In The Big Sleep, Chandler’s iconic phrase “Dead men are heavier than broken hearts” delineates, sharp as a knife, the hierarchy of murder and love—the stopped heart, and the broken. At the end of my last relationship, I was forced to drive twenty-four hours straight home—my parents’ home—feeling displaced and shaken with fractured ribs and a heart that might have paused like an old VCR.
There is danger in using stories for mental and emotional recovery after heartbreak. We hope to heal by knowing people hurt like us, yet we fear we will be heartbroken forever, like our favorite star-crossed lovers. And then there are crime novels: books that assure us we can cry, and ache, and shudder in our pain, but show us that nothing is permanent. In many ways, crime fiction is all about the necessary changes in every life, and how anything, including love, can be lost at any moment, and any time.
Sometimes we read to know that others have felt just what we feel too. From Medea killing her own children, to Othello strangling Desdemona, to Joe stalking Beck in Caroline Kepnes’s brilliant You (and the awe-inspiring Netflix adaptation), crime fiction is concrete proof that no matter who you are, you can be loved. And, sadly, you can be broken by love.
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In The Widows of Malabar Hill, the masterful debut to Sujata Massey’s new series, the novel’s protagonist must solve a murder with several widows as suspects. Some are perhaps jilted, others heartbroken, and some are just plain murderous. The novel could stick to being a straight forward mystery, but in Massey’s hands, she uses the form to document marriage, disgrace, and heartache. I remember opening the pages to this book in the dim light of early morning, sprawled in bed as I read about another person’s shame to match my own. There is hope when we share the things we feel so afraid of being found out about and learn that we are not at fault. Look for more from Massey, a brilliant and still-new voice to the genre.
For Alice Munro, Nobel laureate and master of the short story, breaking hearts and destroying tear ducts can be done in thirty pages or less; never more true than for her story “Corrie,” one of the stories in what she’s announced is her final collection, appropriately titled Dear Life. “Corrie” follows a woman who may be meant for spinsterhood at twenty-six, falling in love with a married man. Of course, no one can fit in a twist like Munro, and the twist, the crime, the heartbreak will come in one swell and devastate even the strongest readers.
Sometimes we return again and again to a lover, whether the lover deserves us or not. In Alafair Burke’s best published book yet, The Wife, the protagonist must choose between saving her relationship and her family, or believing victims of sexual assault and harassment. Ultimately Burke’s gift at writing about a complex woman bruised far below the surface is awe-inspiring. Often returning to a lover, even one who is bad for us, is a part of the process of recovering a broken heart. And murder is often a tragic part of ending a story.
when we finally realize how incredibly fragile not only the love we share with people is, but how fragile our own selves are, and especially our own hearts, that’s when love becomes truly dangerous.Even after the world has ended, and the disgrace has faded away, there are ghosts that haunt us, and love that lingers through time. It is very rare a debut novel as perfect as Bent Road exists, but Lori Roy, now several works into her crime writing career, has created a masterful first novel. The haunted characters in this novel all dwell in their love for a lost young girl, just as we are all culpable in the loss of love, whatever this love may be, and it never truly leaves us behind. Roy’s writing rivals many of the Southern gothic greats, including Faulkner, O’Connor, and McCuller’s more violent work.
The love we leave behind can be the most devastating. Sara Gran is a master at anything she does, including cracking open the hearts of her many readers and her protagonist Claire DeWitt with her devastating twists and turns. Unfortunately for Claire, she may need a whole series to heal from heartbreak.
Likewise, heartbreak is a constant in Steph Cha’s brilliant Song series, and perhaps most explicitly in Follow Her Home. Cha examines what it means to leave a love behind, but to never really move on. If there is one author who might rival Chandler, eventually surpassing a fascination with him and meeting his ghost eye-to-eye as a peer, it is Cha, who still has years before she reaches the age Chandler was when he began publishing his classic Marlowe novels.
What does heartbreak feel like? Crime fiction helps an emotional truth feel physical, and sometimes, heartbreak feels a thousand darts thrown into one of the most essential muscles in your body at once. Keith Lee Morris’ The Dart League King is a novel about being stuck in a small town and being buried in the small-town life, the small-town love, the small-town mistakes, and the things you can never escape, and the story has never felt more visceral than during my own recent heartbreak. By the end of the book, you will know everything about each character but nothing about their fates, and perhaps Morris thinks that’s for the best. After all, what can we know about our future? Can we really recover from heartbreak or any other pain in just a few weeks, months, or years? Does the timeline vary in proportion to a relationship’s timeline? Can anyone ever truly be forgiven, even ourselves? Morris writes that nothing is left behind, everything is still here, and love may quite literally be the death of us, a paradoxically comforting thought to readers plagued by lingering heartache.
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Upon returning to my hometown after being in a relationship and living a different life, a need to escape that hometown (if only in fiction) also returned. I took solace in Everything You Want Me to Be, by the ever brilliant, oh-so-gifted Mindy Mejia, a book that allows the hearts of the main characters to scream their need to be free and to escape a small-town life. The air is suffocating here, the future is restrictive, and the heartbreak seems inevitable. The novel follows several perspectives as we learn about a murder, pushing past what we do and do not know about the facts, and into what we can never truly understand about human emotions, desire, and wanting. Heartbreak can be like the sizzling line traced to a bomb. Once the bomb ignites, everyone goes under, and Mejia does not spare a single heart (and very few lives) in the process.
