It’s interesting (well, to me at any rate – feel free to leave at any time) how crime fiction has changed over the years. How the public’s fascination with it has been nurtured in tandem with our fascination for crime itself, from the ‘penny dreadfuls’ and nascent journalism surrounding Jack The Ripper, through the so called ‘Golden Age’ of crime fiction to our current obsession with serial killers. I think it’s true to say that crime fiction has gone hand in hand with professional crime detection. The Whitechapel murders received the kind of press coverage the Daily Mail can only dream of. By that I mean, post mortem photographs of the victims, as well as tastefully rendered illustrations of the corpses were featured on the covers of sensational tracts offered as reportage. This all helped to whip the public into a frenzy of gloating annoyance with the fledgling police force and authors like Wilkie Collins, Josphine Tey and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle helped to create an appetite for a nice, juicy murder mystery. And we’ve been feasting on the genre ever since.
Much as I love Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle’s hero reflected very little sensible relation to reality. There is much more of the Boy’s Own adventure about Holmes than there is actual detective work. But he did set light to a new genre of fiction, just as the police (particularly the Met) were feeling their way forward in more scientific ways of solving crime. Conan Doyle did, however, reflect the public’s distrust and dissatisfaction with the police, who are generally portrayed as incompetent pedants at every turn. Our lone genius, on the other hand, bestrides the forensic world so entirely (and so casually) that in the very first novel, A Study in Scarlet, he is discovered isolating a re-agent for human blood, a thing unknown at the time. That this is never mentioned again, in any of the Holmes stories, is the difference between Conan Doyle (who believed in fairies) and Agatha Christie, (first published in 1919) who was actually a trained pharmacist and put her medical knowledge to use in less esoteric ways than did Conan Doyle. It also reflects the post-Holmes advances in forensics.
A lot of bad mouthing of Agatha Christie goes on today and I won’t have it. We believe we have become too sophisticated for her parlour games. It’s true, the advances in science have given people a far denser knowledge of general forensic principles than Christie’s readership ever had. And it’s true, some of her novels are real clunkers but give the woman a break, her output was huge, she was entitled to boil a few pots. Whatever you may think of her shortcomings, though, Christie has one ace in the hole – her plotting. At its best, it is simple and elegant and it works on every level. Method, motive and opportunity, those three stalwarts of the crime novel are handled with a believable and satisfying precision that should still be the envy of every crime writer. Even her characters, that much maligned and parodied bunch, are not quite the silly tokens her detractors take them for. Their hidden depths inform every twist and turn. Even Poirot had a fondness for big beautiful women that led him astray.
Can it be a coincidence that the heyday of crime fiction coincided with the modern organisation of the police, the accelerating advances in criminal science and the much reported rise of the forensic pathologist? Of course not. The acid bath Murders, the Brighton trunk murders, 10 Rillington Place, Neville Heath, Hanratty, the black panther, to name a feeble few in the UK alone, are all still well known, even after many decades. The solving of these sensational crimes gave crime fiction’s fan base the reassuring knowledge that somewhere there was an expert witness. If Poirot as a character wasn’t entirely plausible, then at least the basis of his deductions were sound and his standing as a witness wasn’t challenged. Sir Bernard Spilsbury, Sidney Smith, Keith Simpson: these were men who’s names made headlines when they were called in on a case. The law literally hung on their every word at a time when hanging was very real. But, it seems, the science of detection has gradually overtaken the public’s ability to deal with the freewheeling private agent. Just as there are now expert witnesses for DNA, hair, fibre, fingerprints, clothes, soil, forensic odontology, anthropology – the list is endless, so there’s been a rise in an appreciation of the minutiae of crime that would have astonished Sherlock Holmes. Fiction writers followed the detectives and readers and the public followed them both.
