Category: crime blog (Page 3 of 5)

Thriller

April 18, 2019 / Nina

I was now dependent on L. in every respect.

First, because I couldn’t put my foot on the ground. And then because I needed her words, her memories, to nourish the beginning of a novel she knew nothing about.

But I wasn’t afraid of this state of dependence.

It was justified by a higher project, which would develop without her knowing.

(Based on a True Story by Delphine de Vigan, translated by George Miller)

As her epigraphs for Based on a True Story, Delphine de Vigan chooses quotes from the Stephen King novels Misery and The Dark Half. Both are about writers who experience entrapment, Paul Sheldon at the hands of his infamous ‘number one fan’ Annie Wilkes, Thad Beaumont in the person of George Stark, a literary alter ego who takes on corporeal reality. There is a third King novel haunting the pages of de Vigan’s novel, and that is Bag of Bones, in which thriller writer Mike Noonan, thrown into turmoil by the death of his wife, experiences crippling panic attacks every time he tries to write. He can use the computer for other things – Sudoku puzzles, personal emails – but even opening a Word document is enough to make him vomit. Delphine, the narrator of Based on a True Story, experiences a similarly adverse reaction in the wake of publishing a highly successful novel based upon aspects of her own life story.

The only person Delphine can confide in is L, a ghost writer she happens to meet at a party hosted by a friend. L. seems to embody everything Delphine feels she lacks: a polished beauty and ease of manner, a way of existing among others that does not get in the way of her thirst for freedom, a writing career that, although wrapping her in a mantle of invisibility, nonetheless leaves her firmly in control.

L. is eager to know what Delphine is working on, what kind of novel she will write to build on the triumphant success of her prizewinning bestseller. Delphine is adamant that she will not write another autobiographical novel. Her success has also brought her anxiety, the sense of being owned by her audience, poison pen letters. L. is equally adamant that Delphine should not let what she insists are minor inconveniences get in the way of her true calling as a writer of autofiction. What is more, L. is here to help, to smooth the passage of the ‘phantom novel’ she is certain Delphine has it in her to write. Delphine should not worry – L. will see to it that she has space and time to work, that she will not be bothered by interruptions from friends and colleagues. Yet the more L. becomes indispensable, the fiercer the panic attacks. As the months pass, Delphine finds herself at crisis point, transfixed by the dawning awareness that she may have surrendered more of her own identity than she ever intended.

At the heart of Based on a True Story is an extended literary argument about the value of fiction. L. insists that only writing rooted in reality and known by the reader to be rooted in reality can be truly compelling. The rest is so much flim-flam, entertainment:

“Your readers don’t expect you to tell them stories that send them peacefully to sleep or reassure them. They don’t care about interchangeable characters that could be swapped from one book to another. They don’t care about more or less plausible situations deftly stitched together, which they’ve already read dozens of times. They couldn’t give a fuck. You’ve already proved to them that you know how to do something different, that you can take hold of reality, have it out with it. They’ve understood that you were looking for a different reality and were no longer afraid.”

Delphine insists there is no such thing as ‘reality’ in fiction, that the very act of putting pen to paper is a prelude to invention. Moreover, the writer has the right to toy with facts or not to draw upon reality at all – the reader instinctively understands that is part of the bargain they enter into when they open a novel. How much or how little a story is based upon events experienced by the writer is of lesser importance than the story’s internal verisimilitude:

Didn’t a character have the right to come from nowhere, have no anchorage, and be a pure invention? Did a character have to provide an explanation? I didn’t think so. Because the reader knew what to expect. The reader was always up for yielding to illusion and treating fiction like reality… The reader was capable of weeping over the death or downfall of a character who didn’t exist. It was the opposite of deception.

These arguments and counter-arguments seem especially powerful at the present moment, when autofiction – novels and stories that have their origins in lived reality – is experiencing a resurgence and writers such as David Shields and Rachel Cusk are using their fiction as a kind of reality manifesto. Caught in the middle, I find both arguments equally compelling and equally true. With its use of doubles, imaginary companions and invisible enemies, Based on a True Story is a literary thriller in the most complete sense, a novel-length philosophical argument about what fiction is for.

“I’m almost certain that you, all of us readers, all as much as we are, can be totally taken in by a book that presents itself as the truth and is pure invention, disguise and imagination. I think that any halfway capable author can do that: ramp up the reality effects to make you think that what he’s writing actually happened. And I challenge all of us – you, me, anyone – to disentangle true from false. And in any case it could be a literary project, to write a whole book that presents itself as a true story, a book inspired by so-called real events, but in which everything, or nearly everything, is invented.”

And in fact this looks to be exactly what we are reading. We know that Delphine – the real Delphine de Vigan – wrote a bestselling novel based around her experiences of coping with mental illness within her own family. We can only guess at the sense of personal exposure de Vigan experienced in writing and publishing such a novel, just as we can only guess at how much the lives of Delphine the author and Delphine the protagonist might or might not converge. What we can surely agree upon is that for the purposes of the novel we are reading it does not matter – we are invested regardless.

It would seem almost impossible that such a complex and determinedly intellectual book might work equally well as a thriller, but such is the piece of trickery de Vigan has pulled off. This is an unnerving, page-turning book that keeps you guessing and wondering, inventing alternative scenarios, worrying about the characters. Even when in the final act de Vigan ramps up the action – a broken foot (hello again Paul Sheldon), a cobwebby cellar, rat poison, a dark and stormy night – the book remains stalwart and skillful in its use of reality effects. We as readers never stop believing, even when the reality we have been inhabiting is revealed as a lie.

Towards the end of the book I read the following passage

After her mother’s death, L. stayed shut up inside the apartment. I haven’t managed to find out how long. Some time. I don’t think she went to school.

Need to dig further. I think L’s father forbade her to cross the threshold except in an emergency. I think she was so afraid of him she went for several weeks, or even months, without going out. Alone in the apartment.

This triggers a memory of something I read, some time ago, about a woman in France who was kept a virtual prisoner by her father. Hadn’t he been religious, or something? Was there a cult involved? I couldn’t remember in detail but the connection between this passage in the novel and the half-remembered memoir keeps bugging me. After a couple of minutes’ online searching I find what I am looking for, an interview with a woman named Maude Julien who became the subject of an experiment conducted by her sociopathic, alcoholic father designed to make his daughter ‘superhuman’. Reading the interview again now, I notice how her story also bears similarities with the events portrayed in Yorgos Lanthimos’s 2009 film Dogtooth. The article was published in February 2018, to coincide with the release of the English-language edition of Julien’s memoir The Only Girl in the World . Based on a True Story came out in 2017.

Quickly i check the respective publication dates of the French originals: D’apres une histoire vraie by Delphine de Vigan, August 2015, Derriere la grille by Maude Julien, September 2014. Going by the dates alone I know it’s not possible for Julien’s story to have influenced de Vigan’s – by the time Julien’s was freely available to read, de Vigan’s would already have entered the production process. But what if de Vigan knew of Julien’s story already – it’s a small world, publishing. Or perhaps she knew Julien personally, had interviewed her even?

So what? It’s a tiny passage, a nod, a reference, not remotely important. But still, in less than five minutes I have constructed an imaginary narrative in which Delphine de Vigan is actually the ghost writer for Maude Julien and Based On a True Story is the book she wrote afterwards, a heavily disguised account of the peculiar experience of inhabiting someone else’s story and then being erased from it. I am sure this is a fantasy but I let myself believe in it, at least a little. Why not? It’s a great little narrative. It would make a good story.

What Delphine de Vigan most playfully demonstrates in Based on a True Story is how genre – in this case the thriller – can be subverted even as it is greedily enjoyed for what it is. This is a captivating, clever book that leaves its neatest trick till last, as we remember that L. sounds just like elle, the French for ‘she’.

THE END *

On the road with a feeling for snow

February 9, 2019 / Nina

This past week has been rather unusual. I’ve been on the road doing some advance publicity for The Dollmaker, talking to booksellers in London and across the West Country – where the novel is largely set – and having a delightful breakfast meeting with book bloggers and magazine editors at the Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green. The strangeness of finding myself in the company of a whole bunch of people who had read the novel was a sensation outdone only by its pleasure. Andrew and Bramber have been a special part of my life for more than a decade. To realise that they have also become special to other people is the most valuable reward a writer could ask for. This is the end point of the process and one that only ever becomes more mysterious and surprising.

