It’s election day here in the United States and it brings to mind a question I was asked a few years ago as a panelist at Bouchercon, one of several large mystery conventions. The mid-term elections were approaching and the reader wanted to know if the panelists wrote about their characters’ political leanings. My answer was a firm “no,” but not for the reason you might suspect.
We all know that politics is one of those topics you should avoid in the office, at worship services and family gatherings so it makes sense that a reader might be turned off by a main character with very different political convictions. On the other hand, the enlightened reader may enjoy reading about someone from a different background, so fear of offending readers is not a good reason for an author to leave politics out of her fiction writing. In fact, some authors build entire books around controversial issues, i.e. Stephen King’s Needful Things touches on gun control while Insomnia considers the frenzy around abortion politics. King makes it work because he never gets “preachy,” rather he creates authentic characters with believable opinions and reactions and builds plots that show what happens when any philosophy is taken to an extreme.
However, one reason I chose to leave politics out of the Page One mystery series is that the protagonist, Robin Hamilton, is a newspaper reporter and must be vigilant in not showing a bias in her work. The media is always criticized for being sexist, feminist, racist, anti-religious, too religious, too conservative, too liberal, overeducated, simple-minded and so on and so forth. In the 10 years I worked as a newspaper reporter and editor, I was always mindful of the opinions I expressed publicly because I wanted readers to focus on the article and not try to “read between the lines” into “what I was really saying.”
Robin also keeps her politics to herself because she is wrapped up in her own grief over the murder of her fiancé and, especially in the next book (Page One: Whiteout), she is trying to figure out what direction her life should take. She is single, childfree and young – early thirties – and has yet to form strong political convictions based on personal experience. She is, however, dedicated to the ideals of Edward R. Murrow, who made it his mission as a journalist to give a voice to those who don’t have the power to be heard alone, which is very different from forcing an agenda on the public.
Readers, what do you think? Do you balk when a character holds beliefs different from your own? Are you curious about the politics of your favorite protagonist?
