Police Procedurals: The Body, Unplugged

I read with interest a recent essay by Eric Thurm in the LA Review of Books entitled Homicide: Death on the Screen. In it, he analyzes the attitude toward the corpse, as he sees it, in three different kinds of crime drama on television. While I disagree with much of what he says, I found his ideas interesting enough to want to compare them to my own approach to the dead human body in my crime fiction.

Thurm begins with the police procedural drama typified by Law & Order. He finds that, in its formulaic discovery of the body and subsequent investigation, the corpse is reduced to a "plot engine," a clinical object marginalized "as much as possible, hiding the fact that it used to be a person." As a result, he writes, while "murder cases are exciting ... these sorts of series do their best to abstract the fun parts of crime solving from the act and people who make them necessary."

At the opposite extreme, he notes, are series like CSI and Bones in which the body is "placed front and center ... this tendency to transform the body into a scavenger hunt combines with a sort of morbid fascination, making the entertainment value of the human body horrifyingly explicit."

A third tendency, he continues, is found in series such as Hannibal, in which the "treatment of the corpse [is] even more striking, refreshing, and necessary.... The body is a canvas, and the serial killers, the artists." Hannibal acts as a "corrective," as he sees it, to the tendency of traditional procedurals to gloss over death by whisking the body away too soon or to turn it into an intellectual puzzle.

I suggest you read Thurm's essay for yourself and come back to tell me what you think. But consider first the approach I've taken to the dead body in my crime fiction.

To begin with, because procedurals attempt to present a reasonably realistic representation of homicide investigations, it must be said that murder cases are not actually "exciting" and "fun." Not for anyone, but particularly not for the investigators. As I discuss in The Fregoli Delusion, homicide investigators often fall into something called "isolation of affect" in which they compartmentalize their emotional reactions to what they experience on the job, often damaging their personal lives in the process (pp. 174-177). As a result, the body of the victim often loses its humanity and does, indeed, become an object to the detective (and the narrator, as well). And once the instinctual revulsion has been put aside, of course, the investigation mostly falls into the dull, boring routine of interviews, surveillance, and combing through endless records for pertinent scraps of information.

However, good investigators often use the techniques of victimology to reconstruct a picture of the victim as they were in life in order to assess who or what might have put them in harm's way. This is the approach taken by Hank Donaghue in my second crime novel, Marcie's Murder. Hank had only a brief glimpse of an unknown woman before she was murdered, and his desperate, unvoiced desire throughout the novel is to be able to come to know who she was while she was alive. Similarly, he and Karen Stainer retrace the final days of the victims of The Rainy Day Killer in order to replace the harsh reality of their mutilated, tortured bodies, kept mostly off-stage or under cover, with a strong sense of who they were as vibrant, hopeful, innocent young women.

While Thurm is correct that procedurals tend to whisk the body off-stage quickly, it's inaccurate to say that this narrative approach sucks all the marrow out of the story as a result. The intention is not to make "it easier for us to ignore the dead and the dying," or to "allow the no longer living to disappear before our eyes, to merely become parts of the ritual, like so many communion wafers," as Thurm puts it. Rather, the investigative technique of victimology as I use it in my novels forces the reader to come at it from the other direction, as it were. To begin at death and work backward to appreciate who the victims were in life, and to experience the feelings of frustration, revulsion, and pathos at their loss that the detectives often will not permit themselves to acknowledge.

Crime Fiction

Welcome to my blog on crime fiction, writing, and other stuff. I’m also maintaining a blog on my website at http://www.mjmccann/apps/blog and I encourage you to skip over there to check things out. I’ve decided to open up shop here as well, however, because Blogger has outrageously good search engine indexing and better opportunities to interact with the bloggiverse. So, in the immortal words of Darkwing Duck, “let’s get dangerous!”

As I was preparing Blood Passage for publication I found myself wrestling with questions of taxonomy. How would I categorize a novel in which attention shifts between homicide investigators, a murderer who is a high-ranking organized crime official, and a little boy who claims he is the reincarnated spirit of the murder victim at the center of the investigation?

The most appropriate category available from Mother Amazon is Mystery & Thriller, and so Blood Passage has been duly listed there. While other novels in the series may be more accurately described as mysteries, Blood Passage isn’t so much, because while the killers of Martin Liu are eventually identified through the investigations of Donaghue and Stainer – as well as Peter Mah, the Triad Red Pole – the killings perpetrated by Peter are not at all mysterious in nature.

As a result, I took a little comfort in slotting Blood Passage into the Police Procedural subcategory of the Mystery & Thriller category, because it does in truth focus on the investigative procedures of Donaghue and Stainer in some detail. I spent a fair amount of time researching homicide investigation and tried to present a reasonably accurate picture of how police detectives work and live.

But when it came time to settle on the name of the series of which Blood Passage is the debut installment, I balked at calling it the Donaghue and Stainer Mystery series. Instead, after a little experimentation, I settled on “the Donaghue and Stainer Crime Novel series.”

Wikipedia defines crime fiction as “the literary genre that fictionalizes crimes, their detection, criminals and their motives. It is usually distinguished from mainstream fiction and other genres such as science fiction or historical fiction, but boundaries can be, and indeed are, blurred.”

While you could argue that this is a typically fuzzy Wikipedia effort, I like it because it touches on all the important elements in what I’m writing. Crime. Its detection. Criminals. Their motives. This works well for Blood Passage and will work well for the other novels to follow.

This distinguishes it from the kind of story in which the mystery and its solution take center stage, usually a story in which the detective follows clues and uses logic and sound reasoning (ratiocination) to identify the perpetrator, as in the Sherlock Holmes or Agatha Christie vein, or investigators sift through thousands of bits of physical evidence to solve the crime, as in the CSI-centered stories.

The more general definition of crime fiction allows me to position your point of view as reader anywhere in the story I wish. I can withhold the answers from you and make the mystery and its solution the primary focus of your attention, but in some instances I might prefer to position you closer to the characters than to the mystery. In the case of Blood Passage I prefer to have the characters dominate your attention as you move through the story. I want you to learn about Hank, Karen and Peter. And Smoke Archer. And Uncle Sang. And Anna Haynes Donaghue.

So, crime fiction it is.