment of their purpose: to entertain and divert without leaving the reader feeling wrung-out.

You might think thrillers would all be at the opposite temperature extreme, but that’s not the case. In techno-thrillers, the fate of the entire world may be at stake, but the story often remains an intellectual exercise rather than an emotional experience. For me, political suspense usually feels just as cold as a techno-thriller, which is why I avoid crime novels with flags on the covers.

The kind of book I enjoy most gets to me at a visceral level and lives up to its hype as “riveting from start to finish.” I don’t want to merely read about the characters’ ride through hell; I want to go along on the trip.

Tess Gerritsen at her best pulls me into her stories and leaves me breathless. Thomas Cook’s novels are quieter but intense and spellbinding.

Lisa Gardner and Greg Iles both write hot but include patches of cool writing that provide a few minutes of relief and relaxation before they heat up again.

Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine’s books are variable, but some of her psychological suspense novels, such as Going Wrong, The Lake of Darkness, and The Bridesmaid, are intensely creepy and gripping. Definitely hot, even though her prose is spare and might look cool at first glance.

P.D. James is usually cool all the way, although she has written a few passages from victims’ viewpoints that can raise the temperature of a book as well as the reader’s pulse rate.

Stephen White is a cool writer whose main character, a psychologist like White himself, is always thinking and reasoning.

Elizabeth George’s writing is warm when she’s in Barbara Havers’s viewpoint or that of a victim, but when she switches to Tommy Lynley or Simon St. James, the writing goes cold and cerebral even when they’re agonizing over the women they love.

When a book has a strong impact on me, I don’t usually slow down to wonder how the writer achieved that effect, but I’ll go back later to analyze it and, I hope, learn something I can use to make my own writing powerful. “Hot” writing explores primal emotions: love, hate, fear, jealousy, longing. Sensory details abound – readers always know how a character’s body, not just her mind, is reacting to an experience, and we always know how her world looks, smells, tastes, feels, sounds. Hot writing isn’t necessarily more violent than a cool story, but menace lurks everywhere, and when violence does erupt it is gut-wrenching and real, with nothing left out or sanitized. This is the kind of writing that reminds you how unpleasant murder is.

The genre of crime fiction has something for everybody. Books written with cool semi-detachment are as popular as those that shake you and leave you drained. Some readers, myself included, welcome an occasional cool book after a steady diet of high-emotion tales, and reading a warm cozy now and then resets my concept of what is normal so I don’t begin believing that everybody in the world is sick and vengeful. I’m not sure that many devoted cozy readers cross over to the dark side, though.

To each his own. But when I open the cover of a new book, nothing pleases me more than a blast of heat from its pages.

Do you see a cool/warm/hot pattern in your own reading?