While she was still a student at Harvard, Becky Cooper was told about a 1969 postgraduate student of archaeology, Jane Britton, who was found murdered in her apartment after failing to present herself for her General examinations. Traces of red ochre found at the scene seemed to suggest that Jane’s killer might have an association with the Archaeology department itself, that in all probability she had known her attacker.
Jane’s story was told to Cooper almost as a warning – that Harvard was not always a safe place to be, especially for women. Jane had been a singular individual, someone who made an impression on everyone who came into contact with her. There had been people in her life who thought she sailed too close to the wind. Others who nurtured unspoken jealousies. Jane’s murder was shocking, but more shocking still was the silence that seemed to descend in the wake of it. Friends stopped talking about her. Her family were too distraught and divided amongst themselves to discuss what had happened. Following the initial inquiry, the police had drawn a blank. Though there were whispers and rumours among the students who had known Jane and studied with her, no one was ever charged with her murder. The police refused to divulge Jane’s records, even though no work had been done on the case, seemingly, for decades.
The more Cooper’s questions multiplied, the deeper her obsession with the case became. She felt a personal connection to Jane that was hard to define but that would not let go of her. Determined to unravel the web of clues, false leads and tenuous connections that had confounded the police, she sets out on a journey to discover what she can. Ten years later, and just at the point where it seems the truth of Jane’s life and death might never be known, new evidence comes to light that throws all previous assumptions into confusion.
We Keep the Dead Close is a book in which the personal and the political are in perfect alignment. Cooper never loses sight of the story – what really happened? – but she is thorough and unstinting too in her pursuit of wider questions: how are women treated by the academic world? How far must women comply with the norms society expects of them in order to stay ‘safe’? What can we ever really know about another person, especially a person who is no longer around to speak for themselves?
Cooper’s writing is tactile, evocative and powerful in its arguments, above all because Cooper takes the risk of allowing herself to become a part of the story. Anyone who doubts the importance and social relevance of true crime writing might begin their reading here.
Like much of McNamee’s work, his new novel is set during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The bureau of the title is a ‘bureau de change’, where the shopkeepers and business owners who trade either side of the Irish border can exchange currency. This is only the surface layer of what goes on there, however. The bureau’s main business is in laundering the profits made from the less salubrious smuggling enterprises that form part of the natural ecosystem of the borderland, anything from cigarettes and alcohol to unlicensed diesel to human beings. The men who run the border trade are in permanent danger of death both from each other and from more serious criminals higher up the chain. The women involved with these men – whether wives or lovers – are on a hiding to nothing.
‘My writing has always been concerned with real events and making novels around them,’ McNamee says. ‘In this book, for the first time, they aren’t just public events but events specific to me and my family.’ Brendan McNamee is a solicitor. He opened the bureau after being struck off for embezzling funds. The clients he serves now are not the kind of people you would want to cross and it is not just Brendan who will be in the firing line if he oversteps his mark. On the other side of the counter is Paddy Farrell, who dreams of living ‘a sophisticated life’ in Florida or in Dublin, but who is unable to escape the pull of the border and the shadow life he lives there. Lorraine, a young woman whose intense and morbid spirituality seems at odds with her passionate physical desire for Paddy, longs for a time when the hostilities and underlying trauma of the border years will be behind them – except they never will be.
The events McNamee is writing about happened long before most newspapers began to be digitised and so to properly align fact with fiction you would have to consult the archives of the regional papers, as McNamee quotes them, or know your sources first hand, as McNamee does. If you’re as into this kind of literary mapping as I am, you can at least give yourself a virtual tour of the novel’s locations, glimpse the tracery of minor roads that are the back-ways across the border, see the hills and the forest laybys where deals were transacted, the churchyards, streets and houses where these people lived and died. The distance between Newry and Dundalk is about twenty miles via the main border crossing; in terms of what those miles once represented they span two different worlds.
The border is a liminal space, an uncanny valley between the two.
But The Bureau is not a history book, it is a novel; it’s interesting to wonder about the armature of facts on which this novel is based, but it’s by no means essential. Any book must stand or fall on its own internal merits, on its value as text, and it is as text that The Bureau shines brightest, that it lives in the mind. The Bureau is a poem in prose. From start to finish it holds the reader in a state of tension, of uneasy apprehension of what they know from the opening pages will be the final deadly outcome. Yet there is rapture, too – the inspiration and satisfaction one draws from being in the presence of a great work of art.
They drove away from the hospital, rain driven across the rear window as Owen looked back through the rain-tossed branches of the boundary trees, the hospital locked down for the night, Brendan not sleeping, the father in him awake and abroad in the corridors and hidden spaces, abroad in the vagrant dark. Picking his way through memory the way you’d pick your way through the streets and avenues of a burned-out city.
The vagrant dark. The streets and avenues of a burned-out city. The power and beauty of McNamee’s image-making so in tune with his subject matter. His grasp of darkness and of weather, both internal and external.
You want to place other people in the room. Shadowy figures. This was the era of shadows. This was the time when people disappeared without warning. This was the time of unexplained shootings, of clandestine alliances, zones of subterfuge, zones of dread. This was the border. There were set-ups, double-crosses, betrayal. Subterfuge was the currency, the game seen far into the future, the deep tradecraft.
It is often tempting to think of history as having moved on, but it is never that simple. Echoes remain, ripples spread, and in any case, history is not linear but cyclical. When someone asks what writing is for me I speak about my fear of time passing, my obsession with nailing memory into place and this would seem to be McNamee’s mission, too. To not forget. To say: this is how it was, this is what we went through. This is what we remember.
The novel that kept resurfacing in my mind while I was reading The Bureau was Death and Nightingales, by Eugene McCabe. Because both seem equally perfect, equally poised between rapture and terror, equally haunted. McCabe’s novel is set a hundred years before The Bureau and acts almost as a foreshadowing. The sense of place, so much an active element of both novels, is another point of union between them.
Reading a novel like The Bureau reminds me of what I am doing, or at least attempting. Writing as good as this is hard to find, but when you do, you feel grateful, you feel replenished. This is what’s possible, this is what it’s about. You know you’ll never be as good but you’re determined to try.
Speaking about the art and craft of historical fiction
in 2017, Hilary Mantel said she became a novelist because she had believed that
it was too late for her to become a historian. When her first, monumental work
about the French Revolution failed to find a publisher, she turned her
attention instead to stories with a tighter focus, a more restricted circle of
characters. But her reason for writing – and her way of thinking about history
– remained unaltered. ‘The historian and the biographer follow a trail of
evidence, usually a paper trail,’ Mantel explains. ‘The novelist does that too,
and then performs another act: puts the past back into process, into action,
frees the people from the archive and lets them run about, ignorant of their
fates, with all their mistakes unmade.’
The same words might be said – might especially be said – of the novelist who chooses to base their work around the story of a crime that really happened. True crime is simply history as viewed through a particular lens, and as Mantel herself vividly argues, the historical record can only ever be partial. The reader looks to the novelist more as a companion than as a teacher, someone willing to accompany them on their journey into the past. Someone who will put the questions they themselves might ask.
There is some marvellous true
crime writing out there: books that reconstruct trials, that pick apart police investigations,
that interrogate the psychology of criminals and investigate their background. There
are books that help us come to know the victims and to honour their memories. Some
of these books are factual reconstructions, some are investigative journalism.
Others are novels. In writing A Granite Silence I knew from the beginning that
I wanted to use my skills as a novelist to take the reader back in time, to lead
them to the street where the crime took place, to allow them to know the people
who lived there as if they were their neighbours. I wanted to be free to glance
off to one side, to let my imagination wander, to think about people whose
lives are missing from the historical record.
True crime novelists, like
historians, are passionate about the question of what really happened. I find
constant inspiration in the work of those writers who have felt drawn to certain
stories, who have followed them into the crannies behind the headlines. Writers
who find their own way of telling the truth. Here are thirteen of them.
Harriet by Elizabeth Jenkins (1934). Elizabeth Jenkins was a novelist, an historian and a
biographer. She also wrote two important works of true crime fiction, which
deserve to be better known. Harriet is an imaginative reconstruction of the
so-called Penge Murder of 1877 in which four people conspired to cause the
death of a vulnerable woman, Harriet Richardson, and her young child Tommy.
Harriet, who had learning difficulties, had been left a large sum of money by
an aunt – money Louis Staunton, a friend of the family, was keen to get his
hands on. What happened to Harriet was horrific; it was also as complicated,
unlikely and bizarre as the plot of any opera. Jenkins, who was born in 1905, remembered
people still talking about the case fifty years after it happened. She tells Harriet’s
desperate and enthralling story with precision, insight and empathy.
