On reconsidering Crime Fiction

A friend argued with me that Crime Fiction would always be a second-class citizen to other more “serious” or “literary” fiction because it is formulaic and repetitive. “There is no character growth in this story, unlike those characters in the classics” he argued. “There can’t be any depth in these books because the authors are more interested in making money, and thus prolonging the franchise of a successful character. There is not much literary merits in these books.”

I don’t want to comment on the fallacies in this high-brow argument because I was once someone who believed in the same logic, who fastidiously read Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick to impress, feigning interests in a genre that did not appeal to me at all. It was after two years of working in the corporate world that I decided to pick up a crime novel again, partly to distract myself from reality, and to car-chase criminals on a busy American street again.

How wrong I was that it would distract me from the reality. Crime fiction, though focusing on crime as the genre suggests, is sometimes more realistic than some realist fictions. This is a group of writers who pay attention to tension between class, families, communities and individuals more readily, and who do not hesitate to expose and expostulate these tensions in the realm of crime.

“Personal is political”, or so proclaimed the feminist scholars in the late sixties and seventies. In that sense, criminal is also political. How does a crime happen? There should be a motive behind every single instance of crime, be it money, love, or mental issues. Even crimes of passion have motives – which is passion, in every sense of the word. However, these motives allow us to see a bigger social picture.

It is no longer a case of middle-class people trying to find their identities, or fighting for soul survival. It is hard-boiled survival. It’s about people working on the street, taking grimy jobs to earn a small paycheck. It’s about you and me, or the neighbour who stays next door, who is struggling day-to-day to make ends meet, who is wiling to do anything within his/her means to provide hot food on the table, and good education for their children.

Crime writers are more concerned about these individuals. The cynicism that these writers are writing for money must be left at the doorstep the moment we open the novel. Not many writers bother to give a voice to lower-middle class citizens. We should appreciate what the crime writers are doing for people of that socio-economic strata.

We must examine beyond the motives of these crimes. How is it possible that a desire for fame and success propels someone to kill? Does that inform us of any prevalent ideology in that particular community or society? How does that compare to the society that we live in now?

If the narrator is a first-person, then we have to ask even more questions. In the case of Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, the first-person narrative becomes a point for contention. What is the degree of reliability of the narrator? Is the narrator showing a just account? If not, what is the narrator trying to hide or inform us? Is the narrator’s view representative of his society? How is his view different from ours?

There are so many ways to read, access and teach crime fiction. Let’s pay a bit more attention to this genre if we can.

Regards,
Chee Kam