Copycat Crimes: Crime Fiction and the Marketplace of Anxieties
[draft of an article that appeared in Clues: A Journal of Detection 23.3 (Spring 2005): 43-56.]
Crime fiction, which deliberately exploits anxiety in the reader,
frequently does so by reflecting and magnifying society’s fear du jour.
This analysis of four contemporary novels explores the unique niche
crime fiction holds in the production and interpretation of social
sells books, as anyone who scans fiction bestseller lists knows. Fear
also sells claims about social problems. Appeals to anxiety are both
persuasive and attention-getting. “The idea,” according to critic James
Kincaid, “is not to erase the anxiety but to excite it, since it’s the
anxiety itself that’s doing so much for us” (168). Stories that
unsettle us are compelling, whether in the form of fiction or on the
front page. As the old newsroom slogan goes, “if it bleeds, it leads” –
often leading us to conclusions we’d never entertain without appeals to
fiction, a genre that deliberately exploits anxiety in the reader, taps
into topical social concerns using familiar formulas to produce
suspenseful narratives. Our fascination with crime has deep cultural
roots. It seemed fitting that Anthony Hopkins, an actor famous for his
role in Silence of the Lambs, would a few years later be cast in a film
version of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, a tragedy that features
violent rape, dismemberment, and cannibalism. The Elizabethan stage
often drew on historical and classical sources for its blood-drenched
narratives, but pamphlets recounting grisly crimes were also popular at
the time and sometimes became the basis for “murder plays.” A homicide
recounted in Sundry Strange and Inhumaine Murthers, Lately Committed
(1591), for example, appears to have been a source for Thomas Dekker
and Ben Jonson’s 1599 tragedy, Page of Plymouth (Marshburn and Velie).
Early novels such as Moll Flanders and the biographical sketches of
rogues in The Newgate Calendar fed an eighteenth century appetite for
criminal adventure. Today, crime fiction employs procedural, forensic,
and social detail to imitate reality, while the true crime genre
borrows narrative techniques from fiction to give its stories a
satisfyingly dramatic shape.
to Stephen Knight, crime fiction’s popularity is drawn in part from its
ability to reuse and reinvent familiar, even “compulsive” patters.
Another attraction is the genre’s “rapid responses to changing
sociocultural concerns” (x). The interplay between crime fiction and
other social texts can illuminate the ways claims-makers influence the
formation of social issues. This analysis will examine the construction
of four contemporary anxieties—urban violence, threats to the
environment, child abuse, and serial homicide—through the lens of crime
fiction. Novels by Richard Price, James W. Hall, Dennis Lehane, and
Jess Walter make creative use of these fears, offering their readers
new ways to read the news.
The Social Formation of Anxiety
Best and Philip Jenkins have both written extensively on the function
of anxiety in the definition of social problems. The process, according
to Jenkins, “begins with an event or condition that represents a
serious challenge to accepted values. Different activists try to link
that issue with other conditions that they believe to be harmful or
threatening, so that the original incident is used to support a moral
or political lesson and the narrative is embroidered with appropriate
cultural cross-references” (Moral Panic 9).
players compete to name and own social issues so they can repackage the
claims as incentives to respond to the issues in a certain way (e.g.
support a cause or reelect a legislator). To do this, stories are told
that provide examples that typify the problem so the audience will
identify with it. The domain of the problem may be extended to include
more victims, making it a more significant problem, while using the
“symbolic role” of victims to “mobilize consensus” (Best 141). Though
effective, these rhetorical strategies often expand and distort the
threat. Kincaid summarizes the process succinctly: “Doing away with
demons is only one part of the job; the other is providing them” (74).
