THE ASSIGNMENTS have yet to be formalized, but I’ve decided that—should I be teaching a graduate fiction workshop again next semester—I’ll devote this particular course to the writing of crime fiction. The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that our fiction needs a kick in the seat of the pants to go out and deal with what millions of our people read about every morning in the tabloids, but which seldom gets into the rarefied prose of our creative writers, especially those writing in English.
I’ve always had a fascination—bordering on the morbid—with crime and death. I relax by watching new and old episodes of all three CSIs, Dexter, Wire in the Blood (my favorite of them all), and Law & Order. I’ve yet to see even one show of the youngish fantasy Heroes, although now and then I catch up on the medical mysteries on House. I’m a big fan of the “true-crime” genre, and have practically memorized the lives and misdeeds of the world’s most notorious serial killers.
I’m sure that reading all those Hardy Boys books in grade school had much to do with it, but real life took a hand in stoking this interest. Thankfully it wasn’t through any crime that I or my family fell victim to, but through my reading and, eventually, my journalistic writing. I devoured the Free Press reports on such sensational ‘60s cases as the RCA ax murders, the Lucila Lalu dismemberment case, and the Annabelle Huggins abduction case; many of these cases had been written up by Nick Joaquin as “Quijano de Manila”, so I suppose I was imbibing two things at the same time.
Not too long afterward I found myself in the center of the action, during a brief stint as a police reporter in my early days as a journalist in training with the old Philippines Herald. I was 18, a dropout, and gung-ho; my editors could have sent me to cover the goings-on in the Ninth Circle of Hell and I would have happily obliged. Instead they made me a general-assignments reporter, which was just as interesting, because it required me to make the rounds of all the beats from City Hall to sports to the Manila Police Department.
Watching the MICAA basketball tournament for free and from courtside was thrilling, but nothing could match the police beat in pumping adrenaline into the system. In just a few weeks on the beat—practically on the eve of martial law—I got a lifetime’s fill of blood and mayhem, from student demonstrations (where I was parked on the police side, for a change, and could see how they were planning to assault the demonstrators at a pre-arranged signal) to bank robberies (a private jeep oozing blood from the piled-up bodies of people who had been shot in the bank), suicides (an 18-year-old American girl shooting herself in the bathroom with a .38), and hospital fires (bodies of hapless patients thudding to the ground from a desperate leap from the rooftop).
I kept a little black diary with the phone numbers of hospitals and morgues, and learned the routine of ringing them up periodically to check if anyone had given up the ghost that morning or that afternoon—and, if so, if their departure had been spectacular enough to merit some column-inches in tomorrow’s paper. I didn’t mean to become inured to human misery, but I suppose my hide thickened a bit, which was just as well, because martial law would bring me to a long, sad train of funeral wakes for comrades whose bodies had been savaged by the enemy beyond recognition.
I’ve often wondered about this fascination, which we can ascribe to two basic and somewhat related human experiences. The first of these is catharsis, that sensation of being cleansed or purged of your foulest and darkest feelings after you’ve just seen something awful happen to somebody else (whether in a Greek tragedy or a disaster movie). The second’s Schadenfreude, that interesting German yoking of the words for “harm” and “joy”—the harm suffered by others bringing joy to you. I know, they’re terrible notions that make us look like predators or parasites of a sort, but these concepts and their effects are actually great comforts; witnessing the misfortunes and the downfall of others reminds us that we are alive and relatively well. We feel pushed to the limit, at no real risk to ourselves (thus rollercoasters).
As that list of TV programs shows, I’m hardly alone. There’s a bloodthirsty lot of us who’ve come to use the words “epithelials,” “blunt force trauma,” “blood spatter analysis” and “gunshot residue” with the same casualness we apply to talking about vegetables, prescription drugs, and coffee flavors.
So I’m not surprised that we find crime and crime stories obsessively interesting, as a mirror of our worst fears and also as a reassurance of our own well-being. What I do find surprising is the palpable absence of crime—except possibly for rape or sexual abuse, or something political—in our fiction. With few notable exceptions (such as Ichi Batacan’s novel Smaller and Smaller Circles, which began if I remember right as a story submitted to my graduate workshop years ago), characters don’t get robbed, mauled, defrauded, stalked, bilked—nor, for that matter, murdered. (They do occasionally commit suicide, after some agonizingly long “to be or not to be” aria serving the plot less than the author’s own desire to unload his or her “I hate the world” rant on the unsuspecting universe.)
I think that’s a sorry omission, not only because it denies a fundamental reality in our daily life and because it otherwise creates the illusion of a genteel, imperturbable society where people worry only about their love affairs and sexuality and whether they’re more American than Filipino. (This isn’t to put down the many great stories that have been written in this vein.) In our society, crime seems often to be a cross between personal and social imperatives, and without meaning to find easy excuses such as “Society made me do it,” crime fiction could provide us with a genre that looks both at the psychology of the criminal and the topography of his or her environment while providing Pinoy readers something truly saucy to sink their teeth into. Inevitably, it’ll also look into what passes for criminal investigation and law enforcement in this country, into issues of justice.
As usual, the most likely pitfall of genre fiction like this will be the cliché—the story with all too predictable plotting and characterization. A good crime story will demand inventiveness, plausibility, a deep understanding of human psychology—and, I think, a sense of the wicked, maybe even in a comic way.
I’m still putting a tentative syllabus together, so if anyone out there has any good crime story or reference to share, I’d much appreciate hearing from you. Thanks in advance for helping me walk some students down a dark and rain-soaked boulevard—or better yet, a brilliantly sunlit avenue, along a sidewalk of which something catches our eye in the gutter: the red polish on the nail of what, on closer inspection, turns out to be a severed ring finger.
(The Maltese Falcon cover courtesy of ejmd.tripod.com.)