At the Quezon City Public Library (QCPL) main branch’s conference room on June 19, crime writer F.H. Batacan is telling everyone that she’ll be reading an excerpt from her short story titled “The One Cry.” It’s in her new book, “Accidents Happen,” a collection of her previously published short stories. It features journalist Joanna Bonifacio, who first appeared in her novel, “Smaller and Smaller Circles” (2002).

Batacan reads from her cell phone as if she were conducting a storytelling session: “‘Pero you know,’ and now she leans toward me, reaching out to touch my arm as though sharing a confidence, ‘I hope you will be objective about this murder thing, ha.’ So here it is at last, the stick after the carrot, the real reason why we’ve been invited here.”

She glances occasionally at her audience as she reads: “It’s all bullsh-t, but I’ll say anything she wants to hear, if it means Tony and I make it out of this place alive.”

The excerpt reading is near the end of “Usual Suspects: F.H. Batacan in conversation with Kenneth Yu,” one of the programs in Batacan’s Philippine “There are no accidents book tour.” QCPL is the second stop in her six-day tour. The first was Mt. Cloud Bookshop in Baguio City a week ago; the last is BookBar in Singapore on Aug. 2.

“Accidents Happen” is Batacan’s latest work after “Smaller and Smaller Circles.” The latter, touted as the first Filipino crime novel, earned her the title of “Queen of Philippine Crime Fiction.” But she has never claimed the title. In fact, she coyly admonishes Penguin Random House Phils. sales rep Honey de Peralta for mentioning it and her name in the same breath while introducing her this balmy afternoon.

Life happens

Batacan’s radio silence of nearly two decades isn’t because she was resting on her laurels after the huge success of “Smaller and Smaller Circles,” which won literary awards and was made into an eponymous movie in 2017 starring Nonie Buencamino and Sid Lucero. She says she was writing, but put the follow-up to her novel on hold when Rodrigo Duterte became president.

“I didn’t recognize us anymore. I didn’t know who I was anymore. We were so cavalier with the taking of lives,” she recalls.

Still, Batacan says, she wrote desultorily, occasionally chucking what she wrote when she didn’t like it and starting all over again. The cycle went on for quite a while although the idea for “Accidents Happen” percolated steadily in her mind. It was an idea that, she says, predated the phrase “nepo baby” that became a global buzzword.

She says she thought of political dynasties, young scions being groomed and on billboards looking hot and in noontime shows. “They’re strategically embedded in our consciousness with a strong name recall as individual and family, which perpetuates dynastic politics,” she says.

Following through with her idea, Batacan completed “Accidents Happen,” with the 11 stories centered on the theme that there are no accidents. She says the story titled “Accidents happen” encapsulates the book’s theme: “What if one of those political children didn’t want a political life? That’s the central theme of life—the inability to say no.”

It was a deliberate choice of the short story form over the novel on Batacan’s part, spurred by what a reviewer of her work said about her stories asking people to imagine what’s next. She doesn’t want to impose what she wants to happen because, she says, “not everything is resolved in contemporary crime fiction.”

Batacan’s “absence” was also due to her fighting cancer. “I am a cancer survivor. ‘Accidents Happen’ should have come out earlier but I was undergoing treatment and couldn’t see to the editing of the book,” she says.

Family tradition

Batacan choosing to write crime fiction was unusual back then because publishers were only interested in romance and science fiction. Against that context, host Kenneth Yu asks, “Ichi, why crime fiction? How did you get into crime fiction?”

Yu calling Batacan by her nickname Ichi doesn’t go unnoticed, at least by me. Actually, I find it endearing, indicative of a friendship that, Yu reveals, was forged in the era of blogging. (Yu wrote “Mouths to Speak, Voices to Sing,” a collection of short stories, which was published in 2024.)

Batacan’s foray into crime fiction began in Cubao, Quezon City, when it wasn’t yet seedy, she relates. (“Cubao was once like BGC!” interjects Yu.) Sundays with the family then meant watching films—James Bond, thrillers, and espionage—which, later, she adds, became useful for her when she worked at the Philippine intelligence agency.

“When I was growing up, it wasn’t a trend to protect children from crime movies. My parents would take us [with them] to the movies because we didn’t have helpers,” she continues.

She segues to explaining why crime fiction lags behind romance and science fiction, attributing its unpopularity to the prevailing mindset of a crime story steeped in the Western standards of plot twists and a tidy resolution. This is problematic for crime fiction in the Philippines, she contends, because crime is straightforward and attaining justice is difficult, starting with the collection of and the handling/treatment of evidence.

Likewise, the tropes are incongruous with Philippine society. For instance, the conventional detective can’t rely on the police, she points out.

