The Crime Boom

Helen Macallan is a Senior Lecturer in Film and Media at the University of Newcastle, where she teaches a course on the horror genre. Jane Goodall is Associate Professor in the School of Contemporary Arts at the University of Western Sydney with interests in cultural history and the history of science. Her recent books are Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin (Routledge, 2002) and The Walker (Hodder Headline, 2004), which was the Women’s Weekly ‘Great Read’ for March 2004 and joint winner of the Ned Kelly Award for best first crime novel. This exchange grew out of a series of conversations about the prevalence of crime writing, over several long lazy Sunday lunches, defying the pressures of academic life. Both read Tzvetan Todorov’s essay on detective fiction in The Poetics of Prose (Blackwell, 1977) as a starting point for their discussion. 

HM: Jane, your recent book The Walker falls into the category of crime fiction, the various forms of which – the thriller, the detective, and perhaps even the horror story – continue, in the twenty-first century, to hold a fascination for the reading and viewing public. It seems the more conscious we are of living in a chaotic and murderous world, the more voracious is our appetite for stories centered on the subject of death. 

JG: I’m certainly conscious of the irony of a boom in crime fiction co­inciding with a time of escalating political confusion. In the shopping centre where I often hang out on a Saturday morning, I’ll pick up a paper from the newsagent and be checking the headlines for the latest salvo in the propaganda war as I pass the bookshop, with its window full of crime. There are various ways you could read this. Is it a kind of avoidance strategy, a way of resorting to conventionally patterned narratives about law and order versus crime and chaos? Is it politics conducted by other means? After all, some prominent crime writers are strongly identified with sides in political debate. Is it pure commerce? As the market in book selling gets harder and narrower, publishers and bookshops want a sure-fire formula for a product that will sell. Would you see that in terms of genres?

HM: Tzvetan Todorov raises the issue of whether you should approach books through the notion of genre first, and he takes detective fiction as an example. What’s interesting here is whether the sure-fire formula is dependent on genre norms, or whether there’s a need to violate those conventions in order to sell. 

JG: That’s surely a crucial paradox. The whole point of the crime thriller is that it must do something unexpected. I’m interested in how large and diverse an imaginative space the thriller offers. The conventions provide a wide range of options, and there seems to be plenty of freedom to deviate. But curiously, once something’s declared a cliché, or felt to have been done to death (excuse the pun), you get rules against it. I was interested to discover that there is at present quite a strong antipathy to serial killers amongst crime afficionados. The serial killer is regarded as a stale convention. So The Walker has encountered criticism in some quarters for opting into the serial killer model. I’m inclined to defend the serial killer as the central character in a crime thriller, though, on the grounds that there are so many different imaginative worlds they can occupy.

HM: I’d have thought that the success of the imaginative world evoked is dependent less on the subject matter itself and more on the treatment of it. But having said that, I find the runaway success of The Da Vinci Code puzzling. Perhaps it’s something to do with the historical moment we’re in – the phenomenon of a world spinning out of control linked with a desire for conspiracy theories in order to attribute blame. It’s the new fear. We’re far more fearful of the idea of a terrorist attack than of a man with an axe in the street – and it’s a bigger fear because it can’t be controlled in the same way.

JG: Are we reverting to the archaic, because this is more secure? Are you saying that the conspiracy theory offers a coherence that is missing in our orders (or disorders) of fear?

HM: Yes, I think so. In the case of The Da Vinci Code, it’s also the pleasure of revising one of the great religious myths that so many people share. I found the first half quite intriguing and I felt I’d returned to the days of being immersed in The Secret Seven or Famous Five, then at a certain point, I knew that the bare bones structure was all we were going to get. On the other hand, John Le Carré’s conspiracy thriller The Constant Gardener, while on a very different subject, kept my attention because the characters interested me. Another thriller with conspiracy elements that comes to mind is Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s The Seville Communion which evokes a place – Seville – so vividly. It seems to me that The Walker understands the importance of milieu and character. Could you talk about what drives the plot?

