The Pandemic—A Touchy Subject for Writers

I wrote the following piece at the end of the first year of the pandemic, and I've had to rewrite this introductory paragraph twice—once when large numbers of Americans got vaccinated and were repopulating restaurants and flying across the country to visit their grandchildren and now, again, when the Delta variant of the virus has forced those of us who thought the pandemic was almost over to realize it's on the way to becoming chronic.

Some writers took the year of freedom from distraction the lockdown provided to hole up and write prolifically. Others were so distressed by the isolation human contact and the global ambiance of fear, death, and chaos that they couldn't write at all. Fiction writers were certainly in no hurry to tackle the pandemic in their work, whether as theme or primary subject or as the fabric of reality in "the present."

Poets were not so hampered. Waiting to have something to say, I came up with my only pandemic poem very late, just in time to be included in the anthology When the Virus Came Calling (Golden Foothills, September 2020). I read a significant number of 2020 short stories, including entries for the Derringers, and only a couple mentioned it. As for novels, I don't remember seeing any references in 2020. When Donna Leon's latest Commissario Brunetti book, Transient Desires, came out in March 2021, it referred delicately to the pandemic as if it were already over:

For years we Venetians had wished the tourists to disappear and give us back our city. Well, we'd had our wish, and look at us now.

At around the same time, a mystery reader who happens to be a writer posted on DorothyL:

I’m curious as to what folks are thinking about the intrusion of the pandemic into our reading. Are any of you welcoming it (maybe as a way to process)? Are we all avoiding it?

I responded, as is my wont, truthfully and without thinking of looking around for the thought police:

I've been working on a short story that takes place in New York during the pandemic. Everyone wears masks, and the amateur sleuth investigates via Zoom, phone, and walks in the park with witnesses and suspects, keeping social distance. The case looks like an accident and is given short shrift—no autopsy or further investigation—because the morgues are full and law enforcement has more important things to do. It's been fun to write, but I don't know that I'd want to do it for the length of a novel or even additional stories.

No one criticized my comment, but when I heard someone say they didn't want to read anything about COVID-19 because it evoked pain and suffering they had no desire to dwell on, it made me think twice about my use of "fun." Next, I saw submission guidelines to a journal that stated pandemic stories, like erotica or sword & sorcery, would be a "hard sell," just short of "hard passes" like torture or child and animal abuse.

Hey, wait a minute! How can we veto a whole category of literary work that writers' imaginations have barely begun to process? What assumption does avoiding the whole thing make about what pandemic stories will be about?

The analogy that leaps to my mind is the child abuse story, which is so easily banned unseen by editors trying to appear "correct." The flaw in their reasoning is that they can only imagine stories in which children are being graphically and disgustingly abused. As my anthology Me Too Short Stories amply demonstrated, abused children can have a voice, a chorus of voices. They can even survive and grow into women who fight back without becoming the pulp-fiction fantasy action figure with a big bust, two guns, and a skimpy bathing suit.

I think the stories of courage and loss, pain and survival we saw in 2020 need to be told by those who need to tell them, and only those who want to read them have to read them. But illness and death were not all that happened during the pandemic. The part of 2020 that I used, the part I dared call fun to write, was how we New Yorkers went about our business under abnormal conditions—wearing masks, maintaining social distance, using Zoom to congregate, and somehow making the best of it. For the purposes of crime fiction, I asked myself: How would that affect an investigation, both official and unofficial?

One more example of how many different ways writers may find to explore the pandemic: A masterful short story I read blind, so I can't tell you who wrote it, but it was a puzzle story in which an amateur sleuth solves the crime without leaving her house, because the extended lockdown has left her agoraphobic. I could appreciate how brilliantly the author rendered the agoraphobia, because I've been in lockdown too.

So far in 2021, I haven't observed much more willingness to address the pandemic in fiction than in 2020. But on DorothyL, readers, many of whom are writers, have been discussing a shift in their reading habits. Some of them are reading less crime fiction—and these are hard core lifelong mystery lovers. They are turning to other genres for a variety of reasons. I can't help wondering if I'm the only one for whom crime fiction is too dark for these dark days.