A Pin to See the Peepshow by F. Tennyson Jesse (1934). When Edith Thompson and Freddie Bywaters were
jointly accused of murdering Edith’s husband Percy in 1922, the case caught the
public imagination to such an extent that it dominated the newspaper headlines
for many weeks. A hundred years later and more, it is still exciting debate. In
her fictional recreation of the ‘Ilford Murder’, Fryn Tennyson Jesse’s
protagonist is Julia Starling, a young woman from a lower middle class
background who marries deadly dull Herbert and finds herself falling for Leo, a
young airman. With Leo often away on duty, Julia pours all of her
dissatisfaction and longing into her letters. She begins to entertain fantasies
of killing Herbert, and when the fantasy becomes a reality her letters turn
into a weapon to be used against her. Fryn Tennyson Jesse – a great-niece of
the poet – had a lifelong interest in true crime. Her 1924 book Murder and its
Motives is still in print, and she wrote introductions to six of the Notable
British Trials series, including the notorious trial of Timothy Evans and John
Christie in 1957. She was a remarkable writer, whose journalism took her into
war reporting and whose novelistic imagination surely made her identify with
Edith Thompson, a woman whose ‘trial by media’ saw her executed on no other
evidence than the fantasies of murder she had written down.
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1966). This is the one novel that inevitably crops up on
every true crime reading list. There’s a reason for that, which is that it
really is as good as everyone says, a book that anyone with an interest in true
crime would have to read. Capote’s novel is often credited with being the first
of its kind, which isn’t strictly true. What is true is that in Capote’s hands,
this account of a Midwestern farming family and their murder at the hands of
two disaffected young criminals attains the dimensions of classical tragedy.
Capote has been accused of displaying too much sympathy for the murderers and insufficient
attention to their victims, but I suspect that at least some of those who have
said this have not read the book. What we get from Capote is restraint,
empathy, a measured objectivity and just brilliant writing.
The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer (1979). It’s not difficult to trace the lineage from
Capote’s In Cold Blood to Mailer’s magnum opus, which in its turn was the
direct inspiration for Gordon Burn’s book about Peter Sutcliffe, Somebody’s
Husband, Somebody’s Son. Mailer’s novel tells the story of Gary Gilmore, a
convicted armed robber who went on to commit two murders and who was the first
person to be executed in the US following a moratorium on the death penalty
that had lasted almost a decade. Like Capote, Mailer went directly to the
source, interviewing friends, family and associates of Gilmore as well as
police and legal counsel. His coverage of the trial and the debate around the
death penalty – Gilmore refused to appeal his sentence – could have been a book
in itself. I was only ten when Gilmore was executed but I have vivid memories
of the headline news – indeed this was almost certainly my first and horrified
realization of the fact that executions could still happen outside of the
history books.
Mary Swann by Carol Shields (1987). An innovative, densely textured novel that makes use
of both poetry and playscript, Mary Swann is the story of a ‘lost’ Canadian
poet who grew up poor in rural Canada and whose death at the age of forty
remains a mystery. The novel examines the effect of the poet’s life and death
on various individuals in her orbit, including her would-be biographer and a
shy provincial librarian. Shields wrote Mary Swann as a homage to the Vancouver
poet Pat Lowther, who was brutally murdered by her husband Roy in 1975. Pat
Lowther was prodigiously talented – her first poem was published in a local
newspaper when she was ten. Roy was a failed poet, and bitterly jealous of his
wife’s growing success. According to his daughter from a previous marriage, he
was also violent and extremely troubled. With its literary theme, innovative
form and embedded sense of mystery, Mary Swann was one of the novels that first
awakened my interest in writing based around true events.
Libra by Don DeLillo (1988). There is a forensic quality to all of DeLillo’s
writing, a pared-back brilliance that makes it a natural fit for true crime
subjects, and here in Libra we get his take on one of the biggest. The
assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy in 1963 has probably spawned more
words on paper than any other murder (with the possible exception of Jesus of
Nazareth) but DeLillo’s deep dive into the mind and chequered history of Lee
Harvey Oswald is remarkable for very deliberately blending historical fact with
imagined scenarios. DeLillo shows how the assassination could have happened –
whilst maintaining his own stated belief that the truth behind Kennedy’s murder
is most likely lost to history. Unsurprisingly, Libra generated plenty of controversy
in the US. A review in the Washington Post accused DeLillo of being a bad
citizen. ‘If novelists are bad citizens,’ DeLillo countered, ‘we’re doing our
job.’ He gets my vote every time.
Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood (1996). The Grace of the title is Grace Marks, a servant in
the house of Canadian farmer and landowner Thomas Kinnear. In July 1843,
Kinnear and his housekeeper Nancy Montgomery, with whom he was having an
affair, were shot and bludgeoned to death by James McDermott, another servant
of the house and Grace’s lover. McDermott and Marks fled to the US, where they
were soon apprehended. Both were convicted, though Marks was spared the death
penalty. Before he was hanged, McDermott made a statement blaming Grace for the
crimes, insisting that she was the ‘evil genius’ behind the plan, and that she
had feigned madness in order to escape the gallows. Atwood’s novel takes place
after the murders. Grace has been committed to an asylum and is something of a
cause celebre. A doctor, Simon Jordan, is determined to win Grace’s confidence
and to discover the truth: was Grace involved in the murders, or not? In the
novel, as in life, the question remains unresolved.
Red Riding quartet by David Peace (1999 – 2002). Peace’s first four published novels take place
against the background of the Yorkshire Ripper murders, with the investigating
police force revealed as corrupt, inefficient, and riven by internal feuds. Some
characters keep returning from book to book; others are killed off, their
deaths a warning to anyone trying to discover who was responsible. Peace’s
language is bold, stark, uncompromising, as is his portrait of the social and
political landscape that formed the backdrop to his own adolescence. It’s
difficult to overstate the impact these books had on me when I first read them,
most of all for their subverting of crime genre stereotypes. Peace does not
offer any of the comforts of traditional crime fiction. What he offers is
brilliant writing and an honesty about the nature of violence and the impact of
poverty that few writers have matched.
Born Yesterday: The News as a Novel by Gordon Burn(2008). Though Gordon Burn’s career was cut
tragically short – he died of cancer in 2009 at the age of sixty-one – the
books he left behind have been powerfully influential. To write his 1984 book
on the Yorkshire Ripper, Burn spent most of two years living in Sutcliffe’s
home town, getting to know his friends and family in order to gain an authentic
insight into his background. Burn’s later book about Fred and Rosemary West,
Happy Like Murderers, saw him immersing himself in trial transcripts, police
interviews and many other other first-hand accounts. Researching this horrific material
had a severe impact on Burn’s mental health, and he said he would never write
another true crime book. His final novel, Born Yesterday is the closest he came
to revisiting the territory, a kaleidoscopic portrait of a single year – 2007 –
and the news events that defined it, most notably the abduction and
disappearance of Madeleine McCann. Burn said that he hoped the novel might give
future readers a sense of how the raw material of news gets refashioned as
history. It is a remarkable achievement. I have read this book several times
now and am still hypnotized by it.
The Kills by Richard House (2013). In the vastness and complexity of its structure –
four standalone novels that combine to create a single overarching narrative –
The Kills bears comparison with David Peace’s Red Riding quartet. There are
plenty of murders in The Kills, but the true crime being examined is the
political chicanery, economic exploitation and environmental vandalism
perpetrated by US-government-backed big business in the aftermath of the Iraq
war. The ‘War on Terror’ kickstarted by 9/11 is revealed as a free-for-all in
which the only working currencies are money and violence. As well as being a
masterpiece of formal invention, The Kills is a thrilling, disquieting,
thought-provoking piece of fiction that reveals bitter truths about our own
time.
Dead Girls by Selva Almada translated by Annie
McDermott (2020). Roberto
Bolano’s 2004 novel 2666 was one of the first to openly address the crime of
femicide in Latin America. Since Bolano we have seen pioneering work in true
crime writing by Laura Restrepo, Fernanda Melchor, Mariana Enriquez and
Cristina Rivera Garza among others. In Dead Girls, Selva Almada concentrates
her attention on three young Argentinian women who were murdered for their
gender in the 1980s, exploring their backgrounds and circumstances as well as
the political backdrop against which their killings took place. Almada is one
of a brilliant new generation of South American writers whose approach,
blending journalistic with fictional techniques, has brought new energy and
viewpoints into contemporary true crime writing.
The Treatment by Michael Nath (2020). Here is a novel that shows what is possible when
fact and fiction come together in the mind of a writer whose imagination is as
fertile as his talent with words. Nath bases The Treatment around the Stephen
Lawrence Inquiry and the decades-long struggle to unmask institutionalized
racism within the Metropolitan Police. A journalist, Carl Hyatt, has been fired
from the broadsheet he worked for after his investigation into a corrupt
property developer risks getting them sued. He’s been forced to take a job with
the Chronicle, a free-ads paper. But in spite of promising his wife that he’ll
stay away from the story, Carl’s obsession with uncovering the truth is about
to lead him and those he cares about into mortal danger. The Treatment is a
postmodern take on the Elizabethan revenge drama, delivered in a bravura mix of
poetry, street slang and Multicultural London English. Nath exercises superb
command of his material in a novel that demands a second reading to fully
appreciate its inventiveness.
