Mystery as social commentary

Aileen Jacobson of Newsday writes a rather lengthy feature on how contemporary crime fiction is far more focused upon incorporating social issues within the contents of a given novel and as such, has developed its breadth beyond the typical crime-solving approach. Although this development is hardly new, it’s definitely been on the rise in the last couple of decades. A whole host of authors, including Carl Hiaasen, Walter Mosley, Karin Slaughter, Michael Simon, Laura Lippman, and Jessica Speart, are interviewed for their thoughts on the mystery-as-social novel:

Classic golden age British mysteries, such as Agatha Christie’s, were “created as escapism, and predicated on the assumption that the world is good and well ordered, and the only thing that has disturbed that orderedness is one malefactor.” But American noir fiction introduced a view of “a world that is inherently corrupt…. You see a lot more anger.”

The question, [Partners & Crime co-owner Maggie Topkis] says, is not why mystery writers are choosing issues, but why “writers on social issues are choosing mysteries.” The genre, she says, provides both structure and freedom: “It’s exploded its original confines. I can write about anything I want if I pin it on the scaffolding of a mystery plot.”

Critic Maureen Corrigan, who teaches mysteries at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., says a shift took place in the 1960s. Before then, says Corrigan, hard- boiled detective writers “wrote more about what makes a man a man” and were essentially conservative.

But in the years after, hard- boiled detective fiction writers have included gays, lesbians, blacks and other groups among their good guys, “a crowd that would have been the criminals in the older books, while white suburban men are running the prostitution or gun rings.” Robert B. Parker’s Spenser series, launched in 1973, was among the first to do this, Corrigan says, and among the first to fashion, in the group surrounding the hero, an alternative to the nuclear family.

The piece doesn’t really break a lot of new ground, but it’s good to see that this shift is acknowledged in print format. As someone who welcomes the opportunity to read about issues in a crime fiction context, it’s great to see this recognized. But I also agree with those who say that there must be a fairly seamless blending of issue and story and character. Hardly anyone–certainly not me–likes to be preached to, because it’s the quickest way for me to stop reading a book.