I’m sure that if I ever visit a therapist (and we all should at least once in our lives), they’d root out some childhood experience that drives me to write what I write.
It’s not the obsession with writing itself but rather the obsession with crafting crime fiction, where the good guys risk everything to take down the bad guys. I’ve penned a few science fiction stories, too; one was wrapped up in a police procedural, while the other featured good-guy aliens fighting their own planet to save Earth.
Good guys serving up justice.
‘Guys’, of course, is gender-neutral. In my books, you’ll find plenty of female protagonists and female whatever the henchfolk of protagonists are called. Fierce, fighting and undistressed damsels.
But back to it.
After the first half dozen books, I realised what I enjoyed writing were tales of bad people trying something bad and the good people bringing them to justice. Morals were mostly black and white. The baddies rarely had good traits, but the good guys could be morally grey when the situation called for it.
Then, it is just a matter of finding new crimes, new situations where the bad guys could be identifiable as horrible and the good guys appropriately outraged.
Inevitably, when plotting, I’d make the crime incredibly complex with twists, double-crosses and missing heirs. But by the time the first draft is finished, it’s a meat-and-potatoes crime. The complexity comes from how the baddies try to hide it.
You’d think I’d learn, but it happens this way every time.
So, again, back to it.
Good and evil aside, I write crime fiction because I enjoy the problem-solving involved with setting up a crime, deriving a path for the heroes to discover the crime (while at the same time keeping the readers at least half a step behind), and the ultimate squashing of the bounders who had the temerity to violate societies norms.
And these days, it’s a soothing salve when that happens.
