Literature about criminal justice

SIGNIFICANCE: The conflicts between criminals and society are frequent subjects of both serious and popular literature, and fiction with criminal justice themes has shown steady advances in both its realism and the variety of subject matter and characters that it depicts.

The punishment of criminal acts is an enduring feature of social life. Consequently, it is not surprising to find that crime and its punishment are recurring backgrounds for the exercise of literary imagination. Conflicts between the individual and society, between lawlessness and law, between justice and mercy, rank at the forefront of literary subjects. Interest in legal issues has, if anything, increased among readers since the early twentieth century. Changes, such as those effected by the civil rights movement and various other rights movements of the 1960s, have created within the reading public an almost insatiable appetite for novels and films and television programs about the law, especially the law relating to crime and its prosecution.

Antecedents of Modern Crime Fiction

Crime and its attendant legal circumstances have a long history of attention from literature. Shylock’s murderous envy in The Merchant of Venice (1597) by William Shakespeare is brought to justice by Portia. A murder trial anchors the final chapters of Fyodor Dostoevski’s The Brothers Karamazov (1880). Herman Melville’s posthumously published novella Billy Budd, Foretopman (1924) finds a morally innocent sailor tried for striking and killing a superior officer. Hetty Sorrell stands charged with killing her infant in George Eliot’s 1859 novel Adam Bede. In fact, what is thought of as the first modern short story in the English language—Walter Scott’s “The Two Drovers” (1827)—has as its central event the trial and execution of a Scotsman who kills a companion on English soil after a barroom fight.

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries witnessed a proliferation of both serious and popular literature about crime. Edgar Allen Poe, in such stories as “The Murder in the Rue Morgue” (1841), which he referred to as tales of “ratiocination” (reasoning), established influential models for future detective stories. Beginning with A Study in Scarlet (1887), Arthur Conan Doyle introduced Sherlock Holmes, perhaps the most famous fictional detective of all. Although Holmes was a professional, literature about crime has had plenty of room for talented amateurs, such as G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown, a Catholic priest with a knack for solving crimes, chronicled in The Innocence of Father Brown (1911) and The Wisdom of Father Brown (1914).

The most immediate forebears of modern literature about crime were the “hard-boiled” detective stories published between the twentieth century’s two world wars. In these stories, amateur detectives gave way to private investigators, who labored to solve puzzles created by criminal minds not out of mere intellectual curiosity but as a job, though one that did not pay very well. Instead of the pastoral scenes and manor houses that characterized British detective stories of the period, sometimes called “cozies,” hard-boiled detective stories planted their protagonists in the urban underworld spawned by the twentieth century.

Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, the best-known writers of hard-boiled detective fiction, created two of the most enduring fictional detectives: Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade. However, detective literature, while focused on the discovery of crime and its perpetrators, offered an incomplete view of the criminal justice system. In this system, the apprehension of an alleged wrongdoer stands at the beginning of the justice process, with crucial events yet to follow in its wake. Events such as trials, appeals, and incarcerations were not unknown to fiction writers, but these subjects took a decidedly secondary place to “whodunits,” the colloquial name given to detective stories which focused on discovery of the criminals.

Crime and Its Aftermath

Modern literature about criminal justice is more realistic than its forebears at least in this regard—that the full breadth of the justice system is more regularly on display to readers. Nevertheless, the detection of criminal acts remains a recurring subject of crime fiction. However, modern readers have cause to be more informed than earlier generations about the criminal process at each stage because these various stages are regularly described, both in serious and popular literature. Serious works about crime, such as Truman Capote’s “nonfiction” novel, In Cold Blood (1966), now routinely expose readers not only to investigations of crimes, but also to arrests of suspects, their arraignments, trials, appeals, and incarceration or execution. Popular or “pulp” fiction is, if anything, even more comprehensive in its treatment of the various stages in the investigation of crime and the arrest and punishment of its perpetrators.

Not only do readers have access to these stages of the criminal process, but they now have reason to be familiar with a host of subsidiary characters in that process: coroners, bail bondsmen, court reporters, and parole officers being only a few such examples. These characters themselves represent different aspects of the criminal justice system. The familiarity of modern readers with the functions of these various characters represents a significant advance in the realism of crime fiction.