often use cultural resources, such as religion or folkloric motifs, to
frame their issues. Mythic figures of heroes and folk devils can
populate claims with easily recognizable and relatively unambiguous
players (Jenkins, Using Murder). Melodramatic narrative is frequently
used; it’s easily recognized, provides clearly-defined villains and
victims, and above all is entertaining, even when describing unpleasant
social problems. “This was the central discovery of the early penny
press,” according to Best. “A good ax murder makes a great news story”
Fiction as a Source of Information
“scrimmaging of meanings” (Wilson 14) among cultural texts, both
factual and fictional, forms our understanding of crime and social
order. Fiction helps readers make sense of the world, according to
Catherine Ross. Basing her findings on over two hundred interviews with
readers, she argues that pleasure reading is an underrated source of
information. In spite of that, most academic libraries view the value
of popular fiction (except to support genre-related courses) with
indifference, if not disdain (Van Fleet, Crawford and Harris). Though
since 1990 catalogers have begun adding subject headings to works of
fiction, (Miller, Ranta) readers’ use of fiction as a source of
information is little appreciated. Victor Nell points out the criteria
of “timeliness, proximity, scale, and importance” make for a good
story, both in the newsroom and in novels. For that reason, fictional
stories “mirror the issues of the time with no less accuracy than the
daily newspaper” (51). News editors are remarkably consistent in
choosing stories that are newsworthy; so are book publishers as they
choose which stories are likely to appeal to audiences at a particular
historical moment. “Crime waves” in popular fiction reflect and feed
society’s fear du jour.
have examined the emotional and cognitive power of pleasure reading.
Victor Nell argues the very fictiveness of fiction is part of its
appeal: “We willingly enter the world of fiction because the skepticism
to which our adult sophistication condemns us is wearying: we long for
safe places – a love we can entirely trust, a truth we can entirely
believe. Fiction meets that need precisely because we know it to be
false, so that we can willingly suspend our reality-testing feedback
processes” (56). However, there is evidence that, within our personal
knowledge base, this distinction is blurry. Richard Gerrig has
conducted experiments that suggest readers don’t distinguish
information provided in fictional form from facts presented in other
kinds of texts. The less readers know about the subject matter of the
fictional work, the more likely they are to accept material in it as
factual. He adds, “even when readers actively try to discredit
fictional information, they may have called to mind other beliefs that
will persevere after the fiction itself has been unaccepted” (237). In
short, both cognitively and socially we don’t shelve fiction separately
fiction is popular in part because it addresses our anxieties by taking
us beyond the surface of things into its depths, attributing meaning
and pattern to elements of the story, suggesting the mysteries of human
behavior can be solved. “The surface,” according to Warren Chernaik,
“consists of a profusion of data. “But which of these particularities
counts? Which bits of matter matter? When does a fact become a clue? .
. . It is central to the logic and the charm of the genre that
profusion must yield to textual coherence” (xiv). The blurring of
narrative styles between true and fictional crime, in Christopher
Wilson’s analysis, involves us all in a sort of community policing in
which our participation in multiple forms of discourse about crime
reshapes our communal understanding of authority and aberrance.
is unfashionable to believe fiction can cause harm (unlike television
or film which still retains that distinctive power in debates over the
effects of depictions of sex and violence). Yet criticisms of fiction
at the beginning of the twentieth century were almost identical to
those now leveled at television: popular novels were considered
culturally deficient, addictive, and likely to promote passivity and
moral dissipation. The distinction between “trashy” fiction and
literary fiction continues to this day, but with rare exception this
trash isn’t considered toxic. Indeed, according to critic Jack Miles,
fiction is more effective in depicting violence than any other
expressive form, but does less harm than true crime because it doesn’t
exploit real people. Its lack of reference to factual reality is its
strength: “Novelists represent the national imagination at its most
powerful, and this country is dying from a lack of imagination about
its own bloody behavior” (64). He declares fiction “a uniquely safe
medium” for depictions of violence (62).
argument rests on the claim that the majority of crime fiction is
benign because it provides, at best, sleazy entertainment; but when
serious writers tackle crime it ennobles us. It can do good, but cannot
cause harm. Many citizens of Toronto disagreed when American Psycho, a
controversial “literary” serial killer novel (one that Miles criticized
as an artistic, rather than a moral, failure) was being filmed in that
stunt-double of America’s urban heart of darkness. A Canadian murderer,
Paul Bernardo, had a copy of the novel at his bedside; though that
information was ruled inadmissible at his trial, it was noted in press
accounts. Attempts to hold purveyors of violent entertainment legally
liable for the costs of death imitating art have met with failure
(Rohde). Yet fiction plays a role in shaping our personal understanding
of the world, and in the marketplace of anxieties the cultural
signification of fictional crime mingles with the real thing,
reflecting and influencing our perceptions of threat.