Babysitter by Joyce Carol Oates (2023). Oates has frequently takes inspiration for her work
from true crimes, and the background to Babysitter is a series of unsolved
child murders that took place in Detroit in the mid-1970s. The novel follows
Hannah, the wife of a rich but rather dull businessman. She begins an affair
with a total stranger, who refuses to reveal anything about his background or
even his real name. He is powerful, controlling and violently unpredictable –
but for Hannah that is part of the attraction. Oates’s narrative is
multi-stranded, with Hannah only gradually becoming alive to what is going on in
her own neighbourhood. Babysitter is brilliantly imagined and richly characterised,
with a genuine sense of menace. Keeping the external events at one remove –
glimpsed from the corner of the eye – gives the reader a queasy and increasing
awareness of the danger Hannah is in.
I’m reading Helen Garner’s diary at the moment, or
rather her diaries, the three volumes recently released in the UK as a compendium,
beginning soon after the publication of her first novel Monkey Grip in 1978 and
carrying us through to the late 1990s. I’m currently in the middle of the
eighties, just after the publication of perhaps her best-known work The
Children’s Bach, which more or less coincides with the end of her second
marriage. People talk about the clarity of her gaze, her merciless
self-scrutiny and while all of that is true, what strikes me again and again is
the calibre of her ambition, her genuine terror that she might not live up to her
own high standards. She compares herself constantly with other writers and
finds herself wanting, a necessary discipline that does not in the least
diminish her ever-present joy in the practice of reading.
Even in the midst of life – and hers is an immensely social life, a tangled mass of friendships and rivalries and love affairs and motherhood – writing is central. She never seeks to downplay its importance and how I love her for that. I don’t believe in keeping writing stashed at the back of the cupboard, something that is done in spite of. Writing is because.
Garner has arranged her diaries as a series of vignettes. Only the years are given as a guide to where we are in her life. Individual entries are undated. They are like film stills, a pile of postcards, or photographs. You turn them over, one at a time. The year gradually accrues not through numbers but through narrative glimpses. Jump cuts. Sudden revelations. A life to lose yourself in. As I read I keep thinking about how Garner is now in her eighties and so I worry about her. I don’t want to lose her from this world, to lose this voice, this edgy, bracing, self-critical, fearlessly life-loving presence.
I know in advance that this volume will end with only one of Garner’s book-length works of narrative non-fiction out in the world: The First Stone, which was published in 1995. Joe Cinque’s Consolation (2004) and This House of Grief (2014) will still be ahead of her. But even from where I am now in the 1980s, the qualities that make her a great writer of true crime – the acuity of observation, the rapacious curiosity, a quality of objectivity and a relentless capacity for asking questions, not only of others but especially of self – are nailed into place.
A surety of line, the apparently effortless ability to make ordinary language carry a meaning and a beauty that rises above itself. Garner, for all her fears to the contrary, is a great writer, period.
The first book of Garner’s I read was This House of Grief, which follows the trial of Robert Farquharson, accused in 2005 of killing his three sons by deliberately driving the car in which they were travelling into a reservoir. Less than a year earlier, Farquharson’s wife Cindy had left him, and Farquharson had become increasingly depressed and resentful as a result. The series of trials that led to Farquharson’s conviction took seven years to unfold, and Garner was present in the courtroom for every hearing. This House of Grief has, perhaps inevitably, been compared with Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. But it’s a very different book. Capote’s genius is in excising himself from the text entirely – except in the matter of the quality of his writing. Garner is there. She reveals not only the story but her process in telling it. She speaks and sometimes argues with others who are present, reporting their interactions in intimate detail. Like Capote, she finds herself becoming drawn into the circle of relatives and family friends who have been directly affected by the case. But where Capote rode out the emotional impact of such personal involvement in private, Garner’s difficulties and doubts are made plain in the text, becoming an inalienable part of the story she is telling. She asks the questions we ourselves might want to ask, often remaining openly uncertain about the answers she is given.
There is a perfection to Capote’s work that is somehow unassailable; Garner’s has an immediacy that arises from its openness to scrutiny, through its expressions of doubt, not only about casting judgement but, on occasion, about the whole enterprise.
As with her frank and self-searching account of a sexual harassment case in The First Stone, some critics found fault with Garner for not paying sufficient attention to the gender-specific aspects of the Farquharson case, most especially the nature and repetitive frequency of male violence. But one of the qualities I value most in Garner is that she has never been interested in filtering her observations or her writing through an ideological lens. She is interested in people and how they respond to the situations they find themselves in. Most of all she is interested in discovering the truth of what really happened.
This House of Grief had a
powerful impact on me, not just in the shocking, harrowing story it was telling
but in the way it was written. True crime literature has come in for censure –
and I mean always, not just right now – for being exploitative, prurient,
manipulative and even immoral. I would maintain that this is not a problem of
content but of style. If you reach for cliches you will find your narrative
lacking in nuance, in objectivity, in accurate reasoning. In any kind of
storytelling but most of all when you are dealing in facts – especially painful
facts, especially disputed facts – the chief responsibility of the
writer is to strive for language that adequately conveys the nature of what is
being described.
Exploitative true crime is not
so much immoral as badly written. The work of a writer like Helen Garner is the
antidote, the antithesis. In revealing to us the conflicted, contradictory and
hard-to-discover facts and abiding contradictions of this terrible case she
reveals to us ourselves, the extent of our prejudices, the divided nature of
the society we live in.
On the day I started writing this, I read an interview in the Guardian with the writer Hallie Rubenhold. Rubenhold rightly gained attention for her 2019 book The Five, in which she re-examines the lives and circumstances of the ‘canonical five’ victims of Jack the Ripper. In shifting the attention away from the women’s killer, she created a compelling new model for true crime literature as well as providing insight into a society that – sometimes subtly, often not at all subtly – insisted that murdered women were to some extent responsible for their own violent deaths. A hundred years later, the same set of attitudes became a determining factor in the botched police investigation of the Yorkshire Ripper murders. If anything proves the need for the shift in thinking Rubenhold is advocating it is surely this. And yet – proving her own point – she ended up becoming the target of online abuse by ‘Ripperologists’, that peculiar subset of true crime enthusiasts who concern themselves with the unsolved (and now unsolvable) mystery of Jack the Ripper.
Certain extreme fringes of the
fraternity were incensed, it seems, by all kinds of things: that Rubenhold was
not sufficiently immersed in the ‘science’ of Ripperology for her opinion to
have any currency; that she ‘hated sex workers’ because she insisted on
undertaking a more nuanced (and factually accurate) examination of the victims’
backgrounds; that she dared to suggest that it didn’t matter all that much,
actually, who the Ripper was.
They’re a funny bunch, Ripperologists. I’m not going to castigate them for their weird enthusiasm – or only those who go in for online harassment – because to an extent at least I get it. In every writer of true crime there is at least a little of the obsessive, a little of the Ripperologist. What I don’t get is: why Jack? Seriously, guys, we are never going to know. Move on. Rubenhold herself has moved on. Her new book, Story of a Murder, focuses on a crime that took place decades later but that commanded equal column inches at the time. Dr Crippen was often reported in the press as a ‘mild-mannered murderer’; through focusing once again on his victim(s), Rubenhold is intent on showing us that he was no such thing. That indeed there is no such thing.
Rubenhold has some fascinating things to say in her interview about true crime generally. ‘I’m not interested in straight true crime,’ she insists. ‘I’m interested in the darkness in human nature as seen through historical events. And I’m fascinated by how granular you can get in terms of historical understanding; I’m looking at material that a murder throws up – all the witness statements, all the trial papers, all the unspoken human experience.’
I find all this deeply relatable. In writing A Granite Silence, the stuff I kept coming back to was the quotidian detail and circumstance of ordinary lives. The first witnesses called in the trial of Jeannie Donald were working people – a lamplighter, a gas worker, a baker – who happened to be up and about on the street in question before anyone else. I kept coming back to these people – the slaters, the rag-and-bone men and especially the lamplighters. Their trade does not even exist now yet in 1934 it was still part of the normal street scene. Such details – like the items of furniture in a room I describe in the first pages of the novel – are luminous to me because they give us an insight into history as it is lived. To quote Rubenhold again, ‘that’s where the story is – it’s about people’s experience.’
I would add though that I think we need to be honest about our attraction to these kinds of stories. There’s a section of the commentariat that insists the current ‘obsession’ with true crime is a new thing, a toxic byproduct of capitalism, or celebrity culture, or (most popularly and inevitably) the internet. But that simply isn’t true. Going back to Jack the Ripper (if we must) the police file of bogus witness statements, prurient and salacious rumour-mongering, false sightings and – yes – dozens of people claiming to be the Ripper is as thick as any amount of similar correspondence they might receive today. Ditto the Yorkshire Ripper enquiry, two full decades before widespread internet use. And the public fascination with high-profile murder cases goes back well before either.
