Motive, justice, and the many shades of gray

 Douglas's Monday post resonated with me, as do many of the varied posts on this blog. Having a collection of authors from different countries and writing in different sub-genres (all while murdering people) makes for an entertaining and thought-provoking commentary on the creative life.

Douglas talked about the compulsion to write. Even if we won the lottery and could travel the world or retire to a tropical paradise, the writing muse would eventually find us. Possibly thinking up a story about death on a cruise ship or transcontinental train. Ideas come to us from everywhere, all the time. Most will be discarded, and others will find themselves as small scenes or subplots in our larger novel. 

But some, like the poignant story that John Corrigan described in last week's blog, Kernel of Truth, are made to form the cornerstone of a powerful story. So many stories could be told from that short, emotion-laden snippet. So much human tragedy, so much good, evil, and moral ambiguity to be explored. And that is what good storytelling does at its heart. It mines the powerful depths of human experience and pushes those insights to their limit. There would be heroes and villains in that story, often in the same person. There would be cruelty, despair, desperation, frustration, and outrage. There would also be moments to rise above that, to explore compassion, hope, and redemption.

Many crime novels make short shrift of the motive behind the murder in their story. It might be drugs, turf wars, intimidation, or impatience to get at Great Aunt Mabel's millions. But to me, the motive is the core of the story, and the most powerful motives are the ones we can relate to because they stem from primal human emotion. Jealousy, revenge, fear, despair. These are universal whether you live in a wealthy enclave or a tent city. I want readers to care about what happened, to care about the victim, the killer, and those who are left behind. Even the sleuth. I want them to question the moral ambiguities and to walk in the characters' shoes. Ask themselves "What would I do?"

Most crime novels also aim to provide justice of some sort, to bring order back to the world disrupted by the murder. There is satisfaction in seeing justice served at least in fiction, when it sometimes fails us in real life. I am not a fan of "tie it all up neatly in a bow". Life is messy and complex. Most of the time, there are no easy answers. In my books, I near the climax of the first draft without a clear sense of how it will end, or even of whodunit although the why has slowly emerged from the mess and complexity. And I sometimes waver over the "what is justice" question for some time before finding a resolution that reflects justice of a sort, or the best possible justice under the circumstances.

And so I have already started thinking about John's story of the eight-year-old boy and wondering what that justice would be, and what the path towards that outcome would look like.