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Politics & Mysteries

I write about politics because it’s the greatest game around and it has the most dead bodies. Forget about Hannibal Lector, his numbers pale beside a Bush or a bin Laden. Or even a Clinton.

For the most part politicians don’t kill with their own hands. They do it with policies and directives. When they’re on our side, we conspire to maintain a complete disassociation between what they do – legislate and regulate – and the consequences of their acts. Anyone who makes the connection between a president who orders a war and the child who dies when a bomb hits his home is a radical, a traitor, a madman, a lunatic.

When it’s a politician on the other side, we suddenly can see that every atrocity has his personal bloody handprints upon it.

Now that’s interesting.

Both views are schematic, unreflective, one dimensional and dogmatic. Not that there’s anything necessarily wrong with that. Action requires binary distinctions.

In a mystery (and all the sub-genres) crime is personal. Hands on. Painful. It has blood and consequences. If some distant and cool and impersonal act of policy impels the criminal act, that allows us, the readers, to make the translation from the institutional to the personal.

Politics offers us something real and vital for the story to be about. The story, ideally, takes us past the rhetoric and the posturing, to the reality of the politics. A great symbiosis.

That explains why lots and lots of writers would combine politics and mysteries. But they don’t.

Even when they do, it’s rarely about politics as policy. It’s mostly politics as a setting: as the election hangs in the balance, Dibgy Diggitout must uncover the dark secrets of the rich and powerful before they cover him! Or: Hi-tech Harry leads his team of hyper trained Special SEAL Berets as they rappel through the night from Stealth Hawk choppers to rescue the president from the terrorist kidnappers in their secret vault beneath pyramids in a race against time before the dirty nuke wipes out a Blue State.

So the theory may justify my choice, but it doesn’t explain the choice. The real answer must be much more personal.

My parents were political. Moreover they were intellectual, which is to say they actually thought that the way people think determines how they act, as much or more than their psychology, their primal passions, their toilet training, their romantic relationships and the degree to which they are attracted to any of the various deadly sins.

I do too.

The collected works of George Bernard Shaw were on the shelf over my bed. In Shaw’s plays characters clash over their ideologies, over economics, over sociologies, over how they think the world works and how they think it ought to be. I was trained from birth, or at least from the birth of my literacy, to view action as the result of intellectual processes.

I didn’t go out as a ten year old and buy the plays and put them up there within easy reach. Obviously, they came from somewhere else, from my father. Whom I loved and admired and looked up to, both in the innate psychological way that we seem impelled to, like dogs toward their masters, irrespective of any actual worth on the part of the parent, and in my full, judgmental awareness when I came of an age to make objective evaluations and I continue to feel that way now.

So I write books that would please him. No matter that he died seven years before I was first published. I don’t think that he’s looking down and sighing with pleasure and putting gold stars in the window of his posthumous abode. It is enough to know that they would have pleased him had he lived and it is a deeply emotional thing.

Motivation isn’t monofilament. It’s a rope, it’s the strands wrapped together that make it strong.

I did commercials for politicians and worked for a political consultant. As a practical matter, as a matter of convenience, in terms of the economics of personal effort, it’s easier to write about the material that’s at hand.

Also I like politicians. Even when I don’t like their politics. They are not nine-to-five, just fit-in and collect my pension kinds of people. They are out there, on the tightrope, hustling, facing the slings and arrows, getting slapped with criticism and complaint, quite as much as any artist or athlete. There is no job security. They have to go out there every two, four or six years, raising money, spending money and performing for your vote.

I do it because I think it matters. As people live and die when the planes crash and the bombs fall, when the air is poisoned and prisons are filled, it matters. The truth and the nature of truth and the methodology of truth, matter, for their own sakes. Accidentally, and perversely, fiction, specifically mystery fiction, is the tool that I have available to me to talk about unreality of our public mythologies.

Finally and ultimately, I do it because it’s what I can do.