There are many theories
as to why that might be. I tend towards the belief that there is something
mythic about these stories, something we recognise as being common to all of
us. We draw together instinctively behind the headlines in sorrow for the
victim, fear of the killer and fascination with the mystery. We feel horror at
the violence and a sense of helplessness at the suffering of those left behind.
We feel something else, too, something harder to describe. Not excitement so
much as déjà vu. These crimes lay bare our fears, our vulnerabilities. We want
to read about them because they are part of the definition of who we are.
I know all this, because I feel it, too. It is why I am drawn to write about such things.
In her truly excellent book Savage Appetites, Rachel Monroe suggests that there are in fact four distinct categories of true crime junkie: those who identify with the victim, those who seek for justice, those who cast themselves in the role of detective and those – a very small group – who see themselves in the killer. Monroe gives potent examples from each category. I find her arguments convincing and compelling and for the record, as both reader and writer I would put myself firmly in the detective camp. I would also say about myself as a writer that I recognise and respond to the powerful energy of the mystery template in fiction and especially in non-fiction, that relentlessly nagging question: what really happened?
Personally, I don’t find anything wrong in this. How a reader – or a writer – relates and responds to true crime stories is a personal matter, the business of their own conscience. For me, that business depends on providing suitably persuasive answers to the question of why I am interested in a particular story, what I can bring to my account of it that might justify and make sense of that interest in literary terms. There have been moments – quite a few of them – in the last twelve months when I have doubted my ability and my desire to work in this field again. But then I have asked myself: what if I am good at it? What if I cannot, now, imagine doing anything else?
In her interview for the Guardian, Hallie Rubenhold reveals that her mother died while she was working on Story of a Murder. ‘It really made me reflect on being a historian, and documenting lives,’ she says. ‘Because there’s a start date and an end date. Life has a finite beginning and a finite end. This is your time. And that’s it.’
Her words for me are powerfully resonant, a true reflection of my own motivations in deciding to focus my attention on this kind of story.
FIVE ESSENTIAL WORKS OF TRUE CRIME WRITTEN BY WOMEN
The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm
(1990)
‘[The journalist] is a kind of confidence man, preying
on people’s vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying
them without remorse.’ So opens Janet Malcolm’s interrogation of the ethics of
journalism, and true crime journalism in particular. The journalist, Joe
McGinniss, befriended and gained the confidence of the murderer, Jeffrey
MacDonald, in order to write his bestselling 1983 book Fatal Vision. MacDonald quickly
came to see McGinniss as his ‘man on the outside’ and possibly a route to being
exonerated. Needless to say he was very, very wrong. Malcolm’s book is itself a
kind of true crime narrative, brilliantly written and with a deeply personal
understanding of what is at stake.
The Red Parts by Maggie Nelson (2007)
Nelson’s
aunt Jane was murdered in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1969, while she was still a
student. No one was convicted of the crime. The tragedy had always been there
in Nelson’s background, but it wasn’t until 2005 that she addressed it in
writing. Jane: A Murder is a hybrid work that includes poetry, prose and
reportage to tell Jane’s story and to recover her identity from that of ‘murder
victim’. The Red Parts is the continuation of that story some thirty-six years
later, when a new suspect is identified and finally brought to trial. Nelson is
a writer of powerful originality and both these books offer radical new
perspectives on true crime as the subject of literature.
The Murders at White House Farm by Carol Ann Lee
(2015)
Carol Ann Lee is a historian and biographer who has
written on a number of true crime subjects, including Myra Hindley and Ruth Ellis.
The Murders at White House Farm is her exhaustive investigation of the 1985 Jeremy
Bamber case, in which the then twenty-four-year-old Bamber was ultimately charged
with the murders by shooting of five close relatives including his six-year-old
twin nephews. Bamber continues to protest his innocence, now as then blaming his
sister Sheila Caffell for the killings. This is one of those cases that now
appears to be unsolvable. The only person still alive who knows the truth is
Bamber himself – the ultimate unreliable narrator. Lee’s account, like all her
work, is quiet, methodical, beautifully written and open to all arguments. Her
careful reconstruction of the character, background, personal problems and
appalling media portrayal of Sheila Caffell makes this book doubly worthwhile.
I’ll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara (2018)
As well as being the most problematic, serial killers
are for me the least interesting subjects of true crime literature – these men
are violent, small-minded, narcissistic misogynists, end of. For this reason I
read very few serial-killer-related narratives, especially US ones. Michelle
McNamara’s I’ll Be Gone in the Dark is the exception, a book that proves that any
subject can be a worthy subject if the writer is sincerely motivated and equal
to the task. McNamara made it her life’s work to discover the identity of the Golden
State Killer, a notorious rapist and murderer who committed his horrific crimes
throughout California during the seventies and eighties. McNamara died in 2016
with her book still unfinished and the killer still uncaught. The manuscript
was brought to completion by McNamara’s husband, together with an investigative
journalist and a true crime writer. The resulting book became an instant
bestseller and recharged the continuing cold case with some much needed
publicity. The murderer – a retired cop – was finally brought to justice just
two months after the book’s publication.
Liliana’s Invincible Summer by Cristina Rivera Garza
(2023)
Rivera
Garza’s sister Liliana was murdered in Mexico in 1990. She was just twenty
years old. Though the killer’s identity was widely known, he was never arrested.
Some thirty years later, Rivera Garza attempts to gain access to the files that
were kept on the case. Unwilling to expose themselves to scrutiny or criticism,
the police prove to be an active impediment in her search for justice. Rivera
Garza’s formally inventive and searching memoir examines the official response
to the crime of femicide in Mexico amidst the systemic problems of entrenched
machismo and a failure to understand or even recognise the increasing phenomenon
of intimate partner violence. It is also a joyful, defiant celebration of
Liliana herself, a young woman who, one feels instinctively, would be the first
to admire the book that bears her name.
It is now just a little over two weeks before the publication of my new novel A Granite Silence. In the run-up to that, I would like to talk a little more about the background to this work – what inspired it, what it means for me as a writer. The question I have been asked a lot about this book already is: what is it? Is it historical fiction, is it true crime, are there any speculative elements involved? The simple answer is yes, yes and yes, but there’s nothing simple about this book, nor what led me to write it. A Granite Silence feels like a significant milestone for me as a writer. At the same time, it is a novel I have been gearing myself up to write for many years. Here’s an essay I wrote about that journey.
*
READING PEACE, WRITING GRANITE
‘As they left the Highbury pitch that afternoon, as
the sporting men of Fulham shook their hands, slapped their backs and wished
United luck, the very best of luck, Bobby had his head bowed, he did not speak,
a few folk even said he looked distraught, though they could not think, not
fathom why, why would he look distraught? United were in the final of the Cup,
the FA bloody Cup, doesn’t get much better than that now, does it, Bobby lad?
Come on, Bobby, smile, why don’t you smile? You scored a goal, you’re in the
Final!’
My mother remembered Munich; she was fourteen when it
happened. I first learned about the crash from when she happened to mention it
to me, years ago. I have forgotten exactly what she said, but I know she talked
about the Busby Babes, about the tragedy of what happened to Manchester United.
The odd England game aside, my mother is not a football person, never has been.
But she remembered Munich.
On the afternoon of February 6th 1958, the plane carrying the team home from their European Cup fixture against Red Star Belgrade crashed at the end of the runway at Munich airport. Of the forty-four passengers on board British European Airways Flight 609, only twenty-one survived. Of the twenty-three who died, eight were Man United players. The team’s manager Matt Busby was so badly injured he took months to recover.
At the time of the Munich Air
Disaster, David Peace’s father, Basil Dunford Peace was in London studying to
be a teacher. He attended the match United played and won against Arsenal at
Highbury the week before. He judged it the greatest game he’d ever seen. Though
Basil Peace was always a Huddersfield Town supporter, it was the Babes he
talked about. When his father died in 2022, David Peace set aside the book he had
been working on and began to write Munichs, a novel of the crash and of
its immediate aftermath, a novel about football but also – equally, tellingly –
about grief.
British society after the war was slow to change. Deferential and still massively class-bound, it was a society in which the traditional hierarchies of family, church and community were strongly upheld. In Munichs, the second world war is still tangibly close. The older men – the football managers, the sports journalists – have fought in the war. Some of them have fought in two. Bobby Charlton and his friend Duncan Edwards are still doing National Service. All the young players are encouraged to learn a trade – bricklayer, builder, plumber, sparks – in case football doesn’t work out. The idea of taking their game into Europe is still very new, and they feel nervous about venturing ‘behind the Iron Curtain’. More than one of the boys who ended up on that flight would have preferred to stay at home.
Peace evokes a world in which
it is still not unusual for only one house on the street to have a telephone,
where families sit anxiously around the radio, waiting for news. Where women – especially
working class women – are really only expected to be wives and mothers. Where
young lads who’ve just been in an air crash are expected to be out on the pitch
winning matches just a fortnight later.
