Crime Fiction and Society: Laura Lippman Responds

Last week, I reacted to a Newsday article about crime novels addressing social issues that included the following "exchange":

Laura Lippman adds, "Eventually, we should see really good novels out of Enron, WorldCom and other white-collar crime. Just add a murder."

Because Lord knows, a novel about white-collar crime just wouldn't be sufficiently gripping unless there was a murder involved.

Ms. Lippman sent me an email in belated response, and immediately upon reading I thought her thoughtful comments ought to be read by everyone who had seen my glib patter. So here it is, at full length, after the bump.

No, white-collar crime definitely is sufficient in itself for a novel, although my tour-fogged brain can't come up with such a novel from memory. (Liza Cody's Gimme More, on the other hand, is a very good novel about the record industry, which touches on criminal doings, but doesn't have any corpses. Actually, come to think of it, it has one, but not in the usual way.) The Firm, ultimately, was about mail fraud. Donald Westlake wrote about the 1990s recession in The Ax and arcane tax matters in Baby Would I Lie? But all these books had murders.

The thing is, such a book--a story about white-collar crime without a homicide-- won't be tagged a crime novel unless it's written by someone who is identified with the genre. For example, if David Gates wrote a book about an Enron-like accounting scandal, it wouldn't be treated as a crime novel, no matter how central the crime is to the story.

Does a crime novel have to have a homicide? No, but it usually does, and the core readers tend to be reluctant to read those that don't. The Night Men, by Keith Snyder, is one of my favorite books. It centers on a break-in, which summons back memories of a time when its protag and his friends had to sit up all night, guarding a house against a gang of kids intent on hate crimes. This book deserved a wide audience, but no one seemed to know how to market it.

Is a novel with a homicide always a crime novel? Of course not. Otherwise, To Kill a Mockingbird would be a crime novel.

As a former newspaper reporter, I have nothing but sympathy for journalists. They have to produce black stuff to put on the white stuff that goes around the ads, and their editors are often skeptical of truly new ideas. If they haven't read it somewhere else first, they're dubious. The Newsday reporter didn't break any new ground, but she at least cast a wide-enough net to write about some different writers--mainly Jessica Speart. It was refreshing to see a lesser-known PBO writer getting some attention.