JG: That’s quite a classic issue for crime writers. There’s the basic question of how much you plot in advance, which implies that you can somehow make a plot in isolation from all the detail of the milieu and the personalities. One of the difficulties with the conspiracy plot is that it risks being a ready-made. Somebody’s got a plot all worked out, but is it the author? Todorov’s very astute. He talks about the duality of the detective story: there’s the story of the crime and the story of the investigation. To stimulate the excitement or the imagination of the reader, those things have to have a dynamic interaction. If the crime story is always already worked out, because it is a conspiracy, then the novel can fall too heavily on the investigation side of the duality. I would say, though, that what you’re getting at is somehow at the heart of the difficulty in this kind of writing. Character and milieu will give you true ingredients for a plot, but they will only take it so far. At some point, you have to strengthen the plot as a plot, to let it take the lead, so to speak, and somehow bring all the details of the world along with it, in a convincing way. It’s a bit of a sleight of hand, to map this strongly patterned set of events onto a realistic world. If you look hard, the seams will show, so you have to do what the conjurer does, and distract attention from the trick by compelling the attention in some other way. One way is to try and feed the uncanny through the details, to open the way for something larger to happen.

HM: Well, there’s your establishing scene in the prologue in which the adolescent Nell is installed in the self-contained compartment of a night train. Her only travelling companion, a middle-aged woman, appears to be asleep and, initially, you set up a sense of normality, as Nell sits reading the teen magazine, Honey, and dreaming of new clothes. Then, at a certain point, she presses her face against the window only to find that the outside world is distorted because of the reflecting carriage lights. ‘The glass was cold against Nell’s forehead and the rattling of the train made her teeth vibrate. She drew back and saw the compartment reflected, with the hills and the trees rushing through it like ghosts.’ The passage reminds us of the way in which our everyday experience of reality is often intertwined with strange unreal moments, and the image of Nell’s teeth vibrating also prefigures her terror, shortly afterwards, when she realises that the thick dark liquid running along the carriage floor is blood from the body of the woman she had assumed was asleep.

JG: And that’s the start of a plot pattern that has to work itself out.

HM: Do you think we seek from crime fiction the frisson that comes from the unknown, or simply the more prosaic pleasure of the known – the familiar pleasure of the quest whereby we’re all given the chance to play detectives and solve the crime?

JG: The way you pose the question – the frisson from the unknown versus the pleasure of the formulaic quest – actually gets at another level of speculation. You could offer a Freudian response to that: the pleasure principle, the yearning for quietus, is ultimately dominant in human motivation, and an apparent fascination with the uncanny is only a displaced quest for primordial familiarity. But the question remains more interesting than the answer. If I have a defence for the crime-fiction craze at a time like this, it’s that the thriller is a space in which you can spin a thread that takes you out of the repertoire of available answers. When asked ‘why crime?’ Gabrielle Lord says, ‘because the stakes are high’. I like that answer. A thriller deals between the great dualisms of the cultural imaginary – good and evil, chaos and order, knowledge and the unknowable – but if it’s a good thriller, it raises the stakes so that the frisson is what you remember, and what you never quite get over.

I’ve heard this term going the rounds, ‘the cosy’, to describe a subgenre of crime fiction. To be honest, I’m not familiar with its usage, other than that it’s counterposed to ‘mean streets’ as a label for hard core urban macho crime. Let’s pinch that label ‘cosy’ as a name for the problem-solving, pleasure-principle, comfort-zone side of crime fiction. Given your point about the psychological convenience of conspiracy theories, would you be part of the denigration movement? Or do you think the problem-solving mode really has something to offer?

HM: I assume ‘the cosy’ refers to writers such as Agatha Christie, who once would not have appeared cosy to her readership. There are historical shifts in what’s threatening. Again, perhaps it’s a question of the bare-bones structure versus the fleshed-out form. In cinema, a concept of efficiency seems to be taking over whereby dialogue is treated as action or inseparable from the action. Maybe there’s a new impatience with any form of detail. Not just ‘nineteenth century’ descriptive detail – an impatience even with what Nadine Gordimer calls significant detail – that which doesn’t pad, but brings the imaginative world alive and gives it a sense of freshness.

JG: So is that freshness for the writer or freshness for the reader?

HG: She was speaking in the context of an interview, in response to the interviewer’s comment that her stories – which aren’t, of course, in the crime genre – are both criticised and praised for their density of detail. She says when she looks back at her early work it has a sensuous sensibility and freshness she doesn’t have as a mature writer though the compensation is a gain in character complexity and narrative strength. 

JG: The connection between detail and freshness is interesting. The details of objects and settings have a curious kind of agency. They can drive a plot in surprising ways, by providing opportunities for action and dialogue, but getting from there to the level of frisson, which we were talking about earlier, is another step and significant detail won’t necessarily take you there. What makes that step, do you think?

