Kijun Times

This semester I am teaching a Freshman seminar on “The Great Crime Novel”  at an Ivy League institution. The seminar is limited to fifteen students, and when I walked into the first class on a hot day in September, I found fourteen young women, their fresh, and seemingly innocent faces turned up towards  me eagerly. We were eventually joined by one lone boy.

 Was crime of particular interest to young women today, I wondered.   Did this have something to do with women’s nature? Was it Freud’s suggestion that women’s super-ego was not as strong as men’s?  Was it their often restricted lives?  Or on the contrary the greater freedom to imagine committing a crime? Or even the desire to commit one?  

I was also  surprised when I asked them why they had chosen this class. Not one of them mentioned a private or personal reason for their interest in crime, though obviously they might have had one. These are savvy students who have learned long ago to carefully chest their cards.

I then admitted my own interest in crime which is a theme that has run through many of my now thirteen books from the first “The Perfect Place,”  through "Cracks" and on to the last, “Dreaming for Freud.”  In the latter,  though no one is killed,  Freud’s method of interrogation in this early case history which lies behind the book,  sometimes sounds like Sherlock Holmes searching so skillfully and deducing so much from slight clues in order to discover a “crime of the heart.”

I explained that my own interest came from a “crime”  in my own family: my only sister’s “accident” in a car on a dry night with no other car in sight, her husband driving her and himself into a telephone pole,  after a long history of battering and violence on his part.   He, wearing his seat belt survived, but she did not.

It was this trauma that had started me writing seriously, and a subject I had returned to trying to understand how this could have happened to a beautiful and beloved woman not yet forty with six young children.  

I admitted that the books I had chosen for the seminar were none of them “who              dunnits.” We know here who has committed or will commit the murders almost from the start. We were not going to try and discover a murderer but rather  go on an exploration into the mind of a criminal, in a search for the reasons human beings commit crimes.  What interested me here, and I hoped would interest them too,  was the motivation of the killer, why and how such an evil act could be performed and why the author had written the book and why it was so extensively read.  It is Ivan Karamazov’s  old question: the reason for the existence of evil in the world. 

The truth is perhaps that we will never know,  just as Raskolnikov in "Crime and Punishment"  never really tells us why he murdered. Perhaps these murderers do not know why they killed. Many reasons are given: poverty, ambition, a feeling of being possessed, chance or fate or even God. Meursault in "The Stranger" says it was the sun.   

This is perhaps one of the reasons these murderers engage our interest, the mystery that surrounds the act.   The victim, too, is often presented unfavorably, or is not of much interest,  and is only briefly described in many of these books. 

Why have I, for example, writing so obsessively about my sister’s death, never written her story from the victim’s point of view? Why have I not told her story through her eyes?  

Perhaps the reason lies in the fact that a victim is not  interesting on the page. Much more interesting is the active character, the one who is seemingly in control of the plot, the murderer who may initially hesitate before he commits the crime, as so many of these murderers seem to do, creating  suspense by vacillating, yet drawn forward almost ineluctably to his crime. Once the crime is committed the suspense is maintained by the question, will he or will he not be caught? We watch with fascination to see if he will confess, admit to his crime, or if he will escape unscathed.

Perhaps that is why I have a class filled with young women today who no longer identify as victims.  These young women, thanks to their good minds and hard work, find themselves in a favorable situation. They must believe they are active participants in the life of their times,  ones in control of the situation, mistresses of their own destiny. It is they who can decide which way the dice will roll, or so they believe. They are in control of the plot.

As one of the young women wrote so insightfully: “Perhaps the reader identifies with the criminals not only because of the writers careful writing and manipulation .. but because of his or her human nature.” Indeed,  in these books and as authors writing about crime today,  we may find our own darker side and are able vicariously and safely within the structure of a book to express what we would never dare to say: that we too are the guilty ones.

Sheila Kohler is the author of "Cracks"  "Dreaming for Freud" and  "Bay of Foxes"