brendan halpin

I recently saw a call for submissions for short mystery stories that said they didn’t want anything political.

Which I guess means they are actually closed to submissions because all crime fiction is political. I don’t mean that every locked-room mystery is explicitly about the moral rot at the heart of the Republican party or anything like that, but crime fiction cannot operate outside the realm of politics.

Let’s take a seemingly apolitical murder mystery as an example: Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express. (Spoilers for a 90-year-old book follow). The book concerns the murder of a man who has committed a horrible crime but, due to his extensive financial resources, has been able to flee the country, change his identity, and escape justice.

Now, I’m sure Christie didn’t intend this setup as any kind of critique of the class system. Nevertheless, that’s exactly what it is. Money allows people who do horrible things to escape punishment. This, of course, is possibly even more true today than it was in the 1930’s. Poirot ultimately reveals that pretty much everybody on the train was involved in the murder, and conclusion of the police (and the author) is, essentially, “some people just need killing.” This too is a political statement with huge implications.

Or let’s look at the famous and oft-fictionalized Massachusetts murder in which Lizzie Borden allegedly killed her father and stepmother with an axe. (She was acquitted, BTW). It’s impossible to understand her case without politics. Why did Lizzie do it? (She totally did it, BTW) Well, she was a single woman whose parsimonious father kept a small, cramped house he wouldn’t pay to upgrade or electrify. He also would not pay for her to attend the kind of events she needed to go to in order to attract a husband, which was her only option for striking out on her own at the time, barring, I guess, sex work. Her father had remarried a much younger woman after her mother’s death, so even after he died, the stepmother would get all the money and both Lizzie and her sister would be essentially trapped in the house forever, unable to build lives without their father’s money, living under the thumb of someone who would only begrudgingly provide them with the necessities of life.

So yes, the motive is personal, but it’s also extremely political because Lizzie felt backed into a corner because of the lack of options offered to women at that time. Misogyny was codified into law, so she had no legal way to get out of a hellish situation.

And then why was she acquitted? Again this is impossible to understand without the politics of class, ethnicity, and immigration. Oh yeah, and also misogyny. Basically an upper-class all-male Protestant jury couldn’t believe that a) a woman was capable of brutal violence and b) that Irish immigrant cops could be trusted when they accused an upper-class woman of a crime. They posed for a smiling portrait of the accused after her acquittal.

(She went on to found the Humane Society of New Bedford because she was against cruelty to animals, and her home became a kind of nonstop party full of artists, actors, and other weirdos. And she probably entered into a queer romance with a famous actress. Go off, Lizzie!).

How do we define crimes, and why do people commit them? Who do we trust to solve them? Can the victims of crimes get justice? For that matter, what does justice even look like? All of these questions are political.

Any call for non-political or apolitical crime fiction is not only oxymoronic—it’s dishonest. Because the stories they do eventually publish will, of course, be political. But the politics will most likely hew closely to establishment thinking: people do bad things because they are bad people, and the police are diligent, intelligent, and good at their jobs. So it’s impossible to publish crime fiction that excludes politics, and such calls only exclude certain kinds of politics from the final product.