Crime Fiction

This is an opera with no story, but one that explores the critical moment within a story, a crime story, and turns the spotlight on the person who creates this moment: the Author. The primary ingredients of crime fiction are darkness, violence and damaged people plus, of course, plot: the mechanics of the piece. Dark desires have to be played out, motive has to be revealed, lines of investigation have to be followed and a resolution of some sort arrived at. But for the writer, what’s really interesting about crime fiction is not joining the dots, but the dots themselves: the set-pieces, the heightened moments of chaos and bloodshed. In Crime Fiction, the Author is engaged in a struggle with himself to preserve unadorned the moment he’s created, but his characters, the Woman and the Man, are starting to interfere.