Howdunit. Группа авторов
initial victim. We are all inquisitive and curious animals, learning through questioning, and crime fiction touches this deep need both to ask the questions and (hopefully) to begin to touch on possible answers.
Crime fiction also enters dangerous territory – murder, rage, revenge – and so stirs up emotional responses we might not otherwise feel. Reading is not a passive experience in the way sitting through a film or TV show is. We watch violence on the screen, but seldom feel it in our heart. A well-executed narrative description can make us feel the pain of the sufferer, while also putting us inside the head of the inflicter. In a world made largely safe, crime fiction provides the sensation that we may be on the edge of danger. It heightens our basic survival instincts and gives us a primal reminder of the cave and the predator. And yet we read these books in our largely murder-free communities. There is little demand for crime fiction in a war zone. Once the conflict has died down, the crime fiction appears, to try to explain to us what just happened. You see this right now in Ireland, in the brilliant novels of Adrian McKinty, Stuart Neville, Brian McGilloway and many others. And in Africa, in everyone from Deon Meyer to Oyinkan Braithwaite. Just as the Scandinavian crime novel tells us so much about the social issues of that region, so writers in India such as Anita Nair are beginning to use the whodunit to explore issues such as child exploitation and sexual identity.
It seems to me there’s not much that is out of bounds to the crime novel, which is perhaps fitting, since the spirit of the crime novel is anarchic. We are absurdist writers, writing in the realms of satire and irony, from the ‘cosier’ end of the spectrum (owing much to Jane Austen, as realized by authors such as Reginald Hill, P. D. James and Val McDermid) to the harsher, derisive ironies and dark exaggerations of a Derek Raymond, Philip Kerr or David Peace. In satire, prevailing vices and follies are held up to ridicule, and the crime novel is the perfect vehicle for this, dealing as it does with larger-than-life characters whose weaknesses will soon be revealed, all set in a society largely ill at ease with itself. Of course, this also makes the crime novel ripe for satirizing, and plenty of authors have had fun deconstructing the likes of Hercule Poirot or the hard-boiled gumshoe. Michael Dibdin’s sublime The Dying of the Light comes to mind, as does Tom Stoppard’s clever stage comedy The Real Inspector Hound. More recently, Anthony Horowitz (The Magpie Murders; The Word Is Murder) and Steve Cavanagh (Twisted) have played with the crime novelist as anti-hero. Literary authors, too, have been attracted to the crime genre down the ages, either by plundering or paying homage. Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose is a favourite – the monk/detective’s name is even William of Baskerville! Muriel Spark turns the conventions of crime fiction on their head in her short, shocking novel The Driver’s Seat, which was itself influenced by the nouveau roman, especially in the hands of Alain Robbe-Grillet, several of whose experimental novels were shaped as whodunits. More recent literary successes include Eleanor Catton’s Booker-winning The Luminaries, which has a murder mystery as its narrative engine. Nor is children’s fiction immune. J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels are constructed as traditional whodunits, full of untrustworthy characters, reversals, mysteries, twists and revelations. Little surprise that Rowling, post-Potter, has gone on to fresh success as a writer of crime novels for adults.
The whodunit is, however, the broadest possible church, able to embrace the macho blood-and-guts nihilism of a James Ellroy and the gentle humanity of Alexander McCall Smith’s Ramotswe stories. In the stories of the past, however, there was a tendency for the irrruption of violence to lead to resolution (the unmasking of the culprit) and a return to the status quo. These days, it is harder to imagine everything settling back to ‘normal’ after an extreme act. Extremism has visited places we never imagined it would. Murderous acts seem to happen out of the blue – rare though they still are. The murder mystery these days seldom ignores this. As Muriel Spark herself once said, ‘We should know ourselves better by now than to be under the illusion that we are all essentially aspiring, affectionate and loving creatures. We do have these qualities, but we are aggressive too.’
In dealing with these aggressive qualities in the human animal, crime fiction provides both a salutary warning and the catharsis common to all good drama. The tight three-act structure of the crime novel (crime–investigation–resolution) pays tribute to the fact that we humans hunger for form and a sense of closure. Yet within those confines all human life plays out. We readers can explore cultures of the past, present and (very occasionally) future. We can visit countries and regions new to us and see the world through the consciousnesses of myriad others. We can have a multitude of adventures, experiencing the danger of chaos and coming face to face with the ugliest manifestations of evil and depravity as we dice with danger and the threat of imminent demise. And, in the end, haven’t we sentient creatures always been obsessed with death? It’s coming for all of us in some shape or form. Crime fiction gives us a way of exploring some of the implications, while still managing to have fun in the process.
So you see, crime fiction really is good for you.
From Ian Rankin’s belief in the soul of the crime novel, it’s a natural step to consider the moral energy and compass of the genre, subjects that have preoccupied members of the Detection Club from the days of Chesterton and Ronald Knox to the present. James Runcie, son of a former Archbishop of Canterbury, has (like Chesterton) not merely created a hugely popular priest detective but also thought deeply about the implications of his writing.
Since Aristotle there have been numerous attempts to provide a rulebook for crime writing. Most famously, Ronald Knox wrote his famous ‘Ten Commandments’, which recommended no twins, no undiscovered poisons, no supernatural agencies and no Chinamen. Dorothy L. Sayers wrote a historical survey in her introduction to The Omnibus of Crime published in 1928, outlining potential murders and possible plots: ‘Here is a brief selection of handy short cuts to the grave. Poisoned tooth stoppings; shaving brushes inoculated with dread diseases; poisoned boiled eggs (a bright thought); poison gas; a cat with poisoned claws; poisoned mattresses; knives dropped through the ceiling; stabbing with a sharp icicle’ (that melts – I recently noted melting ice in the drama series Death in Paradise on BBC One); ‘electrocution by telephone; biting by plague-rats and typhoid carrying lice; boiling lead in the ears … air-bubbles injected into the arteries; explosion of a gigantic “Prince Rupert’s drop” (that’s molten glass dropped into cold water – a swimming pool might be ideal); frightening to death; hanging head downwards; freezing to atoms in liquid air; hypodermic injections shot from air-guns; exposure, while insensible, to extreme cold; guns concealed in cameras; a thermometer which explodes a bomb when the temperature of the room reaches a certain height; and so forth …’
Then, crucially, she adds, ‘There certainly does seem a possibility that the detective story will some time come to an end, simply because the public will have learnt all the tricks. But it has probably many years to go yet, and in the meantime a new and less rigid formula will probably have developed, linking it more closely to the novel of manners and separating it more widely from the novel of adventure.’
Here, I think, she understands that what matters is not so much plot, but character. Crime fiction cannot work if we do not care about the people involved. The story has to be more than a puzzle. It can’t just be a conjuring trick with people’s lives, no matter how fictional they all are.
It’s my belief that we use crime writing to test the limits of our capacity for good and evil and to make sense of the world – and, as the writer of The Grantchester Mysteries, I think we turn to crime to contemplate our own mortality.
Here’s a thought …
One hundred years ago, in the United Kingdom, people