I have always loved travelling by train. One of the chief joys this week of what might otherwise have been a long and tiring series of journeys has been the opportunity to read three very different novels, one after another and with the effects lingering throughout this cut-off little section of time in the same way a particular weather or aroma might unexpectedly attach itself to a particular place. First came Peter Hoeg’s Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow, a novel I was aware of and intrigued by on publication, yet somehow never got round to reading. I started it the week before last, when our island was still covered in snow, and completed it during the train ride from Glasgow to London that comprised the first leg of my journey.

The prevalence of frost, the steely Clyde, the progression through the still-snow-streaked hills of Cumbria brought me close to this novel in ways I could never have anticipated, and what I felt most of all through the first half of Smilla’s narrative in particular was an increased appreciation of the landscape in which I now live and work, a joy in what I have started to think of as the Northern aesthetic. And yet – and I still feel the pain of this – Smilla turned out to be very much a novel of two halves for me.

The novel’s Part One concerns the discovery of a body – the body of a young boy – and the increasing conviction on the part of the eponymous Miss Smilla that his death is no accident. It is set in Copenhagen, in winter, and I have rarely met with such an exquisite evocation of place, such a deep dive into the strange alchemy of idiosyncracies and generalities that make personal recollection so resonant and compelling. The attention to technical detail, both in matters of meteorology and what might be termed common bureaucracy – that kind of in-depth focus on what might wrongly be construed as irrelevances – made this extended section of writing a joy for me. I felt mesmerised by the beauty of it, by the author’s willingness to take that kind of poetic risk. This part of the novel is also characterised by an intricate social commentary examining the colonial relationship between Denmark and Greenland. The daughter of an Inuit mother and a mostly absent Danish father, Smilla feels irreconcilably caught between two cultures. The tension this induces informs the narrative in powerful and surprising ways.

The characterisation of Miss Smilla herself is a thing of wonder. Rarely have I felt so close to a character. Make of that what you will.

In the second half of the novel, Smilla smuggles herself on board a ship bound for Greenland and the eventual resolution of the mystery. There is absolutely no reason this section should not have been equally compelling – yet turning the page to begin this part of the narrative felt to me disconcertingly, almost shockingly akin to entering a completely different novel. The careful construction of a narrative edifice, the complexity, the minute observations, the fascinating web of relationships – whoosh, gone. Smilla barely seems to remember or think about her life and discoveries in the first section of the novel. What we have instead is a narrative that feels as if it is going through the motions: rather boring thriller elements, unnecessary killings, bare-bones characterisation, sketchy description that felt as if it had been bolted on at the last minute. I was literally open-mouthed with disappointment.

In the past two years or so I have become increasingly interested in new ways of writing crime fiction. What I rejoice in, more than anything, is the kind of novel that takes the detective story as its template and then makes something weighty and great from it, that nods to the tropes and enjoys them but that is driven to go that further mile in terms of literary invention: Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, Rupert Thomson’s Death of a Murderer, Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13, Katie Kitamura’s A Separation. While reading the first half of Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow, I had the same feeling I had when I first read Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, close on thirty years ago – that I was in the presence of a genuinely important work of European literature.

The second half blew that out of the water – almost literally. It felt desultory, by-the-numbers, filling in plot. Most of all, it felt to me as if Hoeg had refined Part One to a degree of perfection that pushed him to the boundary of his ability as a writer at that time, then for some unknown reason went on hiatus. Every writer knows what it’s like – leave a manuscript uncompleted for too long and something gets away from you. It is difficult, almost impossible, to re-enter the state that led to the creation of that particular narrative. Rather than trying to pick up where you left off, it is often better to start again from the beginning, to re-imagine the novel as the writer you have become in the time since you let it slide. Painful, but true.

I have absolutely no idea, of course, if anything of the sort happened. What I do know is that I just don’t get it. The novel’s resolution – the reason behind everything – I actually quite liked. It was sinister and frightening and unusual. But the hundred-and-fifty pages leading up to it were so much generic padding. The novel reads like a cut-and-shut. I’m still in mourning.

After that breathless roller-coaster ride of ecstasy and disappointment, it was actually quite weird to enter Looker, the debut novel from poet Laura Sims, a slim, present-tense, no-words-wasted novel of the perfectly-honed variety that is fashionable right now. The protagonist, a college lecturer, attempts to keep up an appearance of normality while her life collapses around her. As her personal crisis deepens, she becomes increasingly fixated on an actress who lives in the building across the street from her. The actress, it would appear, leads a charmed life. Our protagonist begins to collect pieces of it for herself – literally.

Hoeg’s aim – like Dostoevsky’s in Crime and Punishment, like Thomas Mann’s in The Magic Mountain – is to involve his reader, to draw them, through weight of words and argument, into the same philosophical and emotional labyrinth that enfolds their protagonist. In novels like Looker – think Sheila Heti, think Ottessa Moshfegh, think Gwendoline Riley – there is a distancing effect, achieved in part through the novel’s smoothly planed surfaces, in part through the author’s insistence on our stunned complicity. Like these novels’ protagonists, we do not act, we spy. We gaze, round-eyed, at the misfortune that inevitably unfolds. We are become, in fact, lookers.

I admired Sims’s novel for its perfectly modulated sentences, its mordant insights, its sharp analysis and demolition of traditional mystery tropes. It did suffer from being read straight after the Hoeg, though. You read Smilla and know in spite of everything that Hoeg was pushing himself to the limit. Looker feels studied and if not exactly arch then constructed by comparison. Too obviously aware of itself as good art. Katie Kitamura’s A Separation, though not dissimilar in some ways, takes more risks, reveals more personality, distills more real emotion and feels more mature generally. I liked Looker, but I didn’t love it.

Passing from Looker to Eugene McCabe’s Death and Nightingales provided another jolt, this time in the opposite direction. Set in County Fermanagh in the first half of the nineteenth century. the novel tells a story of nascent sectarian violence, family secrets, betrayal and murderous revenge. It is a crime novel only in the loosest sense: by the time the action is over, a crime has been committed. Of the three novels I read this week, McCabe’s is the most traditional in form – the most staunchly realist. It is also the only one of the three you could point to and call flawless, or Dostoevskian, or both. In terms of page length it is as economical as Looker, yet in terms of the richness and passion of its language, its taut dissection of national schisms, the many unforgettable scenes at its heart it would seem to contain three times as much. One feels enriched and invigorated from reading it, certain in some sense that this is how great writing should taste and feel and be, equally certain that one can never and will never attain such mastery.

It’s strange, though, isn’t it? While I was looking up information on Eugene McCabe, I came across his appallingly unprofessional and, frankly, childish ad hominem attack on the critic Eileen Battersby in the Irish Times back in 2011. A salutary reminder that even the greatest writers are capable, on occasion, of being absolute dicks.

2018 Reading Roundup: Part 1

December 10, 2018 / Nina

In the first of two end-of-year posts I want to talk about my reading of crime fiction in 2018. Some of you may remember the Bute Noir crime reading challenge first thrown down by the organisers of Bute Noir way back in January. I thought this might be a useful and interesting framework for considering crime fiction and so it proved to be. While in one sense I failed the challenge – I did not manage to read a book in all thirty categories – I consider it a success in that it encouraged me to take in a broader spectrum of crime books than I might otherwise have encountered, all whilst reading a grand total of twenty-four titles overall.

