[Previous entry: "More Than a Crime Writer"] [Next entry: "Good News for a New Year"]
11/01/2003: "The rich scarlet thread"
It was Conan Doyle's detective character Sherlock Holmes who observed, 'Everything comes in circles… The old wheel turns and the same spoke comes up. It has all been done before and will be again…' This is a universal truth and it can be applied to many aspects of life and art. And crime fiction. At present there is a trend for the very gutsy graphic crime novel - writing that leaves little to the imagination. I refer to those best sellers where the gore, the horror and the unpleasant details are not only mentioned but underlined. I am thinking of the stomach clenching moments in such books as Val McDermid's The Mermaids Singing or Mo Hayder's Birdman or Mark Billingham's Sleepyhead or any Patricia Cornwell. Sometimes this kind of crafted in-your-face writing is criticised for going too far. Well, I suppose it is if Agatha Christie is your bag. It is unlikely that we would be presented with a detailed description of how a corpse was disembowelled in the vestry in a Miss Marple novel. Genteel poison is more her style. But it would be wrong to think that this vivid approach to crime writing is new. Even old Sherlock Holmes had his gory moments. In the novel The Valley of Fear, the main victim has his head blown off at close range by a sawn off shot gun.
However it was in the thirties that we encountered the commencement of the golden age of graphic violence. At that time a whole gang of writers, probably influenced by the horrors of the First World War, wanted to tell it how it was. When you killed a person there was blood, gore and unpleasantness, why disguise the fact? Paul Cain was one writer, for example, who overstepped the bounds propriety according to some critics. His stories were set in the Prohibition era and dealt with killers, drug dealers, con men, private eyes and sexy girls. One of his notable novels was Fast One (1932) which tells the story of Gerry Kells, a murderous gunman, racketeer and amoral gambler, who with is alcoholic lover tries to muscle in on the west coast mob scene. One Los Angeles reviewer called the book 'a ceaseless welter of bloodshed'; while the Saturday Review of Literature thought it 'the hardest-boiled yarn of a decade.'
Paul Cain was one of a raft of writers who wrote for the Black Mask magazine, a pulp publication which influenced a generation of writers and readers. Within its pages you could find the work of such stars as Dashiell Hammett, Erle Stanley Gardner, Frank Gruber and Cornell Woolrich. The rich scarlet thread of violence, action and sex ran through their stories.
This 'hardboiled school' of the thirties spawned the toughies of the forties, fifties and sixties when such characters as Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer were slapping women about and shooting anyone who irritated them. But the public loved them. There was perhaps a quietening down of such fiction as the peace-loving sixties drew to a close. But today… well the old wheel has turned again. We are now very much a visual culture with television, DVDs and video phones and a violent one also. Crime fiction reflects the age we are in - as it always has. However, graphic though it may be, the work of the current crop of crime writers is perhaps more honed and carefully constructed than ever before.
David Stuart Davies on Monday, November 1st 2003 @ 03:38 PM GMT [link]