Crimetime

Foreword

FOREWORDThere are at least three good reasons why you should read this book—and hopefully many more like it:

1. We Filipinos don’t write enough fiction about crime;

2. We don’t write enough crime fiction that feature the police as heroes; and

3. In fiction as in real life, we find very few heroic law enforcers who also happen to be women.

Dada Fres-Felix’s Crimetime addresses all three deficiencies, which in themselves reveal some interesting and disturbing truths about our society and the way we see and present ourselves.

Going by the tabloid headlines, there’s clearly no shortage of material for crime writers in the Philippines. In 2014—before the new Duterte administration’s bloody “war on drugs” dramatically skewed the figures for both drug use and killings judicial and otherwise—there were over 1.1 million crimes reported in the country, with index crimes (murder, r**e, robbery, carnapping, etc.) accounting for nearly half of them; population-wise, the crime rate stood at 1 in a 100, according to Rappler.com.

But contemporary Philippine fiction hardly reflects this reality. There’s a lot of political violence, for sure, as there has been since Rizal’s time—lands are stolen, workers and peasants exploited, activists abducted and tortured, corrupt politicians assassinated—but people don’t seem to get killed out of sheer rage, greed, jealousy, fear, and the other baser instincts that make us fallibly human. I’ve also often remarked on another notable and perplexing absence from our literature—our irrepressible humor, which otherwise infects everything we do and say. It will take another paper to plumb the reasons for these egregious omissions, but I’ll advance the hypothesis that Rizal’s novels set the template for high seriousness—indeed solemnity—in the way we approach our fiction, especially the novel. To put it another way, politics seems ever worthy a subject, but crime too common to bother with.

Neither do Pinoy cops and gumshoes figure as heroes in popular fiction (although they do now, on TV, especially in these Dutertean times). The reason here should be more obvious, in the deep mistrust with which our law enforcers are held by the public, the sad legacy of decades of perceived corruption and abuse. (I say “sad” as the son of a onetime Manila patrolman.) In American pop culture, heroic cops take on the system—rugged individuals driven to prove themselves right against all odds. In the Filipino sphere, heroes are inextricably bound to the community, and in the very least the family—savior figures who effectively assume the burden of the nation. It’s a tough match to make with the typical caricature of the pot-bellied parak shaking down a motorist for his lunch, and the reported crime solution efficiency of about 30% over the past few years hardly inspires adulation. Many years ago, in an essay for an American literary journal devoted to the theme of “Crime and Punishment,” I remarked that “In the Philippines, we have crimes and punishments aplenty, but they have very little to do with each other.” In a society marked by dysfunctional justice, we clearly need more than a few good men (and women) in uniform.

And how many Filipino policewomen have figured in our fictional fantasies? To my recollection, zero—although we should acknowledge the progress of women officers in the Philippine National Police and the growing utility of Women’s Desks. It can’t be too difficult to imagine that many of these female officers have faced as many aggravations within their precincts as they have on the streets.

For all these reasons, Dada Fres-Felix’s chocoholic, Bon Jovi-loving SJ Tuason is a signal contribution not just to Philippine fiction, but to our imagination of our better Filipino selves in a perniciously hostile universe. She is sympathetically drawn—with the hard edge you might expect of a gal in a tough world, but also vulnerable in ways you don’t expect (and here I’m tempted to put in a spoiler alert but I won’t).

In a seminal essay on crime fiction written more than half a century ago, Raymond Chandler defined his expectations of the detective as hero—almost inevitably, in those pre-feminist days, a “he”:

“He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things. He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness. The story is his adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in.”

That’s basically all that Inspector Tuason has been made out to be—and more, if you factor in a penchant for carving elephants. These four finely crafted stories—which often contrast pop glitter with pedestrian grime—will almost certainly achieve their purpose, a truly noble one in these days of crass entertainment, which is to amuse us by teasing the mind, in our search of the answer to that most basic of human puzzles, for which I suspect the crime story was invented: “Why do we do what we do?”

Jose Dalisay Jr.

Quezon City

1 November 2016