How Can We Reimagine Crime Fiction for a Future Without Cops?
[image description: a gray typewriter with a paper inserted that says “investigation.”]
When I haven’t been reading, I’ve been thinking about the justice system in the US. Namely, how “justice system” is a misnomer.
I could rant all day about how the present-day police force is descended from slave patrols and how the militarization of the police was designed to target Black people and anti-war hippies and how for-profit prisons thrive on racism. But we’re here to talk about books, so it got me thinking… What would crime fiction and mystery/detective fiction look like in a cop-less future?
My thinking was that it would force authors to get more creative with how justice is carried out in their stories. But surely the answer is more complicated than that. Since I don’t read a ton of mystery/detective/crime fiction, I wanted to ask someone who does.
I didn’t have to look far. Mr. Off the Beaten Shelf reads a lot of crime and detective fic, so I asked him.
Me: The question I have is, in a time where a lot of people are saying defund the police, what would crime fiction and detective fiction look like in a cop-less future?
Mr. OTBS: I would say it would look a lot like it looked before 50 years ago. So if you look at the early detective stories, none of them were government agents. They didn’t have police in the early to mid-1800s. They didn’t have police in the sense that we have police now but they were all private citizens who solved crimes on their own, sometimes with the assistance of government agents but sometimes without.
And even as you trace back to the origins of the genre, Sherlock Holmes, not a cop. Poirot, not a cop. Miss Marple, not a cop. The Continental Op from Dashiell Hammett, not a cop. The Thin Man, the detectives in that, not cops. Sam Spade, not a cop. Philip Marlowe, not a cop. Lou Archer, not a cop. Nero Wolfe, not a cop. The protagonists of detective fiction, crime fiction, before the 60s––and I don’t even know if it was before the 80s––were almost entirely not police. You would have the occasional cop but police were the bumbling idiots.
Me: So what changed?
Mr. OTBS: What changed? I don’t know.
Me: Do you think it was the militarization of the police and the rise in popularity of characters like Robocop?
Mr. OTBS: I don’t think it was the militarization because, in fiction, you usually don’t get militarized, institutionalized police like the way we think of them. You get detectives who are people who solve mysteries in plain clothes by talking to people. So even when you have someone like… Shit, what’s the detective in the Dublin murder detectives series?
Me: Oh, by Tana French? In the Woods.
Mr. OTBS: Yeah. So even when you get them, and they are police detectives, they aren’t overly militarized, aggressive cops. They’re people who solve mysteries. But I think people are much more comfortable nowadays in seeing crimes solved by police because of television. Because they’ve seen Law & Order, they’ve seen CSI, and things like that where a lot of it is forensic evidence. You didn’t have forensic evidence as much when you were talking about Sherlock Holmes and Poirot and whoever was solving the crimes. They weren’t sending stuff to a DNA lab.
Me: And the Dublin murder mysteries by Tana French that you mentioned, those were set in Ireland, not the U.S. I’m not sure that Ireland has militarized police to the degree that we do.
Mr. OTBS: Right. And obviously I don’t have a complete knowledge of modern detective fiction, but if you look at the Longmire stories, yeah, he’s a county sheriff in a county in Wyoming that has a sheriff’s office of like five people. And he can send stuff to the crime lab in Cheyenne and he can get an analysis done, but it takes forever and he doesn’t even really wear a uniform. He’s independent and wears and does what he wants. So usually in fiction, you see people who are not cops in the traditional, modern sense of people in uniforms breaking down doors and busting heads. The crimes in books are solved by people talking to people and having relationships with sources in a way that you can’t do if you’re just busting in someone’s house.
Me: So you told me earlier, before I started recording this conversation, that I was asking the wrong question in asking how can we reimagine detective fiction and crime fiction in a cop-less future. What is the question I should be asking?
Mr. OTBS: What you should be asking is, what can crime fiction tell us about how crimes can be solved without a modern police force?
Me: And how would you answer that?
Mr. OTBS: I would answer that crimes were solved for centuries without a modern police force. The modern police force is only 150 years old. I mean, Arthur Conan Doyle was not dealing with a militarized police force with surveillance technology and all kinds of shit. Sherlock Holmes solved crimes outside of that world. And a cop-less future doesn’t mean a detective-less future. A cop-less future just means there isn’t someone walking around with a gun busting up in your car because they saw weed. In the U.K. today cops don’t carry guns.
Me: Do you think technology actually makes detective and crime fiction boring? For example, if it’s so easy to just send some DNA off to a lab or if it’s so easy to pull the video from the surveillance camera, do you think that makes things happen too easily for the characters?
Mr. OTBS: I prefer the stuff from the 40s and 50s where there’s enough technology that they can make a phone call but there’s not enough technology where a satellite can track somebody. And that’s a different conversation about privacy rights if the government can just track you. Where is the link between your right to privacy and the law enforcement agency’s right to track you? I would say we’ve crossed that line a hell of a lot. I think it’s usually in modern crime fiction where you see settings such as rural Wyoming or detectives who are technologically deficient and it happens that way on purpose. It’s authors writing themselves out of a plot convenience where the characters were really good at technology. It’s not fun to write about someone Googling.
Me: I know you said you prefer detective and crime fiction from the 40s and 50s but have you read any good stuff that is set around the present day? Say like from the 90s to 2020?
Mr. OTBS: Yeah.
Me: And how did they get around these challenges?
Mr. OTBS: By having either settings that complicate the technology or characters who resist modern technology. So if you take the Longmire books, he’s not the most tech-forward person. And it’s like a joke where other characters will use cellphones and will make fun of him for not using a cellphone. If he used a cellphone and knew how to Google, the books would be a lot shorter. But to make the story more interesting, he doesn’t follow the technology. You see that even with Tana French. Her detectives are not the most tech-savvy people and that’s by design because the more tech-savvy you are, the less exciting the story is.
You’ve heard from us, now I want to hear from you! How do you think we can reimagine crime fiction in a future without cops? Let me know in the comments below.
