Why I Admire Good Fiction

A Sci-Fi/Murder Mystery

Why I admire good fiction. It's because fiction tempers reality. Pushes it away from me, at least for a little while. Gives me an image of a better way, a better world.

Last week a man shot to death forty-nine people and was, himself, shot to death in a night club.

Last week an alligator killed a toddler in an amusement park. His father and mother couldn't save him. Alligators live in almost all bodies of water in Florida. The child's Nebraska family were not used to protecting their children from such a threat.

Last week three three-year-olds died in closed cars of heat stroke -- a pair of twins in Bossier City, Louisiana, and a little boy in Houston, Texas. And it doesn't look like the parents were necessarily negligent. The children all died in vehicles parked at their homes. It is so easy for little ones to slip away and they all like to play in the family car. A dangerous choice in the heat of summer, but children don't know about that.

Last week a mountain lion attacked a five-year-old boy in his front yard near Aspen, Colorado. The boy's mother was able to pry the cat's jaws open with her bare hands and save her child. Although this story ended better, more like the plot line of a piece of fiction, I can only imagine how long this terror will haunt them.

That was last week's reality.

Real life makes me seriously reconsider my chosen writing genre. I write murder mysteries. My favorite recreational reading is the old fashioned murder mystery. The same with my go-to television and movies fare. How can I spend so much time with such reminders of reality?

I don't like thrillers that involve graphic torture or sexual assault. Those are worse in books than in movies or on TV. At least the Indiana Jones movies have musical scores that tell me when it's safe to uncover my eyes. And most TV shows give me enough warning that I can head for the fridge or go put a load in the washer when I need to. Maybe with the rise of ebooks we'll get some kind of musical score or trigger warnings that will tell us which pages to skip.

What makes a murder mystery I like? We find out who killed the victim. We find out why they killed them. We get satisfying endings. Often, like the nightclub shooter, the villain dies at the end. Even if the book or show ends with the murderer arrested, but before they are tried, sentenced, and removed from society, we know that they will be removed from society. We can sleep safe in our beds.

That's fiction.

Real life never gives us trigger warnings and seldom has a satisfying ending. We might get a pretty good idea who dunnit. Maybe even some idea of why. Whatever the reason why, it never seems like a good enough reason. And the thought of neither imprisonment nor of capital punishment truly satisfies. The victim's losses are too great to be 'paid for.' Our losses as a society are too great.

And good fiction? Ahhhhh. The best is when the author gives us a protagonist who does the right thing for the right reason, no matter how difficult it is. And they do it without fanfare or medals, satisfied that the good guys win.

Fanfare and medals are never enough to fill a real hero's loss. They can never unknow the wrong that was done or what they had to do to try to right it. And, somehow, winning just isn't enough.

I'll keep writing fictional murder mysteries, hopefully good ones. No doubt reality will continue to happen and I'll have to reconsider the morality of writing fiction. Again.