I’ve been thinking a lot about genres, and the promise of genres. Although I read some fantasy and Sci Fi, my heart is mostly with mystery and romance.
The thing about both mystery and romance is that, on some level, you always know where the stories will end. Romance has a happily-ever-after (HEA), or at least a happy-for-now (HFN). Mystery has the perpetrator caught and brought to justice.
Romance gets dismissed for a lot of reasons, not least of which is that it’s associated with women, and our society’s cynicism thinks happiness is passe. I mean, do you, but in a world that feels like it’s rapidly falling down around our ears, happiness and pleasure are important.
Mystery, in the end, does something very similar. In Jill Paton Walsh’s Thrones, Dominations, a Lord Peter Wimsey novel, Peter’s wife Harriet, a mystery novelist, questions the usefulness of her vocation, dismissing it as frivolous. And he counters that:
“You seem not to appreciate the importance of your special form. Detective stories contain a dream of justice. They project a vision of a world in which wrongs are righted . . . murderers are caught and hanged, and innocent victims are avenged and future murder is deterred.”
And, just like romance brings happiness into a time that seems to have little of it, mystery novels can bring a dream of justice into a time that seems to have little of it.
But here’s my problem.
Justice is complicated. There’s the mythology of justice, which involves the whole criminal justice system, and there’s the reality of justice, in which the criminal justice system is largely a mechanism to maintain an unequal status quo, to keep the powerful powerful and the powerless powerless.
Mystery novels largely valorize the former and ignore the latter. Peter Wimsey had his Charles Parker. Sherlock Holmes had his Lestrade. Armand Gamache was the head of the Surete. Thomas Lynley is a duke and an Inspector with Scotland Yard.
I’m increasingly uncomfortable with this, which really sucks since I’m trying to write a mystery.
What it comes down to is this: what does a dream of justice look like in a post-carceral world? If we believe in restorative justice? For people for whom the criminal justice system does not work?
I honestly don’t have any answers for this, but I want to write my way towards them. It feels more real, more compelling, more just than assuming the police and courts equal justice.