Lucha Corpi.
Murder and Mayhem. Gloria Damasco,
Black Widow, and I |
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:
My deep gratitude to Monographic Review and Dr. Ralph Ferguson and the Ethics Center at Texas Tech University for co-sponsoring this conference. I would specially like to thank Professors Jorge Zamora, Genaro Pérez, Rodrigo Pereyra, faculty and students at CILDE for their gracious invitation to be with you today, and for their hospitality. To Professor Rolando Díaz, Southeastern Oklahoma State University, for his study and critical writing on my crime fiction my heartfelt and great conversation with me, much appreciation. And last but not least, special thanks to the department’s clerical staff, for taking care of the pesky details and paperwork to get me here. And to all of you who accompany us today. Gracias.
It is an honor to be with you today. And to share this special occasion with Aldona Pubotsky and Manuel Ramos and many presenters on crime fiction from throughout the country and abroad. Manuel Ramos, in particular, is a dear friend and fellow noir writer I greatly admire. We met in 1992. My Eulogy for a Brown Angel and his Ballad of Rocky Ruiz had been published within a few months from each other. So it seems fitting, and of particular importance to me, that Manuel and I read and present our work together here, because my visit with you at the 8th International Hispanic Crime Fiction Conference marks the beginning of my retirement from presenting and reading my work in public outside the San Francisco Bay Area. This is my swan song moment. So it’s particularly important for me to be here today. Gracias.
Some of the comments in this presentation have been excerpted from my personal essay, “La página roja” first published in The Other Latin@ anthology, edited by Lorraine M. López and Blass Falconer, University of Arizona Press, 2011.
And now, without further ado, let’s get down to the real reasons we’re gathered here today: Murder and Mayhem. “Gloria Damasco, Black Widow, and I.”
Lucha Corpi
The “Gloria Damasco” mystery series, Arte Público Press:
Eulogy for a Brown Angel 1992, Cactus Blood, 1995, Black Widow’s Wardrobe, 1999, and Death at Solstice, 2009
“A Tiny Town, A Big Hell: Pueblo chico, infierno grande,” dicho popular.
“A tiny town can be and often is a big hell,” my mother used to say about Jáltipan, our small tropical hometown and my birthplace in southern Veracruz. Situated on a tropical savannah, it was surrounded by tropical forests, which were home to colorful, and at times also deadly, fauna and flora.
The downside of living in a small community: People who try to keep secrets in a “tiny big hell” do so totally in vain.
The upside: In a small community, although noisy, there is also “a tiny big Eden.”
As for me, in this tiny big tropical paradise, where I was born and spent my formative years, the creation and performance of music, poetry, storytelling and dance sustained people’s spirits.
This business of knowing everyone else personally or by reputation, worked in my favor and in some ways defined who I was meant to be and what I’d been born to do in life. Here’s the story:
My older brother Victor and I were inseparable. When he turned six, he had to start elementary school. He stubbornly refused to attend unless I went with him every day. But I was four years old. My father talked with me and explain the situation. I was free to go with my brother to school. It would only be for a few days. I was thrilled. I said yes. He talked with the principal, who agreed to let me attend school—illegally, of course. Everyone hoped that I would soon get tired and stay home. I didn’t. I loved doing my schoolwork quietly, at a desk in the back of the room. I mastered first grade subjects. Since nobody complained. I moved on with my brother to the second grade classroom, still as an unregistered student.
By age six I had learned most of the first and second grade subjects. I could read well. But I was still too young to attend the third grade. I was asked to repeat the second grade. I did. The next year, my third grade teacher began to coach me on the recitation of poetry to keep me challenged and out of trouble. I memorized poems. Standing on a stepping stool, I recited them during school programs, and later to a larger audience during patriotic holidays.
At that time, my father had problems with his eyes. He’d had a corneal transplant on one eye and had to wear a patch over it. While recovering his eyesight, he asked me to read to him selected news items in the regional newspaper. I loved doing something for my dad, whom I loved very much.
