The Plight of Crime Fiction Or Why Crime Fiction Writers Always Feel Bad
People often ask me why I choose to write crime fiction and I say it’s because it encompasses all the big human emotions – love, hate, greed, revenge, fear — as well as the basic moral questions of good and evil, and that’s more than enough for me. When people say, “I don’t read crime fiction at all,” as if they would not deign to waste their time or intelligence on something so trivial and clearly beneath them (it’s interesting to note that they have no problem saying this to me, a crime fiction writer), I say, “So, you’ve never read Crime & Punishment or An American Tragedy or Lolita or Poe or Chandler or Hammett or contemporary novels like Donna Tartt’s The Secret History or Richard Ford’s Canada or almost anything by Joyce Carol Oates, the “literary” list of crime fiction novels goes on and on. Frankly, I’m hard pressed to think of a … Read more