The Grammar of Violence

There are a limited number of ways to kill someone. How do you keep from repeating them? Or do you not worry about that at all?

I don’t worry about repeating methods of murder because I don’t write murder as spectacle. I keep violence offstage. Like a film under the Hays Code, the act itself is implied. What interests me is the chain of words, decisions, ambitions, and rationalizations that make the act inevitable.

That choice is ethical. Not because I’m squeamish. Not because I walk through life with moral blinkers. But because graphic violence is easy writing. Any competent writer can choreograph blood. Sentences. A paragraph. Done.

The harder task is showing how language engineers violence long before a trigger is pulled.

Crime is as old as civilization. The Bible is soaked in it. Classical literature invents cruelty. Look at how the Romans dealt with parricide. Shakespeare’s tragedies end with heaps of bodies; his comedies are a moratorium on the body count. The ancients understood something we prefer to forget: violence is personal, political, and divine.

For writers, exile has long been one of the cruelest penalties: the loss of language and community.

Ovid.

Dante Alighieri.

Victor Hugo.

Bertolt Brecht.

Oscar Wilde.

Stefan Zweig.

Isabel Allende.

Ahmed Naji.

Salman Rushdie.
 

Exile was more than physical removal; it attempted to silence thought, to sever creators from the very medium through which they wield influence. Words threaten authority; those who command them can unsettle the foundations of any empire.

We are fascinated by violence because we are capable of it. Traffic slows at the accident. We look, appalled and transfixed. We read crime fiction to seek justice, to see order restored. Some want the parsonage, the tidy puzzle, the assurance that daisies will grow again.

That’s comfort fiction. There’s nothing wrong with comfort. Novocain has its uses. But don’t confuse reality with Hallmark.

The truth is we are a violent species. History proves it. The Renaissance refined torture. Germany gave the world Bach, Beethoven, Brahms — and Hitler. Culture and barbarity share the same nervous system.

I have seen violence up close. Circumstances and context are irrelevant. It is not cinematic. It is not redemptive. It is chaotic, kinetic, and once witnessed, it alters you permanently. That is why I refuse to aestheticize it.

In my novel Eyes to Deceit, the architect of the 1953 Iranian coup d’etat, Allen W. Dulles, uses persuasion, propaganda, and realpolitik. He arranges the conditions under which others will kill. My protagonist, Walker, is complicit without ever pulling the trigger. That is the violence that interests me: the polished bureaucrat in a suit.

In my forthcoming Company Files novel The Quiet Eagle, set during the Suez Crisis, Dulles bullied Britain and France to bend the knee and wagged his finger at Israel. He used violence as geopolitical grammar. The next novel after Suez, The Hour of the Predator, offers the psychological portrait of a female assassin in Budapest; it examines violence as pathology.

Sophisticated violence persuades. It signs memos. It sends communiqués. It waits.

Americans rarely see or understand violence done in their name. It happens off-screen — until it doesn’t. Think of Minnesota. Then comes outrage, then impotence. We commemorate September 11 as trauma, yet Italy endured 15 years of daily, unrelenting domestic terrorism during the Years of Lead. The Holocaust is abstract until you walk the grounds of the Vernichtungslagers and feel the mechanization of annihilation.

There’s an Italian idiom: sulla pelle — to feel something on your own skin. Not to understand it intellectually, but to absorb it until it alters you. That is what I aim for.

So no, I don’t worry about repeating ways to kill someone. Methods are finite. What is infinite is the human capacity to justify them.

If my work has a mission, it is not to invent new forms of death. It is to expose the rhetoric that makes death permissible — the language that allows civilized people to nod while someone else does the killing. That is more unsettling than blood on the page.

And it lasts longer.