Censured Crime

Banned Books Week 2025 began yesterday and continues through this coming Saturday, October 11. As the organizers explain, “Banned Books Week was launched in 1982 in response to a sudden surge in the number of challenges to books in libraries, bookstores, and schools. Held in the last week of September or first week of October, the annual event highlights the value of free and open access to information and brings together the entire book community—librarians, educators, authors, publishers, booksellers, and readers of all types—in shared support of the freedom to seek and to express ideas.”

“[T]he vast majority of banned books were due to false claims of illegal obscenity for minors; inclusion of LGBTQIA+ characters or themes; and covering topics of race, racism, equity, and social justice,” says the Banned Books Week Web site. Novels such as George M. Johnson’s All Boys Aren’t Blue, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and John Green’s Looking for Alaska were among the 10 most-challenged books in 2024. Other titles that feature prominently among literary works narrow-minded folk wish to keep out of public hands include Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach, and of course, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which mirrors too well America’s current authoritarian decline.

But a variety of crime and mystery novels have also fallen under the reproving gaze of sanctimonious zealots. Those include:

• A Study in Scarlet, by Arthur Conan Doyle (1887)
• The Thin Man, by Dashiell Hammett (1934)
• Solomon’s Graveyard, by Jonathan Latimer (1941)
• To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee (1960)
• Mystic River, by Dennis Lehane (2001)
• Snow Falling on Cedars, by David Guterson (1994)
• The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown (2003)
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark
Haddon (2004)
• Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn (2012)

You can learn more about those and other challenged titles, and what about them is deemed offensive, by clicking here and here.

READ: “Let Freedom Read,” by B.V. Lawson (In Reference to Murder.)