Ever hear of social justice crime fiction?

First, what is it? Social Justice Crime Fiction is the Best Genre You’ve Never Heard About.

What do Audre Lorde, Sarah Paretsky, Charles Dickens, Jodi Picoult, Tana French and Upton Sinclair have in common?

You can find them all in a Google search for social justice books.

I began writing crime fiction after developing an obsession to understand what makes ordinary people mad enough to kill. Like what happens when a little butcher’s shop goes belly up when the superstore moves in. That shop is his everything. His spirit is crushed. Forced to close up shop, he ruminates for revenge, and plots to show off his craft mastery by cutting up managers and leaving them as displays. He’ll show them!

Each of my villains explores the shadow side of being human, what happens when an ordinary person feels crushed by life, a condition that continues to intrigue her.

Miguel Cervantes, author of Don Quixote aka Man of La Mancha, also wrote Social Justice fiction: satire turned to musical plea to right the unrightable wrong.

I queried ChatGPt for social justice authors, and it gave me some of those names listed above. As a retired professor, I verified the list it provided and added a few other names of authors that do social justice right.

By reading social justice fiction the reader is immersed in the perspective of a marginalized individual or group, and that can create empathy and understanding in the reader. As Sheena Kamal, author of No Going Back, wrote on CrimeReads.com: “some of the most exciting work today is done in this space. No other kind of fiction examines social and environmental justice issues in the same way. It may be my background in political science, or just the way I’m made up, but I’m very much drawn to crime novels that examine a particular social issue and try to serve justice in some kind of way — or at least attempt to deepen the reader’s understanding of that issue.”

Back in 1906, Upton Sinclair, novelist and social crusader, pioneered a form of investigative journalism that his contemporaries derided as “muckraking.” The Jungle, his best-known novel, was an exposé of the appalling and unsanitary conditions in the meat-packing industry. His book led to new…