Well, the last month has been strange and no mistake. Circumstances have meant the world has been rather dreamlike and unreal. Can’t believe it has only been a month, too. So much seems to have happened…and yet much of it doesn’t feel like it has really happened at all.
So, onwards.
Location seems to be a big selling point in some crime fiction these days, the city or town concerned receiving prominent coverage, usually on the cover with something like: ‘Puts Sheerness on the crime fiction map’. I’ve heard comments too that a new location is one of the first things that agents and publishers look for.
I have a couple of problems with this. One is, a drive for originality that means it might be that much harder to sell an Edinburgh novel, too mined by Rankin, or Oxford, too exhausted by Dexter’s Morse. And so many cities now have the writer that everyone associates with them. So you see the settings spread out to other cities, towns, locations that maybe aren’t quite the right setting, not big enough, not plausible enough for the crimes at hand. But hey, they’re new, no-one’s walked that beat before, and besides, it puts Hartlepool on the crime fiction map.
Other than the choice of location, the other problem is that having put that location at the heart of the novel, it’s very hard for the writer to avoid showing it off. After all, it’s what the readers are going to expect. Not a bad thing at all, to have the story grounded in vivid, compelling detail. But I’ve read a few too many where the writer puts you on an open-topped tour bus, and takes you to see the sights. Over here, on the left, the famous steps. There’ll be a chase here, later. If you look to your right now, you will see the museum. We won’t be going in there, too dull. But we’ll stop for lunch in this pub I know, for no other reason than well, I know it. But if you look now, down to the river, you will see the famous bridge, and of course it’s going to show up in the climactic scene. How could it not?
While I like reading novels with a setting that’s fresh, or a perspective that’s new (which is why I’ve read so much Eurocrime over the past year, I can hardly say otherwise), there’s a danger that so much attention is paid to the novelty of the setting that the essential honesty of the novel suffers. That you get a novel which spends so much time showing what Dorking that the people pale beside the scenary. Swap one set of landmarks for another, and you could be anywhere. Or nowhere.
Some of my favourite novels are set in places of the writer’s own invention, and don’t feel any less real for it. Sometimes, they feel more real for it. Perhaps the writers have spent less time on getting it accurate, and more time on getting it right.
Authenticity is over-rated. No, forget that. Authenticity is vital. It’s reality that is over-rated. What matters most is what is true, and good writing shows us this just as well in a place of the writer’s own creation as it does in any place you’ll find on a road atlas.
(Do you have any preference, either as a reader or a writer?)
Tags:
crime,
Crime fiction,
fiction,
Writing
