The world is comprised of both good and evil.
We understand this to be one of life’s core truths.
Those of us who bear the scars of our own encounters with the latter will often search for meaning inside the random complexities of our existence.
Occasionally we’ll catch a glimmer of the order we crave. It’ll peek at us from the face of a smiling friend; we’ll taste it in a lover’s kiss or feel it in the warmth of a beloved child’s unbidden hug.
It’ll hover in the air, shimmering like after-rain rising from pavement on a scorching day.
Then, just as quickly, our sense of understanding disappears.
It gets lost in the sound of a stranger’s footstep after dark. It cannot survive the panic when our car stalls on a deserted road, or when an otherwise empty house speaks to us in the dead of night.
We Crime Writers understand this: that the fabric of our society is woven with strands of both light and darkness. We get that, as often as not, there is no ‘meaning’ waiting to be revealed in the behaviour of our fellow-man.
Human acts of kindness and cruelty have no more consistency than can be found in the wind, one moment singing to us softly and the next raging without mercy, flinging guilty and innocent alike out of its malicious path.
Still, we Crime Writers crave balance. We long for equilibrium, to adjust those scales time and again. We set our caps for justice.
We carve our heroes from 'inner nobility' and set them loose to rain perfection on an imperfect world.
And yes, we know our very concept of 'universal justice' is merely an illusion.
That’s why we call it fiction.
Donna Carrick, January 19, 2012
