Notes Towards A Future Detective Story Without The Police

We are in a room with a giant, hanging chandelier flower of glass looking — in person — like it could well kiss the top of the table. It is April. Spring has conscripted bees into something like tiny little fists to knock on all the windows and all the doors.

We are in a room in a house in Bristol, Rhode Island that used to belong to the DeWolf family, who were able to build the house we were all gathered in with money from the slave trade — and who continued to engage in the slave trade well after it was banned in the state of Rhode Island. We are in a dining room with a glass chandelier because that is what the DeWolf family wanted to show you as they hired men to throw people from the federal government attempting to shut the family business down into the water miles away from where the family was conducting its business.

We are in this room in Rhode Island in April because we are running a writing workshop on how to write a murder mystery in an era defined by police abolition, and — in writing about it here — we hope to start bringing the conversation to all of you as well. We want to reach out to the people who love Columbo but who also understand that — as Egon Bittner notes in The Function of Police in Modern Society —

… calling the cops, whether it involves protection against an undesired imposition, caring for those who cannot care for themselves, attempting to solve a crime, helping to save a life, abating a nuisance, or settling an explosive dispute, police intervention means above all making use of the capacity and authority to overpower resistance to an attempted solution in the native habitat of the problem.

It is Sunday afternoon, preferably before the war. The wife is already asleep in the armchair, and the children have been sent out for a nice long walk. You put your feet up on the sofa, settle your spectacles on your nose, and open the News of the World. Roast beef and Yorkshire, or roast pork and apple sauce, followed up by suet pudding and driven home, as it were, by a cup of mahogany-brown tea, have put you in just the right mood. Your pipe is drawing sweetly, the sofa cushions are soft underneath you, the fire is well alight, the air is warm and stagnant. In these blissful circumstances, what is it that you want to read about?

Naturally, about a murder.

How comfortable is the description Orwell outlines for us. A comfortable sofa, a comfortable fire, and some good, hardy food ready to go. How comfortable the DeWolfs must have been at their dining table. How notable it is that the violence — in both of these quick sketches, in both of these instances — is placed elsewhere.

Having said that, one could reasonably argue that that — this placing of the violence ‘elsewhere’ — is something of a subtle two-step played out right in the open, often in a way that escapes our notice until we inevitably notice it again. Jordan Peele’s Get Out doesn’t come from nowhere, nor does our country’s steady and consistent drumbeat of mass shootings, but how could it be — we rhetorically ask — when we encounter this violence as ‘new’ in Get Out when DH Lawrence was saying the same thing in Studies in Classic American Literature nearly hundred years prior?

All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.

Consider: it feels like it is easier to have a public discussion about getting rid of capital punishment than it is to have a discussion about getting rid of the police. It feels reasonable to stand up and say, ‘Hey, we already have a vast prison infrastructure and extremely well-funded police departments — why do we need to incorporate capital punishment into it, too?’

And yet — as of 2021, even with capital punishment being used less and less — 60% of Americans were still in favor of the death penalty, even with 78% acknowledging that there was some risk of putting an innocent person to death. And how is that not a reflection of Lawrence’s observation?

I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison,
Part panic closet, a little room in a house set aflame.
I lock you in a form that is part music box, part meat
Grinder to separate the song of the bird from the bone.
I lock your persona in a dream-inducing sleeper hold
While your better selves watch from the bleachers.
I make you both gym & crow here. As the crow
You undergo a beautiful catharsis trapped one night
In the shadows of the gym. As the gym, the feel of crow-
Shit dropping to your floors is not unlike the stars
Falling from the pep rally posters on your walls.
I make you a box of darkness with a bird in its heart.
Voltas of acoustics, instinct & metaphor. It is not enough
To love you. It is not enough to want you destroyed.

Where is the detective that acknowledges all this? Where is the detective who can see the narrative difference between how we talk about the state killing someone and how we talk about the state killing someone? (Remember how the police union threatened to boycott NFL games because Kaepernick was exercising his right to free speech? Now compare that with the Texas Governor immediately moving to pardon someone who murdered a protestor.) Where is the detective who can see the outline of — as Terrance Hayes puts it — the prison, the panic closet, and the house wrapped in flames?

Perhaps we’re overlooking a second two-step of another kind here — how the story of an investigation see-saws back and forth between something so small as a detail here or there and something as cosmically large as death. Perhaps we should say more about the show We Own This City.

These were some of the things I was thinking about — and some of the things I spoke about — as I guided my students to begin writing fiction of their own as we sat in that fancy dining room in Rhode Island at the beginning of spring. When I checked in with my students and asked if they had anything to share, one of them talked about how — in real life — they won a contest that tested their knowledge of forensics, how they were the only person to enter the contest, and wouldn’t that be an interesting way to build up the foundation of a murder mystery?

There was something gentle in that, something richly comic in that, and — wanting to believe in spring rather than winter, in the certainty of the past tense over the uncertainty of the present — I agreed.