Mean Streets: The Construction of Urban Crime in Freedomland
1981, Time magazine ran a startling cover that depicted a deformed,
malignant figure holding a snub-nosed revolver. It isn’t quite human,
in spite of recognizable features – an ear, a bandaged nose, a
slack-jawed mouth full of teeth capped with metal. Most prominent are
the eyes that peer out of a skull-like mask apparently composed of
trash and scrap metal. “The Curse of Violent Crime” is the subject, a
curse that seems to emanate from the same supernatural realm as the
Mummy’s. Guns don’t kill people; monsters do.
Time cover is journalism” according to the magazine’s art editor
(Luce). This cover graphically makes the claim that crime is a
significant and growing social problem. Inside, the problem is typified
with thumbnail photos of crime victims identified as “custodian,”
“dentist,” “secretary” – in other words innocents, like us, subject to
random and meaningless violence. “All U.S. cities are in danger of
becoming unlivable,” an associate editor states, going on to expand the
domain of the problem with an emotional double-whammy: “For a parent,
the fear for your children is never very far from your mind” (Meyers).
This cover story announced a neo-conservative era in which crime became
a preoccupying fear for Americans, a symptom of moral decay arising out
of the rotting urban core.
those mean streets American crime fiction writers have gone for
decades. According to John Cawelti, “The setting of the hard-boiled
detective story resembles nothing so much as a world born out of a
curious marriage between the muckraking of Lincoln Steffens and the
lyrical sterility and sordidness of T.S. Eliot’s ‘Waste Land’” (154).
F.R. Jameson has said Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles is “a kind of
microcosm and forecast of the country as a whole: a new centerless
city, in which the various classes have lost touch with each other”
(127). Chandler himself made a famous claim for the detective’s unique
role in exposing a sordid reality.
realist in murder writes of a world in which gangsters can rule nations
and almost rule cities, in which hotels and apartment houses and
celebrated restaurants are owned by men who made their money out of
brothels, in which a screen star can be the fingerman for a mob, and
the nice man down the hall is a boss of the numbers racket; a world
where a judge with a cellar full of bootleg liquor can send a man to
jail for having a pint in his pocket, where the mayor of your town may
have condoned murder as an instrument of money-making, where no man can
walk down a dark street in safety because law and order are things we
talk about but refrain from practicing . . . it is the world you live
heroic detective traverses this dangerous cityscape in search of
answers, armed with enough attitude and honor to confront (if not
vanquish) corruption and moral decay.
long after the Time cover story ran, Lawrence Block published Eight
Million Ways to Die, in which private investigator Matt Scudder is
hired by a pimp to find out who is murdering hookers. New York is
portrayed as a city so close to social meltdown even criminals want
order restored. Even at those moments when the city seems pleasant, a
darker potential lurks. During a walk in Central Park the narrator sees
kids on roller skates and joggers and wonders how to reconcile that
“wholesome innocent energy” with what he reads in the papers. “The two
worlds overlap,” the PI muses. “Some of these riders would be robbed of
their bicycles. Some of these strolling lovers would return home to
burglarized apartments. Some of these laughing kids would pull holdups,
and shoot or stab, and some would be held up or shot or stabbed, and a
person could give himself a headache trying to make sense of it” (42).
title, drawn from an angry speech made by an NYPD detective, revises a
popular culture depiction of the city. “‘There are eight million
stories in the naked city,’ he intoned. “You remember that program?
Used to be on television some years back . . . You know what you got in
this city, this fucked-up toilet of a naked fucking city? You know what
you got? You got eight million ways to die” (114). The reality of crime
and the perception of danger are so confused that at one point in the
story Scudder is about to unload his gun into a threatening car full of
young men and stops himself just in time. “These weren’t professional
hitmen dispatched to kill me. They were just a bunch of kids” (220-1).