It’s now much harder to write crime fiction as a result. The construct needed to help suspend disbelief is a thing that often foils the elegance of Golden Age plotting. Locard’s dictum “every contact leaves a trace” is more true today than he ever could ever have imagined. Everyone knows that each crime scene is awash with ‘trace’ on a cellular level, CCTV haunts even the remotest corners, traffic police have automatic number plate recognition systems, phone calls are logged, computers access your credit cards. How anyone gets away with crime these days baffles me, so how in God’s name can you entertain your reader with a suitably ingenious plot without having to bone up on everything, including police procedure, to avoid falling foul of grisly reality? The lone detective’s pivotal role has been crushed under the weight of evidence. Crime fiction needs a strong central character and it’s hard to get really enthusiastic about a police procedural, in spite of the odd few like Morse and Frost, helpfully promoted by our affection for their TV personas. I would suggest there hasn’t been a really iconic detective for decades. Why it’s so much harder to identify with the lawman is a bit of a mystery. Perhaps it’s that ‘us and them’ mentality that Conan Doyle identified at the very start, who knows? But what to do? Enter stage left The Serial Killer.
The serial killer is a gift for those looking for an oddball and exercised by technicalities. For a start, the apparently random nature of their violence, from the point of view of the writer at least, makes them usefully difficult to catch and you can cheerfully drive a coach and horses through that thing called a reasonable plot with the simple excuse of psychopathology – “Is it because I is mad?”. The police and all their technology can also be reduced to also rans, without appearing to depart too much from reality. It’s a sad fact that many ‘successful’ serial killers are only caught because they keep on doing what they do to the point of recklessness, rather than because science pins them down. But I blame Thomas Harris for real horrors resulting from the cult of the serial killer. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy Thomas Harris, but, well, really… Hannibal Lecter and all the subsequent little Lecter-likes actually have more in common with Sherlock Holmes than they do with any real life serial killers. Very few serial killers have high IQs. Fewer still – yes, Dr. Lecter, I’m talking to you – drink fine wine, appreciate Bach, play the clavichord, paint in tempera, know what Fava Beans are, whatever. Strangely, the representation of white, upper middle class, savants as serial killers in fiction has informed the fallacy that it’s a crime virtually unknown among the black and Asian communities. This is, of course, rubbish, as any quick check of real statistics will tell you. Just as a quick check will reveal that most of them are a little less than honed intellectually. Indeed, the Green River killer, one of the most prolific of US serial killers (his victims numbered over 40) turned out to be a mechanic with an IQ of around 50 that one detective described as “a dumb sonofabitch”. He’s much more typical and sadly not nearly as interesting as one recent fictional plotline that had the omniscient anti hero freeze a corpse for five years as part of an elaborate scheme of Byzantine proportions. And we’re back. Boy’s Own stuff again. But that’s what fiction’s for. It’s an entertainment and there’s nothing entertaining about the reality of crime, unless you’re some kind of sicko. In which case, you’ll be absorbed into the genre and someone will eventually write a book about you. Apart from our very modern fascination with these weirdos (let me through, I’m a ghoul), the serial killer has effectively taken over the role of maverick outsider in detective fiction. Hannibal the Cannibal is every bit as stella as Miss Marple, Hercules Poirot, Holmes and Watson.
Agatha Christie didn’t actually deal with serial killers per se, I suspect because the ready appreciation of what is often a sexually motivated crime would have been beyond the comfortable understanding of her readership, if not beyond the pail altogether. In her day, they were just perverts and not very interesting. That’s not to say she didn’t write about psychopaths. Two beautifully written stories – Towards Zero and particularly Endless Night deal with the subject without losing the plot but this was before the psychopath became interesting in himself, his crimes dished out as some kind of baroque symptom of his illness. A nod and a cheery wink here to the forensic psychologist, who has risen alongside our serial friend, in perception, in fiction and in reality. The forensic psychologist is a creature, in fiction at least, who bears some resemblance to good old Sherlock in his criteria based deductions. Although Holmes never had to deal with a serial killer, in spite of his proximity to the most notorious of them all, his modern equivalent seems to have a similarly messianic attitude to his own self worth. A trait not uncommon in his foe but perhaps that’s the point.
Fiction, fact and the public’s perception of it are all necessarily partners in crime. While the reality often becomes harder and harder to bear, the writer has to find ways to become more devious, while still maintaining a grip on it. There will never be another Golden Age in crime fiction, simply because you couldn’t get away with it now. Literally. We are all wiser. Wiser too, after the event, as you’re likely to reflect from what the police are now pleased to call your ‘custody suite’, while your DNA’s being processed and your SIM card read; something that would have got Moriarty bang to rights. I wonder what Conan Doyle would have done about it. It’s something that exercises me every time I put one word in front of the other.
ruthramsden 