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| Is her name Honey Chandler? Well, she'd better watch out! |
Before I start I want to talk a bit about the people who
read crime novels and thrillers by comparing them to people who read so-called
‘literary’ fiction. I’ve posted comments on Twitter about my recent readings
and have got back a fair few comments along the lines of “Yeah, Fossum’s great.
Just read her latest.” It’s welcome and refreshing. People who read literary
fiction tend to be more critical, so you’d get something more like “Yes,
Banville is good but I prefer Tsiolkas.” You can’t seem to win, whereas with
readers of genre novels it’s just positive all the way. I don’t know which is
better, but as an habitual reader of literary fiction this detail must serve as
a sort of apology to genre readers who may take exception to what I have to
say.
In the same vein, I object to negative epithets being aimed
at genre fiction. I do not believe that it’s “trash” or “rubbish”, as I’ve
heard people say. Writing a good novel of any type requires discipline,
practice and imaginative powers beyond what I myself would be able to command.
As I mention in the post linked to above, the novel itself copped a lot of
flack in the early days, back in the 18th century when it was
starting to become popular. All sort of outrageous things were flung at the
novel, that it was disordering the impressionable minds of young women, that it
was this, that it was that. It’s garbage, just like it’s garbage to say that
“genre is crap”. It’s not. But it’s not for everyone.
So in that spirit, perhaps what I have now to say can be
taken in the guise of constructive criticism aimed at perhaps somewhere down
the line improving the way genre fiction functions. My earlier post said something
about why genre fiction is worthwhile reading. Note also that the following
review contains spoilers and I’ve highlighted the names of the books so they’re
easy to spot.
To start with I recall genre-writer John Birmingham
reversing the tables and having
a red-hot go at literary fiction, labelling it dull and unconcerned with
anything outside the lounge room. And I think that’s true to a degree. There
have been exceptions, of course, such as Tolstoy, who wrote War and Peace
(1869). Another Russian writer, Andre Bely, wrote about an assassination in St
Petersberg (1913). But the realm of high drama that crime novels and thrillers
occupy has been neglected by writers of ‘serious’ novels.
Now I want to get serious and talk about the way that genre
novels deploy cliché to maximise drama. I think they do it because the action
crowds out all other considerations. There is no room made to fashion out a
more nuanced set of characters.
It has been said that all writing is aimed at destroying
cliché, but I think that genre novels use it to tell the reader what to value.
Character development is something that novels are good at. Good novels give
you a clear picture about the protagonist and about ancillary characters that
come to interact with him or her. Genre novels, on the other hand, often resort
to cliché so that the reader knows that the person being talked about is to be
hated, or valued. If the person is to be valued you know that, probably at some
point down the line, that person is going to get into trouble that they’ll have
to be saved from. Characters that are signalled for hatred will probably shame
themselves or turn against the protagonist.
Matthew Reilly, an Australian author, hardly bothers in Area
7 (2001) even though he talks in the afterword to the novel about remarks he
has received on this issue. His answer to those critics is, “I want to write
about action and thrills and adventure, and if developing characters slows down
the action, then developing characters gets the chop!” Which it clearly does.
Luckily there’s enough action to occupy the reader’s complete attention. The
hero gets the girl in the end but it’s thin gruel compared to what readers of
literary fiction are accustomed to.
A less extreme example is Allan Folsom’s The Hadrian
Memorandum (2009). It’s a great story that takes the reader from Equatorial
Guinea (in Africa) to Paris, then Berlin, and then finally to Portugal. The
final scenes take place back at the home of Nicholas Marten, the hero. Complex
and dark, the story centres around the pursuit of Marten and Anne Tidrow, a
woman Marten meets in Equatorial Guinea where she works for an oil exploration
company. They are pursued by a powerful and relentless character named Conor
White. White is an employee of a security company that has been engaged by the
oil company to protect its interests in Africa. Marten and Tidrow team up in a
manner of speaking, in Berlin, because Tidrow wants to make sure that the
secrets Marten possesses are not revealed to the civilian authorities. As the
story progresses a relationship develops between Tidrow and Marten.
