They got away with it.
As I write this, The Guilty is on the market and doing better than I expected. A book I wrote twenty years ago has finally come into readers’ hands, bearing a message I find vitally important: they got away with it.
After the Second World War, the Allies convicted, imprisoned, and executed an astonishing number of German war criminals. But what enrages me is how many were allowed to escape any punishment. The famous Doctors’ Trial only convicted a tiny fraction of German medical criminals. The rest got to live their lives, be happy, and never feel a moment of guilt for their role in atrocities.
I’m returning to this message with my work-in-progress, which I’m calling Black Sun. I condemn a society that allows even a single monster to escape punishment in the name of expedience. If a whole nation is culpable, an entire country should be held culpable. And while I don’t believe in sons suffering for the sins of their fathers, I think it’s probably okay to say it’s too soon to relinquish guilt while victims and victimizers still live.
If you take anything away from The Guilty, I hope it’s this: we are one slip away from doing the unthinkable. For some, that slip comes sooner rather than later, but if conditions are right, the moment will come. The genuinely guilty are the ones who passed that threshold, and they should be judged.