But Batacan says that there has been a shift in how crime fiction is written, and not only in the Philippines, spiking the interest in the genre. She points out that writers have seen how to go about it, marking their stories with ample ambiguity and the absence of a resolution.

Mirroring society

Yu dives deeper, sharing his theories on crime fiction’s invisibility before asking Batacan for her thoughts. He says, firstly, Filipinos are not interested in crime fiction because crime is always in the news and, secondly, Filipinos are overly emotional and solving crime needs a withholding of emotions.

In response, Batacan cites the acceptance speech of British playwright Harold Pinter, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2005, titled “Art, Truth, and Politics.” Referencing the Iraq war, Pinter critiqued US foreign policy and the justification for military interventions, and discussed the important role of art in exposing hidden truths and challenging power structures.

Batacan declares that a writer’s job is to hold a mirror to society despite the clear lack of space for Filipino analyses and reflections within Western crime fiction. She emphasizes that primary and secondary crimes in the Philippines are important, but the most crucial crime is the “machine” (aka background crime) of which the primary crime is a part.

The machine figures prominently in “Smaller and Smaller Circles” because it is not so much about who did the crime as why the crime was done, Batacan points out. She adds that the inability to find justice because of the machine is precisely why crime fiction is written: Readers must see the machine and how justice in certain countries can only go so far.

“I want my readers to be angry because I’m always angry. If you’re not angry, you’re not engaging with the world,” she says.

However, she clarifies, it’s not about resorting to vigilantism. She aims for a “shift,” or a change, but not in the stories’ progression, she says.

She expounds: “All you can hope for is an understanding. You don’t get a tidy resolution. You feel the ‘shift’ the moment the curtain is pulled back and you see the machine. You don’t always get justice. The best you can have is an understanding, which is powerful.”

About Filipinos’ supposed emotionality, she says she doesn’t see it. She asserts that Filipinos are capable of methodical thinking and that the problem isn’t with emotionality but with politics: “We respond to politicians in an emotional way—they get our kiliti. We love our political theater [that] we fail in seeing political theater as a machine.”

About writing

Queries come in fast and furious for Batacan in the Q-and-A session. A woman wants to know if her Jesuit priest-detective in “Smaller and Smaller Circles” is her way of tapping into Filipinos’ religious inclination. Another is eager to hear how she chooses details for her backstories, and someone asks if she returns to her old characters. A young man, who says he’s writing a crime story for his MA thesis, wants her opinion on whether his character—a dismissed cop solving the murder of his partner—is too Westernized.

Batacan says Father Augusto “Gus” Saenz, the Jesuit priest-detective, is her answer to the incongruity of Philippine crime fiction with the standards of Western crime fiction. She explains; “There’s a wariness with cops in the Philippines. You don’t know what’s going to happen; there’s a kaba. Who can investigate? Who’ll be the lead character? Father Gus is an ideal, comfortable character because he’s both scientific—the Jesuits have a strong scientific history—and religious.”

For her detailed backstories, which don’t always make it in their entirety in the final print, her friend’s question—What decisions are easiest to make? Big or small decisions?—guides her. It was an epiphany for her, she says, having thought of smaller decisions as being easier made.

“Big decisions should be easier because they’re moral decisions,” rationalizes Batacan. “You should have decided a long time ago because it’s who you are. Small decisions are questions that don’t reflect who you are, i.e., what dress to wear. It’s the same with my characters. Who are they? I already know what they will decide.”

Still on characters, Batacan admits that she likes returning to her old characters because they’re the reason for the deep backstories. “Characters evolve and I want them to come to certain decisions. Plots depend on backstories, which determine the characters’ paths,” she says.

Finally, she sorts out the issue of the young man’s crime story. Whether it’ll be Westernized or not will depend on the execution or how the backstory is fleshed out, she tells him, adding that her characters have comprehensive backstories because backstories set the tone and influence their movements and decisions in the story.

Future stories

Nearing the end of the Q-and-A, a question is fielded to Batacan: Why not write about a fictional police force since there’s already a fictional priest-detective? It seems easy to do, but writing in the Philippines—that holding up a mirror to society—requires a writer to carefully tread the ground of what and what not to say. Nonetheless, she urges writers to keep on writing and not be afraid. “Fear is valid, but if you’re writing of a culture, a milieu, you can’t go very wrong,” she says.

She herself is circumspect. She says she writes about mindset and culture when it comes to public servants, law enforcement, and political families: It keeps one insulated because there are no specific names.

The writing continues for Batacan, whose idea for her next story has been percolating in her head since last year. It was when she was recuperating from her bout with cancer that a big story “exploded” (she hints at a Senate hearing). She hopes to combine it with her life experiences and turn it into a screenplay.

“The themes are female rage, corruption, and espionage,” she says with an impish grin.

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