The Class Problem in Crime Fiction (Part Two)

Trigger warning- Mentions of rape and violence

When I was considering the way finances impact writing, there were two focus points for me. They are similar enough to be considered together, but too large a topic to comfortably cover each in one combined blog post.

The first, in blog post Part 1, centered on financial barriers to becoming a writer. It was a call to arms that we, as members of these writing organizations and collectives, should find ways to support members from less financially secure backgrounds in their writing.

Now I want to focus on how discussion of financial class, specifically poverty, is handled and mishandled in fiction.

There's this trope from the '80's and '90's where the villain of any comedy movie is a rich developer who wants to tear down the community center, family home, camp or church full of singing nuns for nefarious reasons. And, to be fair, that does happen in real life. Rich developers take over struggling businesses or buy up houses in an area to bulldoze and build highways, parking lots, office buildings, or expand golf courses for other rich people to use.

It's easy to make the rich guy the villain. Even as their behavior nauseates us, the idea of having enough money to do whatever we want is intoxicating. But some of the more interesting characters in fiction, especially crime fiction, come from the opposite end of the financial spectrum.

This next part may seem like a book report, but I'm using these book series as examples of a larger point I'm making regarding poverty in fiction.

If you're a fan of the Will Trent television series, you know that it's loosely based on a book series by Karin Slaughter. What you may not know, if you've never read that series, is that it ties in with another series by Slaughter that focuses on Grant County.

While the Will Trent series focuses on poverty by having the dyslexic main character be a former foster child, he's by no means the most compelling impoverished character in the Slaughter universe. I'd argue that the title goes to Lena Adams.

I can already hear any fan of the series all-but-howling in misplaced outrage. Lena is introduced in the series' first book "Blindsighted" as the sister of a rape & murder victim. She's also a detective on the small, local police force under the supervision of Jeffrey Tolliver, whose ex-wife, Sara Linton, is a pediatrician and the acting coroner who performs the autopsy on Lena's sister.

From the beginning, we know that Lena grew up in extreme poverty. She and her twin sister were raised by an alcoholic uncle in what can only generously be described as a shack. In the almost-completely white Grant County, she's biracial.

In the first book, Lena is kidnapped by the killer, deeply drugged, and is repeatedly raped. Her hands are nailed to the floor to facilitate these assaults.

Lena and Sara share one big similarity- both women were brutally raped in a way that left them physically altered. For Lena, it's scars on her hands that occasionally hurt or itch; for Sara, it's infertility. The difference in how they react to what was done to them is a reflection of how financial class impacts every aspect of our lives.

Sara grew up with money. Her dad was a plumber who owned real estate in town and Sara became a doctor in Atlanta. When she's raped at work, she moves back home with her parents to heal. They support her through her recovery, and later through her divorce from Jeffrey, though they struggle a bit to support her when she gets back together with Jeffrey later in the series. As a result, Sara heals after her assault and can move on with her life. It's a thing that happened to her, but it doesn't define her.

To say that Lena struggles after being rescued is an understatement. Despite not liking alcohol, she drinks too much. She can't sleep or function, and her only familial support is the alcoholic uncle who caused her sister to go blind when they were children. She is drowning in a sea of fear, anger, and resentment. She's afraid, still, of the man who did this to her. She's angry that her sister died and that she (Lena) couldn't defend herself. And she resents the men in her department for rescuing her as she believes they think of her as weak afterward.

Lena ends up in an abusive relationship with a white supremacist who later has Jeffrey, her mentor, and the only authority figure who ever supported her, murdered. Rather than blaming the man who ordered the hit, Sara blames Lena for Jeffrey's death.

In the books leading up to Jeffrey's death in "Beyond Reach," we frequently see Sara's frustration with the way Lena reacts to being raped. In Sara's mind, there is one way to act as a rape victim and Lena is doing it all wrong. Lena is acting out instead of working toward healing and it drives Sara crazy.

When Sara joins the cast of characters for the Will Trent series. her hatred of Lena only grows. If there is a problem in Sara's universe, she's sure that Lena is the cause.