Patiently, he would explain some vocabulary and concepts difficult for me to understand. But there was one newspaper page my father would remove, fold and put in his shirt pocket to dispose of it later. It’s common logic that one simply cannot do that in front of any child, without him or her wanting to read the “forbidden page.”
In my case, that page turned out to be “la página roja,” the crime page, full of very graphic details about accidents and knifings. But since my father didn’t tear it up, I often found it and read it. Some of the legal, moral and social implications of unlawful acts were beyond my grasp. But the descriptions became repetitive and boring. Just about then I read the case of a woman married to a violent husband who abused her. She had finally had enough and come up with a plan to do away with her abusive husband. She made a powder out of some seeds that everyone knew were toxic and mixed more than plenty of it in the sauce for his huevos rancheros. However, the husband didn’t die but was left an invalid. She wasn’t arrested and sent to jail. There was no need. The town became her prison, and she was to care for her abusive husband for the rest of her life. She hung herself from a beam in their living room. A year later, the husband miraculously healed and walked again. He married a wealthy widow in a neighboring town.
The women in the family talked about the case. Each of them offered a way to surely do away with the husband and get away with it. When they all quieted down, I heard my grandmother say, “There is no justice in this world.” And my search for answers to the question of justice and of law began
A year later, my dad got a job with significantly better pay, more benefits and very good schools in San Luis Potosí, a much larger city in central Mexico. I was almost eight years old when we moved to San Luis, where I received most of my formal education. My love for legend, story, and poetry, and always, always for the “forbidden page” was rekindled.
My grandmother died when I was nineteen, two months after I got married and traveled with my husband to Berkeley, California as a student wife. There I learned English, had a son, and five years later, separated, then divorced a husband who no longer loved me. Three fourths of my days were spent working as a secretary to support my son and myself. Also to pay for childcare, tuition and other educational expenses as I put myself through college at U.C. Berkeley.
When the kitchen was clean, lunch in bags, homework done, clothes ironed, near midnight, robbing sleep, I sat at a corner table in the living room. There, I did something which did not have to be justified, paid for, or be for someone else’s benefit; something as entirely mine as my DNA: I wrote poetry.
I wrote every night, when loneliness and anguish became nearly intolerable, or uncertainty and financial obligations threatened to overwhelm my will to survive. Whether what I wrote was good, worth publishing, or would end up as ash in the fireplace was of no consequence. I wrote each night to live one more day. But in my heart, spirit and mind, I knew for certain that I would live to write poems and stories for the rest of my life.
Ten years later, after Palabras de mediodía (Noon Words), my first poetry collection was published, I experienced a long, painful poetic silence. To entertain myself while waiting for poetry to come back, I began to write stories in Spanish, then a couple in English. Poetry eventually came back. My love for narrative grew. In 1990, when I fell under the spell of the mystery story, I heard the voice of my detective Gloria Damasco for the first time. She was telling me a story in English. I trembled at the prospect of not being good enough to write it. But I began to research what I needed to know to write Eulogy for a Brown Angel, published in 1992 by Arte Público Press in Houston. It was followed by three other noir novels: Cactus Blood, Black Widow’s Wardrobe, and Death at Solstice.
The search for justice is of great importance in all of my crime novels, but of paramount importance in Black Widow’s Wardrobe. Licia, the “Black Widow” in it, is the victim of her abusive husband. She kills him. There are extenuating circumstances, but her own sense of justice demands that she be punished. The legal system agrees with her, but it stacks the deck against her. Licia is legally tried but by an all-male jury. She is convicted and sent to prison for eighteen years. Upon her release, someone tries to kill her. And Chicana detective Gloria Damasco is hired to find out who and why.
