I’m intrigued by the role that fear plays in our lives. Anxiety is a potent factor in the formation of social issues, often manipulated by various groups to amplify their cause, by the media, which needs exciting stories to recruit and retain their audience, and by the state, which uses anxiety to gain support for the regulation of behavior. Fear is a pleasurable sensation, so long as the actual risk is minimal. Nobody who rides a roller coaster thinks they are putting themselves in danger, but the burst of adrenaline that accompanies the body’s awareness of physical threat is exhilarating. (Well, for some people. I lost the ability to enjoy carnival rides at around age nine. I don’t smoke crack, either.)
Readers of crime fiction are just as leery of becoming crime victims as anyone else, but close encounters with evil and victimhood offer reliably propelling storylines. Some readers, of course, like a minimal amount of violence and want something comforting – say, knitting – to play a role, while for others “counting stitches” has a completely different meaning.
It’s intriguing that crime fiction has dominated bestseller lists only for the past thirty years or so; previously, blockbusters dealt with scandal among the rich. Sex was the forbidden fruit for readers whose lives were framed by conservative social mores based on the new sacredness of the nuclear family. Hannibal Lector changed all that, and ever since, we’ve been hooked on being afraid. Very afraid.
All three of my mysteries have been about the way fear is manipulated to produce a common social response to threat. In On Edge, residents of a small town, once coaxed into a frenzy of accusation over satanic abuse charges, are being whipped up again when three children are murdered. In the Wind plays off the parallels between the civil liberties abuses of the Vientnam War era and the Bush era, fear of Communism or Muslim extremists nurtured to excuse unconstitutional practices. Though the Cracks deals with a fear that strikes closer to home, the fear every woman is raised to feel in her bones, a fear that constricts our freedom and blames us for our sexuality. Fear of rape.
I remember the moment I got my first lesson in this form of fear. A college student had been assaulted and murdered in our town, something that had never happened before. Overnight, places that had been open to me as a free-range child were suddenly off limits. I was too young to understand why, but it made me angry. My brothers could still play wherever they wanted. That’s so unfair! Now even boys aren’t allowed to play outdoors the way we did, once fear of stranger abductions (a terrible but very rare event) seized the headlines and the public imagination.
The idea for Through the Cracks first came to me years ago when I read an investigative series in the Chicago Tribune on the shocking number of exonerations of Illinois death row prisoners. Many of them involved confessions obtained by detectives working under a Chicago PD commander who valued convictions more than truth. I was, of course, appalled that innocent men had been falsely imprisoned, but I was mostly outraged for the victims. Grabbing some guy off the street at random instead of pursuing the case with integrity seemed the ultimate way of saying “you don’t matter.” I wondered what it was like for victims to learn the men they thought responsible were actually innocent, that whoever had intersected their lives and knocked them off-kilter had remained free.
As I started working on the story, I faced a challenge. Threats to women – the threats that shape our lives on a daily basis – are frequently the subject of crime fiction, used to provide that pleasurable thrill that we all crave. But I didn’t want to check all the locks on our socially-imposed prisons and add a few more, and I really didn’t want to sexualize violence against women. I wanted to treat it as it really is: violence in the service of oppression.
Sexual violence is, apparently, entertaining. Thousands of books use scores of women as throwaway props for a clever killer who is engaged in a duel of wits with a heroic detective. We are often promised a glimpse of pure evil as we are invited to step into the mind of serial killer. No thanks, not interested.
I don’t mind reading or writing about violence, I just want it to be honest. To me, the reality-free serial killer story fits right in with cozies that avert their eyes from icky stuff. Real crime involves real causes: inequality, poverty, racism, hopelessness, the indifference of a culture that hangs on news stories of stranger abductions but is bored by child poverty, that can’t get enough of twisted serial killers but tolerates the fact that one in five women at US colleges is raped. Boys will be boys, and drinking is what students do, right?
Admittedly, real life is relatively dull, and the banality of evil we encounter routinely isn’t easily overcome. Like others, I read crime fiction for fun, not to be educated or to hear earnest lectures. But I’m bothered by the way women are trivialized by fantasy crimes, and I’m thrilled that so many people have taken Lisbeth Salander to heart.
Yes, it’s not the best of the genre. Yes, Steig Larsson’s pacing is uneven, his prose sometimes clunky. Sure, the characters are in some ways stereotypes and there’s a lot of male wish-fulfillment in Mikael Blomqvist.
But the rape that figures in the Millennium Trilogy is different than the usual “be very afraid” storyline. It was just one part of a series of assaults on Salander’s freedom. Her no-holds-barred revenge is more than vigilantism. Larsson won readers over by giving them the sense that justice is possible through the actions of heroic characters who will not put up with injustice, the kind that exists in daily life, not just in the minds of monstrous serial killers. Rather than be a fearful victim who takes sensible precautions, Salander stands up for herself when society won’t, and it’s that stance, not the threats against her, that is exhilarating. This is a very different storyline about women and violence than what we usually get. And I, and apparently millions of others, are ready for it.
A native of Madison, Wisconsin, I’ve lived in Kentucky, Texas, the Middle East, North Africa, and on the coast of Maine. Now I live in rural Minnesota, where I work as an academic librarian at a liberal arts college. My research interests are wide, not to say idiosyncratic, but they all have to do, one way or another, with how various media shape our understanding of the world. I’m particularly interested in the role of anxiety in the formation of social issues – in life and in fiction. I explore the way communities sometimes embrace oversimplified expanations for evil in On Edge and how anxiety becomes a device for the suppression of dissent in In the Wind.
Good crime fiction is immensely satisfying. It’s entertaining, has well-paced, involving stories and intriguing characters. It provides that little rush of adrenaline – which, as Val McDermid has said, is “a fabulous drug. It produces a great high, it’s legal and it’s free.” For many readers, crime fiction is reassuring because in the end order is restored. But the best crime fiction does more than reassure. It helps form our understanding of social issues, and by drawing us into an exploration of that which disturbs us, it can give our deepest fears narrative form and meaning.
At least, as Chandler said, such is my faith.
Visit Barbara’s website here.
