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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
What's the line between desiring to thrill the reader and fetishizing or exploiting the violence?
You have to use your own judgment. That's a tough line to walk. For me, what always holds me in check is that I try always to think about victims. The victims in my books are not just faceless ciphers who are there to be killed. They have, if you like, a life outside their death. That's what I've always tried to keep in mind. And that's what my investigators always hold in their heads. It's not just a piece of meat. This is somebody who had life, who had loves, who had an existence, whose death sends ripples out that touch other people's lives.
If you hold that in your head, it's a way of keeping yourself from going onto the wrong side of the line. If you keep a concern with victims at the front of your head, then you don't tip over into that area of the evil genius becoming the hero. And that's what's always contained me. But you do, at the end, have to use your own judgment. I hope that I stay on the right side of the line. One of the reasons I started writing these books is a disgust I felt at this very thing, the way that serial killing was almost turned into a kind of pornography. I would far rather disgust my readers than have them excited by that. I'm not in the business of cheap thrills. Very expensive thrills, yeah. [Laughs.] The reader has to pay for those thrills.
That's one of things you're parodying in "Killing the Shadows."
Yeah, people die because they write badly. [Laughs.] I think that's entirely reasonable, don't you?
Is it hard to shut out the violence of your material sometimes?
I've never had any difficulty closing down at the end of the day. When you're writing it, you're always thinking about it as a piece of prose. Does this sentence work? Does this paragraph flow? Should I end the chapter here? You're always being mediated by the technique. That stands between you and the text. The reader has a much different relationship with it, more intense. If I've done my job properly, it's right there in the reader's face. It's other people's work that gives me nightmares, not my own. When I read Denise Mina's "Resolution," my partner was shaking me at 4 o'clock in the morning because I was fast asleep shouting at the top of my voice, having some sort of nightmare. Which I don't very often experience, but that did it for me. My nightmares don't come from my own imagination but from other people's. Because I have no control over that.
In a lot of crime fiction the detectives just seem lost in their emotional problems and the reader feels overwhelmed by the drabness and hopelessness of it all. Your characters, their problems notwithstanding, actually seem to enjoy their lives.
I wanted to reflect something a little different. I got very tired in the early '90s, late '80s with the succession of dysfunctional detectives. You think, these people can't even organize their laundry. Why on earth would I expect them to be able to solve a crime?
I have to say my own experience of the world isn't like this. The people I know who are really good at what they do tend to have lives that, in one way or another, are relatively comfortable. They live somewhere that has their mark; they come home to something. It may not be the person they love or their kids or whatever, but they come home to something that is not, you know, the grotty apartment with three weeks of pizza boxes on the floor. My characters have something to lose. They have something to drive them forward. You look at some of these [other] heroes and you think, why would you bother to do this stuff? Because you've got nothing invested in this except some quixotic notion of honor. I prefer to have characters who have more of an investment in the world they live in.
What writers were important to you and who do you read among your colleagues?
I think it would go back to who set me on the track to begin with, and obviously Paretsky, whom I mentioned. Ruth Rendell was a big influence on me, partly because she was one of the earliest crime writers who could write different styles and tones of book and get away with it, take your audience with you and still get published.
Robert Louis Stevenson was a huge influence on me in my childhood years. I can't remember the number of times I've read "Treasure Island" and "Kidnapped," and later on "Jekyll and Hyde." I just loved the way he told stories, and I loved the darkness in his books. Which you didn't get much of in children's books at that time. The Scots are very good at darkness. We're very good at dark nights of the soul, but we're also very good at black humor. And you find aplenty in Stevenson. Writers I enjoy now: Denise Mina, Laurie King, Ian Rankin, James Lee Burke, Michael Connolly. Two first novels I enjoyed very much this year: a book called "The Waterclock," by Jim Kelly, and also "The Cutting Room," by Louise Welsh. There's a lot of good writing going on in contemporary crime fiction. When we finish this interview, I'll think of five other people I should mention.
Last question: Why are Scottish crime writers so tough?
[Affecting a brogue.] Y'ever been to Scotland by th' way?
I think it comes down to what Hugh MacDiarmid defined as the Caledonian antisynergy, the pull of two polar opposites in the same people. We're famously hospitable but we're also famously xenophobic. We have this sort of dark Calvinist past and it's still in place in the present. We also have this wonderful black sense of humor and we love to party. We've produced some of the greatest thinkers of the Enlightenment, and also some of the worst slag-faced bigots in the history of human thought. So there's always the dark pool of these opposites within us that produces a sort of dramatic tension.
And I think the reason why Scottish crime fiction has emerged so much in recent years is that for the first time in 300 years we've been forced to operate as a nation again. We have a parliament. We have to think of how we define ourselves. For 300 years we've been defining ourselves as "We hate the English and we're not them." Now we have to start thinking more positively of our own case. What does that make us? Who we are? And this happened at a time when British crime fiction started to be written with a much wider social perspective. We are the dark knight of the soul.