During the investigation, Gloria begins to explore the nature of justice. How absolute a notion is it in the face of discrimination, abuse or the socio-political reality encountered by people—particularly women--of color in the system? How do law and justice interact with or prey upon each other? Is true justice really possible? What role does compassion play in the administering of justice? Eventually, Gloria and I came to realizations of great personal value to both:
Justice is a living organism, mutating, evolving. Like a poem, it takes substance and form from incongruent elements at various levels of consciousness and the sub-conscious. Both poetry and justice, however, are elusive. They both require from us that we stop and listen—acknowledge.
Our sense of justice also requires that we act on the knowledge, that we calibrate our conscience with compassion and empathy, for without them true justice is not possible.
For me, as a Chicana mystery writer, acting on that knowledge means writing.
Although the mystery story falls under the category of “popular fiction,” writing it is not as easy as it seems. A plot-driven long or short story leaves room for little more than the solution of the crime. The challenge—the art—for any crime writer rests in finding ways to offer much more than the unraveling of the plot, bringing to justice those who have broken the law and restoring the social order.
Chicana/Chicano crime fiction follows some, many or all of the conventions, traditions and structural demands of the genre, but it breaks away from them in the treatment of Chicana/Chicano themes and the development of characters steeped and deeply rooted in the culture. Thematically, our crime novels fit perfectly within Chicana/Chicano literature, exploring themes such as:
Spirituality, and the struggle between good and evil; the search for justice and socio-economic equality; human and civil rights; the history of the Mexican people in Mexico and in the U.S.; and the border and La Migra; Sexism, homophobia and racism, and other gender and gender-preference issues within the culture and in the larger context of a multicultural U.S.
It reflects the reality of ordinary people, like us, who find themselves in the midst of strife, violence and injustice, to which they have perhaps become oblivious, or they feel powerless to change. Guided by the detective’s moral-ethical compass, crime fiction offers a way to engage emotionally and work through those moral-ethical dilemmas. In the process, our perception of the world about us changes, and the possibility of obtaining justice for ourselves, as for others, becomes a more tenable objective.
From time to time during seventeen years as the only Chicana detective-fiction writer, while at a reading or a signing, other Chicanas and Latinas confessed their secret desire to write detective fiction someday. To date, with the exception of Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders, and more recently HIT LIST: The Best of Latino Mystery, featuring the work of four other Chicana mystery writers, I have seen few tangible results. What keeps Chicanas from writing and/or publishing crime fiction? Seeking answers, I began to take a look at my own upbringing as a girl, growing up in Mexico. I developed a taste for murder and mayhem while secretly reading la página roja. But young and older women who dared to read crime novels were punished or became social outcasts. Mexico in the fifties and early sixties seems long ago. Although social rules have been relaxed and TV programming has become a bit more graphic and violent, it is no longer such a crime for women to read crime novels, the majority of Mexican women do not read them or write them.
I have asked many Chicanas and Latinas the same question. To mention a few, their comments range from “Ugh--Fuchi!! No way” to:
“Ay mujer, es que eso de cargar pistola y andar matando gente ... Carry a gun and kill people…?”
“Who wants to write about raping and killing?”
“I’m against portraying women constantly as victims. That’s why I don’t watch the Lifetime channel.”
“We’re not like men.”
I have walked away from conversations on the subject with some major questions. Do we Chicanas really believe…
_ that since violence has to do mainly with testosterone, it has nothing to do with women?
_ that the constant and at times systematic killing of women all over the world, including Mexico and the Chicano microcosm, is real, but it is not in good taste to write or talk about it?
_that in truth women are victims of injustice, but it is not okay to seek justice in the public arena?
_or in general, that writing crime fiction is neither feminine nor feminist?
On the creative process or the value given to the crime fiction genre, I’ve been told, for example, “It’s very difficult to write that kind of novel because it is so rigid.” Or “That’s not really a literary novel. It’s formulaic.”