HM: For me, it’s the sensory charge. To take a film example, Mulholland Drive – there’s a pivotal scene in the opening sequence where one of the main characters is fleeing a car accident. The frisson one gets is something to do with the indigo blue night, the isolation, and the way we identify with her high heels hurrying across different surfaces. There’s a similar scene in Val Lewton’s 1940s film, Cat People…there’s a character at night and two sets of heels, one following the other, although the presence of those belonging to the second pair (the stalker), is hidden from us because of the heavy shadow. In both films we’re put into a subjective position, listening to the footsteps and therefore experiencing the character’s fear. It’s the way we’re made to identify with the character that produces the frisson. In The Walker, you go one step further. There’s the night, the empty street, but in this case we’re put in the intolerable position of identifying with the killer. There’s also something disorienting about the way you slip seamlessly from the diurnal tone of the story’s established world into a nocturnal sensibility. The Walker’s psychotic state, the interpenetrating of historical myth and fictional present, the spectre of the double, which is invoked as the killer obsessively retraces the same East End London streets supposedly walked by Jack the Ripper, and your oblique treatment of the murder, all have an uncanny effect. I had the strange sensation of plunging into an alien world, one with more affinity to the stories of Edgar Allen Poe than to any current crime fiction writer. Could you talk about the influence of other writers in the genre on your writing?

JG: In The Walker there’s a conscious homage to Peter Ackroyd, through the inclusion of a Hawksmoor church as a murder site. Ackroyd has a long track record of exploring what you might call the London imaginary, the dark London of John Dee, William Blake, Charles Dickens and the architect Nicholas Hawksmoor. Ackroyd’s technique is to effect a kind of literary channeling of these voices, something he does to remarkably sinister effect. 

The genuinely sinister is not easy. On the whole, nineteenth-century writers were better at it, I suppose for obvious reasons: because they inhabited a cultural world in which spirits and demons still had a kind of intellectual viability, besides a lot of what you might call house room. Literally, there were places and spaces available for haunting, in the heart of the city and the depths of the countryside. But there are some more recent writers who achieve the imaginative scale needed for the landscapes of the sinister. William Peter Blatty, for example, achieves it in The Exorcist. That opening scene, so brilliantly transferred to the screen, gives the evil a deep history, so it has this space to move in, this sweep of time. And it moves across the globe, as well. Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs achieves the largeness in a different way, by creating a villain with a Romantic imagination and enormous gifts of language and sensory intelligence. Of course, those are also films, and it’s hard now to separate the imaginative impact of the film and the book.

HM: In the film adaptation of the The Exorcist, the sinister comes through the combination of contradictory elements – the grotesque – the perversion of the child’s voice on two levels. It becomes adult, and becomes male. With The Silence of the Lambs it’s the animal lurking below the sophisticated veneer. The grotesque is important in horror. 

JG: Those are violations or distortions of the natural. So if we’re thinking in genre terms, is that taking us away from crime and the detective story? 

HM: Well I guess the genre boundaries are blurred, in both The Exorcist and The Silence of the Lambs. And there’s a long history of that. If you look back, it could be argued that a classic horror film such as Nosferatu is also a supernatural thriller. Thinking about the relationship between the grotesque and the uncanny…one of the trends in thriller writing is to include a famous painting in the plot. Aside from the obvious case of The Da Vinci Code, which uses ‘The Last Supper’ and the ‘Mona Lisa’, there’s the fictional painting ‘The Chess Player’ in Pérez-Reverte’s The Flanders Panel. Could you talk about your use of Hogarth’s ‘Reward of Cruelty’ series in The Walker?

JG: Well, you’re on the money with that point about the grotesque. I wanted an idea for an extravagant, theatrical murder. Hogarth’s anatomy scene is one of his best known engravings, and it’s so grotesque. But there’s a lesser-known drawing of a woman lying on her back with her throat cut. It’s actually more frightening because it is stark and simple. Those two drawings provided a basis for getting at the personality of the killer, which is in a way the biggest challenge. 

HM: What’s at stake in the creation of a villain?

JG: A strong villain is the hardest figure to create, because villainy at that level is a form of genius. It’s about power and control. The life of a strong villain is too large for the world; it creates philosophical and moral crises, as well as the kind of material chaos detectives have to try and clean up. One step further into the supernatural, and you’re in the terrain of Stephen King. The Shining and The Green Mile both have a kind of visionary quality. There’s an imaginative truth about them that makes them totally compelling. Now I realise I’ve put together an all-male list, which makes me wonder if this kind of metaphysical dimension in sinister fiction has been a bit off limits for women in the twentieth century. Feminism has given us such a vigilant sense of responsibility for the social. We go from Jane Eyre to Wide Sargasso Sea, which is a wonderful novel, but it takes this psychically dangerous figure from Charlotte Bronte’s novel and naturalises her. Bronte leans towards the supernatural. Her evocations of Rochester’s wife are not about thwartings and discontents; they’re about the tearing of the veil, and the sheet of flame at the foot of the bed. For some reason, that’s what draws me. The great villains of fiction tell cultures something true about themselves. They offer revelations.

