6 End Violins

Explicit sex and gratuitous violence seem to be the order of the day in genre fiction.

I once read a debut Romance by the wife of an acquaintance. She had won a contest and the prize was a publishing contract. The book was cut from the then-popular science fiction romance category. It featured humanoid characters with prehensile … Well, never mind. Books like that must have heaving loins and throbbing bosoms on every other page or they won’t sell. A gynecology textbook has less detail.

I’ve been reading more than more than my share of thrillers lately. Steve Berry, David Baldacci and Tom Clancy have all crossed my lap. The Clancy book was ghostwritten. Badly, but that not my point.

In all these books, the body count climbs dramatically with each chapter. People are shot, poisoned, burned with Greek fire (whatever that is) or blown up over the ocean. Necks snap regularly. I suppose the plot point was that the evildoers were heartless and cruel, and deserved whatever fate was to befall them in the final chapter.

Unfortunately, the putative good guys were in competition to match them, corpse for corpse, and they didn’t seem to show any more remorse than the heartless evildoers.

This bothers me because I don’t believe the moral order is restored because the winning score is a higher body count. I want to know how justice is served beyond foiling the ultimate destructive act.

Feel free to attack me after reading my books. My higher ground isn’t much more than a mole hill. My principal character, Frank Healy, metes justice from the same bloody chalice. He feels compelled to do so, driven by his inner demons, but he feels badly about his crimes. Does that make him a better person? Probably not, but I think it makes for a better story.

I have trouble writing prolonged scenes of graphic violence. This may be because I don’t have what it takes to write thrillers. I’m not really trying. I think I can come up with sufficiently novel forms of death, but I can’t dwell on them for ten pages. Or a hundred.

Of course, that might be because I feel squeamish describing glistening intestines trailing across the floor. Or maybe I don’t think it adds anything to the story. I suspect most violence is abrupt, over in seconds. The razor-sharp, slowly falling pendulum has a place in suspense, but in crime fiction? I don’t think so. Kill him. Get it over with. You can all vomit at your leisure afterward.

Graphic sex falls into the same bed. True, the average male reader must derive guilty pleasure from a languid description of voluptuous female anatomy. Based on my limited exposure to romance, maybe women enjoy reading about well-formed men, too.

Are all women shaped like that? No. Do all men have abs of steel? Not bloody likely. All cutting and pasting those salacious details does is increase the page count. If it isn’t three hundred pages, it must be a novella, right?

While word pictures of the act may titillate (I love that word), when the old movies faded to black, everyone knew what was going on in the darkness between the scenes.

One aspect of crime fiction, especially noir, is the prolonged agony of unfulfilled desire. The hero is often in a relationship with someone forever just out of reach. How many impediments can you put into a romantic relationship? Quite a few, apparently. I’ve been keeping my lovers apart through four books. Oh, they had a brief fling in book three (haven’t sold that one yet), but even that creates more problems. Will they ever settle down and get married? I don’t know. How dramatic could that be?

Another fact of modern life is that people have become more androgynous. Women dress more like men. Men are supposed to be sensitive and do almost half the housework. Everyone is pierced up the wazoo. How can a manly man prove his masculinity if he can’t club a defenseless deer with a stick? Homosexuality has come out of the closet and wants everyone else to wonder if maybe they aren’t gay, too. Ain’t that a kick in the pants? Fictional real men have a lot to answer for these days.

I expect my hero to get into scrapes. Characters have to die, or I would be evicted from the crime writer’s guild, but that doesn’t mean Frank will be happy about killing the perpetrator. Angst is healthy. He can try to be good and not kill anybody for ten chapters, but justice is always there, peeking over his shoulder, pointing out wickedness, demanding retribution.

What’s a crime fighter to do?