Concentrating on novel-length stuff means that I’ve been doing very little with short stories in the last year, so it was good news to hear this weekend that Hitchcock’s have bought my story ‘A Walk In The Park’.
Tags: AHMM, crime, Crime fiction, Hitchcocks, short storiesSteve Mosby is discussing an article by Richard Morgan about in-fighting in the sf/f community. Richard, whose novels straddle both sf and crime, raises the question of why there seems to be much less of this in the crime fiction community; Steve agrees, and has added his own thoughts on why this might be. It’s an interesting question, and the premise rings true to me. But why is this?
It’s not that sf/f writers are more prone to petty jealousies and stabs at the back of passing authors. When I started writing short stories, most of them were some flavour of sf/f/h, and the support and encouragement of people within the genre blew me away, and I will be forever grateful for that. I’ve not found the crime community to be any different. So it’s not the people, what is it?
SF in particular has a grand tradition of manifestos and movements that crime doesn’t. There are distinctions between subgenres in crime, with edges of various degrees of blurriness, but there are far fewer with a meaningful identity. There’s the split between that which is cosy, and that which is not, and in the latter camp there’s the ongoing discussion about what makes something noir as opposed to hardboiled, but it rarely spills over into angry exchanges and bitter recriminations. There’s not the same degree of inward-looking analysis either, of the place of the genre in literature as a whole or the interplay between what is sf/f and what is literary fiction. In part, maybe this is because crime lives a little bit closer to the edges of the genre ghetto. It’s still in there, for sure, but I don’t think feels quite as looked-down upon by the literary establishment, quite as marginalised. Perhaps this means that crime hasn’t felt so much need to justify, explain and categorize itself.
There’s not the history in crime fiction of Movements along the lines of the New Wave, the New Weird, or whatever. And where you get a movement, it has to be defined, and where it’s defined, it’s usually done by setting it up in opposition to other things…and where you do that, almost inevitably those other things are being put down. There have been flashes of it, from time to time in crime fiction. I remember when Murdaland announced itself by having a go at the established giants of AHMM and EQMM, and there was a lot of discussion about whether having to conform to the requirements of those magazines meant that stories were hobbled, rather than simply different. But that’s about as heated as I have seen it get.
Although the crime market is much bigger in terms of sales, and there is a thriving online and offline community in the crime-fiction world, I don’t think that community is anywhere on the scale of sf/f.The relative numbers of short-fiction markets is maybe one indicator of that, as is the number of conventions. It’s easier to be a crime author and not to be involved with the community, and many happily go on unaware of it, or unbothered by it. I’d guess this is less the case with f/sf. Maybe this makes a difference too.
What would a movement look like in crime-fiction terms anyway? What would be the Dogme of noir, the New Puritans of hardboiled, the New Weird of police procedurals? Discussion of the nature of the beast is a good thing, and there’s been some interesting debate about it. But there’s a difference between a discussion over what makes something noir or not, crime or not, realist or not, and the dogmatic line-drawing of a manifesto. Besides, manifestos generally come across as rather pompous things, and I have a sneaking suspicion that one of the major motivations behind most of them is look at me, look at me, so maybe we’re not missing much.
(Still, if anyone is going to write a manifesto, can we have:
1) If your protagonist is a cop or PI, you cannot make him or her an alcoholic or recovering alcoholic.
and
2) If your protagonist has a friend, they cannot be a psychopath with a heart of gold who will do all the nasty violent things your protagonist won’t because that would make him look bad. Seriously, they can’t. There’s already Joe Pike and Mouse and Win, and that’s three too many. Make your protagonist get his hands dirty.
in there somewhere? Please?)
Tags: crime, fantasy, genres, manifestos, science-fiction, sf, sf/fNO MORE HEROES, the third novel by Ray Banks to feature sometime PI Cal Innes, finds Cal serving eviction notices for Plummer, a slum landlord. Cal spars and bickers with his colleague, Daft Frank, is as offensive to Plummer as he can be and still keep his job, and just tries to get on with life without ending up too hurt.
But one eviction job turns into something very different, and Cal ends up a local hero after rescuing a child from a house that’s been set on fire. Cal walks out of his job, but ends up taking Plummer’s money again to investigate whether the English National Socialists are behind the arson, and whether there are more burnings to come. The investigation is hampered by the enthusiastic help of Daft Frank, a student protest against Plummer’s business, a looming race-riot, and Cal’s ever-present struggle with his back pain. The amount of codeine he takes is getting out of hand (try Tramadol Cal, it’s better). Cal justifies this a number of times throughout the novel by talking about his ‘medical condition’, but Banks very deftly makes Cal’s self-pity and dependency come into sharper and sharper relief, and the other characters - and the reader - can see what Cal cannot or will not see for himself.
Innes makes a very reluctant hero. He’d rather be at home with a bottle of vodka, and doesn’t have a lot of time for most of the people he meets in the novel. And yet for all his cynicism, there’s a faint echo of Chandler’s man on the mean streets who is not himself mean, and never more than at the point in NO MORE HEROES when Cal decides the hell with it, someone’s got to do something so it might as well be him.
Having just moaned about locations, it’s good to see that Banks offers a Manchester which is vivid and sharply drawn, and the world of slumlords, dodgy backstreet garages and racist politics is well-drawn and convincing. Banks resists descending into caricature: the plot, characters and setting are compelling and drive the story on, but the novel still tells the truth about what twenty-first century Britain can be like. It’s good to see writing like this which shows that you can tell a story that keeps the reader turning the pages, without trying to pile high-concept on high-concept to the point at which reality quietly excuses itself and leaves the room. It would be a mistake though to think that this means NO MORE HEROES is po-faced social commentary , as there’s a strong thread of humour running right throughout the novel. This is particularly effective for often being so well understated.
We could perhaps have done with seeing a little more of the characters who turn out to be behind the fire; that we don’t does make them a little opaque, and harder for the author to make their motivation convincing as it could be. First person narration always always makes this harder to achieve though, and as Cal’s voice is one of the best things about the novel, maybe it’s a trade-off worth making, at least in part.
There’s a shocking surprise in the ending, and I’m looking forward to seeing what implications it has for the next Cal Innes novel, and how Banks handles this, because things will never be quite the same for Cal. A brave move, and one that steps aside from some of the usual cliches that the genre can throw out for effect.
While I’ve enjoyed the previous novels, there’s something different about NO MORE HEROES. This is a writer who has really found his voice - there’s a confidence about the writing that shines through. Ray Banks is in total control of his characters, his plot, he’s writing at the top of his game, and NO MORE HEROES shows that on every page.
Tags: cal-innes, crime, Crime fiction, fiction, novel, ray banks, reviewObviously taking its queue from my recent post about fictional cities versus real cities, the Guardian books blog gets in on the act.
Tags: crime, Crime fiction, fiction, WritingWell, 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