Lurking danger can turn out to be innocence warped by fear.
Price’s dystopian urban novel Freedomland (1998) is set in that
no-man’s-land between fear and what causes it, between perception and
reality, as a detective and a journalist try to coax the truth out of
woman who has reported her car stolen with her four-year-old son
sleeping in the backseat. The woman is white; the carjacker she
describes is black. Both the cop and the reporter sense immediately
something is off in the woman’s story, but the race angle of the
purported crime throws the community into crisis mode. The suspense in
the novel isn’t over finding the missing child or in uncovering who is
guilty, it’s whether the distraught and incoherent woman can be
persuaded to explain what actually happened to her son before the city
goes up in flames. The crime allegedly took place in Martyr’s Park, a
seedy DMZ between the impoverished black community of Dempsey and the
blue-collar white city of Gannon, as Brenda Martin tried to take a
shortcut home. When Detective Lorenzo Council takes her back to the
park to ask her how it happened, she says “I can’t tell” (91). It’s not
so much that she can’t recall what happened as a statement of her own
inability to narrate what actually occurred.
of the most unsettling things about Freedomland is that it refuses to
provide the reassurance we expect from police procedurals. The police
investigation at the core of the book seems haphazard, poorly
coordinated, reactive, without the CSI-style technological wizardry or
teamwork that suggests the professionals will get to the bottom of
things. When a police artist creates a sketch of the suspect based on
Brenda’s description, Lorenzo is hopeful; he’s certain he’s seen the
man before. The artist holds it up beside his own face: it’s a
self-portrait. Brenda has simply described the nearest black man. As
Lorenzo interrogates Brenda, her stubborn anguish remains impenetrable.
She continually tunes him out by pulling on headphones and escaping
reporter, Jesse Haus, is just as anxious to get Brenda’s story, and the
media’s methods seem more energetic than those of the police. Others
are equally eager to fill in the blanks of Brenda’s silence. White cops
swarm over the projects, shaking down the community in a massive sweep.
Black activists use the presence of cameras as an opportunity to
showcase their causes. A group of women who have made a mission of
finding lost children get involved, using their media savvy to organize
the campaign. “You got to keep it hot,” their leader tells Lorenzo,
“you got to keep it in the news, you got to keep coming up with fresh
stuff – a slipper, a brother-in-law, a jawbone. I swear, half the shit
we come up with? We just make it up – new witnesses, new evidence –
just to get it back in the news” (360).
take Brenda on a grueling search of an abandoned mental hospital. Like
so much of Dempsey, the facility is a failed social experiment, a
former showcase turned into “a surly and abusive little corner of hell”
(350). After a newspaper exposť, the hospital was shut down, the
grounds left to nature. It is here, after being led through a
children’s dormitory, hearing the baby-like cries of half-starved cats,
that Brenda breaks down and finally tells what happened. Her child
drank a bottle of medicine when she stepped outside to speak with her
boyfriend. Feeling responsible and unable to face what happened, the
mother recycled an image of urban crime that would fit people’s
expectations in order to distance herself from the unbearable reality.
She tells Lorenzo she thought nobody would be hurt by her lie; it was
just another crime story among a multitude about the community. She
miscalculated the power of racial conflict to draw cameras and
attention to a corner of New Jersey that is normally forgotten. Fear
distracts us from the true causes of crime as we focus on monstrous, if
title of the novel comes from an abandoned American history theme park
Lorenzo takes Brenda to, hoping to shake her story out of her.
Freedomtown (named after Freedomland, a genuine theme park built in the
Bronx in 1960) is a decayed, forgotten wasteland scattered with odd
remnants of fake historical artifacts – a civil war canon, a piece of
Jean Lafitte’s pirate ship, a wooden shingle with the word
“information” painted on it. Like the abandoned hospital, the neglected
park named for martyrs of the civil rights movement, and the decrepit
public housing project itself, Dempsey is not a city full of threat,
but a trash heap of broken promises and neglect. Freedomland
unflinchingly shows us the world we live in – and the lies we tell
ourselves to feel safer.
