Interesting story in the New York Times last month about some pre-trial maneuvering in the case of the horrific Chesire, Connecticut triple homicide in 2007. Two total and utter dirtbag psychopaths, Stephen Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky, are accused of murdering a mother and her teenage daughters and beating their dad in a home invasion in their idyllic small town. It was a horror movie come to life. Or was it a book plot?
Hayes’ lawyers (he was arrested near the scene and is about as guilty as you can get before the verdict is actually pronounced; trial begins Sept. 13) don’t want prosecutors to use a list of books that their client read in prison. Speculation is that the books might include In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, the doc-novel about a similar crime in Kansas, or Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. I assume that the defense doesn’t want the book in evidence because it will show that Hayes had been planning to recreate the book crime for some time, that it wasn’t a robbery gone awry. My prediction: the lawyers will get paid; Hayes and Komisarjevsky eventually will be executed or die on death row. Small justice for the victims’ family and friends but better than nothing.
But in the meantime, the legal tactic raises an interesting question. By creating fictional crimes, are authors somehow planting the seed for future crimes? By inventing bad guys are we helping to produce them in real life?
I think back to some of the villains that have come from my imagination. Fuller and Kelvin from the Brandon Blake novel Port City Shakedown, for example. Fuller is a sociopath with delusions of grandeur, at least when it comes to crime. Assault, extortion, kidnapping–Fuller is a schemer and if he has to kill you to make the scheme work, so be it. At one point, he’s trucking a kidnapping victim around in a suitcase. Confronted, his first impulse is to shoot the woman dead.
Could this happen in real life? I suppose, but a criminal-minded reader might want to read Port City Shakedown all the way to the end to see the payoff for this life of crime. (It ain’t pretty).
There are some gruesome crimes in fiction and film, of course. But most crime novels don’t glorify or glamorize the crime. When I create villains, it is with the express purpose of having my characters (Brandon Blake, Jack McMorrow, Clair Varney) defeat them in the end. In the world of my books, good defeats evil, or at least keeps it at bay. In this world, justice does prevail, or at least some form of justice. In order to create a world where good triumphs, you need some bad stuff for the forces of good to defeat.
I suppose that prison inmates reading my books might get an idea or two. They may even see themselves in my fictional criminals (Actually, I hope so). But I’d like to think that readers (incarcerated or not) will be inspired by my fictional heroes as well. When Jack and Clair get locked and loaded to defend someone helpless or vulnerable, when Brandon risks his own life to save another– maybe that will rub off somewhere.
Guys like Hayes and Komisarjevsky don’t need Stieg Larsson to inspire them to commit atrocities. These sorts of criminals have something missing inside, a lost piece of the puzzle that makes us human. They’re broken, for reasons of nature or nuture or both. They appear in crime fiction mostly to be shot down to reassure us that there is a world where people don’t get away with murder. Unfortunately, it’s a world we crime writers make up.
Thoughts on any of this? I’d love to have readers weigh in.
My next stop: Charles M. Bailey Library in Winthrop, Maine, in the lake district west of Augusta, Aug. 17, 6:30 p.m. The complete list is here, under events. Hope to see you along the way.
In PORT CITY SHAKEDOWN, the first Brandon Blake novel, Brandon gets a full dose of bad guys. A brawl in a funeral home introduces him to Joel Fuller, a sociopathic hustler. Fuller is fresh out of jail and determined to take Brandon out—after Fuller and his sidekick Kelvin shake him down.
Rocky isn’t a tough guy. He’s a skinny little kid with crooked glasses, and he shouldn’t be homeless in Portland, Maine. When McMorrow and Roxanne pluck him from under the stomping feet of a gang of street kids, Rocky latches onto McMorrow–and drags him into a world of murder, both old and new. Why is McMorrow protecting Rocky? The cops want to know. Why is Rocky on the run? McMorrow wants to know. Why does death follow in Rocky’s wake? Jack and Roxanne need to find out before they’re added to the list. 
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