BOOK WITH A ONE-WORD TITLE:

Sirens by Joseph Knox

BOOK PUBLISHED IN 2018

The Fountain in the Forest by Tony White (January 2018)

I’ll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara

BOOK WRITTEN BEFORE 1950

Double Indemnity by James M. Cain

BOOK BY A SCOTTISH AUTHOR

The Blackhouse by Peter May

BOOK SET IN SCOTLAND

Bloody January by Alan Parks

BOOK SET IN THE FUTURE

The Last Policeman by Ben H. Winters

BOOK WITH REAL-LIFE CRIMES

This House of Grief by Helen Garner

Joe Cinque’s Consolation by Helen Garner

Death of a Murderer by Rupert Thomson

BOOK IN TRANSLATION

The Pledge by Friedrich Dürrenmatt

BOOK SET IN AMERICA

So Much Pretty by Cara Hoffman

You Were Never Really Here by Jonathan Ames

BOOK SET IN NEITHER THE UK NOR THE US

The Shape of the Ruins by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

BOOK BY AN AUTHOR YOU HAVE NEVER READ BEFORE

Red Riding 1974 by David Peace

The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy

BOOK ADAPTED FOR THE SCREEN

On Beulah Height by Reginald Hill (ITV June 1999)

AUDIO BOOK

The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey (read by Paul Young)

BOOK RECOMMENDED BY A FRIEND

Jawbone Lake by Ray Robinson

BOOK WITH A TITLE OF MORE THAN SIX WORDS

I Hear the Sirens in the Street by Adrian McKinty

BOOK THAT YOU HAVE STARTED BEFORE AND NEVER FINISHED

Laidlaw by William McIlvaney

BOOK BY AN AUTHOR OF COLOUR

Bluebird, Bluebird by Attica Locke

BOOK BY A BUTE NOIR 2018 AUTHOR

The Cry by Helen Fitzgerald

So what did I discover? The short answer to that would be plenty, and that the loose and baggy genre of crime fiction is as riven with pleasures and problems as the loose and baggy genre of science fiction. Commercially I suspect they have a lot in common, these two estranged cousins: both are dominated, on the online airwaves, by an inner circle who go to all the conventions, who tend to ignore the work of so-called interlopers (to shun it if said interlopers get too mouthy) and who believe in their hearts and minds that it is they who are the guardians of the ‘real’ stuff, that they alone understand their chosen genre and know how to write it. This line of reasoning can get rather dull. In the world of the reader, who in most instances knows little of the internecine squabbling that so frequently dominates so-called genre spaces, the reality is much broader and much more open to enquiry. On hearing of my interest in writing crime fiction, a wonderful friend of mine once said to me: it’s really very simple – all you need is a crime or a criminal to write about. His words have stuck with me, not least because they might apply equally to science fiction – just find something weird and interesting and possibly to do with an imagined future you want to write about– and because they demonstrate above all the permeability of genre, the tenuousness of its existence. What we’re saying when we talk about ‘the genre’is simply that we like certain kinds of stories, stories that tend towards uncovering and solving a mystery, stories that tend towards looking at the world in a way that would seem to expand the nature of what we call reality. Sometimes they do both. What is certain is that there are no rules as to who is allowed to tell these stories, and that those hierarchies that exist within so-called ‘genre circles’ are seldom if ever a reliable yardstick for finding their most challenging and memorable examples.

Far and away the best ‘troubled cop’ story I’ve read in along time and this year certainly was William McIlvaney’s magisterial Laidlaw. I am far from the first to express similar sentiments, and very late in discovering McIlvaney’s genius for myself, but what is it about his approach to the simple police procedural that raises it so high? There’s the writing, for a start. McIlvaney writes Glasgow –its speech and its rhythms – in an unadorned, unselfconscious manner that is a constant delight and matter for admiration. But he’s never afraid to express abstract ideas or to reach for the language that best expresses them. This kind of confidence to mix philosophy with street talk is rarely encountered and even more rarely successfully executed. In McIlvaney it comes across as easy assurance but what it is, of course, is the considered hard graft of the committed artist. Then there’s the story. No ludicrous plot twists or high octane car chases for our Willie and what a blessed, blessed relief that turns out to be. In Laidlaw we get a murder that like the vast majority of real murders is senseless, squalid, awful,should never have happened and that ripples out into the community with knock-on effects that are devastating, sad and unexpected. The whole ensemble resists sensation, and sensationalism. People travel around by bus. The understatement of the ending is possibly the most truthful and affecting I’ve ever read in a crime novel. The social attitudes are showing their age a little now but no matter, the underlying fabric and pure intent of this novel is so solid, so skilfully worked it will never age.

Of course a writer as skilful and groundbreaking as McIlvaney will have his imitators – who wouldn’t want to be that brilliant? But for every book as remarkable as Denise Mina’s The Long Drop there are a dozen instantly forgettable generic procedurals that serve only to reinforce the uniqueness of their inspiration, Alan Parks’s Bloody January being an interesting case in point. Allan Massie’s typically insightful review in The Scotsman lays out the case beautifully, and while it is clear from the overall soundness of the structure and attention to place that Parks cares very much about what he is doing, you can’t get away from the fact the results are merely adequate rather than special. Parks’s anti-hero McCoy is just your standard troubled cop, the Dunlops are cardboard villains and the victims are simply placeholders. The ambiguities and complexities that are the lifeblood of Laidlaw are all but absent.

Swapping Glasgow for Manchester, Joseph Knox’s debut Sirens suffers from similar problems. This debut novel arrived garlanded with praise and I was expecting something special, yet it disappointed me in similar ways to Stav Sherez’s The Intrusions from 2017. Both have wanker protagonists and not in a good way (are we meant to feel sympathy for poor, beleaguered, addicted, semi-disgraced Aidan Watts? Short answer, I didn’t), both are novels awash with predictably sexist attitudes hidden beneath the guise of ‘look at me, I’m exposing sexism’, both attempt to cover middling to poor character work with convoluted and ultimately tedious plots. In both cases, the writing is fine – always serviceable, occasionally even interesting, but any effort here is ultimately futile because the overall concept is just so tired.

Across the water in Northern Ireland, Adrian McKinty’s I Hear the Sirens in the Street could have been just as uninspiring but somehow it saved itself. In so many ways it’s a bad book – unconvincing third-act denouement, bolt-on musical references (some of which are anachronisms – see the reference to an Arvo Pärt record in 1984, also the idea that someone might not have heard of Blondie by the same year) and above all appalling gender politics – the scene where Duffy seduces Gloria is the worst-written in the entire novel – which, again, do not come across as ‘gritty analysis of how sexist things were in the 1970s’ so much as just… sexist. However, there’s something about this author’s voice that made the novel extremely, likeably readable. Duffy’s a bit of a dick but I still got on with him. The police work– when we’re not in that final shoot-out – is interesting and makes for a good detective story. The sense of place is excellent in spite of too much clunky political exposition. While I Hear the Sirens in the Street cannot compete with the sheer writerly excellence of a novel like Laidlaw, I were in the mood for an ultimately pointless but pleasurable procedural I could well find myself choosing another in this series. McKinty has flair. And some of his jokes were actually funny, so kudos for that.

Moving from the gritty, city police procedural to the provincial detective story, I found interesting comparisons to be made between Peter May’s The Blackhouse, set mostly on the Isleof Lewis, and Reginald Hill’s On Beulah Height, set in Yorkshire. I found On Beulah Height to be a very good police procedural. Intelligent,forensically detailed, great sense of place and an entirely convincing portrayal of small-town life – it’s immediately clear why Reginald Hill garnered so many fans. There’s nothing groundbreaking here, at all – but with this kind of attention to detail and overall respect for craft, a book like this can be amply enjoyed for what it is, which is a good story, well told. My expectations for May’s The Blackhouse were similarly high. Unfortunately they weren’t met. While the writing about the island and its traditions is good, solid stuff, the plot is a great lolloping mess of a shaggy dog story. Murder, bullying, paedophilia, repressed memory,death of parents in a car crash, death of aunt from cancer, death by plummeting from a rock (father and son), fake rape confession – is there anything that isn’t in this book?? It’s all very pat, very generic, and that’s without the rampant,unconscious sexism on the part of the author – the objectification of women is constant and boringly consistent, and guess what? Not one woman has a real role or genuine agency – such dullness should be outlawed. Far more of a problem in police procedural terms is that The Blackhouse simply doesn’t deliver: there is way too much soul-searching-via-flashback (the whole novel is ultimately one giant flashback) while the murder itself turns out to be mostly irrelevant. (The original murder in Edinburgh that kickstarts the whole business is indeed never mentioned again!) I think it’s fair to say that I was disappointed.

