Mystery Writers Cope With Crime Drop NYTimes.com

AROUND 8 o’clock on a breezy evening in 1992, two private investigators stepped out of their car at the Christopher Street pier in Greenwich Village and approached a group of drunks and addicts huddled over a small fire. The investigators were soon joined by three Chinatown gang members who had information that the investigators needed. But the conversation was brief; the gang leader had a temper, and guns were drawn fast.

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"We have a false sense of security now, and I try to exploit that in my books. The low rate makes every murder more dramatic," says Wendy Corsi Staub.

That was the opening salvo in a chaotic scene that also featured undercover police officers dressed as winos, a surprise attack by another gang from a car speeding along the West Side Highway, and a double-cross scheme by a member of the first gang.

The encounter combined some of the most characteristic elements of New York crime during that decade, which began with 2,245 homicides in 1990 and enveloped the city in a fog of fear. And though the shootout was purely imaginary — a scene from S. J. Rozan’s 1994 novel “China Trade” — it fully reflects the spirit of those tumultuous years.

Such scenes are much harder to imagine in today’s New York.

“That kind of book couldn’t be written anymore, because that level of lawlessness has really disappeared,” Ms. Rozan said in a recent conversation about the changing landscape for the city’s writers of crime fiction. “Anyone who has recently come to New York would pick it up and think: ‘What is wrong with this woman? What is she making up?’ ”

As New York celebrates the sharp decline in crime — earlier this year the city revealed that the 494 homicides in 2007 were the fewest since reliable police statistics became available in 1963 — the crime writer may be the only New Yorker for whom that drop is not an unequivocal blessing. Just as the breakup of the Soviet Union caused problems for writers whose plots hinged on the dark doings of the cold war, so New York’s crime writers are wondering where to find grist in a far safer city.

The grimy archetypes who hung out at Ms. Rozan’s pier have largely receded, and their present-day replacements offer far less satisfying literary inspiration. “Kids from the Midwest sporting goatees” is how Stanley Alpert describes this population in a 2007 true-crime tale, calling them people “without a care in the world other than Corona versus Amstel.”

For some of the city’s crime writers, the solution is to replace the subject of street violence with the subjects of terrorism and financial shenanigans. Others are retooling their plots; a crime can seem all the more shocking when it occurs in a tranquil neighborhood. Nonetheless, many mystery writers worry that a safer New York may become their most difficult case to crack.

“You can’t make up a romantic vision of the kind of crime you would like to write about,” said Ms. Rozan, whose best-known protagonist is Lydia Chin, a Chinese-American private investigator in Chinatown. “Those of us who started in a different kind of era have had to adjust.”

Crime in New Disguises

With talk of recession dominating the news, many crime writers are thinking that if the economy sputters, crime may spike. Chris Grabenstein, a writer of mysteries set in New York and New Jersey, is already pondering the possible nature of a slowdown.

“If the economy were to turn,” Mr. Grabenstein said, “would we go back to 1978, 1979, when I first moved to New York, when there were certain blocks you weren’t supposed to go on, and you weren’t supposed to ride the subway after 10 o’clock?”

Many writers also note that the decline in street crime has not left them without topics, terrorism, of course, being the most compelling. Mr. Grabenstein deployed fear of terrorism in his 2007 thriller, “Hell for the Holidays,” in which a group of American white supremacists, influenced by Al Qaeda’s terrorism tactics, plot destruction not in a faraway land but over a hamburger at the Times Square Applebees.

“We live in a bull’s-eye,” Mr. Grabenstein said of today’s New Yorkers, and that widespread if rarely discussed fear of terrorism provides considerable literary grist for him and his colleagues.

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