This Crime's Big Enough for the All of Us

[Regina Harvey]

Today, over on www.good-girls-kill.com, I'm posting about Baltimore. Already the discussion has started, with thoughts on the challenges a writer faces when writing "his/her" city. Join in here, or pop over there. I'd love to hear what you think.

Denise Mina is a doll. She’s one damn fine writer too. Glasgow - her town - has a growing heroin problem, and a rapidly rising murder rate. She told me and a hundred others about it at a conference last year. It was heart-wrenching to hear her speak about her beloved city slipping away into the maw of drugs and despair.

Ms. Mina informed us of the dozens of murders that year in Glasgow. It was obvious she was ripped apart just to think of it. So why did I smile so wryly, so cynically, when another mystery writer friend leaned over just then and whispered, “Piker.”

Because I write about Baltimore. Charm City, The City That Reads, with its Believe campaign, dem O’s, the Ravens, blue crabs and Hampden Hons, John Waters, Barry Levinson, Anne Tyler, our beloved forefather, Edgar Allan Poe…

And a consistent average of more than 2 murders every 3 days.

Still, I tear up thinking of Glasgow slipping down this slope. That city’s problems are not likely to decrease easily, just as Baltimore’s problems are not likely to decrease easily. An overwhelming proportion of Baltimore’s homicides are drug-related. In fact, it’s said by some researchers that it’s a pretty safe city if you’re not involved in that world.

The trouble is, too many people are.

My mom has been a Baltimore school teacher, a Baltimore foster-care social worker, and even now, nearing a decade marker when most ladies are lunching in retirement homes and sharing scrapbooks of their grandkids, she’s back in Baltimore schools, working with emotional-disturbed kids she calls her “little stinkers.” She can’t tell me much about their histories without breaking confidentiality, but I can tell you this - there has never been a child in her office whose life hasn’t been touched by drugs and the violence they breed. The chance that one of her “little stinkers” has witnessed a shooting or homicide is pretty high.

Did I mention that the average age of her “little stinkers” is seven?

I’m not trying to preach about the evils of drugs. But when I write about Baltimore crime, I will address this root cause (and the root causes of drug addiction, and the root causes of those root causes…). But this pledge comes with a sub-clause. I won’t TELL my readers about it. I will follow the Writer’s Golden Rule and I will SHOW it. In characters, in circumstance, with sympathy, with dark honesty, and even with humor.

I celebrate Baltimore with its crabs and bumper stickers that say “B’lieve, Hon.” I go to The Senator theatre and The Charles, to the Hippodrome and to eat Bertha’s Mussels. But with the same earnest suffering as Ms. Mina showed for her Glasgow, I yearn for a day when I won’t need to laugh away that homicide rate, when I won’t hear of another city’s rate and think, “Piker.”