When you look at photos of Matt
Busby’s team, what hits you in the gut is just how young they were. Several of
those who died were barely in their twenties. Those who survived received no trauma
counselling. They were not encouraged to talk, even by their families, about
what had happened to them. And once they were home there were the match-day
chants, shouts that they ‘should have died at Munich’, accusations that they
burn-outs, selfish for standing in the way of fresher talent. Jackie
Blanchflower and John Berry, who survived the crash but who were too badly
injured to continue in the game, were quickly asked to vacate their subsidised
flats in order to make way for the players who would replace them.
There are intimations in Munichs
of the increasingly commercial route football would follow. Even before the
crash, Manchester United were sneered at for being ‘Hollywood United’, a team
more interested in big names, big money and foreign travel than the home game. Matt
Busby was criticized for taking the team into Europe in the first place.
In some ways, what happened at
Munich represents a dividing line between the 1950s and the 1960s. The more
open, socially permissive era that followed the disaster promised greater
freedom and openness but less security and fewer certainties. Less emphasis on
moral values, more on getting ahead. It is a harsher time, a more ruthless time,
and not just in football. Is it fanciful to suggest that Munich is where
Thatcherism begins? Worth remembering that Thatcher was selected as the
Conservative candidate for Finchley in April 1958, just two months after
Munich, that she was elected to parliament less than eighteen months after that?
There has to be something in
this, at least for a writer. And for a writer the story of Munich is not all
about Man United. Eight journalists as well as eight footballers were killed in
the crash – a horrible symmetry – men who had known each other for longer than
most of the players had been alive. In the world of sport they were famous. The
funeral of Henry Rose, the most-read football columnist the Daily Express ever
had, was bigger even than Duncan Edwards’s or Tommy Taylor’s. When these men
died, whole lifetimes of knowledge and memory went with them, gaps that could
never be filled and that marked the end of an era in British sports writing.
There is also the broader
question of what caused the crash. The inquiry into the accident went on for
years, undermined by disagreements and conflicts of interest between British
European Airways and the German airport authorities. The pilot, James Thain, was
a former RAF officer and an experienced flyer. Thain, who had just turned
thirty-eight at the time of the crash, was subjected to an ongoing barrage of
vitriol hurled at him by the press and by a public who were desperate for
someone to blame. BEA sacked him two Christmases later, anxious to cover their
backs; the German authorities were determined from the outset that Thain was at
fault. It took him ten years to clear his name. He died of a heart attack not
long afterwards, aged just fifty-four.
I could spend a lot of time reading and thinking about
this bitter aftermath. A large part of my passion for true crime literature is in
my hunger for knowledge, an obsession with the question of what really happened.
Munichs though is not so much an investigation as an exhumation, an
evocation of a time as viewed through the lens of a single event. The novel captures
the language and texture of a grief that is both national and personal,
personal not just for the fans and families of Manchester United but for Peace
himself. A means of replaying his father’s memories, reimagining the effect of
those headlines, that heartbreak, the abysmal sense of shock. Of bringing his
father back to life, even. A way to continue with a conversation that had been
cut short.
Peace’s present tense
narrative rolls in a slow wave between crash survivors and the victims’
families, shellshocked staff on the ground at Old Trafford, newspaper
reporters, doctors, older players coaxed back to the game by a desperate
management, teenage reserves hurriedly brought on side. Hostile supporters of rival
teams, keyboard warriors before their time. Taxi drivers, grieving brothers,
even a monk. And of course the Dead, who haunt Peace’s account from its opening
pages. Everyone has their own version of what happened at Munich. Some have
more than one, hence Munichs plural, though that is not the only meaning
of the novel’s title.
Peace never feels the need to
use elevated language. As a potter constructs a miracle from humble red clay,
so Peace achieves poetry through paying attention to the sound and rhythm of ordinary
words. The language heard on the street or down the pub. Of tabloid headlines,
the cliches of condolence, the gulf that exists between what is spoken and what
is felt. You hear this novel as you read it: the voices of the regions, the
heft and weight of sentences, the way words work harder and divulge more secrets
when they are put together in a particular way.
Munichs is as much a piece of music as it is a novel, a
battery of half-rhymes and assonance achieved through Peace’s habitual,
repeated process of reading aloud. A symphony of sorrowful songs, a hymn to all
of the Dead, including his dad.
*
I kept reading around David Peace before I actually
read him. I remember seeing him on the 2003 Granta list and feeling drawn to
what he was saying about how fact works in fiction. About how his first books
had been inspired by the years-long, error-strewn hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper.
I have always been interested in true crime for its detailed evocations of
particular memories, of particular times and places. I remember also the
feelings of guilt and uncertainty I used to have around reading it. True crime
was sensationalist and exploitative, the stuff of tabloid newspapers. It was OK
to read Crime and Punishment and talk about how it was really a crime
novel but reading about real murders was somehow taboo. At least if you were
serious, at least if you had taste.
Then I read an interview with Peace that upended my thinking and ultimately changed my direction as a writer. Speaking in 2010, Peace described the crime genre as ‘the perfect tool to understand why crimes take place, and thus tell us about the society we live in and the country we live in and who we are.’ I had heard similar arguments before, but Peace went further, saying that he was ‘drawn to when writers take on history, take on real crimes. There’s just so much that happens in real life that we don’t understand, that we can’t even fathom. I don’t really see the point of making up crimes.’
I remember feeling electrified when I read that. Peace was writing densely textured works that embodied the vision and freedom to experiment that fiction offers, but that were tied to experiential reality in a way that made them even more powerful. I felt energized and inspired. I was beginning to think in a new way about what I wanted to write. At the same time I felt deeply uncertain about whether I was truly capable of this kind of writing. Whether I could bring anything new to the table. Whether I could do justice to my subject matter.
Neither could I help noticing
that the field of work I was becoming interested in was dominated by men. Macho,
in-your-face men like Norman Mailer and Peace’s own literary idol James Ellroy.
James Ellroy is about as far from British self-deprecation as you’re going to
get. But he has the goods to back up his words and in the end that’s all I care
about, the quality of the writing. If Ellroy feels OK comparing himself with
Beethoven then good on him, because he’s not far wrong. I wish I had his nerve.
I have since come to realise that my uncertainty had less to do with not being Norman Mailer than with not being ready. I didn’t feel I had the technical ability and I was probably right. I took the slow way round, feeling my way towards stories that made sense for me to tell, pushing the envelope of my abilities with each new thing I tried. When I finally came to write A Granite Silence it still felt like a risk, the most difficult and challenging project I had yet attempted. But I had come to a point where I sensed I might be capable of solving the problems the book presented, and where the writing itself – the words on the page – stood a chance of reaching a standard I felt I could live with.
I had arrived at the moment where the risk felt not just possible, but necessary.
*
In the autumn of 2021 I travelled to Liverpool to meet
up with a friend I hadn’t seen in person since before the first lockdown. Just
being in the city put me on a high. Rain fell heavily the night before I headed
home again, and when I went to catch my train I discovered that the West Coast
Main Line was partially flooded, that all services heading north were severely
delayed. I was told to take a train to Preston and await further instructions.
“What happens when I get to Preston?” I asked. No one could tell me, because nobody knew. When I got there the scenes I encountered were predictably insane. Trains arriving and disgorging hundreds of passengers with nowhere to go. People sweeping in tides from platform to platform as rumours of trains that might get us into Scotland flared up, spread like wildfire and then guttered out. The one that finally arrived had limped all the way from Plymouth. By the time it turned up in Preston it was three hours late. I crammed myself into a luggage stand, fenced in by people’s knees and a couple of bikes. As we crossed the border at Berwick-on-Tweed an announcement crackled through the overhead speakers that all passengers were now obliged to put on their masks. The woman sitting next to me – I’d managed to grab a seat just after Newcastle – asked me if I’d managed to catch what they were saying. She’d been on the train since Birmingham. I reluctantly broke the news.
“Jesus!” she groaned. I told her if she didn’t feel like complying with Scottish law that was fine by me. We’d all been breathing each other’s air for several hours in any case. I was exhausted. I was increasingly pessimistic about making the last ferry. But what I remember most about that journey is reading David Peace’s 1980 and 1983, in a breathless six hours of immersion that were still ongoing. And how strange it was, that I was passing through the places I was reading about: those hard-nosed northern moorlands and back-to-backs, streaming past beyond the windows in a reel of silent film.
*
From the Redbeck car park back into Castleford –
Silence
in the black of the back of the van –
Dim
lights down black back roads –
Sat in
the back of the black of the van –
Yorkshire,
1972:
You’ll
wake up some morning as unhappy as you’ve ever been before.
