A Good Crime...
Last night I watched the opening episode of a new TV crime drama. It set me wondering. Where does our seemingly insatiable appetite for crime fiction spring from? (Somewhere in my mental grammar database is the rule that you should never end a sentence with a preposition but I tried all variants and ‘whence springs our insatiable appetite for crime fiction’ just sounds silly in this day and age.)
The series — which is shaping up to be a rural serial killer thriller — contained all the expected tropes: a strong female detective with a troubled past; a killer prepared to go to physical extremes to display bodies in a ritualistic way; stunning, sweeping landscape panoramas; an isolated community crammed with secrets; victim’s families with shady histories and a mistrust of the police; a mismatched detective pair between whom there is both antagonism and possible sexual tension. And this was all just in the first half hour. I went to bed before the end, not because it wasn’t compelling but because I was tired.
It had done its job, though. Alone in the house but for a small and friendly dog, I checked all the window catches and, even so, felt uneasy as I turned out the light. Why? I wondered. Short, choppy scenes and dialogue; half-light; a hint in every scene that something was wrong or not what it seemed; haunting music - was there music? Yes, there must have been but if so, its sole purpose was to build atmosphere.
If these tropes are so predictable, why, after watching and reading so many of these dramas, do I still come back for more? Why do I, with all the possible genres out there, write them? There is a theory that they help us make sense of a chaotic world. In most, certainly in your cosier mysteries, the detective always gets their man/woman. Even when they don’t, in the darker fare, good triumphs over evil and, if it doesn’t, there is still redemption. The heroine might suffer devastating personal loss but ultimately they overcome, even at significant cost. There is some sort of cleansing.
Cosy mysteries are, if anything, less fathomable to me. We take one of the most brutal aspects of society and make the study of it light-hearted. Some cosies are comedic; some are designated cosy because they’re neither gritty nor police procedural and have one or two quirky characters. Cosies do, however, feature serial killers and the crimes can be horrific. The horror, though, is barely felt and often offset by delicious food or interesting crafts. (There are even Amazon categories for cosy food mysteries and cosy hobbies and crafts mysteries. WTF??? Whole categories—which means there are thousands of books in that genre.) They are usually set in rural or seaside locations. Characters are not always police officers or official detectives. I’m currently reading one for genre research, in which the sleuth is a biographer.
One would think the market was saturated. By any normal rules, it is. And yet, readers keep reading, viewers keep viewing, and writers keep writing. Are we escaping from a world in which leaders don’t follow the rules and the bad guy often wins? Perhaps we need a belief in justice and retribution; where wrongdoing is punished, not always by the wrongdoer going to prison but by justice being meted out by either humankind or gods. Where murder, death and deception are offset by either ice cream and pretty villages or bleak resolution, depending on taste.
I like both. I’ll watch and read anything from bleakest Scandi noir (Jo Nesbo’s The Leopard, anyone?) to MC Beaton’s Agatha Raisin, as long as there’s a good puzzle to be solved.
Life has no end besides death. Death is the one sure thing in our lives. It draws us like moths to a flame. As long as we can watch from a distance and know that somewhere there will be a reckoning.
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