The Ends of Nature: Bones of Coral and the Gothic Imagination
beach bum Travis McGee rarely goes to the city, but he makes a trip to
New York in John D. MacDonald’s Nightmare in Pink (1964) where he finds
the effects of development he deplores in Florida is nearing a crisis.
(He’s qualified to make these quasi-scientific observations; in the
introduction to the book, Carl Hiaasen correctly calls McGee a
“poet-naturalist,” xi). When a man in a hurry shoves McGee into another
pedestrian they both turn and “snarl” at him, leading him to one of his
philosophical reflections that is, typically, framed around images of
nature in an increasingly unnatural world.
York is where it’s going to begin, I think. You can see it coming. The
insect experts have learned how it works with locusts. Until locust
population reaches a certain density, they all act like any
grasshoppers. When a critical point is reached, they turn savage and
swarm and try to eat the world. One day soon two strangers will bump
into each other at high noon in the middle of New York. But this time
they won’t snarl and go on. They will stop and stare and then leap at
each others’ throats in a dreadful silence. The infection will spread
outward from that point. Old ladies will crack skulls with their deadly
handbags. Cars will plunge down the crowded sidewalks. Drivers will be
torn out of their cars and stomped. It will spread to all the huge
cities of the world, and by dawn of the next day there will be a horrid
silence of sprawled bodies and tumbled vehicles, gutted buildings and a
few wisps of smoke. And through that silence will prowl a few, a very
few of the most powerful ones, ragged and bloody, slowly tracking each
other down. (33)
rhetoric in this passage (and in others scattered throughout the
series) anticipates Paul Erlich’s 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb,
a jeremiad about the dangers of overpopulation. The analysis is in the
tradition of what Killingsworth and Palmer call “millennial ecology” –
a framing of the anxiety we feel (or wish others to feel) about the
degradation of the environmental as an approaching apocalypse. This
end-game does something paradoxical: it depicts the final stage of
human “progress” as a return, of sorts, to nature – one red in tooth
and claw, savage, chaotic, and violent. Development will collapse into
its opposite. “Growth” is really decay.
made with the rhetoric of millennial ecology appeal to a peculiarly
American sense of doom and destiny. In Silent Spring, Rachel Carson
expanded the domain of concerns about nuclear annihilation to embrace
pesticide poisoning. She typifies the problem by describing a little
town that is sickened by an “evil spell,” but it isn’t witchcraft after
all – the town has simply poisoned itself with pesticides. This crisis
is culturally cross-referenced to utopian and apocalyptic texts by
suggesting the arrogance of science will bring on an ecological
Armageddon. She offers a way out, a road less taken that is more in
tune with nature. It’s that quiet back road that leads to Slip F-18,
Bahia Mar – and beyond, across the water to James W. Hall’s Florida
thrillers are set in MacDonald’s Florida – a natural Eden threatened by
development. His heroes are, like Travis McGee, men who live off the
grid, close to the water and the rhythms of the sea, who bring to their
collisions with modern life a Quixotic sense of archaic nobility.
Though the strongest argument for environmental issues is found in
Hall’s poetic descriptions of the natural world and the simple life,
his plots often hinge on ecological issues – exotic animal smuggling in
Gone Wild, the dangers of farming non-native fish in Mean High Tide,
the history of developers’ greed in the shaping of modern Miami in Hard
Aground. But it is in Bones of Coral that threats to nature provide the
most cinematic thrills.
