If you teach criminology to students at Stockholm University for fifteen years, you inevitably notice certain patterns, recurring dilemmas, controversies. One thing my class nearly always ends up at, is the notion of meaning in human behavior, and in the world. Does it exist or is there, really, only chaos?
As I wrote The Living and The Dead, I thought a lot about that question; it is one that almost every crime story, at its most subconscious level, has always been about. Think about it: at first the world seems coherent, meaningful. With the crime, however, something fundamental breaks: the illusion of meaning and coherence shatters. Everything is broken and nothing makes sense.
As bits of evidence are collected, witnesses speak, as motives and suspects are tried and discarded, and the world unravels, we begin to wonder: how will all of this make sense again?
If the novel is a mirror we hold up to see life more clearly, or truthfully, the crime novel puts us in deep trouble: maybe life has no meaning.
At the end, however, we are rewarded. Someone, usually the detective, who, in one way or another and sometimes at great personal sacrifice, has managed to fix the mirror, and what was broken is now put together again. Every last piece fits, eventually. All it took was someone too clever, stubborn, desperate, and/or brave to give up, someone refusing to accept chaos—to uncover what was there the whole time: order, coherence, meaning.
Look at that, the story says, I had you scared for a while there, hadn’t I? You began to suspect that your fears were being realized, that there can be no truth. But you stuck with me and, at the end, the world actually makes sense. Everything has a place.
The only way out was to go deeper; you did, and in doing so, the story rewarded you. Now, as you leave here, maybe the world outside, too, will feel just slightly more meaningful and coherent for a little while, even though there are many, many moments out there that, for good reason, make you doubt it.
Beneath the blood and violence, the love affairs formed and crushed, the secrets kept and the secrets exposed, there is a deeper, existential undercurrent running through a crime story as well: a reckoning with the possibilities of meaning, and of meaninglessness and chaos.
That’s one of the beauties of crime fiction.
It’s not everything, of course, but it sure is something.
Below are four novels I find myself returning to again and again, usually late at night when I’m unable to sleep. I walk, I smoke, I browse through the pages. If you were to see me, you would probably think I was searching for something. I probably am.
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Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
Raskolnikov, a poor ex-student, kills a corrupt pawnbroker and her half-sister. A journey begins, a tense cat-and-mouse game running through the streets of Petersburg, where the brilliant, terrifying detective Porfiry Petrovich chases Raskolnikov through the deep maze of the city and the even deeper mazes of the soul. The mystery of Crime and Punishment is not the identity of the killer, but the ambiguity of his act: why does he kill?
The man we witness is not a cold, composed murderer with a modern idea of utilitarian killings as his guiding star. Instead, we follow an impulsive, frantic, feverish, and almost psychotic Raskolnikov who is on the verge of losing himself even before the murder is carried out.
Until now, Raskolnikov has tempted and tested himself and the ideas he believes drive him, and now, as we reach the point where the murder awaits him, everything becomes distorted—or rather, set right. The reality of the murder is thrown in his face, and what happens no longer concerns only the people in the novel; Dostoevsky has brought the reader herself into the narrative. She cannot escape the crucial question. Why does he commit the murder, really, since the motive Raskolnikov gives (even to himself) so clearly does not hold up? Can we commit the most horrifying acts without understanding them?
Raskolnikov. It’s easy to see him as an exception, deviation, a lot more difficult to acknowledge in him a possible truth about us all: there are very important things about ourselves that we do not know.
I sometimes think about them as the inner elevator shafts of our souls. Some we know inside and out, all the way down to the darkest cellar vaults where drives, desires, and impulses curl around one another. Others we are completely unfamiliar with; we don’t even know they exist until one day they open right in front of us: a sudden explosion of violence. The taste of a drug. A first lie to a loved one, to conceal an affair. How far we’re really capable of going to get what we desire.
There ought to be a special word for the things we do even though we don’t understand them. Perhaps there is? I don’t know.
Roberto Bolano, 2666
How to even begin? Perhaps with you. You track an elusive German author across Europe, feel your ambitions shrinking under the weight of literary history. You chase him through cities, libraries, conversations that slip through your fingers. You hear stories about a series of murders in the town of Santa Teresa.
You travel to Santa Teresa. Women vanish. Bodies pile up. The air is thick with dust and despair. You write down names and dates.
You’re a detective. You sort reports, maps, lists of victims. They are mostly young, mostly poor, mostly unnoticed until it’s too late. You count bodies. You count holes in families. You count how much the city doesn’t care.
You’re also a city. You are noise and industry and silence and streets where blood and dust mingle. You witness repetition: murder after murder. Patterns form, then dissolve. You realize nobody will solve it. Nobody can. You sense conspiracy in your heart.
You pass through war, through madness, through obsession. You meet criminals, lovers, the condemned. You keep walking. If you only go a little deeper, there may be something down there that makes it all clear. Could it be that meaning is found in searching itself?
Dennis Lehane, Mystic River
You may not think of the above novels as crime stories, specifically. I understand that, as they’re not typically found on the CRIME/SUSPENSE shelves. That being said, they contain everything a crime novel usually contains: a murder, a killer, a riddle, and a detective whose main reason for being in the story in the first place is to figure it all out. So why aren’t they? Good question.
Mystic River, on the other hand, usually is thought of as a crime novel. Why do I love Mystic River? Because it’s so brave. Because it never flinches. Because it understands trauma so deeply. Because it sees the social and psychological dynamics of crime, the moral ambiguity inherent in the word justice. Because every ethical issue must be gray.
Because guilt, grief, and anger are sometimes impossible to distinguish from one another. Because it’s so rich. Because it’s so funny. Because it’s so beautifully written without ever becoming pretentious. Because life is hard. Because the most important time to venture deeper is when it’s the hardest to endure. Because hearts break. Because love is the only force that’s as strong as death.
Kerstin Ekman, Blackwater
On Midsummer’s Eve, a woman stumbles upon two dead bodies in a tent. Eighteen years later, the killer is found.
Eighteen years. Makes you think about time and memory. That’s part of Blackwater’s immense power, for me—the way the novel understands time and people, how crime ripples through years and changes.
Maybe a memory is a sort of story that takes place inside, over and over again, and just like a story does, it evolves and changes with time. Memory is far too fickle a thing to capture the past; in Blackwater, memory is the opposite of what it claims to be. Memory succeeds at what nothing else can: memory makes it possible to be reconciled with one’s history. What was once unbearable is no longer so. It is only a memory.
As I’ve heard it, the story goes: entering the kitchen where her husband sat having coffee one morning, Ekman said, “You know what? I think I’m writing a crime novel.”
As if the novel had surprised her.
“The novel showed me a double murder,” she said later. “If a novel does that, as a writer you need to try and figure them out, because the reader will. You have to respect your reader.”
Ekman had to go deeper, to find her way out. It was the only way; the novel challenged her to. So she did and wrote what is, for me, my favorite crime novel ever to come out of Sweden. Perhaps it is the Great Swedish Novel; it’s certainly a contender.
What is the Swedish experience, exactly? I’m not sure. I’m trying to figure that out.
In Blackwater, no one’s a villain, no one’s a hero. Everyone you meet is so incredibly ordinary and still mysterious. Everyone is searching for meaning wherever they can find it: in nature, community, in the idea of home, in silence, in their own history, in their sins. And possibly, eventually, only find it in the rare moment of truly touching, reaching another human being.
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