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Letter to the editor

Pith, not pulp

For insight into life's Big Questions, turn to a crime novel, where bestselling writers Michael Connelly, Jeff Lindsay and Mark Winegardener go to the heart of darkness.

By Colette Bancroft, Times Book Editor
Published October 25, 2007

Meet the authors

Michael Connelly (The Overlook) will speak at the Times Festival of Reading at 11:15 a.m. Saturday in the Campus Activities Center. Jeff Lindsay (Dexter in the Dark) will speak at noon in the Poynter Institute South Pavilion. Mark Winegardner (The Godfather's Revenge) will speak at 1:15 p.m. in the Campus Activities Center. 

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Crime fiction gets a bad rap.

Just a pop genre, some say, darkly savory brain candy. Gripping, sure, and often well written, but really just a distraction from the big questions. Not, you know, litra-chure.

Think again, sweetheart.

Sure, it was born in pulp magazines and has in turn borne a million bastard sons who sling their guns in cheesy books, films and TV series.

But at its best, crime fiction can, and does, rise to the level of literature, offering readers not just compelling style but intelligent substance.

And as for the big questions: What's bigger than good vs. evil, the essential crime novel plot?

From Sam Spade to Tony Soprano, the crime story is arguably America's most indelible cultural export, right up there with blue jeans and rock 'n' roll. The Western, in its purest form the saga of a lone man with a gun facing down his enemies, was an earlier version of the same myth.

Three of the best - and bestselling - American crime novelists working today are headliners at this year's St. Petersburg Times Festival of Reading: Michael Connelly, Jeff Lindsay and Mark Winegardner.

Spanning a wide range of the genre's forms - the classic tough detective story, the gangster saga and the murder tale told by the murderer - these writers bring their own sharp twists to a familiar form.

Connelly, an award-winning journalist, drew inspiration for his fiction from some of the masters of the detective form: Raymond Chandler, Ross MacDonald and Joseph Wambaugh. But his 18 mesmerizing novels are unmistakably his own.

Twelve of them, including the latest, The Overlook, focus on Los Angeles police detective Hieronymous "Harry" Bosch.

Connelly paints such a vivid picture of Los Angeles that the city is practically a character, but the focus is always Bosch. He's a classic loner, a man with a haunted past - absent father, murdered mother, experiences as a "tunnel rat" in Vietnam he wishes he could forget - and an uncertain future, thanks to his stubbornly independent refusal to play police department politics.

Bosch is skilled at solving crimes, but he often has to bring to bear his own violent urges while catching the criminals. Connelly usually pits him against terrifying serial killers, saying, "Your good guy is only as good as your bad guy is bad."

Speaking of bad guys, Lindsay has written three novels about a very bad - and very charming - one. Dexter Morgan is, to all appearances, a mild-mannered lab geek who analyzes blood residue from crime scenes for the Miami-Dade police.

But Dexter isn't just Dexter. Inside his head rides the Dark Passenger - a force that, on certain nights, drives Dexter to take out his very sharp knives and kill people.

But only the right people. As a child, Dexter was taken in by a police detective's family after his mother was the victim of a grisly murder. His foster father was a seasoned cop who recognized what the toddler found in a pool of blood might grow up to be, so Dexter was carefully raised to steer his Dark Passenger only toward victims whose guilt he can verify: child molesters, rapists and other, less scrupulous serial killers.

Making a character like this palatable, much less likable, is quite a trick; making him compelling enough to inspire three books and a Showtime television series is really impressive. But Lindsay has found a combination of voice - Dexter is mordantly funny and self-aware - and fast-paced plots that works.

In his latest novel, Dexter in the Dark, the character, and the reader, must confront what Dexter would be without the Dark Passenger. Lindsay deftly poses some uncomfortable questions about how we really draw the line between good and evil.

Those questions are built in to the subculture explored in Mark Winegardner's last two books, The Godfather Returns and The Godfather's Revenge.

Winegardner was a literary novelist and director of the creative writing program at Florida State University in 2003 when he got an offer he couldn't refuse: audition to write an authorized sequel to Mario Puzo's blockbuster novel, The Godfather.

He has written two, carefully crafting his characters and plot to mesh with the family saga created in Puzo's book and in Francis Ford Coppola's three movies about the Corleones.

Winegardner has continued those works' exploration of a family that embodies both all-American virtues - loyalty, hard work, patriotism - and the most cold-blooded, ruthless sort of violence.

Setting his story amid a lovingly crafted picture of American culture in the 1960s, Winegardner details the Mob's involvement in American politics, business and entertainment and creates new characters, such as disaffected Corleone underboss Nick Geraci, to complicate those questions about good and evil in even more interesting ways.

In thoughtful crime fiction, the line between good guys and bad ones is never bright or clear. Harry Bosch is a cop, but he struggles with his own bloody impulses, with rage and revenge, and he doesn't always win. Dexter Morgan, Michael Corleone and Nick Geraci are killers, but their creators make them insistently human, men who love their families, who work hard for a living, who even as they kill consider their own motives.

These books are entertainment, certainly, engaging stories that take us out of our own humdrum lives. But they do something more, especially in the hands of writers as skillful and astute as these three.

Dig down a little beyond the dark shadows and the gunfire, and these stories are counterpoint to the American belief that we can always reinvent ourselves, individually and nationally, and leave our pasts behind. In the best crime fiction, in novels like these, the past is always waiting, and moral debts always come due.

Colette Bancroft can be reached at (727) 893-8435 or bancroft@sptimes.com.

[Last modified October 24, 2007, 20:16:31]