by news reports of an unusually high incidence of Multiple Sclerosis in
Key West and by an obscure government report that suggested a link with
clandestine chemical warfare tests conducted there in the 1950s, the
inventive plot of Bones of Coral (1991) situates environmental threat
at a high-tech garbage incinerator where an ex-military entrepreneur
disposes of toxic waste, failed military experiments, and inconvenient
enemies. Though the story carries echoes of The Tempest (one of the
villains is a Caliban-like “thing of darkness” who grew up in a mental
hospital and taught himself to read using pornography; there is a
Prospero-like professor who has renounced his work on chemical weapons,
literally drowning his discovery in a hidden tidal pool) these literary
references don’t intrude on the entertaining romp. In Bones of Coral,
Hall turns the tables on millennial ecology, finding in our fears the
material for an exciting thriller. In doing so, he taps into an older
tradition, that of the Gothic attitude toward nature and science – that
which is not natural is monstrous, a chilling spectacle of horror. The
Gothic acts, in Tracy Johnson’s words, as “an index of social change,
bringing to light the fears that inevitably accompany shifting cultural
paradigms” (60); In Hall’s hands, Gothic effects in a formulaic
thriller make fun of our fears.
opening line of the novel prepares us for this as fiction and reality
trade places: “Cassie Raintree was dying of brain cancer every
afternoon at two-thirty.” The role of a dying heroine on a soap opera
is played by an actress being written out of the soap because she has
been diagnosed with MS. She and her long-lost love do their homework
and discover the connection between the government’s chemical testing
and the disease. “It’s all there in the public record. Anybody could
find it in a half-decent library” (321). And, in fact, they learn a
scientist has done the analysis, but the genre he’s writing in limits
his conclusions. “It’s really pretty dry. Full of statistics, graphs,
charts. I read it all, studied it all afternoon, and every chart, every
statistic points to this bacterium, the spraying, as the trigger for MS
. . . But when [the article’s author] gets to his summation, he says
‘inconclusive,’ ‘needs further review,’ ‘strong indications, but no
definite link’ . . . There’re cancer clusters all over this end of the
end of the island. Don’t tell me this is inconclusive” (323-25).
with the research, the two act on their convictions. The story
concludes with a slam-bang Hollywood ending, in which the hero must
rescue his girl, who is being fed on a conveyor belt into an
incinerator. Ecological disaster is staged as a Perils of Pauline
cliffhanger. Hall turns newspaper headlines into the stuff our
nightmares are made on. In this entertainment, if not elsewhere, we are
able to confront an environmental crisis without relying on the
ambiguous probabilities of science.
Cycles of Violence: Mystic River and the Reproduction of Child Abuse
are gold in the marketplace of anxieties. Threats to children have made
for compelling melodramatic narratives since the Brothers Grimm
collected folk tales. The surprise is that the familiar name for the
problem is so new. Coined in 1962 in an article in The Journal of the
American Medical Association, the phrase child abuse nudged the concept
from a social problem into the realm of medicine (Hacking). Doctors,
wanting to publicize the harm done to children by their parents, were
careful to frame this issue in terms that would be acceptable to the
general public. By making child abuse a disease, it became treatable.
meanings of child abuse changed as the rhetorical capital of the
concept changed hands. Because of its emotional charge, stories about
the problem rarely jive with its epidemiology. Stranger abductions
prompt national news coverage and numerous thrillers, but in reality
over ninety percent of homicide victims under the age of five are
killed by their parents, relatives, or close family friends (U.S.
Bureau of Justice Statistics). Even though the numbers of children who
suffer from physical abuse and neglect are far greater than those who
are sexually assaulted, by the 1980s concerns about abuse focused
almost exclusively on sexual abuse. Fears surrounding cults, stranger
abductions, incest, pornography, occult practices, and the influence of
youth culture on morality all folded themselves into a generalized
hysteria focused on children. In the mid-1980s these concerns, fuelled
by the popular use of therapy to recover memories of abuse, led to
hundreds of investigations into conspiracies in which Satanists
allegedly abused children at daycare centers (Fister). The backlash
that followed ridiculed the Satanic Field Theory of evil, but sexual
abuse of children remains such a heated topic that publishing research
on the topic that questions claims can still lead to legislative
condemnation. As Rind, Bauserman, and Tromovich point out,
agenda-setters have a stake in believing children are endangered; they
don’t want to be reassured.
fiction naturally picks up on this source of anxiety. Andrew Vachss,
for example, routinely exploits children in his novels – in the name of
publicizing the issue of child exploitation. In a subtler vein, Dennis
Lehane has touched on threats to children in several of his novels,
with Gone Baby, Gone offering some particularly disturbing visions of
abuse. In Mystic River (2001), a sophisticated novel of psychological
suspense, an episode of childhood sexual abuse becomes a life-defining
moment for three friends. Dave, the victimized boy, grows up tortured
by memories and urges he tries to suppress. He thinks of himself as The
Boy Who Escaped from Wolves and at moments of stress “his brain tended
to split into two halves, as if cleaved by a carving knife” (237).