And that hatred of Lena is sometimes embraced by readers. When Slaughter gave a virtual talk for a local bookstore a few years ago, I was shocked to hear how many women hate Lena. A large portion of the audience found her behavior after the rape to be beyond the pale. They blamed Lena for Jeffrey's death more than they blamed her abusive boyfriend.

So why is Lena seen as a villain in the series, while Will and Jeffrey's faults and bad behavior are all-but-ignored?

A lot of it has to do with the way the characters in the books describe Lena, Will, and Jeffrey. In particular, the way Sara sees them. The men in the books are portrayed as noble ones who overcame poverty by Sara. She can look at every action they take and tie it back to their childhood trauma. Sara does not extend the same grace and understanding to Lena.

In that way, her books mirror life. Many people cannot seem to comprehend the role that an impoverished background plays on our future selves.

For example: when there are discussions of the homelessness crisis in major cities, people fall into one of two camps. There are those that understand the underlying reasons for homelessness are often rooted in childhood poverty/abuse/neglect, and those who prefer to think of the homeless as morally reprehensible layabouts who just want a handout.

Until there is a safety net that keeps children from living in poverty, the homelessness crises will continue to grow.

When we write characters in crime fiction, it's important for us to understand everything that drives them to become the person they are in the book.

• Did they grow up in stable households, or ones where they never knew whether a kiss or a kick was waiting for them when they walked through the front door each day?

• Was there always a meal on the table?

• If they fell on the playground, was their parent home to tend to their wound after school or were they working three jobs to keep the lights on?

This is especially true when it comes to writing about characters who grew up in financial insecure households. Poverty is a language written in our bones, literally. And like any language, if you're a non-native speaker, you're bound to make mistakes.

Maybe your main character complains of being poor while driving a relatively new, reliable car with the appropriate license plate sticker.

Maybe they complain of being poor but still take (presumably unpaid) time off work to solve a murder, while still managing to pay their bills on time.

Or they go to the dentist when they have a toothache, or the doctor when they are injured, or the optometrist when they have trouble seeing rather than attempting home remedies first.

All of the above are examples I've seen in fiction. Readers who didn't grow up speaking the language of poverty will never notice the inaccuracies of those portrayals of financial insecurity, but they've led to much internal eye rolling from me. Details matter.

As writers, it's our responsibility to think of the ways the characters' financial background affected their bodies, their minds, and the choices that they make about the events in the book.

If they steal a loaf of bread, it's not enough to describe the action. We need to know why they stole it and how they feel about stealing it. We need to know if this is part of who they are as a person, or if this was a one-off event that is at odds with their moral code.

Similarly, we need to think of all the ways other characters will react to this action. Will they be like Sara, only understanding in some circumstances for some people, but refusing to extend the same grace to others? Or will they be like Kay Scarpetta, finding evidence of poverty in someone's bones and feeling sadness at a life cut short by the actions that stemmed from such a childhood?

How other characters react to the impoverished character does more than drive our story along. It also helps our audiences to think about poverty in ways that they may never have considered before.

When people find out about my childhood, many of them mention how impressive I am. It's shocking to them that I'm doing as well as I am considering my past.

But I'm hardly unique that way- thousands upon thousands of other people grew up in poverty and survived. Some of them are criminals, some of them are saints, and most of them are somewhere on the scale near the middle, just doing their best to survive life.

We can't only tell stories where the people who grew up in poverty are the villains or the anti-heroes. If we do, we're telling those who grew up in poverty that criminality is all they can aspire to as they get older. We're telling future employers that applicants with poor credit scores are bad employees, even though it has no bearing on the type of work being performed. We're telling policy makers that the homeless got there by bad choices alone, rather than choices that were informed by their background.

When we write our stories, we need to make sure that we take those financial differences into account. If we only write about people who grew up in poverty as losers and criminals, we're creating a worse world than the one we currently inhabit. We're telling the world what we really think of poor people, even if it's not actually how we feel if we forget to add nuance. And that is dangerous.