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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
In contemporary British crime fiction the heroes are often cops, and while they may have to fight dunderheads in their own ranks, in America the heroes still tend to be private eyes, renegades. Obviously there are exceptions on both sides. But does that imply that the British have greater faith in their institutions?
I don't know if it's so much that we've got greater faith in our institutions as that the private eye in the U.K. has always had a slightly different feel than in the U.S. In the U.S. the private eye has always had a kind of status, conferred by the fact that they have to be licensed, they have to qualify in certain respects to do their job. In the U.K. people have a much lower opinion of private eyes because anyone can be a P.I. You can get out of jail one day and set up your slate saying "I'm a private eye" the next day. You can be a convicted felon, you can be a con artist, and you can set yourself up as a private investigator. So I think we went from the amateur sleuths, which became increasingly difficult to sustain, to the idea that the people who actually solve crimes are the cops and the associated agencies, and the private eye doesn't really figure in our mythology to the same extent.
Do you feel that crime writers are filling a void that literary fiction has left behind?
Yes, I think that's very much the case. There's been two things with literary fiction, I think. Literary fiction in the U.K. became very concerned with literary theory, critical theory, to the extent that the notion of narrative almost became a dirty word. That's slowly started to change because the simple economics of the marketplace dictate that readers actually want to read things that have a beginning, a middle and an end. I think we're hard-wired for narrative. I've been saying this until I'm blue in the face for the last 10 years. And interestingly enough there was an article recently in the Observer when the Booker short list came out saying precisely this, and I felt I'd been vindicated.
But it seems to me that although literary fiction is returning to the notion of narrative, [literary fiction writers] are still not engaging with the society that we're living in. There's a big boom in historical fiction, whether it's recent history or further back in time. I mean Ian McEwan's novel "Atonement" is essentially an historical novel. It doesn't engage with the present day. And I think that if you look at the successful books in literary fiction, this is what you find. So the crime novel started to pick up the baton in the '90s. We were the ones writing about the reality of the world we lived in.
One of the things that's very strong in British crime fiction, in particular Scottish crime fiction, is the notion that the people who break the law are not the only criminals. Social institutions, the way we live, the structures we set up in our society, are often equally morally reprehensible. And I think a lot of British crime fiction deals with this notion that there's more than one way to be criminal.
As a genre writer, do you feel like you're fighting for respect?
I think most of us have given up the fight for respectability some time ago. I think we are content to be read, and we're content to carry on trying to write the best books we can. It's frustrating to see the way that we're not regarded as being respectable. And I usually put this down to ignorance, people who don't know better because they haven't read anything since Agatha Christie. I remember the year that "A Place of Execution" came out in the U.K. the chair of the Booker judges was interviewed after the awards ceremony, and he was saying it had been a particularly strong year, it had been a hard choice, there had been a lot of contenders for the short list and the long list, including Val McDermid's "A Place of Execution," but of course that was a genre novel.
You just say: The readers like the books; that's the important thing. And I know that as a writer I'm getting better, that I'm developing, that I'm a lot better writer than I was five years ago, two years ago, and every book is a process of trying to be better.
In his book "On Writing," Stephen King said nobody ever asks genre writers about the language. They ask about the mechanics of plotting, but not about the care you take with the language.
Yeah.
That's been your experience, I take it?
Yeah. I remember a few years ago at an arts festival, Ian Rankin and I were doing a panel with, as sometimes happens, the literary novelist who has attempted to dress himself in the clothing of the genre and purported to have subverted the genre. Which actually is another way of saying, writing a badly plotted crime novel. The moderator asked Ian about writing a police officer and how was that, and how did he do his research. He asked me what was so interesting about writing about psychological profiling.
And then he turned to the other writer and said, "Of course, you're concerned with style and characterization." Ian and I, our jaws just dropped. I sat and took this for about 20 minutes and I finally just blew. I couldn't take any more of this insulting patronizing. I just went off, saying anyone who didn't think that there was interesting experimental writing being done in the crime genre, and good writing being done in the crime genre, was displaying nothing more than the depth of their ignorance. I just went off on a roll and ranted for five minutes. I stopped, thinking there was going to be this deathly silence, I'm going to be drummed out of the festival. And the next thing I knew, the audience were stamping their feet and cheering. Go figure. They knew that they were reading good stuff.
We seem to be at a stage where we're fetishizing the serial killer, with writers and filmmakers trying to outdo themselves with the most outrageous modus operandi they can come up with and the most gruesome murders. Sometimes there's a barely disguised thrill in that writing. I don't feel that in the Tony Hill trilogy or in "Killing the Shadows" -- though there are things in your books that have made me blanch.
That's a good thing, because if it didn't, you should probably seek professional help.
