The Allure of Crime
Crime is rampant and always has been. You think we’d be sick of it. Instead, we’re fascinated, maybe in the same sense as seeing a train wreck. And it is not a recent development. The first homicide on record happened 430,000 years ago to a poor Neanderthal man who got whacked on the head and thrown down a cave shaft, and since then, it seems we can’t get enough of it, either committing the crimes, solving the crimes, getting blamed for crimes one didn’t do, or talking about the crimes. And it’s not the crime, per se, it’s the mind behind it. Is it a savage mind, a work-for-hire business mind, an act of violence against a loved one, of someone one randomly does not know, or a crime of passion against someone with whom one is otherwise intimate?
We’re also fascinated with solving crimes: what goes into it, who does it, how did they do it, how did they get caught, and maybe even more so, how did they get away? Around the dinner table, even our children talk of crimes: silly things done at school, theft, drugs, hidden alcohol in the cars in the high school parking lot. It seems the severity doesn’t matter. From young to old, from a misdemeanor to some sort of torturous murder or mass killing, the fascination in the telling and the hearing are the same, even if we, in our armchairs or at our dinner tables, never want to get close to the crimes at all. In our safe homes, however, we still bring evil in with relish.
So, what makes someone a criminal or likely to commit a crime? What makes someone act purposefully, opportunistically, or randomly in a deviant way from the norm? Certainly, it is not the shape of their faces, which the Greeks thought, in their study of physiognomy, that caused one to commit a crime. Just because one’s nose is crooked shouldn’t make the person a criminal. What fascinates me is how we are aghast at some crimes, but at the same time, some of these crimes become legends or even romanticized in our minds. Ted Bundy, John Wilkes Booth, Al Capone, Bonnie & Clyde, Joseph Stalin, Lizzie Borden, Jack the Ripper, John D. Rockefeller, Joseph McCarthy – pick your villain and your hero. It seems crime, or the allure of crime, or of certain kinds of crime, is as individual as we are individuals. For me, I tend to think the moonshiners of my family were heroes, not criminals, in a fight against an overreaching government, but then, hey, I’m of Irish descent, and there’s also a group of romanticized rag tags for you. The point is that crimes appall us, but crime also fascinates us and even grips us imaginatively. One man’s crime, it seems, is another man’s justice. Plato said, “He who commits injustice is ever made more wretched than he who suffers it.” I’m not sure I agree. I’ve known of some wretchedly disposed victims and then also criminals who walked away. From dead bodies to white-collar crimes where innocent people’s futures have been destroyed, they are all, in some way, the same. Someone is unjustly hurt. Someone did it to them. And sadly, the facts are never square nor round. They all fit into a peg hole of your own subjectivity.
Is it the criminal mind, the opportunity, or the time into which the soon-to-be-criminal is born that makes the difference? It seems all of the above. So, no matter what our interest is, there is an interesting crime taking place in those very circumstances, and I would bet money that you are glued to it. I would also bet money that you enjoy reading about it or watching it on your favorite biased network or cable news program, some of which could be construed as criminal unto themselves. Which brings us all to this hounding question, my gentle but blood-curdled reader: why would someone as placid as myself create a writer’s conference, in fact, the #1 U.S. writer’s conference according to The Writer Magazine based upon the idea of conflict and crime? Because, my friends, regardless of the Puritans we like to claim to be, we all love a story about someone who has done somebody wrong. And, adding to that, I guess, which side would we put those Puritans on? Pick your lionhearts and pick your malefactors. In your mind, you’ve got your own recipe for villainy. You know who fits where, if only you alone share that view. Read and write it with gusto. We’re dying to hear the details.
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