I'm not ashamed to write murder mysteries

I write murder mysteries.
And I'm not ashamed to say so.
I note that because I have several friends who think I should abandon what they call my "crime story fixation" and, instead, concentrate on writing "serious" novels. I may try to do that one day, if I can ever get someone to explain to me just what a "serious" novel is, but for now I am quite content to write - mostly - murder mysteries.
There are two very good reasons why.
The first reason has to do with that old cliche: "Write what you know."
The simple fact is that because I was a journalist for a long time and covered a lot of cop stories during my career, I know a lot about crime, especially murder.
I learned during the years I spent on the police beat how cops investigate crimes, for example. I also learned that while there are some similarities in how an investigation is run, investigative techniques vary - often dramatically - from department to department depending upon the availability of resources, the relative age of the cops doing the investigations and the amount of pressure detectives must cope with from the public, the press and elected officials. I learned, too, that federal, state and local law enforcement agencies approach a crime scene differently and why. (You might be surprised to learn just how much those approaches differ.)
I also got to know a lot about how cops of every stripe think and live because I bought them an awful lot of beer and coffee over the years. In addition - after spending four years as a volunteer counselor inside Attica - I know a lot about criminals and what motivates them to do what they do.
Second: I like writing murder mysteries because it gives me an opportunity to explore other issues in the context of an eye-catching event.
In "Murder in the Rainy Season," for example, I used the story of a serial killer in a Fort Lauderdale suburb to delve into the influence of small town politics on police procedure, the subtle racism practiced by the media and religious fanaticism.
In "The Session" I tried to show readers how state Legislatures actually work, how cops and journalists sometimes cooperate at the risk of their respective jobs, the collateral damage of revenge and to examine some different aspects of loyalty while telling a story about the murder of an undercover detective.
I think that may be one of the biggest changes in crime fiction these days and I daresay that it has elevated this genre to the realm of "serious" fiction.
Let me explain.
Like many people who enjoy murder mysteries, I started out reading Sherlock Holmes and Dashiell Hammet, progressed through Ed McBain and Rex Stout, Dorothy Sayers, Dame Agatha and a host of others. Sayers dealt with some social issues in her stories - her amateur sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey suffered from what we'd now call PTSD, for example - but most of those earlier stories concentrated on the crime, the criminal and those people trying to catch the criminal and solve the crime.
The previous generations of crime writers were able to write those kinds of stories because to most readers the world of cops and robbers was exotic, something they knew very little - if anything - about. Because of that, writers did not have to go into great depth about their characters or the investigations themselves.
The fact is that in the days before television and the widespread availability of reliable radios, only a relatively few number of people knew a cop and even fewer knew a crook.
That. however, is no longer the case. Television, the film industry and radio - not to mention the Internet - have exposed millions of people to both real crime and to crime fiction. As a result, today's readers are far more sophisticated than their parents and grandparents were and they are demanding much more from crime writers than the old "Jack shot Jill and Officer Smith arrested him" kind of story.
Today's readers want to know about the lives of the characters in crime fiction: Who is ambitious and why; who drinks too much on the job; who is going through a divorce; why did Jack shoot Jill and how the heck did Officer Smith figure that out?
This isn't to say that murder mystery writers don't focus a lot of the attention in their novels on the crime itself - well, I mean we pretty much have to if we're going to call it "crime fiction" and not "a serious novel."
Despite the need to do that, however, an increasing number of us are also using our novels to offer thoughtful commentary (at least I hope it's thoughtful) on social issues that affect us all in one way or another.
Frankly, I think that's a good thing.

(amazon.com/author/billington)