I am both a writer and reader of murder mysteries. I love the puzzle. I love watching the pieces come together in the detective’s mind, usually in ways I know I’m missing because the detective is smarter than I am. I love the low-stakes satisfaction of justice done as I veg on the couch, my cup of tea slowly growing cold on the table beside me. I also love the evening’s version of that scene on the couch, the tea now replaced by a glass of wine, the book by BritBox mysteries and American crime shows. Yet I find myself thinking about the ways in which the classic murder mysteries and TV shows I love are both morally dubious and psychologically deadening. Last week brought those concerns to the fore.
A few days ago, I attended a trial that has strongly impacted my local community. In 2020, Monica Goods, an 11-year-old Black girl, was killed during a car chase when a white state trooper allegedly rammed twice into the family’s car, causing it to flip over. Monica, in the back seat, was thrown from the car, which then landed on top of her. Now-former state trooper Christoper Baldner has been charged with second-degree murder, manslaughter, and reckless endangerment. This month, five years later, the case has finally come to trial.
A dear friend of mine is one of the people who have worked hard to keep Monica’s name alive. She has been sitting in each day in the courtroom, and I came with her one day last week, as much to support her as to show solidarity with the still-grieving family. I was there when Monica’s stepmother recounted the horrific events that led to Monica’s tragic death. I was there to watch the cam footage that recording the events. I saw the desperate attempts to find Monica. I heard the screams. The defendant sat a short way in front of me, to my left. The jury were in their box to my right. The attorneys splayed out cross the tables.
It was, in other words, a scene entirely familiar to me from all the courtroom dramas I have ever watched on television. The witness was a real woman, grieving the unspeakable death of a child. The defendant was a real person facing the possibility of decades in prison. Yet it looked nothing to me so much as one more Law and Order rerun, one more way of bingeing away a pleasant evening. I watched my emotions fail to kick in, my mind fail to grasp that this wasn’t a TV show. I found myself capable of anger at the needless death of a little child. But sorrow, horror, true empathy just weren’t there. I wondered where my humanity had gone and whether crime fiction, on the page or the screen, had seriously robbed me of a piece of humanity.
And then I wondered whether, as the author of a murder mystery, I was part of the problem.
My own mystery plays – the word ‘plays’ is telling – with notions of justice and the costs of loyalty. The few people in the novel who ever know the truth are scarred by the experience, with the price they pay commensurate with their culpability. My novel is hardly The Brothers Karamazov or, to take a 21st century example, Ian McEwan’s Atonement. It’s a beach read – a good one, I hope, and for all its humor meant to be read by thoughtful, caring people. Still, as with any classically plotted murder mystery, the reader can relax into the anticipated misdirection, the oh-so-smart detective who solves the case at the end, and a predictability of pacing and narrative arch that itself is comforting.
But murder mysteries, fiction though they are, do have a reality. That is, like all forms of art and entertainment, they exist within a social and cultural world on which they have a real impact. That I found the courtroom in which I sat last week as familiar and banal as one more TV show is a real social effect that has altered my emotional responses and numbed me to the horrific details of a real-life, entirely avoidable tragedy.
It seems to me that murder mysteries and TV dramas, by their very nature, raise the question of justice – what it means and how we determine whether it has been achieved. They both question and at the same time take for granted that there is a collective understanding — of how we know justice when we see it and what we expect of our society. But I am trying to reckon with the ways in which they also desensitize us to tragedy and horror and deaden our capacity for outrage and grief. It’s satisfying when villains get what they deserve. I get that. I can’t even promise never to write another murder mystery. But I don’t want to reader to get off scot free.