In a post on CrimeReads, Lo Patrick examines small town life and how proximity breeds the kind of contempt that leads to murder. “The endearing but paltry community mixed with a tragic crime is a most fascinating combination,” she says. “Murder in a sleepy dot on the map has its own cocktail of nuance and sinister revelation.”
Despite the cliché that small towns are neighborly, some people come there to disappear. They want to be anonymous and folks will let them. “It is in these hollows that one would expect to find a killer, the basis of a crime, the pulp of a mystery,” Patrick writes. “It would be easier that way—to blame the purposeful outcast, but it’s more commonly someone on the fringes of normalcy, not obscurity.”
In a small town, crime is never as simple as it seems. Gossip can transform a clearcut case into an expansive mystery. Locations become known by the crimes committed there. “Closeness breeds contempt—and long memories, without a lot of people to share them with, can poison a small town’s well,” Patrick says. “The minute something really bad happens in a small community, locals start to wonder where the rot came from—like trying to locate termites destroying the frame of a house.”
In a big city, we can remain disconnected, but in a small town, worry sets in. “It’s not a stranger or someone known only through distant, foggy recollection,” Patrick explains. “It’s your neighbor’s kid, the one who used to work at the gas station and who had a green bike when he was in fifth grade.” Small town crimes dig up old secrets and grudges, and folks might worry that some deeper rot is setting in.
“An unsolved murder in a small town casts a wide and ever-spreading shadow over a group of people not large or agile enough to get out of its cover,” Patrick says. “In a place that’s on the edge of nothing, outside nothing else, and not on its way to becoming anything, something like a violent murder causes a giant, contagious loss of faith.”