Far more interesting to consider are the two novels I read in the ‘author I’ve not tried before’ category. Both giants of crime writing, I had hitherto read a great deal about David Peace and James Ellroy without actually having sampled a novel from either one of them. It was time to break that duck. In both cases I’m glad I did, though for differing reasons. I consider the Channel Four adaptations of Peace’s Red Riding novels to be masterpieces of the small screen, some of the best British TV since Peter Flannery’s Our Friends in the North. There’s an interview with Peace that I’ve read multiple times, in which he states the importance of creating crime fiction that stems from lived reality. For me, pretty much everything Peace says about writing and crime fiction in particular is inspirational and thought provoking in the most constructive way possible –which is why I felt surprised and not a little cheated to find him breaking some of his own rules. The background to Red Riding 1974, the sense of place and time is, as we might expect, impeccably drawn, yet the violence and torture involved in the crimes at the heart of the novel are gratuitous and have little to do with the times, incorporating precisely the kind of serial-killer-thriller tropes so rightly decried by Peace in his interview. His portrayal of women is just a joke, with ‘our hero’ Eddie no hero whatsoever in this respect. Also how come Eddie himself is so ready with his fists? He’s meant to be a journalist. We learn next to nothing about him, about his motivations, and his readiness to resort to insane levels of violence and misogyny undermines any belief we may have in his fight for justice. It’s hard to escape the impression that this is yet another novel about men using their supposed (and mostly unconvincing) rage at the death of female children as an excuse to get into it with each other, which makes me sad, because Peace’s writing is compelling and plays merry havoc with the established formulae of the police procedural.

All that being said, I will return to Peace and I will complete my reading of the Red Riding Quartet, because the sense of place, the texture of his reality is Gordon-Burn-good. In addition to that, there is the sense with Peace that he is self aware about his blind spots, that he is constantly pushing himself towards new levels of insight. Which is more than I can say for James Ellroy and The Black Dahlia. Ellroy is famous as a monster of ego, which for me makes that ego itself a trope and therefore dull.So he owns thirty guns and thinks he’s the Beethoven of crime fiction, so what? Ellroy’s writing is as tight as a drum and on that level he really is the natural heir to Chandler. But his attitudes – which I’m guessing are meant to shock us with their retrograde offensiveness, a constant tirade of ‘this is how it was, guys, so suck it up’ – are so unexamined and so much a barrel of cliché– mean streets, tough cops taking it to the lowlifes and paedos and (mostlyMexican) scum, trouble at t’ LAPD mill where it’s hard to tell the heroes from the villains in a world where women, unless they’re madonnas, whores, or murdered bodies don’t exist at all – that reading this book becomes almost laughably tedious. To paraphrase another stroppy American, he cannot be serious. The scene where one of our heroes is driven to psychotic levels of outrage by… the existence of lesbian sex had me totally bemused. To use a well worn phrase, it’s like watching a child throw its toys out of the pram. I’m kind of interested to read one of his more recent novels, just to see if Ellroy has grown up at all, but it might be a while. I cannot stress how much betterJonathan Ames handles a similar milieu and street scene in You Were Never Really Here, and if you are interested in how to write effectively and with genuine impact about violence against women then Cara Hoffman’s So Much Pretty is excoriating,brutal, brilliant, as well as being one of the most accomplished crime novels I’ve yet read. If it’s noir you’re after, you could do a lot worse than return to the heartland. James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity is a beautifully crafted mystery with a satisfying simplicity and economy of style that many more modern practitioners would benefit from taking note of. You could read this in almost the same time it takes to watch the movie and enjoy it just as much.

Myencounter with Josephine Tey, in the audio book category, was interesting. Teyis often portrayed as the overlooked outsider, a master of Golden Age crimefiction whose visibility has been overshadowed by the perennial popularity ofAgatha Christie. It just so happened that Radio 4 Extra were rerunning PaulYoung’s unabridged serialised reading of Tey’s The Daughter of Time earlier in the year, which made for a perfectopportunity to discover this important and underappreciated writer for myself. The Daughter of Time features Tey’sregular detective, Alan Grant, as he researches a cold case while laid up inhospital after an accident with a burglar. The cold case in question is themurder of the two Princes in the Tower, supposedly ordered by their uncle, thefamously dastardly bastard Richard III. But is the case as open and shut as thehistory books would have us believe? This novel is at its heart an explorationof the way in which history is created after the fact, and I have to say Iloved Tey’s investigative approach, her use of detective fiction to tackle animportant subject, her obvious passion for the misrepresented ‘hero’ at theheart of her novel. I actually preferred this treatment – that energising linkbetween past and present – to Hilary Mantel’s brand of needlepoint reimaginingin Bring Up the Bodies, which I alsofinally got around to reading this year and found rather static. Tey is sharp,acerbic, funny. If it weren’t for the painful layers of internalised misogyny, The Daughter of Time would be theperfect bedtime detective read.

Another unexpectedly perfect procedural was Ben Winters’s The Last Policeman. An investigation that takes place against the background of Armageddon-by-meteor, this turned out to be a really excellently put-together book that works equally well as a police procedural and a work of science fiction. The claustrophobic atmosphere is striking, the characterisation of our protagonist, obsessive cop Henry is great. As science fiction, The Last Policeman impresses precisely because the SF is approached from a sideways angle. A sad, affecting novel that speaks to our times. I’ll definitely be coming back for the sequels. More disappointing to me was Attica Locke’s Southern procedural Bluebird, Bluebird. I’ve heard such great things about Locke’s novels and many of them are true. As an examination of race issues in the South and the trauma and inequality and personal danger involved in being a Black cop not just within a racist society but within a persistently racist law enforcement apparatus, Locke’s voice is essential and important. But although the characters are solidly crafted – what a welcome change it makes to read about a policeman who goes against the ‘troubled cop’ stereotype – in essence, Bluebird, Bluebird is just a standard whodunit. From the ecstatic reviews I’d read of Locke’s work I’d imagined something deeper and more game-changing, more interestingly written.

I have to say that Ray Robinson’s Jawbone Lake disappointed me a little, also. Robinson’s feeling for the Peak District is intense and real and he does not shrink from revealing the stark divisions within the community. For those who live on the Nether Tor Estate and work in the local ice cream factory, the climate is harsh and unforgiving and it is only those with means and leisure who are able to rejoice in the landscape as it appears in hotel brochures. Rabbit especially is an interesting character – her talent for mathematics, the way we see her gradually begin to heal after the death of baby Jasper – but the great hole at the centre of this book is the wealthy Arms family. Joe is a blank slate and a real pain, we barely get to know Eileen, Bill is well drawn but there are leaps in logic. CJ’s crimes themselves are boringly predictable and we never really get an ‘in’ as to why he went down that road or what he was like. There is some excellent writing about Joe in Hastings but the eventual denouement is too simplistic –Joe’s money solves everything, which feels like a cop-out. Also, the gun battle in the hotel room is just plain stupid. I kept wondering, above all, what inspired Robinson to write this novel because ultimately it felt like a hollow book and I much preferred his earlier mystery, Forgetting Zoe.

The Cry by Helen Fitzgerald is a great deal better as a novel than in its recent BBC screen adaptation. The TV series works by withholding crucial information for almost half its length. I’m not a fan of withholding as a narrative technique and it is to Fitzgerald’s credit that her original novel does not make use of it. As readers, we learn the brutal facts of this case within the first fifty pages. The suspense is generated – as it should be – through character and relationships: what will happen to whom when the truth becomes known. There’s nothing flashy or particularly evocative about Fitzgerald’s writing but she knows how to get inside the skin of a person and the situation in which she places her characters makes for compulsive reading. If it weren’t for the stupid ending – the too-convenient dispatch of the most odious character (not that they don’t deserve it, it’s just a cheap move) – The Cry would score highly with me as an original and thought-provoking thriller.

Some of the my absorbing and satisfying reading this year has come in the form of true crime – indeed I am constantly on the lookout for new or previously overlooked works at the high end of this category. Anyone interested in crime writing should be reading Helen Garner. I read This House of Grief and JoeCinque’s Consolation in close succession and found them dauntingly good, onso many levels– clarity of vision, self-analysis, factual detail, sentence structure, social comment, characterisation, the showing, the telling, sheer writerly beauty. I’m intending to read everything Garner has written. One’s heart breaks for Michelle McNamara, who devoted more than a decade to what can only be called a private detective’s quest to discover and unmask the true identity of the Golden State Killer. McNamara died before she was able to complete her book detailing these investigations, and less than three years before the killer was finally arrested. The book – I’ll Be Gone in the Dark – was posthumously completed by crime writer Paul Haynes, a journalist, Billy Jensen, and McNamara’s husband Patton Oswalt. We can feel grateful for their dedication and close attention and respect for what McNamara wanted and as a unique entry in the annals of true crime, I’ll Be Gone in the Dark is indispensable. We cannot ignore the fact though that McNamara’s tragically untimely death means the book is flawed. It is only really the sections McNamara completed that glow with intent and commitment, that feel fully realised. The rest read like bridging material, which of course and through no fault of anyone’s is exactly what they are.

