Crime And Heat In The Desert

For today's notes on craft and on crime fiction, I talk about why I write about the desert and crime.

Photo by JC Cervantes on Unsplash

Today, I want to talk about the gravity of setting and subject. There is no universal formula, but for me, the desert and the crime were inevitable.

The Desert

I’ve written before about place. The setting of a story is often as important as the characters, and writing about that place requires an incredible amount of discipline and care. It's much too easy to fall victim to tropes when writing about a certain region. Fortunately for me, I grew up in Southern Arizona. I know the region like the back of my hand. I know its people and its problems. I know the heat, and I know the crime.

But why do I focus on the desert instead of somewhere like Los Angeles or Chicago or New York? It’s for the same reason authors such as David Joy, Wiley Cash, and Michael Farris Smith set their stories in places such as the Appalachian Mountains, North Carolina, and Mississippi. They all lived in those places. They lived the lives of their characters or they lived lives that ran parallel to their characters. That’s true for me as well.

I wasn’t born in the desert, but I spent most of my life there. My father finished his stint in the Air Force in Tucson, AZ. That’s how we were introduced to the Sonoran Desert. And but for a brief stint in California, I spent the next 25+ years of my life in Tucson.

And yet, the funny thing is I had no desire to write about the southwest when I first started writing. I thought I had to write stories set in the big cities. When I applied for my MFA program, I sent in a half-baked novel set in Washington, D.C. It had never occurred to me that I could write stories set in the place I grew up even if I didn’t see many (or any) other writers writing about Pima County, Arizona. It took reading writers like the ones I mentioned above plus countless others to realize my greatest strength as a writer was my intimacy with the desert.

That’s why you’ll find my stories set in Arizona. Maybe someday I’ll write something set somewhere else, but for now, I’m comfortable exactly where I am.

The Crime

So, what about crime fiction? Why do I focus my time there? Why not romance or fantasy or sci-fi? Why not cozy mysteries or horror? I think there are a variety of answers to this, but if I had to boil it down to three main reasons I write about crime, they’d be:

1. Dennis Lehane

2. Economics

3. Law enforcement relationships

Let’s take these one-by-one.

Dennis Lehane

Lehane was the first author I read who gave me permission to write about violence. To write about characters who were flawed and cursed and did horrible things for good reasons and did good things for bad reasons. His writing opened my eyes to the world of crime fiction.

If I had to pick a single author who has influenced my writing the most, it’d be him. Even his regional focus in Boston can be seen in the echoes of my stories set in Arizona. While Boston is a big city by my standards, Lehane wrote about Boston neighborhoods, tight-knit communities, regional specificities. Without Lehane I wouldn’t have discovered Daniel Woodrell or Eli Cranor or Jess Lourey. I wouldn’t have discovered any of the authors who write about home.

Economics

Tucson, Arizona is a poor city. It’s not a rust belt city impacted by the loss of factories, but its poverty rate sits significantly higher than the national average. It’s a college town with a few key employers, and that means great jobs are hard to find.

There’s a strong correlation between poverty and crime, and I grew up living in this correlation. I knew people who had to steal to get by. I knew people who were so bogged down by financial pain that they lashed out, did things they never would have done otherwise. I was generally pretty fortunate, but I was frequently around crime as I grew up.

Law enforcement relationships

My father was in law enforcement. My grandfather (on my mom’s side) was in law enforcement. In fact, my grandfather wasn’t just a police officer, he was a police sketch artist. His home was filled with sketches of missing persons, bank robbers, and the occasional murder victim. Beyond my family, many of my friends from high school went into law enforcement (remember, not many job opportunities in Tucson).

In addition to being around crime as I grew up, I was also around the police a lot. It’s through that balance that I could see the impact of crime in the city from both sides. Those law enforcement connections helped shape the eventual direction of my writing.

Connecting The Dots

I think I write about crime because of where I grew up. I write about the desert because of where I grew up. It just took me a while to realize I was allowed to do that. My younger self stumbled through writing that was not true to me as a person. Fortunately, I grew out of that and discovered authors (like Lehane) who gave me permission to write the way I do now.

Next week, I will give some examples of authors who are not from a place but write about that place, perhaps, better than locals would.

What about you? Are there specific regions, settings, or hometown authors you find yourself drawn to as a reader? Let me know in the comments.