Val McDermid discusses why crime fiction is leftwing and thrillers are rightwing:
As my compatriot Ian Rankin pointed out, the current preoccupations of the crime novel, the roman noir, the krimi lean to the left. It’s critical of the status quo, sometimes overtly, sometimes more subtly. It often gives a voice to characters who are not comfortably established in the world — immigrants, sex workers, the poor, the old. The dispossessed and the people who don’t vote.
The thriller, on the other hand, tends towards the conservative, probably because the threat implicit in the thriller is the world turned upside down, the idea of being stripped of what matters to you. And as Bob Dylan reminds us, “When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.”
Of course, these positions don’t usually hit the reader over the head like a party political broadcast. If it is not subtle, all you succeed in doing is turning off readers in their droves. Our views generally slip into our work precisely because they are our views, because they inform our perspective and because they’re how we interpret the world, not because we have any desire to convert our readership to our perspective.
Except, of course, that sometimes we do.
I’ve been blogging about cyberpunk lately. I feel it’s relevant as leftwing crime fiction.
Most of the fundamental cyberpunk texts are very left-wing. I call out Gibson’s work and Effinger’s When Gravity Fails in particular.
Some tend a bit toward right-wing libertarianism — notably W.J.Williams’ Hardwired and Sterling’s Islands in the Net.
Cyberpunk fiction tends to celebrate the antihero as a left-wing hedonist — often an amphetamine abuser — who enjoys promiscuous sex but nonetheless has a “sensitive guy” heart of gold.
Outside of cyberpunk, it would be interesting to look for leftwing elements in crime shows such as The Wire, Breaking Bad, etc. and movies such as the Godfather series.