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Read Cartel trilogy author Don Winslows essayhere.
Lust made him a killer.
I recall this upbringing when I consider how exactly I ended up writing crime novels.
Im definitely interested, maybe unhealthily so, in humanitys darkest proclivities.
I struggle to reconcile my aversion to real-world violence with my willingness to conjure it on the page.
Me, Mom Im that kind of person.
And I wonder about that, too.
So how does he reconcile this?
The big thing for me is showing that violence has consequences.
He closed his laptop.
Im not sure why that shooting in particular affected me the way it did, he says.
A fluke of timing, I suppose.
But I walked out my front door and wandered my neighborhood for hours.
And I didnt write another word of fiction for weeks.
He eventually finished that novel, which wound up nominated for several awards.
(There are people who believe this; trust me, I know.)
(For a primer on the latter trope, see Alice Bolins recent essay collection,Dead Girls.)
The smartest crime writers I know, authors like Megan Abbott and Attica Locke, do just that.
In public policy, thewhycan be distracting at best and a deliberate diversionary tactic at worst.
In fiction, its the only question worth asking.
(The Devil did make me do it, literally.)
Eventually I came to believe that those ideas are exactly wrong.
What appeals to me about crime writing is that, at its best, it refutes them both.
It reinvigorates me to tell stories of survivors and resistors.
Im never going to write stories of uplift, of course.
Its just not my nature.
