On June 5, 2024 William Shaw entertained us with his talk “A Life in Crime.”
Is genre fiction ‘literary’? Can crime fiction ever be proper ‘literature’? Some well-read people turn their noses up at science fiction, at ‘romantic’ and historical novels, at horror fiction, at spy thrillers and at detective fiction. This isn’t Thomas Browne, they say. This isn’t James Joyce.
There’s no doubt that Poe’s ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’, Collins’ ‘The Woman in White’ and Dickens’ Bleak House are literature. Many would also regard Raymond Chandler as a dyed-in-the-wool ‘literary’ novelist.
William Shaw set out to do two things: 1) to show that good detective fiction deals with a wide range of serious themes, both social and psychological; and 2) to provide a history of how the genre originated (with Poe), and how it evolved over the century and a half that followed.
Clearly the genre resonates hugely with readers: more so, from a purely statistical point of view, than all the other genres put together. It certainly more than out-sells them nowadays. (If you doubt this, just consider how many current TV dramas are about murder and crime).
Mr Shaw knows what he’s talking about. He is one of the very few writers who are able to make a respectable living from the books they write. (The average UK novelist in 2024 makes about £7,000 a year: not enough to live on.)
Starting as a music journalist in the early 1980s, he worked his way up to becoming a celebrity interviewer. He discovered a way to make his interviewees open up (and to make his articles about them more original as a result). One completely unexpected question right at the start of the interview always took them off-guard, and turned what might have been a purely transactional encounter into a real relationship: “Have you ever seen a corpse?”
One can see how the stories that subsequently poured out led him towards trying his luck as a crime novelist! He loves writing stories, and we love reading them.
But how odd it is that in a country where Death has become as much of a taboo as Sex used to be for the Victorians, we adore one sanguinary body-count after another. (Just think of Midsomer Murders!)
But this frisson of danger we experience when reading a British murder mystery, in which the death-count of murder victims is highly implausible in comparison with actual UK crime statistics, may be some kind of compensatory mechanism for the sanitised, remote, hands-off way in which we deal with death in real life. (Three to four murders per crime novel seems to be the norm.) Compare the 5,000 to 6,000 murders committed per year in the British Isles with the 87,000 DIY-related accidents per year (admittedly not all of which are fatal) — and, Mr Shaw suggested, perhaps there’s an entirely new genre waiting to be discovered: the ‘Serious, Maybe Terminal, Accident in the Toolshed’ novel?
The Victorian sensation novel, with at least one murder-mystery and one plodding detective, gave way to the brilliant amateur sleuth, always several steps ahead of his Dr Watson sidekick, or his unimaginative Scotland Yard counterpart; and this was followed by the somewhat cosy, middle- or upper-class ‘Golden Age’ of Detective Fiction, in which the puzzle was one that any reader could solve if they paid sufficient attention to every tiny clue . . . all of which was dealt a brutal blow by the much grittier and more ‘hard-boiled’ detective fiction on the other side of the Pond, exemplified by Hammett, Chandler, Ross Macdonald and Elmore Leonard, to name but four. These were novels in which place had become much more important: it was as important, maybe even more so than plot or character. It had to be real: Chandler’s deeply corrupt San Francisco convinces us because of the authenticity of its depiction. In fact it has itself become a kind of character. The purely whodunnit element no longer mattered nearly as much as the claustrophobic atmosphere of menace conjured up by the realistic creation of a murky underworld that matched the true-crime photography of a rubber-necker like Weegee.
Simenon’s Maigret novels were also alluded to: here, too, the reality of a particular district of Paris, or province of France, or area of Belgium is important to the solving of the the case; and all the characters, good, bad and both at the same time are treated with a kind of bleak compassion. It’s almost a case, with Maigret, of ‘Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardoner’. Understanding the motive for the act has become more important, and more interesting to the reader, than the act itself.
And what about the British ‘police-procedural’? Much research goes into each one. But the demands of fiction do not always meld with actual crime investigations: in a police procedural murder mystery there’s usually one main (deeply conflicted) detective character, who’s provided with a younger side-kick, and a small team of four or five others — whereas in reality such a murder team might consist of seventy or eighty policemen and policewomen, most of whom are slowly, methodically and undramatically knocking on doors, or making phone-calls, or sifting through evidence or compiling mountains of paperwork.
Once again, the worlds conjured up by Colin Dexter, P. D. James, Ian Rankin, Peter James, or Reginald Hill all display a strong Sense of Place. Readers of such novels have, it was argued, achieved a degree of sophistication that was perhaps somewhat lacking in readers of Christie, Allingham or Sayers.
The question and answer session that followed pursued the problem of what sort of ‘literature’ are we dealing with? A broader definition would include most, perhaps all genre fiction, and pay tribute to the skills involved in being able to write so ‘transparently’ that character and plot take centre stage. A narrower one would require evidence of stylistic flair: phrases and sentences that draw attention to themselves and make the reader pause to gasp with admiration. ‘Show-off’ writing that draws attention to itself? That would be the average crime-writer’s response. Writing in such a way that the reader never notices the technical prowess and sheer hard slog that’s gone into crafting the novel is a key component in the crime-writer’s art.
We are very grateful for this lively and fascinating talk (peppered with moments of humour) from Mr Shaw.
Our thanks to Kevin Maynard for his very comprehensive notes.