Crime is a perfect vehicle for any kind of story. At the very least, it provides you with an immediate conflict which you can spin out into a developed plot. Crime places your characters under pressure. It raises the stakes for all the characters involved, either the victims or the criminals or the agents of justice, whether they are law enforcement officers or private detectives or citizens who want to take matters into their own hands.
Crime can occur anywhere, and it can affect anyone, regardless of demographic. It’s a violation of what we think of as civilization. We want that violation fixed—we want justice.
When I was in college, I drove a Suzuki Samurai with a soft top. One day I got in my car to drive to campus for class, and I reached down to turn the car stereo on and my hand went right through a big hole in my dash. I looked down and saw wires sticking out of this big hole. Someone had sliced open the back of the soft top, climbed in, and stolen my stereo.
I was upset. It wasn’t like I’d left my car on the side of the highway for a week—it was in the parking lot next to the house where I lived, surrounded by other cars. But I was more than upset—I was outraged. I drove to the police station and I filed a report. A small part of me imagined that the police officer taking my report would say something like, “Oh, yeah, this sounds like George,” like George was the town ne’er-do-well. “Me and the boys will pay him a call.” And the cops would kick down George’s door and catch him red-handed with my car stereo on his kitchen table, and he would be arrested and go to jail and I would get my car stereo back, maybe with a note of gratitude from the town mayor for finally helping to put George behind bars.
At the same time I was having this little imagined hero story, I realized I was never going to see my car stereo again. My parents commiserated with me and my dad told me to get the soft top repaired and then go find a decent car stereo that didn’t cost too much. Repairing the soft top was easier than I anticipated, and I found a new car stereo readily enough and had it installed soon after—it was probably better than the original one. And that right there is part of crime novels, too—the disproportionate effects of crime. In the end, for me, at most it was a big inconvenience. I was rattled for a couple of days—someone had broken into my car—but pretty soon I was just annoyed that I couldn’t listen to music while I drove.
So crime novels can open up understandings into different social worlds. They provide an entry for an author to explore issues of class and race and gender and sexuality, etc. There are so many kinds of crime novels—murder mysteries, locked room scenarios, cozy mysteries, brutal psychological thrillers, gory horror, comedy, family drama, etc.
One of my favorite writers is Martin Cruz Smith, who wrote Gorky Park (1981) and introduced Arkady Renko, a homicide investigator in Moscow during the Soviet era. Smith is still writing Arkady Renko books—his ninth came out last year—although now they are set in post-Soviet Russia. Arkady is cynical and stubborn but also romantic at his core, and he hates corruption. In his third book, Red Square, Arkady is talking with some expat Russians who say to him, “You’re a policeman in a police state. Why do you do this?” Arkady thinks for a second and says, “Permission…When someone is killed, for a short time people have to answer questions. An investigator has permission to go to different levels and see how the world is built. A murder is a little like a house splitting in half; you see what floor is above what floor and what door leads to another door.”
I love that idea as a writer, that a crime can split a house in half and reveal how the world is built. Once you start investigating, you always discover something. And that’s the thrilling part about crime novels—when people investigate, they always discover something, and we go along for the ride and learn about secrets and hidden motives and get to see worlds we don’t know about.
Never Turn Back is set in Atlanta, but Atlanta is a big city with a lot of different neighborhoods. I live in Sandy Springs, a nice suburb just north of Atlanta proper, with lots of trees and a public golf course and park and everything I need—work, grocery stores, dry cleaners—within a couple of miles. This is where my protagonist Ethan Faulkner lives, in a rental house, the same area where he and his sister lived with their parents. But just ten miles south of here are English Avenue and Vine City, two adjacent neighborhoods west of downtown Atlanta. Part of that area is known as the Bluff, which used to be basically an open-air heroin market. Ten years ago the Bluff was listed as the most dangerous area in Atlanta, and the fifth most dangerous neighborhood in the United States. Since then there’s been a fair amount of redevelopment and several efforts to clean up the neighborhood. But this isn’t some remote part of town. Georgia Tech and the World of Coke and the Georgia Aquarium are right next to the Bluff.
Atlanta a large and very diverse city that has exploded in size since the 1990s. Aside from the tight center of downtown and Midtown, a map of Atlanta roads looks like a plate of spaghetti, winding everywhere out from the city center. It’s a huge, messy canvas to play with. You’ve got the swanky Buckhead area and funky Midtown and Virginia-Highlands and Inman Park and Decatur and Morningside and Brookhaven and Chamblee, and that’s just a sampling that doesn’t include at any neighborhoods south of I-20, which runs east and west right through downtown, splitting the city. Amanda Kyle Williams, a beloved local author who wrote a PI series set in Atlanta, did a great job of exploring the darker sides of Atlanta before cancer took her from us far too soon. Karin Slaughter does the same thing, and Thomas Mullen and Trudy Nan Boyce and many others.
And I’ve got the audacity to think I can do the same thing, and like those authors, I’m going to use crime thrillers as my vehicle. I hope you come along for the ride.