True. Crime novels in a series may become formulaic. They rely for continuity on the same investigator’s point of view. But, in each novel a distinct set of characters, moral dilemmas and ethical decisions confront the investigator. Skillfully crafted, each story in a series will be entertaining yet poignant and emotionally engaging. It will be delivered in a language accessible to a variety of readers, with characters portrayed honestly in all their facets, including those who do wrong. It will deal with moral dilemmas, unethical and criminal acts, but it won’t be preachy in its approach to what is right and wrong.
Is the job of the literary writer any different from that of the genre writer? Well-developed credible plot and characters and adequate descriptions of the place where the story develops are the basic requisites any literary or genre fiction writer must meet. Writers may choose to fracture time, set the story in the midst of a particular era, counterpoint stories within the larger work, use brevity of detail or indulge in complex description, maintain a tight pace or allow characters moments of reflection. But literary or genre, any writer must answer to the degree necessary five pertinent questions: What? Who? Where? When? Why? For the crime writer, a sixth question—How?—is paramount, because the investigation of the crime and the quest for justice are the wheels that keep the plot moving and eventually lead, in a full circle, to the motives for the crime and the apprehension or death of its perpetrator.
It’s a fallacy that mystery writers make a lot more money than literary authors. So the following comment never fails to make me chuckle: “Maybe, to make money, I’ll write a mystery novel someday, but only under a pseudonym.” I do not have the heart to burst these dreamers’ bubbles. One crime novel hardly brings in even the mid-five-figure royalty advance in a very competitive field, where you need to establish yourself with at least three mystery novels.
I can, however, assure any Chicana who is now contemplating penning a mystery novel that the writing of crime fiction, when one respects one’s art, is as legitimate as any other kind of writing; that exposing the machinations of a “justice system” which more often than not stacks the deck against women, especially women of color, is not only all right, it is also a way to obtaining justice for those who won’t or can’t speak for themselves.
At times, when I’m writing, I think of my grandmother and her pronouncement that tropical night, long ago that “there is no justice in the world.” I regret I never had a chance to tell her that sometimes I write to bring about justice, even if poetic. But I want to think that she would be proud of Gloria Damasco and of me, for giving voice to those who can’t speak for themselves.
Thank you.
Lucha Corpi
My deep gratitude to Monographic Review and Dr. Ralph Ferguson and the Ethics Center at Texas Tech University for co-sponsoring this conference. I would specially like to thank Professors Jorge Zamora, Genaro Pérez, Rodrigo Pereyra, faculty and students at CILDE for their gracious invitation to be with you today, and for their hospitality. To Professor Rolando Díaz, Southeastern Oklahoma State University, for his study and critical writing on my crime fiction my heartfelt and great conversation with me, much appreciation. And last but not least, special thanks to the department’s clerical staff, for taking care of the pesky details and paperwork to get me here. And to all of you who accompany us today. Gracias.
It is an honor to be with you today. And to share this special occasion with Aldona Pubotsky and Manuel Ramos and many presenters on crime fiction from throughout the country and abroad. Manuel Ramos, in particular, is a dear friend and fellow noir writer I greatly admire. We met in 1992. My Eulogy for a Brown Angel and his Ballad of Rocky Ruiz had been published within a few months from each other. So it seems fitting, and of particular importance to me, that Manuel and I read and present our work together here, because my visit with you at the 8th International Hispanic Crime Fiction Conference marks the beginning of my retirement from presenting and reading my work in public outside the San Francisco Bay Area. This is my swan song moment. So it’s particularly important for me to be here today. Gracias.
Some of the comments in this presentation have been excerpted from my personal essay, “La página roja” first published in The Other Latin@ anthology, edited by Lorraine M. López and Blass Falconer, University of Arizona Press, 2011.
And now, without further ado, let’s get down to the real reasons we’re gathered here today: Murder and Mayhem. “Gloria Damasco, Black Widow, and I.”
Lucha Corpi
The “Gloria Damasco” mystery series, Arte Público Press:
Eulogy for a Brown Angel 1992, Cactus Blood, 1995, Black Widow’s Wardrobe, 1999, and Death at Solstice, 2009
“A Tiny Town, A Big Hell: Pueblo chico, infierno grande,” dicho popular.