Because the two are on the run they tend to spend a lot of
time together, so their relationship has to work and has to be integrated with
the bigger pursuit story. But what happens in these safe houses and hotel rooms
is confusing. From scene to scene the relationship alters in ways that are not logical
and even confusing. One day Tidrow is masterful and commanding and the next day
she is meek and submissive. And Marten’s character is jerked about in the same
way. A consistent picture does not emerge. The reason for this is that the
bigger pursuit story occupies all of the author’s attention and the
relationship between these two key characters ends up serving the demands of
the pursuit story, and nothing else. The delineation of the main characters
suffers as a result of this single-minded focus.
The sex suffers, too, in The Concrete Blonde (1994), one of
the Harry Bosch novels by Michael Connelly. Romantic interest Sylvia Moore gets
it on with Harry on occasion but the sparks don’t fly, even though they do it
on the rug in front of the fire at least once. There’s hot kisses on necks and
glasses of wine but it’s a bit limp. Sylvia becomes part of the bigger story –
the hunt for the copycat serial killer – when Harry perceives a threat to her.
Poor Sylvia threatens to call it quits with Harry as a result, not liking it
when she starts to get involved in one of his cases. But you don’t really care
what she does. When a teenage student of Sylvia’s is shot in a drive-by
shooting Connelly again serves up the house drama, complete with hot tears, but
only Sylvia gives a damn. We’re too busy worrying about the killer. In fact, so
is Connelly.
The author sets up a potential love interest in the form of
lawyer Honey Chandler, but the heat Harry strikes up during conversations with
poor doomed Honey never kindles into flame and in the end she is tortured and
killed by the serial killer. Chandler is the lawyer for the plaintiff in a
court case Harry is fighting and there are plenty of clues from Connelly that
she is a good egg, and deserves our respect. It gets her death with a mean set
of bite marks and numerous cigarette burns; it doesn’t pay to have Connelly
like you too much unless you’re Harry Bosch.
Fossom was the exception to the rule. I’ve already mentioned
her 2007 novel Black Seconds in this post. What Fossum does that delights
readers is to reduce the story’s scale. The novel contains a single death, and
it’s not a murder although everyone thinks it might be for most of the book.
The main character is the cop, Inspector Sejer. There’s also his sidekick,
Jakob Skarre. Sejer is intense but also very circumspect in his words and
actions; this is not a hard-boiled world of corruption and vice.
The novel’s prime focus is to find who killed a small girl,
Ida Joner, who went out on her bicycle to shop in town one day and never
returned. Ida’s mother, Helga, is devastated by her daughter’s absence and it’s
Helga’s pain that insinuates itself into all parts of the narrative. Because
her grief is well-realised and because it is so important to how we view the
case there is no room for rough drama. It’s rough enough when Ida’s cousin
Tomme keeps up his involvement with an unattractive local fellow named Willy. Willy
helps Tomme when Tomme’s new car is damaged in a traffic accident. It gets a
lot worse when Tomme and Willy go to Denmark by boat from Norway, where the
story is set, to do some sort of unsavoury business deal.
Tomme turns out to have been responsible for Ida’s death –
he hit her with his car while driving on the road – but his
non-communicativeness almost gives him away. Here’s the flaw in Fossum’s
creation. Tomme’s presence is so weird that it does give him away toward the
end of the book. And on top of this structural weakness Fossum uses a clumsy
device – a ticking sound that only Tomme can hear, and that we hear with him –
which is somehow linked to his feeling of guilt. The sound kicks in when he is
being asked questions. It’s reasonably effective but it’s a device as old as
Edgar Allen Poe’s The Tel-Tale Heart (1843) and not a very subtle one.
But at least Fossum eschews the rapid action, busy cast, and
spicy drama that other crime novelists enjoy using, and this is the reason why
she has caught the market’s attention. Like Jane Austen compared to the lesser novelists
who preceded her and who were her contemporaries, Fossum turns down the
dramatic volume control and focuses with greater precision on a smaller set of
characters than do other novelists within the genre. She gives herself time and
space to pay attention to the small details that make good novels so great to
read. She eschews cliché and she’s able to do it because the plot does not
occupy all the available space inside the novel. She doesn’t tell us who to
like and who to hate, but gives us the license to make up our own minds. This
is a boon for the reader.
Verisimilitude is something that novels pioneered – it’s
Coleridge’s “suspension of disbelief” – and it’s not something to be sniffed at.
It’s Austen’s “little piece of ivory” all over again and, with apologies to
fans of the other writers I’ve mentioned, it works.
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