Despite this development, individual works of fiction still tend to focus attention on particular segments of the criminal process, especially on criminal investigation, arrests, and trials. Tom Wolfe’s 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities is typical in this regard, since its narrative emphasis is on stockbroker Sherman McCoy’s arrest and trial for a hit-and-run accident. Patricia Cornwell’s novels about Kay Scarpetta, Virginia’s chief medical examiner, target attention chiefly on criminal investigations. Novels such as John Grisham’s The Chamber (1994), on the other hand, spotlight the inevitable appeals that immediately precede applications of the death penalty. Viewed collectively, modern crime literature broadly canvases the entire gamut of the criminal justice process.

Police and Private Investigators

Long part of the enduring furniture of crime fiction, descriptions of police took a fairly radical turn in the last decades of the twentieth century. Before that time, police characters populated the plots of crime fiction but seldom played major roles. Private detectives, both those whose services could be hired and those who were purely amateur investigators, assumed larger proportions than official law-enforcement officers. Thus, as between Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard, Holmes was the central figure, Lestrade nothing more than a foil.

In Edgar Allan Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” the prefect of police takes a back seat to the independent detective, the Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin. Similarly, in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1939) and other hard-boiled detective stories by Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and others, the criminal justice system is only a pale shadow behind the investigations of private detectives such as Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade.

Modern crime fiction has revised this hierarchy. After World War II, fictional crime seemed to mature and become less susceptible to solutions that involved only a single hero. Detection of crime depended increasingly on forensic scientific techniques and the ability to acquire and organize significant sums of information. Private investigators, whether of the professional or amateur variety, would not realistically have access to the products of forensic investigation or the information such as that contained in the voluminous records of the telephone company. Moreover, detection of crime, although still enormously important, found itself allied with arrest and enforcement issues. The police and police departments, accordingly, took on more importance in American public life and, consequently, more importance in fiction about late twentieth and early twenty-first century crime.

Beginning with Cop Hater in 1956, Ed McCain’s police procedural novels focused less on individual police officers and more on teams of officers, specifically, the officers of the fictional 87th Precinct. As might be expected from narratives in which an organization takes center stage, the bureaucratic forms of that organization find a place in McCain’s novels. Cop Hater introduced readers to pistol permits, ballistics reports, and other standard law-enforcement forms. Even McCain could not resist the narrative attractions of paying special attention to the development of a central protagonist—Detective Steve Carella in his case. Nevertheless, his novels—and others in the police procedural genre—represented another genuine advance in realism insofar as they elevated the cooperative nature of law-enforcement work over its individual aspects.

Lone fictional heroes of criminal detection still exist. Notable examples are Agatha Christie’s Belgian detective, the retired police official Hercule Poirot, or Walter Mosley’s African American private eye Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins. More often, even lone heroes are at least nominally attached to police organizations, such as Hollywood police detective Harry Bosch in The Last Coyote (1995), and other novels of the series by Michael Connelly. Lone detectives in the modern age must generally rely on webs of relationships among official law-enforcement agencies to have access to the information that only these agencies can acquire and compile—information that is often crucial to the solution of modern crimes.

Constitutional Rights and Criminal Processes

Reality infiltrated literature about crime nowhere more prominently than in the late twentieth century emphasis on constitutional criminal rights. Under US chief justice Earl Warren, criminal procedure in the United States experienced a true rights revolution during the 1960s. Most famously in Miranda v. Arizona (1966), the Court expanded the constitutional protections available to those accused of crimes. Miranda instituted the now familiar requirement that suspects be advised of their rights, such as the right to counsel and the right to remain silent. Elsewhere the US Supreme Court reaffirmed and expanded its allegiance to the exclusionary rule, which stipulates that evidence unlawfully obtained generally cannot be used in criminal prosecutions. Similarly, the Court developed doctrines such as the “fruit-of-the-poison-tree” rule, which limited the ability of the government to rely on evidence that is legally obtained but which is discovered as a result of other evidence that is obtained illegally.

These developments in constitutional law did not escape the notice of fiction writers. Crime fiction explored the initial—and in some ways continued—opposition in some quarters to these new protections and the means by which law-enforcement personnel sought to circumvent them. Often, as well, these protections were simply absorbed into the plots and vocabularies of crime fiction. Overall, the very titles of crime novels in the late twentieth century signaled a growing familiarity with constitutional developments on the part of fiction writers. Charles Brandt’s The Right to Remain Silent (1988), Ridley Pearson’s Probable Cause (1990), and Lisa Scottoline’s Final Appeal (1994) capture in their titles the new focus on constitutional rights and procedures that began to infiltrate crime fiction in the last quarter of the twentieth century.

