From New York Newsday, Aug. 4, 2004

Crime novels that crusade:
More and more mystery writers are using their literary pulpit to take on social issues

By Aileen Jacobson

August 4, 2004

Special Agent Rachel Porter is at the gym practicing her street-fighting skills and experiencing a vivid waking nightmare about getting shot, when her cell phone rings. The Lotis blue, North America's rarest butterfly, is being threatened with extinction, the caller tells her.

Furthermore, the expert hired by Porter's U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service hasn't been heard from in two weeks.

"Then the chill that had previously nipped at my skin returned — only now it was stronger than ever," confides Porter. She is the lead character in "Blue Twilight," author Jessica Speart's newest novel mixing taut mystery and ecological zeal.

"I want to write about something that really fuels me, that makes me angry," says Speart, who spent 10 years writing magazine stories about wildlife before publishing her first novel. "With fiction, I can reach a wider audience, and I can vent more. I don't have to worry about being objective."

Thus Speart joined the ranks of writers in an expanding genre within a genre: mysteries with a message. From environmental disaster to race relations to child abuse, more and more writers of mysteries — the world's bestselling genre — are spinning compelling tales that are not just good reading, they're meant to be good for you.

As a literary subset, it's not exactly brand-new — writers tackled social issues in the 1930s, too — and no one seems to be tracking numbers. But many have taken notice. The range of issues has "exploded in the last 30 years," says bookstore owner Maggie Topkis.

And, because mystery writers usually write a lot, for readers who gobble up the books right away, novelist Nevada Barr says, they "have a tendency to stay on the edge of the interesting and provocative issues of the day."

Of greed and the environment

"I don't count on changing the world," says Carl Hiaasen, whose latest satirical thriller about environmental harm and human greed in Florida, "Skinny Dip," is on bestseller lists. "But people who are laughing at my books are getting what I'm trying to get across."

He usually embodies his theme —"whatever happens to be ticking me off" — in his villain, he says, in this case "Chaz, a biologist who has gone to the dark side, who sold himself out." Chaz — who aids polluters in the Everglades endangering such creatures as dolphins, birds and manatees — tosses his wife off a cruise ship on their anniversary. She survives after grabbing a floating marijuana bale, then goes for revenge. Hiaasen — who also espouses causes in a twice-weekly column for the Miami Herald — says he doesn't mind if people read his books for pure entertainment. But, as he recently told an audience at Huntington's Book Revue, "If people get angry enough to go to the next zoning board meeting," he'd feel good.

Walter Mosley, whose latest Easy Rawlins mystery, "Little Scarlet," is also on bestseller lists, says that though others say his books carry a message, he's no proselytizer. "I want to write about black male heroes... to bring those characters to life."

His book is set around the 1965 Watts riots, which happened when Mosley was 13. "It had a big impact on my father. He wanted to go and be in it, and partially knew he shouldn't because it was wrong. He knew both these things, and it was a heartbreaking situation."

He invests his sleuth with some of that ambivalence. But the book, he says, covers "a much larger canvas.... It's also talking about America, that white America was forever changed by the Watts riots. They never knew that blacks were so angry, that they were willing to go throw rocks at police. That was a shock to a large part of America, not unlike Americans' shock today that people in the rest of the world don't love us," another topic on which he hopes to provoke thought.

Social themes

Mosley calls the inclusion of social themes "the most important thing about crime fiction going on," though he's not sure it's new. With others, he points to noir writers, such as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain and Ross Macdonald, who, starting in the 1930s, addressed themes of "good and evil, right and wrong, corruption in the police and government."

But author Nevada Barr and others see dramatic expansion in recent years. Barr's 12th book featuring national park ranger Anna Pigeon, "High Country," is set in Yosemite. "We're branching out into things we weren't allowed to talk about 40 years ago, such as mental illness or alternative lifestyles. We're experiencing them, and we're passing it on."

Barr, once a park ranger herself, says slipping her message about preserving nature into her mysteries through her heroine "is a so much better way to get it across than if you wrote pamphlets.... The best way to change people is to give them a ride in someone else's shoes."

Because authors including Hiaasen, Mosley, Barr and John Grisham, who often criticizes the legal system, are bestsellers, the message mystery is "more prominent than it has been in the past," says Topkis, a co-owner of the Manhattan bookstore Partners & Crime.

British escapism

Classic golden age British mysteries, such as Agatha Christie's, were "created as escapism, and predicated on the assumption that the world is good and well ordered, and the only thing that has disturbed that orderedness is one malefactor." But American noir fiction introduced a view of "a world that is inherently corrupt.... You see a lot more anger."

