from his or her own consciousness into that of other people in what can often be very different cultures and circumstances. In doing so it broadens our appreciation of human nature and the world around us. At some point in history, however, genre fiction became separated from literary or mainstream fiction, which are apparently more ‘serious’ in their approaches and ambitions. Yet it can be argued that early pulp fiction, such as that published in cheap popular magazines by the likes of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, is the child of the serials and stories written by Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle and others; stories which in their day were exemplars of mass entertainment, even sensationalist, like modern-day TV soaps, but are now regarded as literature. Dickens in his own day was not regarded as a particularly worthy writer; rather, he was a forerunner of the modern airport bestseller. This gives me hope that many of today’s crime and thriller writers will in the future come to be regarded as powerful moralists and stylists as well as tellers of fascinating tales.
If we examine the canon of Western literature, especially the novel, we find that the main ingredients of crime fiction – violence, sudden reversals, mystery, deception, moral dilemmas and so on – can be found everywhere, from the Greek epics to contemporary Booker Prize winners. Ask yourself what keeps you reading a particular novel. It is the need to know what happens next. Novels need to pose questions and problems which will be resolved only if the reader keeps reading. If an author makes us curious, we will keep turning the pages. In a sense therefore all readers are detectives, and the crime novel merely codifies this essential aspect of the pleasure of reading.
The great crime writer and critic Julian Symons (one-time President of the Detection Club) once described the folk tale Little Red Riding Hood as an interesting case of disguise and attempted murder. Murder, suspense and betrayal can be found throughout folk literature and in the classic texts of most if not all civilizations – from The Odyssey through Hamlet and King Lear to the novels of Ruth Rendell and P. D. James. The poet and detective novelist C. Day-Lewis thought of the whodunit specifically as a twentieth-century form of folk tale, while for his fellow poet W. H. Auden the classical detective story seemed an allegory of the ‘death’ of happiness. In real life, we seldom know what specifically killed off our happiness, whereas in the novel the seemingly random nature of existence is given an explanation – in crime fiction, death never happens without good reason and the causes of death never go unexplained (and are seldom unpunished).
Auden of course was talking of the ‘classical’ English detective story. Things have been changing more recently, the crime novel becoming ever more elastic. Consider the various terms by which it is known: the crime novel, detective novel, whodunit, suspense novel, roman noir, hard-boiled, pulp, police procedural, mystery novel, domestic noir, Scandi noir … even tartan noir. The reason for this proliferation may lie in confusion about the basic identity of the crime novel. This is a genre after all that would seek to include everything from the most basic puzzle-style story up to the likes of Dostoevsky. P. D. James tried to have it both ways when she described a successfully realized crime novel as combining ‘the old traditions of an exciting story and the satisfying exercise of rational deduction with the psychological subtleties and moral ambiguities of a good novel’. Certainly crime novels are intended to entertain. They are products of popular culture. As such they must turn a profit, for few institutions and publicly backed funders will subsidise them. Crime fiction may have literary aspirations, but its emphasis on entertainment ensures that these aspirations do not deter potential readers. Crime fiction is democratic in that it is accessible to all.
Before the Second World War, the crime novel in the UK reassured its readership that all would be well, that society might occasionally be shaken up (by some heinous crime such as murder) but that order would quickly be restored. A courteous and brilliant detective would bring elucidation and the guilty party or parties would be uncovered and sent for trial. The tight confines of this fictional universe, and the neat conclusions, provided pleasure to many but meant that the crime novel was considered as escapist literature, since real life seldom provided its own set of pat resolutions. In the United States, authors such as Raymond Chandler began to argue against such tidy (and mostly bloodless) confections. He wanted crime fiction to be a bit more cynical about human nature, creating a world of tarnished knights such as Philip Marlowe. Chandler sensed that what crime fiction really needed was a sense of the incomplete and of life’s messy complexity. The reader should go to crime fiction to be challenged by these realities. Practitioners in the UK began to realize this, too – gritty urban settings competed with rural idylls; good did not always triumph over evil; evil couldn’t always be explained away. In contemporary crime fiction the villains may escape justice altogether, or the reader may be invited to take sides with the criminal against the powers of law and order. There are even novels with no detectives and no mysteries, showing a world in which criminality, in the form of organized crime, operates openly and without apparent hindrance.
For many readers this came – and comes – as a refreshing change, because the crime novel has always been capable of so much more than simply telling a good story or playing an elaborate game with its audience. Crime writers throughout the world have known for years that the crime novel can be a perfect tool for the dissection of society. It’s something I learned very early on in my Inspector Rebus novels. I wanted to explore the city of Edinburgh from top to bottom, but also wanted to use Edinburgh as a microcosm for the wider world. I wanted to discuss politics and economics and moral questions and the problems we all face as a society. I realized that my police detective gave me a sort of all-areas pass. He could visit the various seats of power but also investigate the worlds of the dispossessed and disenfranchised. This has allowed me to explore themes of racism and human trafficking, the drug trade, various political upheavals, changing social attitudes, the rise of new technologies, our increasingly surveillance-driven society and so forth, without my novels reading as tracts or treatises. The adventure, the thrill of the chase, underpins the whole, but the story is no longer ‘just’ about that chase.
In spite of its exaggerations and heightened effects, the contemporary crime novel often tells us more about the world around us than do literary novels, many of which can seem introspective or focused on a narrow remit (an individual life; or the lives of a small interconnected group). Crime fiction tackles big issues, from corporate corruption to child abuse, inviting its readers to consider why these crimes continue to affect us, while also warning those same readers of new types of crime – as evidenced by the rise of the crime novel where the internet and social media are seen as a potential source of malevolence. The shadowy figure who steps out of a darkened alley in front of us has been replaced by an equally shadowy figure who threatens us via our home computer or mobile phone.
Writers such as Val McDermid, Denise Mina, Sarah Hilary, Eva Dolan, Mark Billingham and Adrian McKinty challenge their readers with stories that seem torn from the pages of this week’s newspapers and which make dramatic use of current technology, be it DNA analysis or CCTV. I’m not sure if they think of themselves as political writers, but there are certainly political elements to their themes and stories. These authors – and many others like them – see the roots of petty crime in abject poverty, in the current social problems of the UK. They also know how easily petty crime can escalate, and they often have a view to the larger (often invisible) crimes perpetrated by institutions and corporations. Their stories tend to be set in the urban here and now, allowing them to engage more readily with the world inhabited by their readers. Drug culture, youth problems and the alienation felt by many at the bottom of the pile are dealt with in their novels.
I chose Edinburgh as the setting for my books for similar reasons. It’s a city that visitors feel they can get to know fairly quickly, being compact and on the surface safe and civilized, with a wealth of historic streets and artefacts. In fact, it can seem a single homogenous entity with a castle at its core. Some of this conceit was exploded by Irvine Welsh’s novel Trainspotting – and more especially by the hugely successful film that came shortly after. In my own first novel Knots and Crosses a serial killer is stalking the Edinburgh of the mid–1980s, and locals gather together to share their astonishment and outrage – it’s just not the sort of thing