Writing from Experience

Writing fiction about the criminal justice system does not require authors to have had personal experience working within this system. Nevertheless, more than a few authors have precisely this kind of experience, or other personal connections to the justice system, that assists them in portraying the system with high degrees of accuracy. The father of the great nineteenth century British novelist Charles Dickens went to debtor’s prison when Dickens was an adolescent and thus inadvertently gave the future author a firsthand perspective on the law’s operation. Novelist Harper Lee’s father practiced law in Monroeville, Alabama, and she herself studied law at the University of Alabama before writing one of the twentieth century’s most famous novels about a criminal trial, To Kill a Mockingbird (1960). The mother of another author of crime fiction, James Elroy, was strangled to death when Elroy was ten years old, and this event partially inspired Elroy’s career as a writer. In fact, Elroy’s second novel, Clandestine (1982), offers a fictionalized portrayal of his mother’s murder.

More often, however, writers of fiction about the criminal justice system have a past professional connection with this system themselves. Former criminal justice professionals are fixtures among the authors of this genre. William F. Caunitz, a best-selling author of crime fiction, was a retired lieutenant of the New York Police Department, and Joseph Wambaugh, author of such novels as The Choirboys (1975) and The Black Marble (1977), is a retired detective from the Los Angeles Police Department. Patricia Cornwell, the author of the best-selling series of novels about chief medical examiner Kay Scarpetta, was a crime reporter for the Charlotte Observer and spent six years working for the Virginia chief medical examiner’s office before writing Postmortem (1990), her award-winning first novel.

John Grisham practiced both civil and criminal law in Southaven, Mississippi, for nearly a decade and served as a Mississippi legislator before his second novel, The Firm (1991), catapulted him into the ranks of best-selling authors. He followed the success of another lawyer author, Scott Turow, who managed to pen several legal thrillers, beginning with Presumed Innocent (1987), while still practicing law, first as an assistant United States attorney in Chicago and later for a private law firm. Both these authors follow in the footsteps of Erle Stanley Gardner, the don of courtroom fiction in the United States. Gardner traded two decades of law practice for a writing career, which began with the publication of his first novel, The Case of the Velvet Claws (1933), which introduced Perry Mason, America’s most famous fictional lawyer.

True Crime in Literature

Reliance by writers on accounts of actual criminal cases has often given an added measure of realism to literature about the criminal justice system. Sometimes, authors explicitly set out to portray actual cases, such as writer and prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s portrayal of mass murderer Charles Manson in Helter Skelter (1974) or Joseph Wambaugh’s The Onion Field (1973), which depicts the murder of a California policeman. Truman Capote, for example, famously depicted the real-life murders committed in the fall of 1959 by Perry Smith and Dick Hickock. His book In Cold Blood , which some critics have dubbed a “nonfiction novel,” relied on extensive research about the case, including interviews with Smith and Hickock. Capote attended their trial as well as their execution. In fact, he was apparently the last person to speak to the two men before their hanging, and he later paid for headstones for their graves.

Norman Mailer wrote another “nonfiction novel” in the tradition of Capote, called The Executioner’s Song (1979), about Gary Gilmore. Gilmore was convicted of two murders in 1976, and on January 17, 1977, gained national notoriety by becoming the first person executed in the United States since the Supreme Court’s declaration of a moratorium on the use of capital punishment until states rectified certain constitutional defects the Court found in the use of this punishment.

More commonly, authors use real cases as inspirations for their own fictional accounts of crime. For example, Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (1925) is based on the real-life case of Chester Gillette, who was executed for murder in 1908. Like Dreiser’s fictional Clyde Griffiths in the novel, Gillette had a sexual relationship with a victim who tried to persuade him to marry her. In both the novel and the real case, the young man takes the woman out on a boat ride on a lake from which the woman does not return alive. Both women are ultimately discovered drowned; both men claim the boat accidentally capsized and they could not save the victim.

Another classic of American literature, Native Son by Richard Wright (1940), demonstrates a similar pattern of borrowings from a real case. Wright, however, was halfway through the first draft of his novel before he heard of the case of Robert Nixon, a young Black man who—like his fictional protagonist Bigger Thomas—pleaded guilty to murder and received the death sentence. Both Dreiser and Wright achieve something more in their novels than the simple re-creations of notorious crimes, but both were able to bring added verisimilitude to their writing by crafting fiction from fact.

Multiplied Professionalism

By the end of the twentieth century, crime detection and enforcement involved teams of professionals who brought different skills to their work. Standard figures such as police detectives, district attorneys, and judges remain, but they cooperate more with other professionals, such as medical examiners and crime lab technicians. Police departments, especially in urban contexts, divide law-enforcement tasks among specialized teams of officers: traffic, fraud, robbery/burglary, homicide, juvenile, internal affairs, and other divisions segregate the responsibilities of officers according to different types of crime. In addition, multiple law-enforcement agencies cooperate and sometimes compete. Highway patrol officers at the state level and federal agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), and US Secret Service, for example, all participate in the enforcement of criminal law.