The most satisfying books in crime as in any area of literature tend to be those that do not fit easily into any category, that confound expectations. Tony White’s The Fountain in the Forest contains some of the best police procedural writing I have encountered – gritty, dense with detail, obsessively forensic – and on the level of a detective story it is entirely satisfying. That it also works as an experimental novel of the OULIPO school, and as a work of political and social commentary gives it a denseness and what I can only call composure that few novels in any genre can hope to emulate. Juan Gabriel Vasquez’s The Shape of the Ruins is the very best kind of autofiction – the kind that is actually about something. It is also an important account and interpretation of historical events, an investigation of conspiracy and obsession, an immensely satisfying chunk of effortlessly beautiful writing (brought to non-Spanish speakers in Anne Maclean’s effortlessly beautiful and idiomatic translation) and – of course – a dark and disturbing murder mystery. Vasquez is one of the most interesting and important writers working. The narrator of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Pledge would have us believe that all detective fiction is a waste of time – before plunging us into a detective story we cannot help but consume in a single sitting. The Pledge is part of Pushkin Press’s Vertigo imprint, devoted entirely to crime fiction in translation, a goldmine of fascinating titles, many of them available in English for the first time. Leaving the best till last, Rupert Thomson’s Death of a Murderer might almost be described as an anti-crime novel. The action, if it can be called that, takes place over a single night,as a police officer is sent to guard the body of an unnamed murderer (it’s Myra Hindley) on the eve of her funeral. As he looks back to the time of the original crimes, strange truths and darker memories begin to be revealed. Thomson explores the lives most of us lead – ordinary tragedies illuminated by moments of danger and hubris and daring. Beautifully judged, humane, dignified,unusual, subtle, sad and uplifting, Death of a Murderer is quite simply a stunning book, perfectly understated and immaculately told. It also shines a necessary light on our love for detective fiction, on our own motives and ambitions for reading and for writing it.

Well, that was my year in crime fiction, a journey that has been informative, inspiring, compelling, sometimes frustrating, occasionally ludicrous, always fascinating. A journey I am intending to continue in 2019 as I seek out ever more challenging and weird examples of detective fiction as well as revisiting some old favourites. In the meantime, I aim to return here later this month for Part 2 of my End of the Year reading summary, in which I’ll talk about books that aren’t about murder, or at least not specifically, aswell as reading and writing plans for the year ahead.

You Were Never Really Here

March 21, 2018 / Nina

I was in Glasgow yesterday evening for an event that ran as part of the Aye, Write! literary festival and featured an interview with crime writer Nick Triplow about his recent (and excellent) biography of fellow crime writer Ted Lewis, followed by a screening of Mike Hodges’s Get Carter, the film that brought Lewis’s most famous creation to a worldwide audience. I enjoyed the event tremendously, not least for this rare opportunity to see Carter on the big screen. Michael Caine will always be Michael Caine, for good or ill, but the film’s extraordinary sense of place, its grimy textures, its evocation of a certain time remain an extraordinary achievement. Get Carter captures the seventies in a way its creators would not – could not – have been aware of at the time, the surest test of a piece of art that actually appears ageless.

I booked for this event some weeks ago, and when I realised I would also be able to fit in the matinee showing of Lynne Ramsey’s new film, You Were Never Really Here, the trip suddenly became doubly worthwhile. You Were Never Really Here is based on a 2016 novella of the same name by Jonathan Ames, a text that turned out to be short enough for me to read in its entirety during my journey to Glasgow. I was thus able to experience the movie literally within an hour of reading its source text, something I don’t think I’ve ever done before and that made seeing the film almost like a weird kind of flashback. Whether this makes for a good way of looking at and thinking about adaptation I couldn’t say, but it is certainly a powerful and discomfiting one.

The Ames novella tells the story of an ex-Marine named Joe. Beaten and abused as a boy by his violent father, Joe’s trauma is broadened and deepened by his experiences in the military. He thinks constantly of suicide, and it is only his loyalty to his eighty-year-old mother, who was equally abused by Joe’s father, that keeps him going. Joe now works as a hired ‘fixer’ with a special ability in retrieving kidnap victims from their abductors. Violence is Joe’s tool, and he is an expert in its deployment. Returning to New York after a bad experience in Cincinnati, Joe is given a new job by his handler, McCleary: a senator’s thirteen-year-old daughter, Lisa, has been kidnapped. After six months of inconclusive police investigations, Senator Votto has received an anonymous text, informing him that Lisa has been put to work in a brothel frequented by rich businessmen and politicians. Joe is to recapture Lisa and return her to her father. There will be a rich reward. There are also risks, however. Votto’s father was known to be in deep with the Mafia, and there is reason to suspect that Votto may have come under pressure to conduct his political affairs in a similar fashion…

You Were Never Really Here was an almost perfect reading experience for me. Transgressive, sometimes horribly violent but often surprising in its twists and turns, fastidious and economical in its use of language, this is a novella that chews up the rulebook on show not tell (any kind of successful rule-breaking in fiction is a pump-the-air moment for me) and streams through the consciousness in a rush of blazing streetlamps and concussive hammer thwacks. Joe is a broken man, most would argue a bad man, yet as a protagonist he refuses to be categorised in such reductive terms. As a piece of writing You Were Never Really Here is a gem, as a work of noir fiction it should be famous. If you’re not keen on physical violence on the page, I’d advise caution, but otherwise I’d recommend it wholeheartedly.

I love Lynne Ramsey’s films, and her adaptation of Ames’s novella is a great piece of work that has already won prizes and should transport anyone who sees it. For me though, almost certainly because I came to the film feeling an unusually close kinship with the original text, it became a demonstration in how often film fails to reproduce the peculiar and unique intensity of a reading experience, the particular and perhaps irreplaceable intimacy of the printed page. Lynne Ramsey’s sense of place – her film-maker’s understanding of the urban landscape – is sensational, with a darkly alluring streetscene that reminded me somewhat of Steve McQueen’s 2011 film Shame. I loved the film’s composed soundtrack and its use of incidental music. And yet in spite of some standout scenes – the death of the cop in Joe’s house (a certain eighties ballad will never be the same again), the ‘funeral’ at the lake – Joaquin Phoenix was never quite ‘my’ Joe. Perhaps he just talked too much. More importantly, I found myself mystified by some of Ramsey’s choices with regard to plot changes. In the novella, much of the horror lies in our discovery of Senator Votto’s obscene betrayal of his own daughter – which in its turn mirrors the way Joe was himself betrayed by his father’s abuse. By making Votto a victim, Ramsey has stripped the story of much of its urgency and narrative drive.

I sympathised with Ramsey’s ending – her desire to give Joe a second chance – and for this reason alone I would hesitate to say that we have lost something, exactly. It is more that we have been given something different, in its own way powerful but perhaps – perhaps – less memorable. Even the violence in Ramsey’s version, though we can see it right there on the screen in front of us, feels less impactful than what we are faced with on the page.

I am sure to watch this film again at some point, and when I do, freed from the immediate influence of the text, I will almost certainly admire it more. For the moment though I am still in the world of Ames’s novella, envious and rejoicing in the power of the writer to deliver something special that cannot be replicated.

The Last Policeman

February 7, 2018 / Nina

This year, the excellent people who organise the annual Bute Noir crime writing festival set a reading challenge for anyone who wants to join in: 30 crime books, 30 different categories. How many can you complete and which are your favourites? I’ve decided to give it a go, just for fun, and because I’m hoping it’ll lead me into areas of crime writing I’ve not explored before, or not explored for some time. I’m blogging some of my findings here as I go along. I’m also intending to write up the experience as a whole towards the end of the year.

The experiment is proving incredibly enjoyable and worthwhile so far. The category I’ve tackled most recently has been that of crime novel set in the future. I chose to read Ben H. Winters’s The Last Policeman firstly because I happened to have it already on my Kindle (it was going really cheap at one point, so I snapped it up) and secondly because I needed an antidote to the recent (bloody awful) BBC future-crime series Hard Sun, and a friend happened to mention that The Last Policeman utilised some of the same ideas but much better.

