My daughter recently saw me reading one of my beloved crime novels and asked a question that was both innocent and completely reasonable:
“Dad, why do adults read about murders?”
It is the kind of question children ask when they are not yet used to accepting adult contradictions as normal. From her point of view, the problem was obvious. Murder is bad. People are killed. So why would anyone choose, voluntarily, to read a book about it?
My first answer was not my finest moment.
“Because they’re entertaining.”
That was true, but also useless. It was the kind of lazy adult answer that explains nothing. She immediately saw the weakness in it.
“But murder is bad. People are killed.”
At that point, I had to do something that happens quite often when you are a parent: retrieve, without warning, something from the back shelves of your mind. In this case, it was a piece of literary theory I studied at university decades ago.
Crime fiction is not really about enjoying murder.
At least, one hopes not.
It is about the investigation. The clues. The solution. The pattern becoming visible. The culprit being caught.
The murder breaks the world of the story. The detective tries to put it back together.
So I gave her the shortest possible version:
Murder is bad. But justice is good.
She thought about that for one second, nodded, and went back to her Hello Kitty cards.
I went back to my book, slightly more aware that having a child sixty-one years younger means being examined at random on things you thought you understood fifty years ago.
Transcript
“Dad, why do adults read books about murder?”
My daughter asked me that while I was reading one of my beloved crime novels.
I tried the easy cop-out:
“Because they’re entertaining.”
She was not impressed.
“But murder is bad. People are killed.”
So I had to raid my memory and pull out, on the spot, something I studied at university decades ago.
Crime fiction isn’t really about the murder.
It’s about the investigation.
The clues.
The solution.
Catching the culprit.
Murder is bad.
But justice is good.
She thought about that for one second.
Then nodded, and went back to her Hello Kitty cards.
Because apparently, having a child means being examined at random on things you thought you understood fifty years ago.