Justice & Law Quote by Jeffery Deaver

There’s a quiet defensiveness baked into Deaver’s “Of course”: an anticipatory shrug to the perennial suspicion that crime writers are trafficking in cruelty for fun. It’s a small word that does big work, framing violence not as a lurid indulgence but as an occupational hazard of the form. He’s staking out a professional ethic: if you’re going to tell stories about harm, you can’t cut away at the moment it becomes uncomfortable.

The key phrase isn’t “describe violence.” It’s “the aftermath of violence.” That’s where crime fiction either grows up or gives itself away. Plenty of thrillers treat violence like a special effect - kinetic, consequential only insofar as it moves the plot. Deaver’s emphasis signals an obligation to residue: trauma, grief, damaged bodies, warped routines, the moral mess that doesn’t resolve when the villain is caught. The subtext is also a rebuttal to sanitization. A tidy, offstage violence can feel “responsible,” but it can also be dishonest, turning real-world devastation into a narrative convenience.

Context matters: Deaver writes in a mass-market ecosystem where speed, suspense, and escalation are rewarded. The line reads like a boundary-setting move against both censors and cynics - those who want the genre to be less ugly, and those who accuse it of being ugly for profit. He’s arguing that realism here isn’t voyeurism; it’s accountability. If the story’s engine is crime, the price of admission is refusing to pretend crime is clean.