“A tiny town can be and often is a big hell,” my mother used to say about Jáltipan, our small tropical hometown and my birthplace in southern Veracruz. Situated on a tropical savannah, it was surrounded by tropical forests, which were home to colorful, and at times also deadly, fauna and flora.
The downside of living in a small community: People who try to keep secrets in a “tiny big hell” do so totally in vain.
The upside: In a small community, although noisy, there is also “a tiny big Eden.”
As for me, in this tiny big tropical paradise, where I was born and spent my formative years, the creation and performance of music, poetry, storytelling and dance sustained people’s spirits.
This business of knowing everyone else personally or by reputation, worked in my favor and in some ways defined who I was meant to be and what I’d been born to do in life. Here’s the story:
My older brother Victor and I were inseparable. When he turned six, he had to start elementary school. He stubbornly refused to attend unless I went with him every day. But I was four years old. My father talked with me and explain the situation. I was free to go with my brother to school. It would only be for a few days. I was thrilled. I said yes. He talked with the principal, who agreed to let me attend school—illegally, of course. Everyone hoped that I would soon get tired and stay home. I didn’t. I loved doing my schoolwork quietly, at a desk in the back of the room. I mastered first grade subjects. Since nobody complained. I moved on with my brother to the second grade classroom, still as an unregistered student.
By age six I had learned most of the first and second grade subjects. I could read well. But I was still too young to attend the third grade. I was asked to repeat the second grade. I did. The next year, my third grade teacher began to coach me on the recitation of poetry to keep me challenged and out of trouble. I memorized poems. Standing on a stepping stool, I recited them during school programs, and later to a larger audience during patriotic holidays.
At that time, my father had problems with his eyes. He’d had a corneal transplant on one eye and had to wear a patch over it. While recovering his eyesight, he asked me to read to him selected news items in the regional newspaper. I loved doing something for my dad, whom I loved very much.
Patiently, he would explain some vocabulary and concepts difficult for me to understand. But there was one newspaper page my father would remove, fold and put in his shirt pocket to dispose of it later. It’s common logic that one simply cannot do that in front of any child, without him or her wanting to read the “forbidden page.”
In my case, that page turned out to be “la página roja,” the crime page, full of very graphic details about accidents and knifings. But since my father didn’t tear it up, I often found it and read it. Some of the legal, moral and social implications of unlawful acts were beyond my grasp. But the descriptions became repetitive and boring. Just about then I read the case of a woman married to a violent husband who abused her. She had finally had enough and come up with a plan to do away with her abusive husband. She made a powder out of some seeds that everyone knew were toxic and mixed more than plenty of it in the sauce for his huevos rancheros. However, the husband didn’t die but was left an invalid. She wasn’t arrested and sent to jail. There was no need. The town became her prison, and she was to care for her abusive husband for the rest of her life. She hung herself from a beam in their living room. A year later, the husband miraculously healed and walked again. He married a wealthy widow in a neighboring town.
The women in the family talked about the case. Each of them offered a way to surely do away with the husband and get away with it. When they all quieted down, I heard my grandmother say, “There is no justice in this world.” And my search for answers to the question of justice and of law began
A year later, my dad got a job with significantly better pay, more benefits and very good schools in San Luis Potosí, a much larger city in central Mexico. I was almost eight years old when we moved to San Luis, where I received most of my formal education. My love for legend, story, and poetry, and always, always for the “forbidden page” was rekindled.
My grandmother died when I was nineteen, two months after I got married and traveled with my husband to Berkeley, California as a student wife. There I learned English, had a son, and five years later, separated, then divorced a husband who no longer loved me. Three fourths of my days were spent working as a secretary to support my son and myself. Also to pay for childcare, tuition and other educational expenses as I put myself through college at U.C. Berkeley.