HM: So going back to the theme of the cultural moment, you set The Walker in the early 1970s and it seems to me that it’s the way you capture the significant detail of that era that takes the book beyond the ‘bare bones’ structure I was talking about. 

The sense of the past – of pre-Thatcherite London – is wonderfully evoked. It’s hard to believe that, within a few years of that period in which The Walker is set, the East End had radically transformed, a transformation indicated in the conversion of the Brick Lane synagogue to a mosque! 

JG: Yes, it’s an extreme transformation in places, yet other parts of the East End remain almost unchanged. I went and walked around the Ripper mile, running into no less than three guided-tour parties, and was really struck by the way some of the old lanes and alleyways are still there. Artillery Lane, for example, which has this weird dog-leg shape and gives you a sense that the whole area is full of twisted constructions. I’ve actually always been a bit sceptical about the Ripper legend. How many poor women and prostitutes were horribly killed in London without anyone ever taking the slightest notice? Yet there arises this nation-gripping level of fear and outrage over a set of such deaths which are seen to be connected. It’s as if the popular imagination really wanted this legend of the phantom killer. There are earlier legends about compulsive killers – for example, Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner – but the Ripper has become the prototype, maybe because it’s almost as if the real killer is the neighborhood itself, as if there’s something murderously psychotic about the actual place. That’s what grips the imagination, I think. I was in London as a student in the seventies and went to a part of London University that was based in the East End, in the Mile End Road. That had none of the kind of atmosphere you find in Whitechapel, though. It was the opposite version of poor London – all ghastly through-roads and semi-derelict concrete monoliths. You’d be more likely to get skittled by a mega-truck than by a knife-wielder in a dark alley. What’s going on in the cultural imaginary doesn’t always have a very logical relationship to what’s happening in the world of the present.

HM: Part of that cultural imaginary was swinging London which, despite the connotations of ‘free love’, was retrospectively quite an innocent time. 

JG: Yes, I think it was innocent. Or maybe it’s just I was innocent at the time. I also spent time in the West End, especially in university vacations. I shared a flat in Collingham Gardens, where three girls in the novel are living, and I worked at the Way In boutique in Harrods, so I shared a lot of that immediate intoxication with the fashion world, which was about much more than trendy clothes. It was a whole culture surge, with high levels of impulsive, inventive change going on in all aspects of everyday life.

HM: I was there in the late sixties, when that mood of exuberance was at its height. It came rushing back with two images in The Walker – that of the plastic ‘tomato’ sauce squeezer on the table at the Wimpy bar, and that of the ‘booby trap’ – the liberating piece of material that allowed for the ‘burning of the bra’ advocated by Germaine Greer! I liked the double play in the book – the booby trap becomes, literally, a booby trap.

The transitional nature of the early seventies is conveyed through the use of such detail – the mini giving way to the maxi, fish and chips to the pizza. You also show that the innocent consumerism of the times had its underbelly, the West Coast sects and the turn to hard drugs (Haight Ashbury going bad), and you embody this social schizophrenia not only in The Walker killer but also in the emergence of a new figure – the unprincipled Waterlow character, one of a new breed of ‘invisible Operators’.

JG: I guess if there is any real parallel between then and now it’s in that feeling of being on the cusp. We know things are moving, but we can’t get a clear sense of where, in what direction. People have picked up on the Ripper allusions in The Walker, but to me Charles Manson is a more important reference point. And the historical figure of Bartholomew Tremlay, who was a dangerous experimentalist during those traumatic years of the 1660s, when London went through the epoch-changing trauma of the great fire. You get heated cultural debates around such identifiable points of transition. People want to line up with and against the contrary ideological directions of such moments. So in the seventeenth century, it’s science versus alchemy and magic. In the time of Manson, it’s the drug-crazed counter-culture versus a renewed emphasis on economics and literal-minded rationalism. Political investments tend to flatten these debates, and to distort what’s really in the mix in cultural crises.

Traditionally, universities should be places that offer insights at these times of nervous transition, but it’s not one of those needs recognised in the list of national research priorities! My own feeling is that the current climate of mass communication is so Orwellian, you have to find some other way of broadening the bandwidth. Debate mode will never do anything other than short-circuit any attempts to achieve a sane perspective. Maybe we have to go into the imaginative space of fiction, whether in literature or film, to do the work of exploration more freely.