When David Peace started work on 1974 he did so
with the youthful ambition to write the best crime novel ever written. That the
Red Riding novels have become classics proves the strength of that ambition,
though Peace now feels ambivalent about the first movement of his quartet. Perhaps
he feels that it does not stray far enough from the roots of the genre. But
whilst it is true that some of those roots are showing – Derek Raymond, Ted
Lewis – how could it be otherwise? When you first start writing you’re lucky, not
to mention talented, if anything you produce is entirely yours. Peace had written
earlier, unpublished novels before finding his true direction, grounding the
story he wanted to tell in the Yorkshire of the seventies and early eighties, a
time that coincided with the beginnings of his desire to write and that in some
sense formed it.
He brought to it also some of
the kitchen-sink sensibility of the previous generation of northern writers,
whose novels he had been introduced to through his father’s book collection:
Stan Barstow, who lived just a few streets away from Peace in his hometown of
Ossett; Alan Sillitoe, who as well as being a novelist was also a poet. And
there was something else too, something extra: the gritty, poetic rigour that
marks Peace’s own style, a confidence around his material that increases as the
sequence moves forward.
The material by itself is
challenging enough. Peace’s portrait of a corrupt and increasingly beleaguered
police force offers none of the familiarity and consolation of traditional
detective fiction, and few writers have come anywhere close to confronting the traumatic
effects of violence and poverty as Peace has done. In terms of story, the Red
Riding novels are masterpieces of ambiguity. But what makes these books truly groundbreaking
is their insistence on being more than a story, on being words on a page. Peace’s
language becomes increasingly codified, more condensed, so close to poetry in
places there is really no difference. The language of 1983 especially
gains a kind of transcendence, hammering the page like rain on windows,
staining the paper like mould.
You can feel it being written.
*
I first read TS Eliot’s The Waste Land in English
class when I was fourteen. I count myself as lucky. I would bet the farm – if I
had one – that they don’t teach Eliot now. My mother has always loved poetry.
She used to read it aloud to me throughout my early childhood, and so I had the
advantage of being familiar with how poetry works. I think even at fourteen I
knew instinctively how to read The Waste Land, which I recognized as a
country of the imagination as much as a symbolic portrait of the postwar
landscape.
I was so excited by what I read it made my heart race. I felt angry and frustrated with my classmates, who did not get it, who kept flipping back and forth between the text and the notes at the end, trying to discover the poem’s ‘meaning’ from references they had no hope of understanding. I didn’t understand the notes either – they were too esoteric, notes from a bygone era even then – but I knew enough to know that I didn’t need them. There was something happening between me and the words, and that was enough. I was discovering phrases and cadences and – more even than that – a way of looking at language that was to become the central strand of my writer’s DNA.
To Carthage then I came
Burning burning burning burning
There was something about Eliot’s
images that made my teeth chatter. Over in my German class I was coming to know
the stories of Wolfgang Borchert, who had worked with similar raw material,
even though his register of language and lexicon of references are very
different. I began to understand how one work of literature could inform
another. Storming through Red Riding forty years later I became convinced that
Peace must have experienced a similar epiphany. That mental thrill, which is also
visceral. The narrowing of the gap between the thought and the word.
As an adolescent, Peace
harboured a secret fear that his father might be the Yorkshire Ripper, that his
mother might be the Ripper’s next victim. What is any writing but the stuff you
are most interested in or obsessed by? Ideas you keep having. Stories you keep
noticing. Ambitions that won’t keep quiet or go away.
Finding a path towards your
material can be a tortuous process. I had ambitions to write a novel based
around true events for most of ten years before I found myself at work on A
Granite Silence. It happened almost without my realizing it – as I describe
in the novel itself, the story I had set out to write was very different.
Allowing aspects of that story to keep resurfacing became essential to the narrative
as it developed.
Every novel is a set of
problems waiting to be solved. Paying attention to how other writers have
solved their problems may not help you solve your own – the problems you have
will be different, or should be – but it should at least hold out the hope that
a solution is possible. David Peace’s work continues to speak to me directly. The
chord it first struck was so powerful it has never died away.
Earlier this summer, I reread Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. This was the first time I’d revisited the book since seeing Bennett Miller’s film Capote when it was released in 2005. Capote is a favourite film of mine, one I rewatch frequently and with undiminished admiration. Of course, Philip Seymour Hoffmann is out of this world in it. But it’s not just him. From the opening frame, there’s something about the texture of this film, the evocation of sense of place most of all, that keeps me coming back to it, wishing that there were more true crime dramas that accorded their subject matter this level of attention and restraint.
Over time and with repeated viewings of the movie it was perhaps inevitable that book and film had become inextricably enmeshed in my imagination. This was a good part of the reason I chose to revisit the novel. I have read a significant amount of true crime literature in the almost twenty years since first encountering Truman Capote’s magnum opus. How would it have fared in the onrush of time and memory?
If anything, it was better than I remembered. Not just a masterpiece of true crime literature but a masterpiece full stop. The attention to detail, the restraint, the beautifully jointed, watertight sentences. In Cold Blood is rightly called a novel, not simply because it goes beyond the reporter’s brief in imagining scenes, dialogue, alternative scenarios but because it is a novelist’s feel for structure and for narrative form that Capote brings to his material. The thing that surprised me most – the thing I’d forgotten – is how little Capote inserts himself into the text. There is just that one line near the end, in which he refers to ‘the journalist’, a person that can only be him, but who is neither named nor referred to again.
I have read criticism of In Cold Blood that suggests Capote’s obsession with the two perpetrators and his uncomfortably close relationship with Perry Smith in particular makes the book unforgivably unbalanced, that he ‘did not do right by the Clutter family’. Though one has to take account of and respect the views of those who knew the Clutters as neighbours, I would have to disagree with this assessment. Whatever his private turmoil, Capote does not in any way ‘favour’ the murderers. His summoning of an entire community and way of life, very much including the personalities and daily lives of Herb, Bonnie, Nancy and Kenyon Clutter is a act of imagining – I almost want to say resurrection – that favours nothing but the truth insofar as he was able to discover it, an inextricable tangle of opposing truths, contrary points of view, accidents of fate that are as horrifying today as they were in 1959.
More than sixty years ago and still, this story. There is nothing that can forgive or make right the evil act that ended the lives of a blameless family. But in literature as in life, the line between ‘evil acts’ and ‘evil men’ is a notoriously tricky one to navigate or to describe. That Capote attempts to do so is his job as a writer and he succeeds brilliantly. The only certain thing is that the death penalty helps no one, and solves nothing.
There is similarly much to contemplate in two more recent works of true crime, both published this year. Francisco Garcia’s We All Go into the Dark revisits the Bible John murders that took place in Glasgow in the 1960s – less than a decade after the Clutters were murdered – while Cristina Rivera Garza’s Liliana’s Invincible Summer recounts the murder of Garza’s twenty-year-old sister Liliana in Mexico City in 1990. In the case of Patricia Docker, Jemima MacDonald and Helen Puttock, no one was ever charged with their murders and the identity of Bible John remains a mystery. In the case of Liliana Rivera Garza, the identity of her murderer is all too clear – but he, similarly, has never been charged.
Francisco Garcia admits up front that he has little to add to the Bible John narrative as it is already known. His intention in writing the book is to examine the effect the crimes had on Glasgow at the time, their treatment by the media and the ultimately unsuccessful attempts of detectives to shine a light on the identity of the killer for decades afterwards. While I might have liked a little more commentary on the harshly constrained lives of Glasgow working class women in particular, Garcia’s work is honest, thorough and captivating and I like his book a lot. His unsensationalist, self-questioning approach to writing true crime should be noted and applauded. I hope his next book will push this envelope still further.
I know Cristina Rivera Garza’s work from her strange, elliptical 2012 novella The Taiga Syndrome. It would be impossible for her not to insert herself into the text of Liliana’s Invincible Summer – whole tracts of this heartbreaking narrative are inevitably her story, too – but the miracle she performs in allowing her sister not only to be properly seen for who she is but in some sense to be the narrator of this remarkable book is no less an act of literary resurrection than Capote’s. As an examination of coercive control, intimate partner violence and the only recently named and acknowledged crime of femicide, Liliana’s Invincible Summer is an essential addition to the library of true crime literature. As an elegy for a lost beloved it is equally indispensable.
Reading this excellent interview with Eliza Clark over the weekend – Clark is the author of the smartly original novel Boy Parts and has recently been named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists – I was particularly struck by what she says about what it is that attracts her to true crime narratives:
“I’m just interested in people’s lives and the histories of places… True crime, done well, feels like one of the only times you get to read nonfiction about day-to-day lives.”
This chimes so exactly with my own reasons for being interested in true crime literature, why I think it’s important. It’s good to see new voices entering this arena, even better to see the inventiveness, seriousness and respect with which they approach this difficult and sensitive material. I cannot wait to read Clark’s new novel, Penance. And while I’m waiting, I have my own research to be getting on with…
Apologies for my absence from the blog recently. The work-in-progress is currently in its final stages, and so the bulk of my concentration and energy is being poured into that. I hope to return to more regular posting soon. In the meantime, here is the transcript of a talk I gave yesterday evening to the North Bute Literary Society, which is not entirely unconnected with the novel I’m working on. This was fascinating to research and write, so much so that I have ideas about expanding it into something more substantial at a later date.
