How Much Truth Should Crime Fiction Tell?
Crime fiction has a curious relation to truth. It’s fictional so not real, but there’s high pressure to make sure details are ‘correct.’ Woe to the author who confuses clip with magazine or bullet with shell. Or has a police officer read a Miranda warning at the wrong time or walk into an interrogation room armed. On the other hand, a story can force too many details in, whether it’s the freezing temperature of blood or the post-mortem effects of a poison. Eyes glaze over and the mystery novel’s curious search for ‘truth’ is derailed .
Some crime fiction is based on a real life crime. Recall that Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” published in three installments from November 1842 to February 1843, was inspired by the scandalous murder of Mary Cecilia Rogers in New York City in October 1838. Although he set his story in Paris, Poe wrote in a letter that he himself analyzed and solved (in his mind) the Rogers murder in order to contrive Dupin’s solution of the crime. The Rogers murder was never solved in real life.
James Ellroy’s 1987 The Black Dahlia, the first in his LA Quartet, fictionalizes the 1947 murder of Elizabeth Short. Ellroy suffered the murder of his mother during a difficult childhood and is said to have symbolically transferred his feelings for his mother onto Short. The Black Dahlia case was never solved, like so many murders of young women, although Ellroy provides a solution in the book. Two real unsolved murders turned into solved crimes in fiction. Is the truth crime fiction offers a version of reality where things make sense?
Dashiell Hammett went to Butte, Montana as a Pinkerton, likely in the year when anti-union elements blew up a copper miners union hall, a fire killed 168 miners and martial law was imposed on the town. The corruption and violence informed Red Harvest, set in a town nicknamed Poisonville. Although the novel doesn’t portray the murder of IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) organizer Frank Little, the attacks on leftist ‘Wobblies’ in Butte influenced Hammett’s politics. But Hammett said fiction should stay close to the reality that serves as its model. Addressing the Third American Writers Congress in 1939, Hammett observed that "the contemporary novelist's job is to take pieces of life and arrange them on paper. And the more direct their passage from street to paper, the more lifelike they should turn out.”
So Hammett thought he was depicting reality faithfully. Margaret Atwood used historical material as a basis for Alias Grace. She commented that if the subject is known, you can’t just arbitrarily change it. The story was based on an 1843 murder of a man and his housekeeper that she read about in a frontier memoir. Still she worked over the historical material, first writing a cycle of poems and then a TV film before writing the novel.
Perhaps the most famous mystery built around a real crime was Agatha Christie’s 1934 Murder on the Orient Express. Christie used many of the elements of the infamous kidnapping of aviator Charles’ Lindbergh’s toddler son in 1932. She also relied on her own trips on the Orient Express as well as a news report of a snowstorm that stopped the train for several days. The real Lindbergh case was solved when a bank teller became suspicious of a gold certificate traced to the ransom money, not in the way Christie describes.
Exactly what is the role of fact in crime fiction? Authors may incorporate real crimes, real places, real details but not to convince readers that what they’re reading is true. We know from the get-go a novel won’t provide truth. Maybe incorporating authentic details allows for trust so that we suspend disbelief and immerse ourselves in the fictional world? But people do learn about the real world from fictional worlds. Readers of historical novels derive pleasure from the feeling of learning about a past epoch.
So what is going on? While reality is messy and complex with loose ends and mysteries that don’t get solved, crime novels must make sense and provide a solution to the crime. Despite the pressure to be factually correct, a crime novel isn’t a mirror of the world. Suffering a crime is horribly painful and terrifying and no reader wants to feel that. Yet we want to read about murder, even though murder deaths are currently a fraction of traffic and overdose deaths. What is the truth we seek in murder mysteries? Let me know what you think.
Rattlesnakes Strike Twice is available for review on NetGalley and Reedsy Discovery!