Novelist Patricia Abbott, whose debut novel Concrete Angel is a nominee for the 2016 Macavity Award for Best First Mystery, discusses some of the thorny issues facing writers of crime fiction.
The Difficult Centerpiece of SHOT IN
DETROIT
SHOT INDETROIT is the story a female photographer desperate to find artistic success.
Through her relationship with a mortician, she comes up with the idea of photographing
young black men who have died in Detroit over a six-month period. I wrote the
character of Violet Hart as ambitious, a loner, a pest in getting what she
wants. An artist in other words. She lives on the outskirts of conventional
society--at least in her mind--reasoning that an artist is given license to
bend societal norms. Or is she? Does Violet exploit the men she photographs or
does she honor them? Is it somewhere in between? These are the issues I
wrestled with in writing SHOT IN DETROIT. Both in creating a character who
thought like this and in making her the book's centerpiece. And was I guilty of
the same transgressions?
I set SHOT
IN DETROIT almost totally within Detroit. It's a city often accused of
exemplifying transgression: the murder capital of the world plunged into
bankruptcy, suffering the lowest rate of high school graduation in the country,
imprisoning the most black males, enduring the most extreme poverty. The art
and literature coming out of Detroit was edgy, bleak, transgressive. How could it not be? To find a Detroit prompting a
different story, I'd have to have set it much earlier. Even in Joyce Carol
Oates' brilliant THEM, set in the fifties and sixties in Detroit, the plunge is
well underway.
Early
readers of SHOT found Violet a difficult sell. An agent gave me this advice:
change her name, make her younger, give her girlfriends, find her a best friend
who isn't a gay Filipino who sells drugs. Make her more appealing to women:
they buy the books. I took some of his advice. But each time I stepped farther
away from the Violet in my head, the story felt off-beam. If the central
premise of the novel was going to work, Violet could not be the sort of woman
who sat on PTA boards or lunched with former sorority sisters.