When I sat down tonight, I planned on writing a brief and lighthearted recap of last weekend’s Bouchercon in St. Louis. But then things happened, my mood turned, and now I’m in no position to trade on small talk.

Last week, after a month of tweaks and fixes, we went live with a new Tyrus Books website. Included on the site were brand new submission guidelines. I tried to be more detailed than I’d been in the past, because no matter how hard I try to let people know who we are and what we do, I inevitably get submissions that aren’t right for us.

Those of you who have heard me speak at a conference or follow me on Twitter know that, even though we publish what is often called “crime fiction,” I’m not big on fast-paced thrillers, books about serial killers, or anything else with an inflated body count.

And it’s not that I’m squeamish. I’ve grown up on a steady diet of heavy metal, gangsta rap, video games, and pro wrestling. I own guns. I’ve talked to real-life bad guys who have done real-life bad things.

Back to the whole crime fiction thing.

In books, like in real life, murder is never just about the victim and the killer. There is always the shockwave that follows, that blows out from the scene to destroy families and senses of normalcy and to rearrange what we know about things in ways we could have never understood before.

I can’t—even when reading fiction—ignore the emotional impact of murder. The author may very well be ready to move on to the next page, but I get caught up in the “what if…” and “how would I…” questions that I’m sure would plague me in real life.

Sometimes I am the victim.

Sometimes I am the killer.

But the older I get, the more I approach it from the perspective of a son. Or a brother.

Not just the son or brother of the victim, but I often wonder what it would be like to be kin to the monster. What hell comes down on the family of the killer?

Sure, there is the horror of the crime. But there is also the horror of knowing that somebody who is close to you, who appears in family photographs, who laughed with you before things derailed is guilty of the transgression.

One of the most meaningful books to me as a publisher, as a writer, and as a human being is Mikal Gilmore’s stunning family biography, Shot in the Heart. In the book, Gilmore traces the history of his family, including that of his infamous brother Gary, who was convicted of murdering two men, hotel clerk Ben Bushnell and gas station attendant Max Jensen, in the Provo, Utah area during the summer of 1976.

In a testament to his writing ability, but also to the sometimes inconvenient complexity of human beings, Mikal Gilmore paints a detailed portrait of his brother that goes far deeper than the understanding anybody reading a newspaper could have gotten. Gilmore discusses the tragic roots of his family tree, the power of familial legend, and the fight to keep his brother alive, even after Gary accepted his sentence of death by firing squad. He talks about how hard it is to have a regular existence when everybody knows who you are. He gives some explanation for how it’s possible to be closer to the murderer than the murdered, but still end up a victim of the situation.

(Last year, in what I think was an attempt to understand better what happened with Gary Gilmore, I went to the scene of the Bushnell murder. I wrote about it for the Huffington Post here. )

A little over an hour ago the State of Georgia executed Troy Davis, a man convicted of murdering Mark MacPhail, an off-duty Savannah police officer working as a bus station security guard during the summer of 1989.

Davis’ pending execution generated spirited debate on the Internet. Doubts over his guilt were raised.  Political and religious leaders called for a stay of execution. Vigils were held. But in the end, needles broke skin, pentobarbital was injected, and a few minutes later, Davis, like MacPhail 22 years before him, was dead at the hands of others.

Words like “justice” and “closure” were thrown around.

I make no claims about the guilt or innocence of Troy Davis. I wasn’t there. I didn’t sit through the trial. I, however, don’t believe in state sanctioned killing.

My opinions on the matter at this point are excess shouting in an already loud public square. But when I try to do the math of the situation—adding up two dead men, a lost father, a lost son, and all of the implications of being passive and active bystanders, I’m left with a painful conclusion.

We are all the victim.

We are all the killer.

And this is not a book.

 

This piece originally appeared on the blog Hey, There’s a Dead Guy in the Living Room