It begins with the Seven Deadly Sins—pride, lust, envy, gluttony, greed, sloth, and wrath—comprising the human condition, their heavy freight giving rise to entire institutions.
They manifest through egregious or heinous acts by one person against another. Punishment may or may not attach under the guise of justice—if not societal justice, perhaps street justice—or better yet by a femme fatale who doles out comeuppance to the hapless dupe, then walks off with the money. This is fodder for noir crime writers. Our currency is shady characters, twisted outcomes, and dismal circumstances. Even cozy mysteries have dark aspects: somebody has endured loss at the hands of another.
These underlying moral elements are the stuff of crime writing. In crime thrillers: will the criminal be stopped before he kills (robs, rapes, defrauds, etc.) again? In police or legal procedurals: are the procedures effectively applied and sufficient to stop the bad guy, or should they be circumvented? In noir: the perpetrator knows what he’s about to do is wrong but does it anyway. In mystery: who did it and why—and there will be scars.
Along the way are good cops and rogue cops; clever but flawed private eyes pursuing clever perpetrators; good lawyers and shysters; red herrings, ambiguous circumstances, ambivalent characters, pained victims, heroes, dopes, and serendipitous dark clouds.
I grew up in part working at a family-run restaurant in a working-class area of Detroit. I delivered food to after-hours drinking and drug dens, called in local parlance, “blind pigs.” As a high school kid, I routinely cruised late night, hard-scrabble streets—not unlike Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver—my windshield a lens to life without boundaries, unshackled from the incrimination of daylight. In addition to the general decrepitude, I witnessed muggings, knifings, robberies, prostitution, police brutality, and strange nocturnal juju. Also, our place was a few blocks from the Seventh Police Precinct, so detectives, uniforms, motorcycle cops, and the special unit Clean-Up Squad (think Mulholland Falls), were back-room regulars, relating life from the dregs with aplomb while embossing my brain with a world view unimaginable by my school pals. They found my stories incredulous. Not surprising, theirs were lives of lawns, gardens, and cul-de-sac neighborhoods in which the only felonies were hydrangeas instead of lilacs, or worse, crabgrass.
Crime writers plumb the depths of moral compromise, depravity, injustice, fate, temptation, and all things ancillary to the Seven Deadlies. For me, writing crime was as compelling as a moonless night, and would bear witness to all I saw and experienced as a teen-age boy, sixty-two years ago.