One of the most helpful features of modern crime fiction is its revelation, to the reading public at least, of the multiple layers of law-enforcement personnel. Scarcely any significant actor within the criminal justice system lacks a novel these days. For example, Dr. Alex Delaware, Jonathan Kellerman’s serial character in novels such as Therapy (2004), is a police psychologist. Richard Quinn is the young judge featured in Philip Margolin’s The Undertaker’s Widow (1998).

Various agencies of the law-enforcement world also have their own protagonists in crime fiction. Some of them, such as Alex Cross in the novels of James Patterson, have careers that realistically involve moves between different law-enforcement positions, as Cross, for example, serves first as a homicide detective in the District of Columbia, and subsequently, beginning in Big Bad Wolf (2003), becomes an agent for the FBI. Even less familiar law-enforcement roles, such as that played by federal park ranger Anna Pidgeon in the novels of Nevada Barr, have become the subject of fiction series. Added to these multiple law-enforcement roles are descriptions of other collateral players in the criminal justice system, such as police reporter Jack McEvoy in Michael Connelly’s novel, The Poet, or forensic anthropologist Gideon Oliver in Aaron J. Elkins’s Old Bones (1987).

Emancipation of the Criminal Law System

Among the many changes in American life produced by the civil rights movement was the emancipation of occupations formerly dominated by White men. Laws against employment discrimination, such as the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972, contributed to the removal of obstructions that had previously limited access to certain occupations for women and minorities. As crime fiction of the last quarter of the twentieth century labored to picture the criminal justice system accurately, it inevitably recorded this new social development, and White men lost their monopoly on fictional law-enforcement positions. Women and minorities became cops and FBI agents and lawyers and any number of other kinds of actors in the justice system.

As late as the late part of the nineteenth century, in Bradwell v. Illinois (1873), the US Supreme Court had found no constitutional difficulty with state laws that prohibited women from practicing law. However, by the last quarter of the twentieth century, the Court had reversed course and become increasingly skeptical of laws that discriminated between men and women. As a consequence of this and other social and legal developments, women flooded into the legal profession.

Fictional accounts of lawyers were swift to recognize the new role women played in the justice system, especially as lawyers. In the early twenty-first century, when roughly half the students in American law schools are women, female lawyer protagonists are well established in the genre of crime fiction. Barbara Parker, for example, has published a series of novels such as Suspicion of Vengeance (2001), featuring lawyer character Gail Connor. Perri O’Shaughnessy’s character, Nina Reilly, is the protagonist in a series of novels including Unlucky in Law (2004).

Minority characters similarly populate modern crime fiction in a variety of professional roles. The novels of Tony Hillerman feature Native American Lieutenant Leaphorn and Detective Jim Chee. Patterson’s African American police detective (and now FBI agent) Alex Cross has inspired a series including Kiss the Girls (1995), which was made into a popular movie starring Morgan Freeman. Mosley’s Easy Rawlins is a Black private investigator in Los Angeles to whom the police turn for help during the late 1950s in White Butterfly (1992).

The characters of both Patterson and Mosley were anticipated in the novels of Chester Himes, beginning with A Rage in Harlem (1959), which featured two Black police officers who worked in Harlem—“Coffin” Ed Johnson and “Grave Digger” Jones. These and other fictional portrayals have helped to democratize crime literature in a manner parallel to the democratization of American society in the wake of the civil rights movement. Moreover, the introduction of women and minority characters in crime fiction has allowed authors to explore continuing legacies of discrimination in American life.

Courtroom Fiction

Long before private investigators such as Sherlock Holmes began to appear in fiction about crime, courts and their officers had been a fixture of literature. Shakespeare had Dick the Butcher propose to “kill all the lawyers,” in Henry VI (1592), thus reminding his audiences of the role lawyers play as bulwarks against anarchy. In The Merchant of Venice, Portia pretends to be an eminent male jurist and appears in court to foil the envious plans of Shylock.