*
In a 2010 interview with the American publishing website GalleyCat, the British novelist David Peace talks about how he believes that crime writers, rather than inventing fictional serial killers, should concentrate their minds on interrogating the real events presented in newspaper headlines and police investigations. “I’m drawn to when writers take on history, take on real crimes,” he says. “To me there’s just so much that happens in real life that we don’t understand and we can’t even fathom. I don’t really see the point of making up crimes. I think that the crime genre is the perfect tool to understand why crimes take place, and thus tell us about the society we live in and the country we live in and who we are.”
Peace’s own writing has from the beginning centred itself upon real crimes. The Red Riding Quartet, set against the background of the Yorkshire Ripper murders of the late 70s and early 80s, takes its inspiration from the Yorkshire and specifically the Leeds of Peace’s own childhood and adolescence. His later Tokyo trilogy examines the political and social evolution of post-war Japan through the filter of three real-life crimes that shocked and polarised a nation already traumatised by war and the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki through the brutal force of Allied nuclear weaponry.
Peace claims as his most potent inspiration the American writer James Ellroy, who is so intent upon recapturing the atmosphere of the 1970s Los Angeles he writes about that he still uses a typewriter and has never owned a mobile phone.
We tend to think of the current interest in true crime as a modern phenomenon. Whether it be through podcasts like Serial, Netflix productions like Making a Murderer or closer to home, TV series like David Wilson’s Crime Files, which has a specifically Scottish focus, everyone seems to be talking about, watching or reading true crime. Along with popularity comes criticism – what is it about our society today that has led to what some call a prurient obsession with murder and murderers? Many, inevitably, have pointed to social media as the accelerant and you only have to look at the inappropriate and often abusive social media commentary around cases such as the recent, tragic death of Nicola Bulley in Lancashire to understand why.
Personally, I have always resisted the narrative around social media that has cast it as the chief villain of contemporary society. I happen to believe that social media is itself morally neutral, its agenda set entirely by those who use it. I would describe it not as the cause of a set of new and by extension worse behaviours but simply as a tool, a faster delivery system for the information, rumours, gossip, and scandal that has always obsessed us.
Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood was published in 1966 and is often hailed as the first ‘non-fiction novel’. In Cold Blood takes as its subject matter the murder, in 1959, of Herb, Bonnie, Nancy and Kenyon Clutter, a Kansas farming family by small-time criminals Richard Hickock and Perry Smith. The two had recently been released from prison after serving time for robbery. They arrived at the Clutter house expecting to make away with more than $10,000. What they got was $40. Capote took more than 8,000 pages of notes in the course of writing the book, which brings the events to life using the techniques of New Journalism – a personal agenda, imaginative reconstruction and the interleaving of multiple points of view. As the writer Rupert Thomson puts it:
“Capote saw journalism as a horizontal form, skimming over the surface of things, topical but ultimately throwaway, while fiction could move horizontally and vertically at the same time, the narrative momentum constantly enhanced and enriched by an incisive, in-depth plumbing of context and character. In treating a real-life situation as a novelist might, Capote aimed to combine the best of both literary worlds to devastating effect.”
Just two years later, the playwright Emlyn Williams turned a
similar focus upon the Moors Murderers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley in Beyond
Belief, a work that similarly blends hard facts with imaginative reconstruction
and that lays emphasis not on the crimes so much as the social background and
family circumstances that made Hindley and Brady such an appalling influence on
one another.
Both these books were instant bestsellers – and instantly show us that the interest in true crime, for both reader and writer, long predates the advent of the internet. And we can trace that interest back far further than Capote. As early as 1875, the writer Wilkie Collins, perhaps most famous for his fictional mystery The Woman in White, wrote The Law and the Lady, a novel freely inspired by the trial of Madeleine Smith in 1857, a case that also inspired William Darling Lyell’s 1921 novel The House in Queen Anne’s Square. In 1912, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, best known as the creator of the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, wrote a freewheeling true-crime account of another Glasgow case, the gross miscarriage of justice against Oscar Slater, falsely accused of murder and whose case was famously taken up by Doyle himself.
In my previous talk for this society, we concentrated upon writers associated with the so-called Golden Age of detective fiction, the period between the wars when the social order was rapidly changing and whose excitement and unease were so inventively tapped by detective writers. We tend to think of the Golden Age writers as spinning convoluted, sometimes fanciful ‘puzzle plots’ – the antithesis of the gutter-level vantage point of true crime narratives. As it turns out, the Golden Age writers were as fascinated and inspired by real-life crimes as any of their grittier modern counterparts.
The Anatomy of Murder, published in 1936, is a collection of essays by Golden Age writers such as Dorothy L. Sayers, Francis Iles and Helen Simpson examining some of the most famous true-crime cases of the era. In his introduction to a recent reissue of the book, crime writer, historian and latter-day president of the Detection Club Martin Edwards talks about the fascination felt by Golden Age writers for real cases, how Detection Club meetings would often feature engaged discussion on the latest theory or new piece of evidence. Nor did they confine themselves to abstract discussions. Novels directly inspired by true crimes were as common and popular then as they are now, with many of them displaying much of the same concern and fascination with the social background to crime and the inequalities within society that is often influential not only upon the causes of crime, but how crime is seen and judged.
Perhaps the most written-about criminal ever is Jack the Ripper, whose true identity, ironically, remains unknown unto the present day. Anyone who suspects that behaviours such as trolling and the spreading of ‘alternative facts’ are the product of the internet age might do well to take a look at some of the spurious letters, communications and false rumours that deluged down upon the heads of officers charged with investigating these brutal murders in the Whitechapel of 1888.
More than a hundred years later, crime writers, podcasters and film makers are still writing and talking about the unidentified serial killer. One of the very first novels to take the Whitechapel murders as their key inspiration is The Lodger, written in 1913 by Marie Belloc Lowndes, the sister of the poet and satirist Hilaire Belloc. Sometime in 1910, Marie Belloc Lowndes attended a dinner party where she heard from the painter Walter Sickert of how the landlady of his then apartment in Mornington Crescent first showed him the rooms, telling him that she was sure a previous tenant had been Jack the Ripper. Sickert famously painted the room as ‘Jack the Ripper’s bedroom,’ drenching the scene in his characteristic umber light, producing an ambience of dingy notoriety. Belloc Lowndes drew just as much inspiration from the tale, which inspired a short story published in McClure’s Magazine in 1911, a story that proved so popular with the readership that Lowndes decided to expand it into a novel.
The Lodger tells the story of Bunting and his wife Ellen, who keep a lodging house on the Marylebone Road. The Buntings meet while they are both in service, Bunting as a manservant and butler and Ellen as a maid. They work in good houses for generous employers, eventually acquiring enough money to set themselves up on their own. However, a series of disappointments and unforeseen accidents have left them without an income and as Lowndes’s novel opens they are desperate. Lowndes makes a point that might well have been missed by modern readers otherwise, that had the Buntings been either poorer to begin with, or more middle class they would have been more certain of finding help within their community. As things stand, they belong to no class, and so are thrown back on their increasingly depleted resources.
When
a mysterious stranger presents himself looking for lodgings, Ellen feels his
presence almost as a divine intervention. Mr Sleuth, she is certain, is ‘a
proper gentleman’. A touch eccentric yes, but quiet, decent and god-fearing, a
teetotaller like herself. His needs are simple, and if his habits seem strange
then the money he offers in return for his rooms is ample compensation. For the
first time in many months, the Buntings see the possibility of a new start. But
when a series of gruesome murders becomes the talk of the neighbourhood, Ellen
Bunting begins to notice an uneasy correspondence between the scenes of the
crimes and her lodger’s nocturnal rambles. As the body count rises, Ellen’s
imaginings take on the quality of nightmare.
The Lodger is a fascinating social document, evoking a world in which class is still absolutely the most defining factor in society. In spite of mounting evidence to the contrary, the police find themselves unwilling, almost unable to believe that crimes of such a violent and sordid nature might be the work of a ‘gentleman’, and Lowndes is astute in demonstrating how their blinkered approach actively hampers their investigation. Lowndes’s portrait of Ellen Bunting is the most nuanced, revealing her increasing fascination with the crimes and the ways in which her insights lead her into places and behaviours that would previously have been unthinkable. A romantic subplot involving Bunting’s daughter from a previous marriage dovetails neatly with the main action when Daisy finds herself falling for a detective constable involved with the murder investigations. The Lodger is plainly written, unostentatious in terms of its literary style but Lowndes is an honest craftswoman with a nose for a good story and her descriptions of a London caught up in murder fever are given extra life by her knowing references to other real-life crimes of the period and her professional insights into tabloid journalism and the public thirst for sensation and especially for true crime. Bunting’s clandestine pursuit of his murder fixation in the Evening Standard will raise a knowing smile from all modern day podcast junkies:
Thanks to that penny he had just spent so recklessly he would pass a happy hour, taken, for once, out of his anxious, despondent, miserable self. It irritated him shrewdly to know that these moments of respite from carking care would not be shared with his poor wife, with careworn, troubled Ellen.
