The Politics of Crime Fiction

What are the political leanings of crime fiction? Over the past several years, some well known writers have sounded the genre’s progressive or conservative orientation. My contribution to this ongoing discussion, rather than adding more evidence for the left- or the rightward leanings, tackles a more fundamental question. How does crime fiction serve to reinforce the overall system irrespective of its particular slant? A typical work of crime fiction, be it detective, police procedural, espionage or even noir, begins with the disruption of a seemingly stable reality. The arc of the plot takes the protagonist through a series of challenges that keep increasing the tension until the climax when the crime is solved and the status quo ante is restored. The genre is therefore essentially conservative.

In 2015, Val McDermid penned an article with the provocative title “Why crime fiction is leftwing and thrillers are rightwing.” Her premise was that crime fiction, defined as the police procedural or the detective novel, gives voice to people who “are not comfortably established in the world – immigrants, sex workers, the poor, the old.” Thrillers, on the other hand, tend “towards the conservative, probably because the threat implicit in the thriller is the world turned upside down, the idea of being stripped of what matters to you.” The personal stakes in a thriller are so high, that survival takes precedence over diversity.

Almost immediately, Jonathan Freedland pushed back, suggesting that detective fiction has its conservative authors—Agatha Christie being the most famous of them—and that there are plenty of thriller authors who advance a progressive point of view, the post-Cold War John le Carré being the most obvious choice here.

A couple of years later, HB Lyle demanded more “working class” spies, lamenting the fact that spy thrillers are littered with upper class operators who go to clubs and can draw on their classmates from public schools. Though this may be more of a British issue, his point is well taken. Working class spies’ loyalties would be tested because their connection to the system is far more tenuous than that of their upper-class counterparts.

One would think that adding class to the discussion should lead to more emphasis of the systemic questions, but class is fuzzy. In the U.S. most people think of themselves as “middle class,” making the concept useless in terms of how readers view themselves in the political system. In Europe, the notion of class still is more relevant. Even there, it’s not clear, however, that a “working class” spy, detective, or police officer would significantly alter the overall role of crime fiction. As Fredric Jameson in his book on Raymond Chandler points out, “the real function of the murder…is for order to be felt more strongly.” In other words, the murder that features in every piece if crime fiction is meant to make the reader appreciate—even desire—order more strongly now that it’s been disrupted.  Jameson goes on to show that while American detective fiction depicts the local realm where the crime occurs as rife with corruption, class or race conflicts, it maintains, at the same time, a “boundless optimism as the greatness of the country, taken as a whole.” Yeah, there’s some nasty stuff going on in this place, but we still live in the greatest country.

Given the long lifespan of a work and the ability of readers to interpret however they’d like, reporter Andy Martin, who shadowed Lee Child for a year, concluded that “the author cannot control and cannot be held accountable for the interpretation of his texts.” He cites Gregg Hurwitz’s comment that thrillers “tend to reflect rather than steer.” Irrespective of an author’s political leanings, readers will assign meanings that fit their particular world view.

I’d like to focus the manner in which crime fiction and thrillers contribute to the reproduction of the system itself. French sociologist Luc Boltanski points out that the modern state strives to convince its citizenry of the “reality of reality,” that is, it stresses that the circumstances of everyday life are real, predictable and safe. And deep down, we believe that, too. How else would we be able to get out of bed every morning and do what we need to do?

All crime fiction starts with a disruption of that reality: the inciting incident. Suspense, its driving emotion, originates in the fact that the reality of reality is not nearly as stable as our governments would like us to believe. We have plenty of reasons to doubt the predictability and safety of everyday life.

This latent disbelief in the reality of reality represents a significant challenge to the state. If we can’t assume anymore that our lives follow predictable paths, the maintenance of any system of governance becomes difficult. Revolutions aren’t necessarily born from deprivation as such, but from the frustrated expectation that things will get better. The current state of the world gives some credence to this claim.

Here lies the ultimately conservative angle of crime fiction. The “happy” ending, the solved crime, the culprit brought to justice, all restore the disrupted reality. Rather than expanding our sense that reality doesn’t have to be the way it is, crime fiction, after first raising that possibility, neatly restores reality to the status quo ante. We are relieved that the good side won and return to our lives. Although it can and does critique specific aspects of society, it does not present a general critique of everyday life in the sense Henri Lefebvre demanded.

The noir genre seems to avoid this pattern. In the novels of David Goodis, for example, the bleakness of the setting and the characters isn’t resolved in some “happy” ending. If anything, life remains as miserable as it was before. While flawed characters pursuing ill-conceived objectives might represent a critique of the system, they don’t offer a vision of how the world could be different. If anything, the bleak ending of noir novels encourages despair—or the need for a stiff drink—but not a sense of going out to look for a better world.

I write thrillers and I participate in this game. My protagonist doesn’t work for a government but for the United Nations. That was a small step beyond the reproduction of the territorial state, which is at the core of every international spy thriller. When he solves the crime and outsmarts the criminals, the victims are hopefully able to restore sanity to their lives. Yes, one gunrunner or trafficker may be out of commission, but the reader is aware that the system that enabled the crime continues to function. A brilliant example of such writing is The Constant Gardener by John Le Carré. The reader follows Justin as he investigates how he failed his murdered wife. Along the way, the novel excoriates the practice of global pharmaceutical corporations to test new medicines in poor countries where informed consent is not given and officials are bribed to look the other way. At the end of the novel, nothing has changed on the surface, but the reader knows that everything is different, and is even moved toward action through a list of NGOs who combat such practices.

Fifty years ago this May, the Situationist International in Paris used the phrase “Sous les pavés, la plage — Under the cobblestones, the beach.” Progressive crime fiction worth its salt ought to at least offer glimpses of a different world, a world worth striving for, while doing justice to the murky mess of our current reality. I don’t know, yet, how to write that novel.

Maybe one place to start is punishment. The current norm is that the perpetrator is killed or arrested. Killing is the easy way out. It satisfies our baser urges and avoids protracted legal wrangling too tedious to recount. The arrest of the culprit puts them into the hands of the state. The criminal procedures that follow are between the state and the criminal. The victims rarely matter in that process.

What if we wrote crime novels that explore reconciliation? How can you reconcile after a murder? Well, I’ve seen enough footage from hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, to know that survivors of heinous acts can still reconcile with the perpetrator, if the basic humanity of each is recognized. Equally important, when we take punishment out of the hands of the state, Michel Foucault tells us, we deprive it of a crucial means of disciplining all of us. This suggestion is fraught with danger—vigilantism is one possible outcome—but it might also offer a glance into a different future.