However, in the main, lawyers receive far better treatment in literature than they do in modern lawyer jokes. In fact, the absence of defense lawyers in some literary courtroom scenes is a stark reminder of the value now placed on seeing criminal defendants represented by counsel. In George Eliot’s Adam Bede, for example, Hetty Sorrell stands charged with murdering her newborn infant after allegedly abandoning it. Any lawyer reading the account of the trial in which she is found guilty imagines a brief that would be full of arguments that should acquit her. Similarly, in Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Foretopman, a young sailor stands charged with mutiny for striking and killing a superior officer. Although Captain Vere, his chief accuser, views Budd as morally innocent, he presses for Budd’s conviction and execution. No lawyer for Budd stands in his way, and Vere readily secures a conviction that would be hard to imagine in more realistic circumstances.

Modern fiction about criminal trials generally represents a significant improvement over that of earlier generations of writers. This improvement probably has a good deal to do with the large number of lawyers or former lawyers who are currently writing fiction. Following the tradition of Erle Stanley Gardner who practiced law before creating Perry Mason, writers such as John Grisham and Scott Turow have relied on their own legal experience to craft fiction about the work that lawyers do. Now readers are regularly exposed in crime fiction to virtually every stage of courtroom procedure, from arraignment to the final desperate appeals of a prisoner on death row. Moreover, in the best modern fiction, courtroom scenes are treated with great accuracy. Testimony is not simply summarized, but presented in question-and-answer form, as it occurs in real life. Authors can now be expected to understand such features of real courtroom practice as the difference between leading and nonleading questions—and when each form of question is permitted—and the general ineffectiveness of objections to evidence merely on the basis that it is “highly prejudicial.”

Heroes and Villains of Criminal Justice

Modern fictional accounts of the criminal process portray law-enforcement officers and lawyers of varying moral hues, as one would expect in reality. Heroes are still to be found. Prominent examples include Atticus Finch, the lawyer who represents a Black client accused of raping a white woman in To Kill a Mockingbird, and Perry Mason, Gardner’s fictional creation. The most prominent sins of Alex Cross are that he works too hard and sometimes misses performances of his son’s choir.

Villains also are to be found among both law-enforcement officers and lawyers in modern crime fiction. Peter Maas’s Serpico (1973) chronicled the corruption rampant in the New York Police Department. This novel followed the 1972 release of the report of the Knapp Commission by New York City officials that detailed widespread corruption among New York police. In a similar vein, the lawyers in the firm of Bendini, Lambert and Locke of Grisham’s The Firm (1991) are not averse to killing young associates who try to reveal to the FBI the firm’s close connection to the Chicago Mafia.

Although heroes and villains make for lively reading, actors within the real criminal justice system tend to be more complex. Crime fiction often captures this more nuanced understanding of human personality in which courage and ambition are frequently coupled together, selflessness and greed, compassion and occasional cruelty. Joseph Wambaugh’s first novel, The New Centurions (1971), is a good example of a police novel that depicts the idealism of new police recruits gradually being corrupted by life on the streets. Sometimes, the dominant characteristics of characters in crime fiction are neither heroism nor villainy but simply competence. For example, the various lawyers chronicled by Norman Mailer in The Executioner’s Song, about the execution of Gary Gilmore, are notable chiefly for the solid ability they bring to their different roles.

The Genealogy of Crime

Fiction about the criminal justice system has the capacity to explore the origins of criminal behavior. Native Son famously used the account of Bigger Thomas to suggest that the racism of American society at the beginning of the twentieth century was an incubator for crime among Black men. Bigger Thomas accidentally kills one woman, then deliberately kills another, but Wright attributes both crimes primarily to social sins, rather than to culpability on the part of Thomas.

Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy similarly traces criminal behavior to excesses embodied within the pursuit of the American Dream. Crime by both accounts is not simply, or perhaps even mainly, the product of the individual, but of broader social conditions. Dreiser, in particular, suggests, moreover, that pursuit of the American Dream is shared not only by the criminal but by the participants in the justice system who stand in judgment of him.

Modern popular fiction tends to be less inquisitive about the origins of criminal behavior. Perhaps this is because the kinds of crimes committed in novels such as Native Son and An American Tragedy are crimes of outsiders and the dispossessed and are less frequent subjects than crimes of sociopaths. The serial killers and terrorists who dominate the pages of best-selling crime fiction of today may wish to accuse society for their crimes, but the authors who create them tend to spend little time exploring the origins of their sociopathic personalities. It may be that they were sexually abused as children or mocked by adolescent schoolmates. However, authors frequently tell their readers little more about the origins of criminal behavior. This reluctance to explore the social origins of crime has the effect of giving much modern crime fiction a conservative tenor and of disabling it from exploring ways in which the criminal justice system might respond not only to the crime and criminals, but to the origins and sources of crime.

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