When the kitchen was clean, lunch in bags, homework done, clothes ironed, near midnight, robbing sleep, I sat at a corner table in the living room. There, I did something which did not have to be justified, paid for, or be for someone else’s benefit; something as entirely mine as my DNA: I wrote poetry.
I wrote every night, when loneliness and anguish became nearly intolerable, or uncertainty and financial obligations threatened to overwhelm my will to survive. Whether what I wrote was good, worth publishing, or would end up as ash in the fireplace was of no consequence. I wrote each night to live one more day. But in my heart, spirit and mind, I knew for certain that I would live to write poems and stories for the rest of my life.
Ten years later, after Palabras de mediodía (Noon Words), my first poetry collection was published, I experienced a long, painful poetic silence. To entertain myself while waiting for poetry to come back, I began to write stories in Spanish, then a couple in English. Poetry eventually came back. My love for narrative grew. In 1990, when I fell under the spell of the mystery story, I heard the voice of my detective Gloria Damasco for the first time. She was telling me a story in English. I trembled at the prospect of not being good enough to write it. But I began to research what I needed to know to write Eulogy for a Brown Angel, published in 1992 by Arte Público Press in Houston. It was followed by three other noir novels: Cactus Blood, Black Widow’s Wardrobe, and Death at Solstice.
The search for justice is of great importance in all of my crime novels, but of paramount importance in Black Widow’s Wardrobe. Licia, the “Black Widow” in it, is the victim of her abusive husband. She kills him. There are extenuating circumstances, but her own sense of justice demands that she be punished. The legal system agrees with her, but it stacks the deck against her. Licia is legally tried but by an all-male jury. She is convicted and sent to prison for eighteen years. Upon her release, someone tries to kill her. And Chicana detective Gloria Damasco is hired to find out who and why.
During the investigation, Gloria begins to explore the nature of justice. How absolute a notion is it in the face of discrimination, abuse or the socio-political reality encountered by people—particularly women--of color in the system? How do law and justice interact with or prey upon each other? Is true justice really possible? What role does compassion play in the administering of justice? Eventually, Gloria and I came to realizations of great personal value to both:
Justice is a living organism, mutating, evolving. Like a poem, it takes substance and form from incongruent elements at various levels of consciousness and the sub-conscious. Both poetry and justice, however, are elusive. They both require from us that we stop and listen—acknowledge.
Our sense of justice also requires that we act on the knowledge, that we calibrate our conscience with compassion and empathy, for without them true justice is not possible.
For me, as a Chicana mystery writer, acting on that knowledge means writing.
Although the mystery story falls under the category of “popular fiction,” writing it is not as easy as it seems. A plot-driven long or short story leaves room for little more than the solution of the crime. The challenge—the art—for any crime writer rests in finding ways to offer much more than the unraveling of the plot, bringing to justice those who have broken the law and restoring the social order.
Chicana/Chicano crime fiction follows some, many or all of the conventions, traditions and structural demands of the genre, but it breaks away from them in the treatment of Chicana/Chicano themes and the development of characters steeped and deeply rooted in the culture. Thematically, our crime novels fit perfectly within Chicana/Chicano literature, exploring themes such as:
Spirituality, and the struggle between good and evil; the search for justice and socio-economic equality; human and civil rights; the history of the Mexican people in Mexico and in the U.S.; and the border and La Migra; Sexism, homophobia and racism, and other gender and gender-preference issues within the culture and in the larger context of a multicultural U.S.
It reflects the reality of ordinary people, like us, who find themselves in the midst of strife, violence and injustice, to which they have perhaps become oblivious, or they feel powerless to change. Guided by the detective’s moral-ethical compass, crime fiction offers a way to engage emotionally and work through those moral-ethical dilemmas. In the process, our perception of the world about us changes, and the possibility of obtaining justice for ourselves, as for others, becomes a more tenable objective.