Heartbreak, the ripping apart of yourself from who you thought you were, and the relationship you thought you knew, is much like the separation of the protagonist from her best friend in Jimmy Cajoleas’ latest novel—The Good Demon. Yes, the best friend is a demon, and yes, the protagonist is in love with a minister’s son, so everything is star-crossed and ill-fated from the beginning. A writer endorsed whole-heartedly by Megan Abbott, Cajoleas is still new and blooming, but The Good Demon shows no signs of a freshman or, in this case, sophomore effort. This is a masterful novel of horror and crime, of love and lost, of one woman choosing to save herself and to forsake her male lover. This loss, this crime, is more than just about sacrificing and losing some lover through a criminal—and possibly supernatural—act. This is about the protagonist learning to think outside herself and of herself; learning that she is more than the people she loves.
Just as crime fiction is about survival, so too can you survive this.2018’s Grist Mill Road by the brilliant and impossibly talented author Christopher J Yates opens with a young man shooting a young woman whom he’s tied to a tree with a bb gun. The girl tied to this tree is a victim, but she, like so many other people, has done something unforgivable, and while they may not be lovers, the love and needing of love involved in this crime will echo through decades and tear many lives apart in one of the greatest crime novels in decades. Riveting in both its language and the twists and turns the mystery takes throughout the novel, Grist Mill Road proves that the biggest heartbreaks aren’t the cleanest cuts. Sometimes they shatter, dust speckled and glittering, a sharp reminder of everything we’ve lost, and can’t get back.
A few years ago, I discovered After I’m Gone by Laura Lippman. Let me correct myself: Laura Lippman had published many, many best-selling novels before this, so I happened to be exposed to her for the first time. Lippman is a master at diving deep into the depth of human emotions, and truly understanding what makes people tick, arguably one of the frontrunners in engineering the “whydunnit” and kicking the “whodunit” to the curb. After I’m Gone features a father who leaves behind his wife, three daughters, and mistress. Lippman decided instead of approaching the story from a detective’s outsider perspective, she would delve deep into the lives of these women who were left behind, creating one of the first of her “quiet novels,” as she calls it. Spinning through the tale masterfully, never exploiting the reader with cheap tricks or terrible twists, Lippman saves the gut punches not for the reveal of the murderer or anything quite so dramatic, but for the heartbreak. The beauty in it all—this perfect, brilliant novel—is that the clues are there all along. Reading and rereading After I’m Gone, any reader will beat themselves up for not seeing a twist that Lippman so masterfully unveils just at the right time, so you feel at least a quarter of the pain its protagonist experiences throughout her lifetime. I have yearned to write about After I’m Gone for years, and I think the most important takeaway is this: We are all allowed to feel a deep sorrow over any loss, especially the loss of the person who might have been the love of our life. What’s important is to recognize when something is bigger than our heartache, when to ache, and when to try and move on, to celebrate, and to flourish.
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Love, fate, destiny. These are things we write about; some of these things we hope exist, some of these ideas we pray will bring happiness and fulfillment into our lives, and clear the doom from our past. Claire Vaye Watkins writes of her own family history, and how she might have been doomed, in the opening story in her first collection, Battleborn, “Ghosts, Cowboys.” Battleborn is arguably a flawless collection, and in “Ghosts, Cowboys,” Watkins explores her family’s history with the Manson family, and writes herself into a story with a dead baby who haunts her. Scary to some, perhaps, and very odd to many, sure, but Watkins provides a story that offers hope past the doom of a name, of a history, of any family members who have come before us. In writing her narrative at all, Watkins has taken control of her story. She has autonomy over her own life and her future, and like East of Eden’s famous refrain timshel, Watkins is given choices, and in Battleborn and all of her subsequent writings, she makes the right ones. No one is perfect but accepting that we aren’t cursed, and that we do not have to accept that which history might have decided for us, we can move on from heartbreak, from fate, from loss. There is so much to be gained.
Chandler’s words still echo in crime fiction today. Many of the greatest crime novels revolve around the worst heartaches, the need for vengeance, the desperation for closure, and reading crime fiction is sometimes the greatest cure for heartbreak. Knowing your heart can shatter again and again simply proves that your heartache is not unique, and just as crime fiction is about survival, so too can you survive this. The truth in crime fiction, and the reason so many great mysteries and thrillers feature resounding love stories, is that love is everywhere, but love is breakable, just like anything else in the world. At the end of the day we understand that love—the love of anything—drives us, makes us wake up in the morning, go the grocery store for flowers, plan anniversary dinners; when we finally realize how incredibly fragile not only the love we share with people is, but how fragile our own selves are, and especially our own hearts, that’s when love becomes truly dangerous. You can cry and grieve, which is healthy and necessary, and you can wish you had never met you lover. But if every story is one of crime and mystery, and also of love, perhaps it’s all just about finding answers, solving the puzzle, putting every piece together. There is the hope that with time, with effort, we can get closer to a resolution, the denouement of our own story. Healing might not follow the Save the Cat beat sheet, but the healing is there, the mystery is worth solving, no matter how dirty, gritty—how noir the path is. Just get to the final page.