Inside him lurks a demonic inner child. “Usually the boy lived only in
Dave’s dream world, feral and darting past stands of thick trees,
giving up glimpses of himself only in flashes. And as long as he stayed
in the forest of Dave’s dreams, he was harmless” (238) But power of
this inner monster is growing.
one of his boyhood friend’s daughters is brutally murdered, Dave falls
under suspicion. As more than one character remarks, those who have
been abused are likely to become abusers. Though this notion is a
conflation of two invalid theories – that gay men recruit boys through
seduction, and that people who experience violence as children will
inflict it on their offspring – it is an error that carries enormous
social weight because it has the Gothic logic of folklore. When
watching a vampire movie, Dave recognizes himself. He tries to explain
it to his wife: “it’s like I was saying about the vampires, Celeste.
It’s the same thing . . . It doesn’t come out. Once it’s in you, it
stays” (319). Later, as he fights the urge to pick up a child
prostitute, he thinks, “The Boy Who’d Escaped from Wolves and Grown Up
had become a Wolf himself” (323). Though Dave commits murder – killing
a child abuser, a sort of suicide-by-proxy – he is not responsible for
the girl’s death. She was murdered by a different species of monster, a
teenager with no conscience, another stock figure of the modern Gothic.
In his next
novel, Shutter Island, Lehane deliberately mimicked the over-the-top
drama of 1950s Grade B horror movies, claiming they had more truth in
them than more “realistic” movies of the time. Though some critics
expresses surprise in his departure from gritty realism, Mystic River
plays on Grade B pop psychology in much the same way. The folkloric
roots of Dave’s motivation, however sociologically inaccurate, draw on
our deepest fears about violence, sexuality, and identity.
Making Monsters: Over Tumbled Graves and the Construction of Serial Killers
serial killer is the most fictional of our fears. Like child abuse,
it’s a newly-named category. “Serial killer” entered the language
around 1980 even though popular accounts of these kinds of crimes have
enthralled readers since at least the early nineteenth century. In the
early eighties, in an effort to recoup police powers curtailed after
the excesses of COINTELPRO were exposed, the Department of Justice
released astonishing statistics that indicated serial murder had jumped
from less than one percent of homicides to as much as twenty-five
percent. Though they later retracted those numbers – they had simply
added up all murders for which the police did not know the circumstance
at the time they reported them – those numbers still circulate.
Certainly, if a census were taken of fictional crime victims, serial
homicide would be a leading cause of death.
understanding of serial killers and the profilers who stalk them was
shaped by the deliberate way law enforcement engaged the media in
making claims about the problem. The Silence of the Lambs drew on true
crime accounts by law enforcement officials that popularized the image
of the profiler and raised the profile of serial murder. That fictional
mirror-image achieved a strange authenticity; at least two television
documentaries about profilers used clips from the film version to show
how profilers work. Incorrect assertions that serial murders are
committed exclusively by white males made the threat more acceptable to
feminists, minorities leery of the expansion of law enforcement powers,
and critics of the death penalty (which had been ruled unconstitutional
because it was discriminatory). The perpetrator was identified as a
monstrous other while the domain of potential victims expanded to
include all of us.
