William Faulkner famously wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” These days that phrase borders on cliche, but it just about sums up what historical crime fiction is all about, except that, of course, almost always someone in the past actually is dead.
The appeal of the best historic crime fiction is that, along that path strewn with bad deeds and dead bodies, it brings the past alive in a visceral and high stakes way, transporting us to a different time and place where we can immerse ourselves. And if the writer has done his or her job, perhaps we can learn a bit of history along the way. Maybe even learn something about the present, and about ourselves.
Based on my own experience writing and reading historical crime novels, they are almost always ultimately about the present. It is hard to write about the social and political forces of another age without seeing the slender thread that pulls through to our own times.
Even though the setting is historical, the concerns of the author and reader are inevitably contemporary. Consciously or not, historical crime fiction uses the past as a mirror to examine modern issues like corruption and abuse of authority, fear of social change, power and inequality (gender, race, and class), and the tension between scientific fact and unexamined belief. It all happened back then, and it is all happening now.
One recent example is Madeline Martin’s newest novel The Secret Book Society. Set in 1895 London, the novel follows three women who form a secret book club and uncover dangerous truths in a world that prefers to keep them silent. The narrative structure and focus on female empowerment directly reflect twenty-first-century conversations about gender roles and women’s self-actualization.
Historical mysteries can also allow a safer exploration of current controversial topics. By placing a crime in the past, authors can explore sensitive or politically charged ideas at a distance—making commentary feel less confrontational. From that “safe distance” readers can re-examine contemporary injustices indirectly, notice patterns that repeat across time, and think critically about contemporary policing or legal systems.
For example, Alma Katsu’s 2022 novel The Fervor is set in Japanese-American Internment Camps during WWII and uses the historical context of systemic injustice and xenophobia to provide that “safe distance” for readers to reexamine the very same issues of xenophobia, discrimination, civil rights, and governmental abuse of authority that we see reported every day on television and in the newspapers.
Writing a historical novel brings its own joys and challenges. A novelist friend once cautioned that a historical fiction writer needs to be very careful about researching each fact in the story because, for some who read largely fiction, that is how they receive much of their information about times past. So writers owe it to their readers to get the facts right. And of course, publishers can be quite unforgiving about post-release corrections.
So we writers take no solace from the standard disclaimer at the beginning of every novel that it’s all made up. That is just to keep the lawyers happy. In the worldbuilding arena of the historical novelist, the writer is always haunted by the certain knowledge that some reader out there penned their doctoral thesis on the very era that we are recreating, and everything we write will be expertly scrutinized for accuracy.
It’s daunting, but it’s also a motivator. So if you do not have the time to get that doctorate yourself, you just have to try to do the best you can to get it right.
And happily, within any factual historical structure there is much room for us to play. From our own lives we know that beneath the headlines of life’s major events, there are interstices that are filled with human complexities that contain further interstices themselves filled with complexities, worlds within worlds within worlds, like chaos theory where there are fractals within fractals ad infinitum.
In those gaps are where the human experience lies—and where the imagination can roam free, conjuring the sounds and smells of that bygone time, like the smell of manure and the sound of carriage wheels and clopping hooves on the cobblestones of a foggy London street.
It is the gritty detail that can truly bring a story to life, and there is nothing grittier than a murder scene. After all, mortal sin raises the stakes like nothing else and brings a singular focus to the story. Indeed, who would give a damn about the Maltese Falcon if it hadn’t left a trail of bodies in its wake?
Those gaps in the historical record also provide an opportunity to challenge or correct it. Marginalized voices lost to history can be brought to life, while nostalgic views of the past can be challenged by recreating the visceral experiences of those who actually lived it.
We all know the history of slavery in this country, but how much do we know about the hopes, fears and passions of a single enslaved individual? If history is written by the victors, perhaps a more grounded truth can be found in the lived experiences of the vanquished. And it is in the interstices of history that the writer has license to recreate those lived experiences.
In the final analysis, the simple truth revealed by historical crime fiction is that the past is never past because human nature really does not change. People are people. The motives for crime—greed, jealousy, desperation—are timeless. The social problems of today often have roots that run deeply into the past. And the very concept of justice evolves very, very slowly.
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