The other day I stumbled across an interesting blog discussion on why there are so few examples of Philippine crime fiction. I've asked myself that same question many times. And as is often the case when I start Thinking Deep Thoughts, my ruminations have usually led me to the conclusion that a terrible headache can be soothed by ice cream.

But unfortunately, I've been on a strict diet for months now, hence no happy (and totally OTT) epiphanies. Instead, some wildly incoherent thoughts on the subject.

As someone turned on very early to crime and mystery in books, television and film, and as someone who even now remains relatively unschooled in Philippine fiction, I had always blithely assumed that there were many Filipinos writing in this genre. And that I would find their work when I was ready to comprehend and appreciate it.

The general assumption seems to be that there ought to be more crime fiction written by Filipinos because there is so much crime here. I think however the more telling indicator is the proportion of crimes solved, and whether people generally feel that the solution of cases is possible.

In 2005 the PNP reported that crime solution efficiency was at nearly 89 per cent. I seriously doubt if anyone actually felt that 89 per cent as a reality in their daily lives. What most people are more likely to have felt was the relatively large proportion of incidents that went unreported thanks to a lack of confidence in local law enforcement.

Yeah, yeah; but what's it got to do with the dearth of crime fiction here? Patience please; I'm developmentally challenged and have trouble enough putting one foot in front of the other, let alone one sentence.

Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories succeeded in setting up the conventions of the genre as well as in holding up a mirror to Victorian society: its values, fears, traditions, prejudices. The relationship between the values of a society and the crime and mystery fiction that spring from these, is an enduring one (and one I'll delve into in greater depth in a later post). Crime writer Andrew Taylor says: "The best crime novels ... do not suggest a remedy for crime or reassure us that all in the end will be well; but they can help us to understand our violent society, and they also allow us to hope that evil will not go unpunished."

I suspect however that many of us have given up that hope. Despite all the lip service Philippine society pays to the value of human life, death is all around us, and I suspect it's lost its power to shock, to anger, to galvanize in any sustainable manner. People are killed -- in botched raids, in shootouts, in ambushes, in massacres; on a street corner, in a taxi, in the bedroom -- and in dying become a temporary diversion for the media and the public. Then we all move on to the next death, the next big case, the next heinous crime to feel righteously angry about. We're all about the grand gesture, the indignation rally, the petition and noise barrage, the People Power spectacles; but when it comes to standing around in long queues in anonymous government buildings, doing the legwork, dealing with greedy bureaucrats and weary hospital workers, trying to find the right people to talk to, well, that's just too much work.

So we don't write about it because we think it won't work in the Philippine context; the same way we don't bother to go to a police station when the FX we're riding in is held up by armed men who take our mobile phones, our wallets, our wedding rings. There's a sort of romanticized hopelessness in the way we write about crime, a stoic acceptance that that's the way things are, here in da Pilipins.

So to sum up a very long ramble: the first reason I think we don't write a lot of crime fiction -- to paraphrase Taylor -- is that we long ago stopped trying to make sense of our violent society, and quit hoping that evil would not go unpunished.

Other reasons: the "burgis" solution and a failure of imagination (to be continued).