The novel takes place in the very near future, An asteroid is on a certain collision course with Earth. It will bring about a worldwide environmental catastrophe of extinction-level proportions. Society hovers on the brink of collapse. With basic infrastructure beginning to crumble, and a wave of suicides reaching epidemic proportions, the police have begun to turn their attention away from solving crimes and towards the more urgent business of enforcing order. In the city of Concord, New Hampshire, police patrolman Henry Palace has just realised the dream of a lifetime: he’s been made detective, early, and he intends to live that dream, asteroid or no asteroid. When the police are called to investigate a death at a local McDonald’s, Hank’s fellow officers are inclined to dismiss it as yet another ‘hanger’. Hank is not so sure. He believes Paul Zell has been murdered, and is determined to prove it.

This book surprised me in all sorts of ways, most of all in Winters’s skilled and original use of science fiction. If I was expecting anything at all, it was a rather clumsy, Armageddon-like action thriller. Instead, I was given a subtle, claustrophobic, believable pre-apocalypse that swapped deliberately ramped-up tension for genuine emotion, a slowly accumulating, all-pervasive dread that infects the reader’s system as the novel progresses. It infected this reader’s system, anyway – maybe it’s just Brexit.

But the true success of Winters’s approach lies in his ability to keep his science fiction at one remove. Palace’s obsessive temperament, his tendency towards isolation, his dogged sense of morality ensure that it is the murder investigation, and not the asteroid strike, that dominates the narrative. What we get is a detailed – detailed to a level that only Hank could provide – account of a crime in progress, a portrait of a town that Henry knows like the back of his hand. That Henry and the murdered man seem so alike is another piece of weirdness – and also fortunate in that it allows Henry privileged access to the mind of the victim. The plot is deftly worked and – unlike so many generic thriller plots – it does not degenerate into senseless melodrama towards the end.

The Last Policeman is a beautifully executed, intellectually satisfying police procedural. It is a novel of craft and assurance, in which a close-focus, personal account is played off against a world-changing political story arc to devastating effect. The writing – like the story itself – is understated and powerfully resonant. As science fiction. Winters’s novel worked better for me than anything I read for last year’s Sharke. As crime fiction, it is equally bold, introducing us to a detective we admire for his persistence rather than his brilliance. We understand his turn of mind – or maybe that’s just me…

In either case, I’ll definitely be reading the rest of the trilogy. The Last Policeman is a treat, albeit a bitter one. Recommended.

Guérillères

January 27, 2018 / Nina

“He has enslaved you by trickery, you who were great strong valiant. He has stolen your wisdom from you, he has closed your memory to what you were, he has made of you that which is not, which does not speak, which does not possess, which does not write. He has made you a vile and fallen creature. He has gagged abused and betrayed you by means of stratagems, he has stultified your understanding, he has woven around you a long list of defects that he declared essential to your well being, to your nature.”

(Monique Wittig, Les Guérillères 1969)

This week saw the launch of the Staunch book prize, an award for the best crime novel or thriller ‘in which no woman is beaten, stalked, sexually exploited, raped or murdered’. Its founder, the screenwriter Bridget Lawless, has stated that the idea for the prize was born out of her increasing discomfort with the level of violence – and routine violence at that – meted out to women in crime thrillers, be they on TV, in film or in novels. ‘[Books] are a source for so much material,’ Lawless says, ‘and if I can have a tiny bit of influence there, it will help’.

In the kingdom of crime fiction there are many mansions, and plenty worth exploring. Personally, I enjoy crime fiction because I enjoy mysteries, and the description of painstaking forensic work that is frequently involved in solving those mysteries. I enjoy the close focus on particular individuals, their histories and motivations. I enjoy the way such close focus can often be used to reveal wider truths about our society and ways of seeing. All of this and more is the stuff of crime fiction, which is why I read a lot of it. It would be wrong of me not to concede also that crime stories can be thrilling, that the adversarial nature of the set-up, that ancient and timeless conflict between protagonist and antagonist – however you may wish to cast them – provides a story scenario so compelling it is hard to resist, no matter how many times you might have encountered it before.

One subgenre of crime fiction I tend to avoid, however, is the serial killer thriller. There will be notable exceptions of course, but most serial killer thrillers are for me the novelistic equivalent of the slasher film in horror: formulaic and unutterably pointless. these films and books are not so much frightening as tedious, the product of dull imaginations and brain-wearying in the extreme. In recent years, I have started to find these kind of crime novels not just boring but actively offensive. As Lawless suggests in her rationale for the Staunch prize, women in serial killer thrillers are all too often simply cannon fodder, not so much characters as tropes, an excuse for the depiction of, well, more violence against women. Now, whenever I see a book blurb describe ‘a series of brutal murders, all young women’, I know that nine times out of ten the book in question will be a lazy book, a book whose hackneyed plot I have encountered too many times before, a book that will waste my time and test my patience.

Perhaps the worst aspect of such ‘thrillers’ is how often they try and masquerade as paeans to social justice: ‘Gee, we’ve got to catch this monster before he kills again!’

On the other hand, when confronted with something like the Staunch prize, I find myself instinctively reacting against any kind of prescription for what writers should or should not be choosing as their subject matter. For me, Lawless’s contention that ‘how we see women depicted and treated in fiction does spread out to the wider world and how women are treated there’ treads perilously close to Mary Whitehouse territory, the scares about what video nasties were supposedly doing to youth in the 1970s, the City of Westminster banning Cronenberg’s innocuous adaptation of Ballard’s Crash back in 1996.

Fiction is surely a reflection of what is going on in the real world, not the other way around, and the point with subject matter is not what that subject matter is, but how it is used. When asked her opinion of the Staunch prize, the crime writer Val McDermid maintained that it is ‘entirely possible to write about [violence against women] without being exploitative or gratuitous… My take on writing [about this] is that it’s my anger at that very thing that fires much of my work. As long as men commit appalling acts of misogyny and violence against women, I will write about it so that it does not go unnoticed’.

The announcement of the Staunch prize this week happened to coincide with my reading of Cara Hoffman’s astounding 2011 debut So Much Pretty. Someone recommended Hoffman to me a couple of years ago, and now I’ve finally got round to reading her, my main feeling is one of frustration that she’s not better known. Hoffman based So Much Pretty on a real-life abduction case that she investigated while working as a journalist. The resulting novel is one of the most compelling and best executed crime novels I have read in recent years. It is also one of the most chilling. So Much Pretty is essentially the story of three women – a journalist, a gifted high school student, a waitress in a local diner – and the way their histories interweave. The novel is set in upstate New York, in a small and supposedly close-knit farming community that hides bitter social division and personal tensions. As much as anything, So Much Pretty is a characterisation of that community. Hoffman tells her story through a series of interviews, essays and personal accounts that build a detailed and intimate portrait of small town life and politics, the often arbitrary nature of the most horrific crimes, the habits of denial that allow such crimes to be perpetrated, the way such denial continues to shape and to define the social milieu in which we exist.

Although Hoffman chooses to depict very little violence on the page, the violence we glimpse between the lines is devastating. That anyone could come away from this book without sensing Hoffman’s anger at the violence – daily, routinely – done to women would beggar belief. As a polemic, So Much Pretty is excoriating. As a book – as a way of telling a story – it is brilliant. As a crime novel it is important. This is a book that needed to be written, a book people – and I’ll go one further here and say men especially – need to read. I would also say we need more novels of this calibre, that show this level of skill and bravery in tackling their difficult subject matter, not fewer.

I am not ‘against’ the Staunch prize, quite the opposite. As a book prize, it’s not trying to ban anything, but to draw attention to something. If it can draw attention to books that find new ways of telling crime stories – new ways of seeing, as Lawless hopes – then the endeavour will have been worthwhile.

For the writer though, the only duty is to tell the story they are drawn to telling as well as they can. To think about the subject matter they have chosen, and before they take that leap, to perhaps ask themselves why exactly they have chosen it.

Experiments in crime

January 15, 2018 / Nina

There was a piece by Tim Lott in the Guardian recently in which he argued that in Britain at least ‘the form of storytelling and literary novel writing has become largely divorced’. How needlessly reductive can you get? His argument seemed to me like a variation on the often rehearsed and entirely fake battle between genre fiction and so-called litfic, a ridiculous distraction from the job of proper criticism.

