I’ve asked myself countless times why I’m fascinated enough with murder and mayhem to write three crime fiction novels about Santa Monica? Why do I feel such glee in learning the forensic details of death and dying? If I were alone in this fascination I’d worry about myself because it feels perverted, but I’m not alone.
Many of us enjoy the thrill me, chill me, scare-me- to-death aspect of getting up close to Hannibal Lecter on the printed page. We love Halloween, death-defying roller coasters, tornadoes. Don’t we?
Crime fiction has its appeal because we’re assured that in the end goodness will prevail over evil and the villain will be punished. Things will end up right.
Sometimes there is no closure and the villain goes unpunished. The good guy doesn’t always win and we are left burning with a sense of injustice. Such is the world of victims of crime.
So while I confess my guilty pleasure in crime fiction I know too that crime in real life ripples outward and causes misery and suffering. This will surely touch some of us in this recent mass shooting in Santa Monica.
What kind of fantasies does a young man raised on television and action movies have in his head as he barrels across town dressed in black, wearing body armor and a helmet and brandishing a military-style assault rifle, a shotgun, a handgun and an ammunition belt? What stories is he telling himself? Or telling about himself as he dies in a glorious blaze of gunfire at the hands of a cop?
That cop or cops—however the story is finally told—will never forget or get over what he or she has done in the line of duty. Everyone involved will still be processing some kind of what if question. What if I had been in that library? Riding that bus? Many of them will still be shaking, wondering, going over it and over it, unable to let it go.
It will take months to uncover the backstory and assess what happened at the nine different crime scenes.And will we be any further ahead then in preventing or dealing with this kind of craziness?
That’s up to us to answer—and then do something about.