invitation to accompany a profiler and “enter the mind of a killer” is
tantalizing. Philip Jenkins believes profilers in crime fiction
personify the triumph of rationality; through the work of a profiler,
“order is imposed on an otherwise inexplicable world.” If profilers
failed in fiction as often as they do in fact, it would “subvert the
discourse of rationality on which the fiction depends” (Using Murder
109). That subversion is exactly what Jess Walter performs in Over
in Spokane, Washington, Over Tumbled Graves (2001) opens with a botched
police operation. Caroline Mabry, posing as a mother in a drug sting,
accidentally flips a doll into the river. In the ensuing chaos the drug
dealer is pushed off a bridge into the torrent and Maybry has to choose
between pursuing his assailant or attempting a rescue. She fails at
both, but as they search for the dealer’s body they find a murdered
hooker. As more prostitutes are killed in a similar way, and the case
catches the attention of the media, the FBI offers a profiler.
Eventually two dueling profilers are attached to the case. When Mabry
looks up books written by one of them, she’s amazed at what she finds.
had set out to investigate a murder and had stumbled across a genre;
this thing infecting her city was a thriving industry. Alive, a woman
like Jacqueline [one of the victims] was worth a couple hundred bucks a
day until her looks ran out or she died of AIDS or hepatitis or was
shot by an angry john. But if this monster got hold of her, she could
be worth a chapter in one of these books, perhaps even a composite
character for the miniseries. (152)
Mabry’s partner Dupree is frustrated by the turn the investigation has
taken. He has his own theories of crime, such as the theory of yard
relativity. “You could tell a criminal by the amount of yardwork he did
. . . the basic theory being that criminals didn’t have patience for
yardwork. That’s what crime is, he believed—a lack of patience” (303).
But the case is taken over by a younger, more educated cop guided by
the help of the profilers and Dupree angrily demotes himself back to
patrol. Unlike the police in Price’s Freedomland, the young cop runs an
investigation that is systematic, organized, and in control. The
investigators come up with a suspect –one who fits the profile. Mabry
realizes the profile describes just about every man she’s ever met.
“Maybe there were no monsters,” she thinks, unable to follow the
experts into the mind of a killer. “If she couldn't imagine the violent
fantasy, what could she imagine? The victim. The fear. And what good
were those?" (177)
the end, the profile is wrong, they’ve gone after the wrong suspect,
and the crime turns out to be motivated not by sexual gratification but
by economics. The owner of a security firm has been paid by a developer
to rid the neighborhood of prostitutes. He deliberately constructs the
crime as the work of a serial killer, having read enough true crime
books to make it authentic, and he takes pride in his work, eager to
confirm with the famous profilers that some aspects of his ritual are
unique. Though his motivation is rational, as he “enters the mind of a
serial killer” he takes on the desires of the fictional monster he’s
trying to replicate, a disturbing shift that implicates the reader as a
voyeur. Maybe the only monsters are the ones we conjure up to lead us
again and again into a darkness we relish. We don’t want evil
explained; that would spoil our fun.
Coherent Form for Social Anxiety
crime fiction uses social anxiety for dramatic material, subgenres
employ different strategies for framing it. Hall and Lehane borrow from
the gothic tradition, putting it to work in contemporary settings
within the conventions of the thriller and the novel of psychological
suspense. Price and Walter contrast the media construction of crime to
the more chaotic reality experienced in police investigations to
critique the easy answers we give ourselves. Uncertainty and
instability in both form and themes characterize the diversity of
contemporary crime fiction, according to Stephen Knight. We can no
longer assume that in a fictional framework wrongs will be righted,
that order will be restored. Instead, the representation of violence
and social injustice in crime fiction today “provides a coherent form
of contemporary anxiety” (199). It gives our deepest fears narrative
form—but doesn’t necessarily provide simple solutions that resolve our
anxiety. Jenkins has pointed out, “[f]or all the science and
quantification used to substantiate a new problem, its true momentum
will be located in its appeal to deep-rooted anxieties that respond
poorly to rational inquiry, still less rebuttal” (Using Murder 229). He
suggests that the formation of social problems can be understood
through its treatment in popular culture, where our fears are given
dramatic form. Since crime fiction deliberately draws us into an
exploration of that which frightens us and frames our inchoate
anxieties in textual coherence, it may indeed be just the place to
conduct such an examination.
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