Turning to crime
After my chat with Merwyn Sloman at the Book Lounge last Friday a woman asked me why I’d turned to writing crime fiction? It’s becoming a bit of a buzzy question these days and my standard answer that I’d done with the heavy stuff and now wanted to write something different, didn’t seem to cut it for her, but there you go.
What intrigues me about this issue is the timing. Surely it’s the sort of question that’s asked at the first sign of what some see as an aberration, ie the publication of Out to Score. Or at least at the second indication (the publication of Payback) that I’d stepped from the straight and narrow. Or do people only take you seriously after the third book? Perhaps that’s not a question one should think on too deeply.
And then should readers be taking genre fiction seriously at all? Well, in my more serious moments I like to think of crime fiction (some, certainly not all, crime fiction) as satire. An opportunity to take potshots at the maniacs running government and commerce. Which brings me back to James Ellroy’s point – or rather the point of his Underworld USA Trilogy – that the sexy topic of crime fiction now concerns crimes of the state. See my Monday blog.
And now two points of view to further muddy the waters.
(1) This from Ian Rankin speaking to the German broadcaster Deutsche Welle and quoted in The Independent: ‘The best crime fiction today is talking about the same things big literary novels are talking about. They are talking about moral questions, taking ordinary people and putting them in extraordinary situations … some of the best crime fiction is literature. And some of the best literature is crime fiction.’
And (2) from John Skotness in the Book Chat columns on a statement by Rankin that ‘crime writers must also pay attention to the victims in all these stories, they can’t just be card-board cut-outs from central casting.’ ‘MUST? We know that for the victim there is never true justice. Of course good writers deal in more than cardboard cut outs and explore social conscience, that’s what makes them stand out; but for heaven’s sake how depressing does Ian Rankin want an aeroplane flight to be? How painful a couple of hours out from the pleasure of domestic bliss? Just how conscientising must the last half hour before I sleep really become? The only “must” in my humble view in the crime writing genre is it’s an enthralling read with clever unexpected twists and turns.’
Ah, the conundrums of this trivial genre.