From time to time during seventeen years as the only Chicana detective-fiction writer, while at a reading or a signing, other Chicanas and Latinas confessed their secret desire to write detective fiction someday. To date, with the exception of Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders, and more recently HIT LIST: The Best of Latino Mystery, featuring the work of four other Chicana mystery writers, I have seen few tangible results. What keeps Chicanas from writing and/or publishing crime fiction? Seeking answers, I began to take a look at my own upbringing as a girl, growing up in Mexico. I developed a taste for murder and mayhem while secretly reading la página roja. But young and older women who dared to read crime novels were punished or became social outcasts. Mexico in the fifties and early sixties seems long ago. Although social rules have been relaxed and TV programming has become a bit more graphic and violent, it is no longer such a crime for women to read crime novels, the majority of Mexican women do not read them or write them.
I have asked many Chicanas and Latinas the same question. To mention a few, their comments range from “Ugh--Fuchi!! No way” to:
“Ay mujer, es que eso de cargar pistola y andar matando gente ... Carry a gun and kill people…?”
“Who wants to write about raping and killing?”
“I’m against portraying women constantly as victims. That’s why I don’t watch the Lifetime channel.”
“We’re not like men.”
I have walked away from conversations on the subject with some major questions. Do we Chicanas really believe…
_ that since violence has to do mainly with testosterone, it has nothing to do with women?
_ that the constant and at times systematic killing of women all over the world, including Mexico and the Chicano microcosm, is real, but it is not in good taste to write or talk about it?
_that in truth women are victims of injustice, but it is not okay to seek justice in the public arena?
_or in general, that writing crime fiction is neither feminine nor feminist?
On the creative process or the value given to the crime fiction genre, I’ve been told, for example, “It’s very difficult to write that kind of novel because it is so rigid.” Or “That’s not really a literary novel. It’s formulaic.”
True. Crime novels in a series may become formulaic. They rely for continuity on the same investigator’s point of view. But, in each novel a distinct set of characters, moral dilemmas and ethical decisions confront the investigator. Skillfully crafted, each story in a series will be entertaining yet poignant and emotionally engaging. It will be delivered in a language accessible to a variety of readers, with characters portrayed honestly in all their facets, including those who do wrong. It will deal with moral dilemmas, unethical and criminal acts, but it won’t be preachy in its approach to what is right and wrong.
Is the job of the literary writer any different from that of the genre writer? Well-developed credible plot and characters and adequate descriptions of the place where the story develops are the basic requisites any literary or genre fiction writer must meet. Writers may choose to fracture time, set the story in the midst of a particular era, counterpoint stories within the larger work, use brevity of detail or indulge in complex description, maintain a tight pace or allow characters moments of reflection. But literary or genre, any writer must answer to the degree necessary five pertinent questions: What? Who? Where? When? Why? For the crime writer, a sixth question—How?—is paramount, because the investigation of the crime and the quest for justice are the wheels that keep the plot moving and eventually lead, in a full circle, to the motives for the crime and the apprehension or death of its perpetrator.
It’s a fallacy that mystery writers make a lot more money than literary authors. So the following comment never fails to make me chuckle: “Maybe, to make money, I’ll write a mystery novel someday, but only under a pseudonym.” I do not have the heart to burst these dreamers’ bubbles. One crime novel hardly brings in even the mid-five-figure royalty advance in a very competitive field, where you need to establish yourself with at least three mystery novels.
I can, however, assure any Chicana who is now contemplating penning a mystery novel that the writing of crime fiction, when one respects one’s art, is as legitimate as any other kind of writing; that exposing the machinations of a “justice system” which more often than not stacks the deck against women, especially women of color, is not only all right, it is also a way to obtaining justice for those who won’t or can’t speak for themselves.
At times, when I’m writing, I think of my grandmother and her pronouncement that tropical night, long ago that “there is no justice in the world.” I regret I never had a chance to tell her that sometimes I write to bring about justice, even if poetic. But I want to think that she would be proud of Gloria Damasco and of me, for giving voice to those who can’t speak for themselves.
Thank you.
Lucha Corpi