Writing is a peculiar business, and one aspect of writing that is rarely acknowledged is the fact that most writers have little control over what kind of writer they are. You are pulled inexorably, often mercilessly, in a certain direction. The writer of ‘literary fiction’ is no more necessarily an Oxbridge snob than the writer of popular spy thrillers is a money-hoovering philistine. The most successful bestsellers are written because the author loves and understands the form and wants to communicate their excitement to readers. Those writers who find themselves more drawn to exploring language are no different from the painters who, in the 1890s, began exploring the possibilities of paint itself – the medium, not the message. The work of Monet and even Cezanne hardly seems revolutionary to us now – we have absorbed it into our iconography, our collective understanding of what representational art can reach for and achieve. Fifty years later Krasner and Pollock, Frankenthaler and Motherwell would stretch the point further, doing away with representation almost entirely. Similarly, the paintings that outraged a generation of critics now adorn our coffee mugs and supper trays. We get it.

Writers write what they can and what they must. To insist that writing – arguably the most malleable of art forms – should universally strive for the ideals upheld by work that was no longer new even a century ago is just so much bunkum, just as it is bunkum to suggest that British literary fiction has ‘lost the plot’. Lott rightly cites Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (American, you see) as one of those works that appeal equally across supposed literary and commercial divides. I would raise him Barbara Vine’s Asta’s Book, Catriona Ward’s Rawblood, Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl, Ali Smith’s The Accidental, Christopher Priest’s The Prestige, Zoe Heller’s Notes on a Scandal, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Graeme Macrae Burnet’s His Bloody Project. Some of these titles you will recognise from recent Booker shortlists. Many of them use elements of the thriller, detective fiction, horror fiction, science fiction to achieve their effects. All have propulsive plot lines. All reward a second, even a third reading.

Books, books, books. So much to read, so little time to waste arguing over what, exactly, writers should be writing. Lott would surely concede that the most interesting and rewarding works are to be found precisely at the margins of genre, where our expectations can be subverted and yet where – yes – we can continue enjoying the ideas and tropes of those stories and narrative archetypes that resonate with us most strongly. Yes, we are all still campfire dwellers. That does not mean we don’t enjoy it when the bard from another village wanders across to inform us we don’t know jack, that it’s really this story we should be listening to and so sit the hell down…

More interesting by far than Lott’s boringly prescriptive essay is Tony White’s choice of his Top Ten Experimental Thrillers, a piece that delves deep into why it is that we enjoy thrillers (I reckon Gertrude Stein for one would act pretty swiftly in calling out those who accuse crime writers of slumming it), as well as the ways in which detective fiction – perhaps the most enduringly popular of all literary genres – can still surprise us. Of course, any future ‘top ten’ list of postmodern crime fiction would have to include White’s own new novel, The Fountain in the Forest, which exemplifies his thesis pretty much perfectly, as well as killing Lott’s theory about British literary writing’s plotlessness stone dead.

By Lott’s reckoning, White’s interest in and practice of OULIPO techniques would place him firmly in the discredited ‘literary’ camp – read confusingly esoteric non-narrative with a snobbish insistence on obscurity – yet The Fountain in the Forest can be read with all the pleasure you might expect from a knotty police procedural, a knowledgeably detailed, intriguing and compelling police procedural at that. The story drives ever forward, even when it takes you backwards in time to take a look at the roots of the crime in question. Even when it flip-flops between two distinct time-streams and character identities within the space of a single sentence, the sense throughout is of a steady and satisfying accretion of significant information, i.e clues – exactly what you’d hope for from any good thriller.

The OULIPO stuff – elaborated upon in detail by White in his Afterword – is as significant to the narrative as you want to make it. You could read the novel with no knowledge of OULIPO and enjoy it just as well. Yet for those who feel like delving deeper, an examination of White’s methods and motives will reveal new layers, extra nuances and a background atmosphere that lends the novel an added eeriness and potency.

Anyone who enjoyed Keith Ridgway’s Hawthorn & Child or Nicholas Royle’s First Novel will love this book. Anyone who is into Ian Rankin or Denise Mina will love it, too.

For me, The Fountain in the Forest has been made especially enjoyable through a web of strange coincidences that seem none the less prescient for that: my own concerns over the gentrification of London, obscure parts of Exeter that I happen to know well, a string of places in the south of France that mark significant childhood memories, even salt-glazed ceramics – it’s all stuff from my own life, stuff I recognise and might write about. To find it turning up randomly and all together in someone else’s novel is a delightful surprise. And weird.

Above all, there is the joy inherent in a book well made: language expertly deployed, place wonderfully evoked, ideas, characters, memories, theories, political subtext brought vibrantly to life, a good story well told. The Fountain in the Forest would be a worthy contender for the CWA Gold Dagger. It is equally the kind of book that might win the Goldsmiths Prize. Read, and enjoy.

Hardy of the Highlands

August 3, 2016 / Nina

Crime blog: His Bloody Project by Graeme Macrae Burnet

Anyone who’s read a Hardy novel will know how his stories pan out: a fundamentally decent human being makes a mistake. This error might be rooted in a secret past, it might be an action forced upon them by adverse circumstance. Whatever it is, it snowballs. Far from being allowed to forget their youthful transgressions, our unfortunate protagonist sees their life sliding further and further beyond their control, resulting finally in a tragic denouement which, for Hardy fans, is all part of the painful pleasure of reading him. We know, almost from the first page, that things will not end well. What draws us on is Hardy’s evident sympathy for his characters, his passionate involvement in the human condition. He’s a good plotter, too – a characteristic of his fiction that isn’t mentioned enough.

And it was Thomas Hardy that kept coming to mind as I read Graeme Macrae Burnet’s Booker-longlisted novel His Bloody Project. Hardy’s first extant novel, Under the Greenwood Tree, was published in 1872, just a couple of years after the action of Macrae’s novel ostensibly takes place, but it’s not the books’ historical cousinage that draws the comparison so much as the doomed nature of things.

Macrae presents his narrative as a series of documents pertaining to a crime carried out in the Highland settlement of Culduie. The bulk of the text consists of a testament, written from prison by seventeen-year-old Roderick Macrae, charged with the murder of Lachlan ‘Broad’ Mackenzie, the town constable, along with two other members of his family. Roddy does not deny his crimes – indeed, he turns himself in almost as soon as the butchery is over – but he has agreed, at his advocate’s suggestion, to put his case in writing: how did he come to commit these murders, and why?

Over the course of some hundred and fifty pages, Roddy Macrae tells the story of how his family fell deeper into debt and near destitution, small misunderstandings leading to grievous misfortune, all presided over by the hulking figure of Lachlan Broad, a man who seems bent on the destruction of the Macrae clan, and all for reasons unknown. What else is Roddy to do to save his father and siblings? What else can he do? As in all of Hardy’s great novels, the outcome seems inevitable, inexorable. But where Hardy chooses to tie up his narratives pretty firmly, securing his loose ends in traditional nineteenth century fashion, Macrae Burnet seats us, as readers, on the bench alongside the jury at Roddy’s trial. Just how accurate, how truthful, is the murderer’s testimony? The end of Roddy’s story is plain to see, yet the impulse that brought him to that end is not so certain.

Nature, or nurture? Choice, or circumstance? Was Roddy mad, or simply bad, and dangerous to know?

His Bloody Project is a tightly worked novel, beautifully crafted and compulsively readable. The language – understated, idiomatic, stark and elegant – is one-hundred percent fit for purpose. As well as the mystery surrounding the murders, the novel also has much to say about the social inequalities and class divides that characterised life in the Highlands at the time, many of them stemming directly from the Highland Clearances. The very real poverty and hardship sustained by ordinary crofters and working people is portrayed in a forthright, unsentimental manner that imparts a wealth of information without ever becoming overtly didactic, revealing great skill on the part of the author in and of itself.

All that being said, I have to admit to not fully understanding the novel’s selection for the Booker longlist. When I compare it with Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, for example, shortlisted for the Booker in 1996 and with a narrative roughly equatable with His Bloody Project, I would be forced to conclude that in terms of its depth, breadth and stylistic innovation, Alias Grace far outdoes His Bloody Project in terms of its reach and literary ambition. Whilst Macrae Burnet does provide us with a measure of dramatic irony, contemporary metafictionality and a fascinatingly unreliable narrator, I would ideally have liked to see all these aspects writ larger, deeper. Whilst wishing Macrae Burnet all the luck in the world – it’s fantastic to see a relatively new author published by a Scottish independent press making his mark in this way – I would have liked His Bloody Project to be bolder and more out there in its commitment to postmodernity.

