Kill a Mockingbird Crime Drama

¶ … Kill a Mockingbird

Crime drama -- novels, television shows, and movies -- have been among the most popular entertainment outlets since the printing press. Early "whodunits" captured the imagination of the human mind since "The Three Apples" in the Scheherazade narrated tale, One Thousand and One Nights, likely written as long ago as the 9th century. Audiences are rapt to read about Poe's Murder's in the Rue Morgue (1841), Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, and the so-called Golden Age of "whodunits" from 1920-1940. Murder mysteries abound, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammet, and Mickey Spillane have sold millions of copies and remain on the bestseller list, and modern mystery writers often have backorders for the books months before publication. (Symons, 1974). One of the most dramatic parts of courtroom dramas is the manner in which the protagonist is able to use legal summations to discuss optimism and the hope one holds for the future -- especially as a paradigm for social change in convincing the jury that a wrong has been committed.

This is particularly the case with Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird. To Kill A Mockingbird is set in the deep south, and asks us to look below the surface of a quite, peaceful town "apparently" filled with good people to ask what happens when thinking stops and prejudice erupts? The book won a Pulitzer Prize and was published in 1960, and focuses somewhat autobiographically on events that took place during 1936 when the author, Harper Lee, was 10 years old.

The character of Atticus Finch, so aptly portrayed by Gregory Peck in the 1962 film version that he has become the very soul of Atticus, is the narrator's father, and represents all that is good, moral, and a model of justice and integrity. The book has had a huge impact on society, helping the post 1950s world deal more clearly with the subject of civil rights, racial injustice, and the eradication of childhood innocence. "In the 20th century, To Kill a Mockingbird is probably the most widely read book dealing with race in America, and its protagonist, Atticus Finch, the most enduring fictional image of racial heroism" (Crespino, 2000, 9).

There are numerous themes that also make this novel an enduring classic -- gender roles, compassion, truth, and while most scholars and librarians believe this is a book that everyone should read while alive, there are numerous critics who object to the novel's treatment of black roles and racial epithets. Fortunately, reason has prevailed, for it is just exactly those stereotypical characterizations and use of language that Lee wants the reader to become incensed with rage and disbelief that just a few short decades ago, people actually talked that way about another human being (Pauli, 2006; Samuels, 2009).