The question, she says, is not why mystery writers are choosing issues, but why "writers on social issues are choosing mysteries." The genre, she says, provides both structure and freedom: "It's exploded its original confines. I can write about anything I want if I pin it on the scaffolding of a mystery plot."

Critic Maureen Corrigan, who teaches mysteries at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., says a shift took place in the 1960s. Before then, says Corrigan, hard-boiled detective writers "wrote more about what makes a man a man" and were essentially conservative.

But in the years after, hard-boiled detective fiction writers have included gays, lesbians, blacks and other groups among their good guys, "a crowd that would have been the criminals in the older books, while white suburban men are running the prostitution or gun rings." Robert B. Parker's Spenser series, launched in 1973, was among the first to do this, Corrigan says, and among the first to fashion, in the group surrounding the hero, an alternative to the nuclear family.

The workplace family is another social trend in mysteries, she says, reflected also in the all-female Philadelphia law firm imagined by Lisa Scottoline, a former trial attorney who writes with humor about challenges women face in a male-dominated world.

For Andrew Vachss, the ability to entice readers to learn about child abuse compelled him to start writing his mysteries some 20 years ago, he says. A lawyer who defends children, he has spent his career working on behalf of abused youth, he says, including writing a textbook. "Down Here," his 15th and most recent novel, features his fictional protagonist, Burke, a criminal who was abused as a child and hunts down pedophiles.

Replacing the social novel

In past centuries, says Vachss, crusading social novelists tackled issues mystery writers now routinely address. "Crime and violence and the abuse of children are now mainstream topics. We now look at these things as crimes, properly. When Sinclair and Dickens were writing, those things weren't against the law."

Author Laura Lippman recalls reading that crime novelists have taken over the social novel. "The social novel had been kind of abandoned as a little old-fashioned and unhip." But crime novelists such as George Pelecanos and Dennis Lehane, she says, "have made it pretty hip" again.

Successful writers weave their causes in subtly, says Otto Penzler, who owns Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan and publishes mysteries under his own imprint. "Anybody who's being lectured to starts to feel uneasy. You buy a mystery to have a good time."

Vachss says he takes care to write a strong narrative and "marble in the information.... I know if I can't engage you, I can't get you to read to the end. Then what good is the message?"

Some mystery writers just set out to be authors, and their themes entered later. That was the case for Karin Slaughter, whose latest thriller, "Indelible," arrives this month and includes as main characters two women who were sexually assaulted.

"It happened because those are my interests. I don't want to be didactic," she says. "I just present it and let the reader decide." She grew up in Atlanta during well-publicized child murder incidents there, and a college friend was raped.

Kathryn Harrison, who wrote about an incestuous relationship, Slaughter says, led her to see the importance of having women write about assault.

First-time author Michael Simon says he started out to create just a "fast-paced crime book," but past experiences caused him to include social views in "Dirty Sally." Because he once worked as the only New York Jewish probation officer in his unit in Austin, Texas, he says, he made his Austin homicide detective hero the only Yankee and only Jew in his squad, with a similar outsider-insider status: outsider in some ways, but insider compared with ethnic minorities.

Readers further learn in his book that in Texas, "92 percent of the poor are African-American and Latino."

Journalists first

Indeed, there's a nonfiction underpinning to many mysteries. Some books describe less- known milieus, such as Orthodox Jewish or American Indian, and many are filled with precise facts. Unsurprisingly, many authors have been journalists. (Unexpectedly, at least three — Speart, Barr and Simon — have been actors.)

"I covered social services for a long time," says Laura Lippman, who spent 12 years at The Baltimore Sun. "I covered poverty and homelessness and all those issues.... I'm a little wonky on welfare reform."

In her "Butchers Hill," an old crime comes back to haunt five former foster children. Inspired by a true story, the novel contains "a lot of information on foster care, welfare, even adoption and adoption rights, all drawn from my years as a reporter," says Lippman. Her latest, "By a Spider's Thread," explores religion, identity and the effects of divorce on children.

Lippman says the three mystery writers she read most before launching her career were Hiaasen, Mosley and Sara Paretsky, whose books limn such charged topics as abortion and toxic waste pollution.

Like Paretsky, Lippman doesn't stick to one issue. "There's a different subtext for every book, always something larger and philosophical in nature." Although "the puzzle novel has a lot of pleasures to deliver," she says, she prefers books that go beyond whodunit.

"Crime is a great way to examine a community, because crime is an event that often brings into conflict parts of a society that usually don't touch one another," says Lippman. "It's a disruption of the status quo that brings introspection, whether it's just one individual or something rotten in the society. Eventually, we should see really good novels out of Enron, WorldCom and other white-collar crime. Just add a murder."

Copyright © 2004 by Newsday. Reprinted with permission.