Saying these things makes me feel somewhat churlish, however, because they are somehow beside the point. What gets on any award long- or shortlist is down to the judges, and should not take away from the fact that what Macrae Burnet has produced here is a good novel, sound in wind and limb, a shifting-sands kind of narrative that is never quite what you think it is. For anyone interested in crime writing, in Scottish writing, in a damn fine story, I would recommend His Bloody Project unreservedly.

Crime blog #11

November 2, 2015 / Nina

Carthage by Joyce Carol Oates

To Carthage then I came

Burning burning burning burning

O Lord Thou pluckest me out

O Lord Thou pluckest

burning

(T. S. Eliot The Waste Land)

It still amazes me, how critics still seem not to ‘get’ Joyce Carol Oates, how often her prodigious talent is spoken of dismissively, in belittling terms – ‘oh, Joyce Carol Oates, there’s just so much of it!’ – as if her very prodigiousness, the prolific expression of her talent could be a reason to reject it as something freakish and therefore unworthy in some way.

‘She writes so much – is any of it any good?’

I’ve heard this said, seen it written. It often crosses my mind, and seems increasingly clear to me, that were Joyce Carol Oates a man her position as a ‘great American novelist’ would be assured. The broadsheets and the book blogs would all have been arguing over Carthage this summer instead of Purity. I wish they were. I wish they would. I think Oates is one of the greatest writers currently working, and I think that all the more because her books are not perfect. To me, each new novel (and I’ve probably read about half her output) feels like the next chapter, the next essay in an ongoing experiment, an ongoing project to discover the possibilities of the modern novel.

Some of these chapters are ragged, some are too long, some are just astounding. All are meant, involved, and acutely intelligent, the most complete expression of her intent the writer could manage at the time. All are worth reading, and all will stay with you, a quality which, surely, is one of the defining factors of great literature.

Fans of speculative fiction and horror in particular will be familiar with Oates’s interest in the gothic. Her most recent essay in the horror genre, 2013’s The Accursed, was a masterpiece of ambition and reach, spanning an American century, examining the guilt and tarnish at the heart of American privilege. I’ve written about the ‘Lovecraft chapter’ in The Accursed before, and it remains a shining memory. I don’t think I’ve yet mentioned the book’s sharp and canny mirroring of a perhaps-best-forgotten yet nonetheless fascinating horror novel of the 1970s, John Farris’s All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By, turning the embarrassingly misused tropes of that novel against each other, like wild dogs.

But Oates is just as interested in crime fiction as she is in horror, and it’s precisely novels like Carthage – ambiguous, labyrinthine, incautious, imprecise – that I’m forever bemoaning the scarcity of in the genre.

Some of those who care to examine Carthage as a work of crime fiction might be tempted to define it as one of those (always intriguing) works – Patricia Highsmith made a speciality of them – which pose as crime fiction but lack its defining element: that is, a crime. This is one way of looking at the book, but I would counter that Carthage is a story about a murder – just not the murder that is foregrounded.

The crime is fully described. A person is arrested and imprisoned. These two events are not connected in the way that they should be.

Carthage tells the story of Cressida Mayfield, a precocious and alienated nineteen-year-old who goes missing from her home in Carthage, upstate New York. We learn of the desperate search for this lost young woman, of the violence that appears to have precipitated her disappearance, the parents, the sister, the suspect (who happens to have been engaged to the sister), the half-truths and evasions, the blank spaces in memory and chronology that form the core material of such addictive mysteries. Fans of Oates will instantly be catapulted back to her earlier examination of this subject – the devastating impact of violent crime upon a previously stable and contented household – in her 1996 masterpiece We Were the Mulvaneys.

This first section of the novel is then cut off in mid-stream, with no resolution in sight. We tun the page and the jolt of unexpected revelation is physically palpable. What follows is strange, and much less easy to define: hundreds of pages of back-and-forth story. Gradually we learn everything, and perhaps more than we felt we needed to know, about Cressida Mayfield and what happened to her. The last people to find out what we have come to accept as the facts of the case are those most directly affected: those whose lives these facts have ripped apart.

I loved this book, even when I wasn’t loving it, even when I was wishing Oates would get to – or rather get back to – the point. I loved it because it is the kind of text that reminds readers that literature can aspire to be more than simply a pastime, an entertainment. That it should ask questions to which the answers are not always knowable or uncontested. That it should present itself in forms that can appear unfinished, as if the writer were still working on the manuscript up until the point where it needed to be delivered, still enmeshed in the world of those characters and the moral and psychological problems they represent.

Texts like these – where the writer’s engagement with the subject remains visible to the reader – I find to be amongst the most rewarding and significant.

I also found it odd, reading Carthage. There’s some stuff in it that overlaps, quite a bit, with what I’ve been writing myself these past eighteen months. I’ll never be Oates, of course, and the backgrounds of our work – American, British – are so very different. But I can’t help but feel that pulse of an interest simultaneously shared, a synchronicity that is disconcerting as much as it is satisfying.

Mainly though, I’m just left wanting to read more Oates.

Crime blog #10

October 29, 2015 / Nina

The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson

In lots of books I read, the writer seems to go haywire every time he reaches a high point. He’ll start leaving out punctuation and running his words together and babble about stars flashing and sinking into a deep dreamless sea. And you can’t figure out whether the hero’s laying his girl or a cornerstone. I guess that kind of crap is supposed to be pretty deep stuff – a lot of the book reviewers eat it up, I notice. But the way I see it is, the writer is just too goddam lazy to do his job. And I’m not lazy, whatever else I am. I’ll tell you everything. (TKIM p161)

And tell you he does. Thompson’s relentless first person perspective forces us into a deadly proximity with his ‘hero’, Lou Ford, a small-town deputy sheriff with justice – and its dispensation – very much on his mind.

If Lou sees himself as lawgiver, the man he has cast as recipient is Chester Conway, local bigshot and all-purpose asshole, a man who, Ford informs us, is an each-man-for-himself kind of guy and no matter the cost:

Conway had been the big man in town before the oil boom. He’d always been able to deal with others on his own terms. He’d gone without opposition for so many years that, by this time, he hardly knew it when he saw it. I believe I could have cussed him out in church and he wouldn’t have turned a hair. He’d just have figured his ears were playing tricks on him.

It had never been hard for me to believe he’d arranged [my brother’s] murder. The fact that he did it would automatically make it all right. (TKIM pp 33-4)

The time has come for a reckoning, and Lou has a plan. It goes wrong almost from the start, and Lou finds himself having to take ever more brutal steps to cover his tracks. By the time we reach the end, Central City’s population statistics will need to be adjusted, and Lou? Well, he’s not one for easy apologies, either:

Just because I’d been around when a few people got killed. Just because I happened to be around… (TKIM p175)

This novel’s reputation is already assured, and not without reason. It’s tautly written, smart, tense, economical as they come and with moments of genuine horror. Thompson’s language showcases the very best of the pulp/noir tradition. You won’t find any extraneous detail here, no dwelling on weather or landscape or family history. But there’s real poetry in these pages, an instinctive feel for the rhythms of speech and thought that would put many more verbose writers in the shade. Thompson’s talent – and Ford’s, I guess – is to tell it how it is, and with no words wasted.

Nor is Lou Ford any kind of ordinary psycho. He’s an intelligent, canny, thinking man, a man who reads and observes and understands human motivations and behaviour on an intellectual as well as a gut level. It ain’t his fault he’s got the sickness now, is it? If I have any criticism at all of The Killer Inside Me, it’s that Ford’s true nature is revealed too early. His murderous assault on Joyce Lakeland is so appalling, so totally beyond the pale, that it’s impossible – at least for this reader – to ever feel the empathy for him that Thompson is clearly tempting us towards. I can see Thompson’s reasoning – he doesn’t want to trick us, he wants us to know that Lou is a killer and still go along for the ride, and it’s very nicely done – but I think for me the book might have worked even better if he’d held off just a little longer.

Category: crime blog (Page 3 of 5)

Thriller

On the road with a feeling for snow

2018 Reading Roundup: Part 1

You Were Never Really Here

The Last Policeman

Guérillères

Experiments in crime

Hardy of the Highlands

Crime blog #11

Crime blog #10

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