Hello, I’m Zhan Qingyun.

We have finally finished Dudley and Stephens and its extended thought experiment, The Case of the Speluncean Explorers. What did you make of them?

Dudley was the first case in my thousand-page criminal-law textbook, perhaps because it addresses foundational questions such as punishment’s purpose. I initially thought the editors feared we would find law dull and opened with cannibalism to wake us up.

Later I discovered many disturbing cases. Their facts may be less bizarre, yet reveal darker aspects of people and society.

A distinctive feature of legal work is frequent contact with society’s darkness.

I am not a criminal-defense lawyer, but people who know I practice send messages about legal problems. Many are ordinary troubles; others are extremely heavy.

Sometimes I cannot respond not from busyness or unwillingness, but because I lack the courage. Perhaps I still need more experience.

Crime and punishment force reflection on evil and social failure. Extreme cases like Dudley test humanity under conditions resembling dystopian fiction. Perhaps that is why literary classics use crime and punishment to explore individuals, classes, eras, society, and national character.

Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment follows a student who murders an elderly moneylender and undertakes a long struggle toward reconciliation and redemption.

His vast novel The Brothers Karamazov, which we mentioned earlier, begins with patricide and uses three brothers’ different temperaments, beliefs, and lives to examine an age and human nature. Its extensive religious discussion has led some listeners to complain that it is not entertaining.

Tolstoy’s Resurrection is another large novel of guilt and redemption. Its nobleman is a juror rather than defendant, moved during a trial by a woman he wronged in the past and beginning his own moral resurrection.

Among such epics, my perhaps conventional favorite is Les Misérables. It too tells a story of personal redemption while using intersecting lives to portray different characters, forms of humanity, and an entire era.

Detective fiction offers lighter reading, yet often goes beyond ingenious plots and logic to pursue deeper questions.