Free people read mysteries

You need freedom of speech, law and order, hope and prosperity to be able to enjoy fictitious crimes and violence.

Liza Marklund, Books to Die For

Liza Marklund

Liza Marklund is a Swedish author of crime novels, one of which she co-authored with James Patterson. Her essay in Books to Die For is about The Ghost of Blackwood Hall, a Nancy Drew mystery by Carolyn Keene. She writes about how she devoured Nancy Drew books as a girl in Sweden and how these books have spread around the world and been translated into many languages. But they are not popular everywhere, she says. In some countries, even if they are available, they are rarely read.

From there Marklund goes on to say that in countries with oppressive governments, hardly anyone reads mysteries. "I spend quite a lot of time in Africa," she says, "and when I tell my friends in Kenya that I write fictional books about crimes being committed, they look at me strangely and ask: 'Why?'"

"If you're living too close to the real thing," she goes on, "the urge to indulge in the killing of individuals for the purposes of entertainment seems to be limited." In Argentina, she says, one can go into bookstores and find romance, political biographies, supernatural novels, horror and porn — but no crime novels.

Perhaps it is for the same reason that frivolous Hollywood musicals and comedies were so popular in America during the Depression years of the 1930s. Entertainment is an escape from real life. If novels about crime, danger, intrigue, betrayal and deceit seem too much like real life, where is the escape?

At a time when governments in Canada, the United States and other western countries are moving rapidly toward restricting freedoms, censoring speech and punishing dissent, it may pay to keep an eye on the crime fiction on the best-seller lists. It may be the canary in the coal mine.