Anyone
reading The Lodger when it was first published would have been acutely aware of
its realworld resonances, and accordingly thrilled.
Lowndes was a prolific writer and journalist, active in society and constantly on the lookout for material suitable for adaptation into the hugely popular novels that, essentially, supported her family. The writer of our next book, Elizabeth Jenkins, was of a very different temperament. Shy and something of an introvert, she was an intensely private woman, who chose her subjects carefully and who expressed her opinions obliquely within her writing. Margaret Elizabeth Jenkins was born in 1905, and lived into our current century, dying at the age of 104. Jenkins studied English and History at Newnham College, Cambridge, and worked variously as a teacher and civil servant before becoming a full-time writer after WW2.
Her most popularly successful novel, Harriet, was published in 1934 and was awarded the Prix Femina, beating both Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust and Antonia White’s Frost in May. Harriet is based on the infamous Penge murder trial of 1877, fully ten years before the Ripper crimes but a case that excited at least as much attention at the time.
Jenkins, who often insisted she needed the firm armature of a real-life incident to inspire her best writing, first learned about the case when her brother David, who was a solicitor, gave her a copy of The Trial of the Stauntons by JB Atlay, one of the volumes in the Notable British Trials series. David thought the peculiarly enmeshed, secretive family relations at the heart of the case might be of interest to Elizabeth, and he wasn’t wrong. She quickly found herself becoming obsessed with the Stauntons – or the ‘Cudham quartet’ as they became known – and decided to write a novel about them. This of course was Harriet, which in Jenkins’s own words was to be “one of the very earliest instances – if not the earliest – of a writer’s recounting a story of real life, with the actual Christian names of the protagonists and all the available biographical details, but with the imaginative insight and heightened colour which the novelist exists to supply’.
Harriet Woodhouse – Harriet Richardson in real life – lives in London with her mother and stepfather, her birth father, a well-to-do clergyman, having died when Harriet was twelve. As well as a generous settlement from her father’s will, Harriet has been left a sizeable sum of money by an aunt. Harriet has learning difficulties, and although she has a lively and curious nature she depends heavily upon her mother, who has always been determined that her daughter should gain as much life experience as possible within a safe environment.
Harriet is in her early thirties when she first comes into
contact with the significantly younger Lewis Oman at the house of a near
relation. Lewis, an auctioneer’s clerk, is a good looking young man, and when
he starts paying special attention to Harriet she quickly becomes infatuated
with him. When he proposes marriage, Harriet’s mother realises immediately that
he has no real affection for her daughter, but very real designs on her money. She
attempts to have Harriet certified as a lunatic in order to prevent the marriage
and protect her daughter, but the family doctor is quick to warn her that this
plan will probably fail:
‘You must see,’ said the doctor, ‘that what she’s doing now is done by hundreds of young women who to all intents and purposes are as sane as we are: alarming her friends by wanting to throw herself away on a worthless young man.’
The horror of Harriet’s eventual fate is equalled only by the bizarre network of relationships and lies that enable it. Elizabeth Jenkins’s abiding interest as a writer is centred upon human relationships – between men and women, between families – and her understanding of the characters at the heart of this story is acute and brilliantly rendered. She enters into the mind and heart of each person equally, whether they be innocent, guilty, or a little of both. Her descriptive writing has immense power, as we see here in her description of Lewis, standing at the London dockside not long before his devious plan goes into operation:
Hoarse cries sounding from the water, unintelligible words ceaselessly filling the ear, the perpetual hurrying to and fro of figures in the gloom, made an atmosphere so enthralling that hours passed unnoticed; and as Lewis stood amidst this stir he knew that a power was coming to him, too, that he was about to enter the sphere of those who moved the world by their activity; that whole tracts of his own being were waking to life which had lain stagnant in the routine of poverty and restricted labour.
Four people stood trial for Harriet’s murder: Lewis himself, his brother Patrick, Patrick’s wife Elizabeth and Lewis’s lover Alice. They were sentenced to hang, a judgement that was commuted to a pardon for Alice, and life imprisonment for the others just forty-eight hours before the executions were due to be carried out. Patrick died in prison just a couple of years later. Elizabeth and Lewis were released twenty years later in 1897. Lewis finally married Aliceand the couple emigrated to Australia. Elizabeth went on to run a boarding house, where the rumours surrounding her never entirely subsided.
Elizabeth Jenkins did venture into true crime again with her 1972 novel Dr Gully, based on the affair of Dr James Manby Gully, his affair with Florence Bravo and the consequent suspicious death of her husband Charles. Jenkins claimed Dr Gully, published in 1972, as her favourite among her own works.
The third of our spotlighted books was published in the same year as Harriet, though the case that inspired it has remained much closer to the centre of public consciousness, quite possibly because, for one of those who stood trial at least, the eventual outcome represents one of Britain’s most horrific miscarriages of justice, one that even at the time led to vociferous calls for the abolition of the death penalty. The case of Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters, popularly known as the Ilford murder, took place in 1922. Edith, unhappily married to the rather staid and predictable Percy Thompson, became passionately attached to Bywaters, a young and handsome merchant seaman who was originally a friend of both the couple, so much so that Percy Thompson offered him lodgings in their house in Ilford.
When
Bywaters stabbed Percy Thompson to death in the street in October 1922, he
claimed he never set out to kill him, wanting only to confront Thompson in an
attempt to resolve the situation between the three of them. Edith played no
part in the murder and had no idea Freddy was even in the vicinity. She was
arrested solely on account of the love letters she wrote to Bywaters, found in
his room after his arrest and filled with tirades against Percy and fantasies
about possible ways to get rid of him. The two were jointly convicted according
to the ‘rule of common purpose’, and in spite of a million-strong petition pleading
for mercy, they were hanged at the beginning of January 1923.
Edith’s case has generated a substantial amount of both fiction and non-fiction over the years and the horror of her execution – the hangman in question, John Ellis, later took his own life – has continued to generate discussion as a standing argument against the death penalty. One of the most interesting fictional treatments of the case is Fryn Tennyson Jesse’s 1934 novel A Pin to See the Peepshow, which is as much an exploration of the background and particular character of Thompson herself as an account of the crime and of the trial. Jesse, a writer and journalist who was the great-niece of the poet Albert Lord Tennyson, had a longstanding interest in criminology and the law. She edited and introduced several volumes in the Notable British Trials series, most notably the Madeleine Smith case and the John Christie case. In 1924, she published the investigative volume Murder and its Motives, positing the theory that there are six main categories of motive that might lead to murder: Gain, Revenge, Elimination, Jealousy, Conviction and Lust of Killing.
In contrast with the rigorous, fact-based approach taken by Elizabeth Jenkins in Harriet, Jesse tells her story using characters and situations more loosely inspired by the real people involved. A Pin to See the Peepshowfocuses on the young Julia Almond, an intelligent, articulate and highly imaginative young woman from a lower middle class family who makes a dull marriage and soon wishes herself out of it. From the very beginning, we observe Julia’s love of romance, her desire for excitement and for a life beyond the ordinary suburbs of her upbringing. Her tendency to daydream, to fantasise is beautifully captured by Jesse, not least in the passage that gives the novel its name. Here we see the sixteen-year-old Julia, who is minding a class of younger pupils while their teacher is absent, confiscating a home-made ‘peepshow’ box from the nine-year-old boy who, a mere ten years later, is to change her life forever:
Then she picked up the box. A round hole was cut into each end, one covered with red transparent paper, one empty. To the empty hole was applied an eye, shutting the other in obedience to eager instructions. And at once sixteen year old, worldly wise London Julia ceased to be, and a child, an enchanted child was looking into fairyland. The floor of the box was covered with cotton-wool, and a frosting of sugar sprinkled over it. Light came into the box from the red-covered window at the far end, so that a rosy glow as of sunset lay over the sparkling snow. Here and there little brightly-coloured men and women, children and animals of cardboard, conversed or walked about. A cottage, flanked by a couple of fir trees, cut from an advertisement of some pine-derivative cough cure, which Julia saw every day in the newspaper, gave an extraordinary impression of reality and of distance. This little rose-tinted snow scene was at once amazingly real and utterly unearthly. Everything was just the wrong size – a child was larger than a grown man, a duck was larger than a horse; a bird, hanging from the sky on a thread, loomed like a cloud. It was a mad world, compact but of insane proportions, lit by a strange glamour. The walls and lid of the box gave to it the sense of distance that a frame gives to a picture, sending it backwards into another space. Julia stared into the peepshow, and it was as though she gazed into the depths of a complete and self-contained world, where she would go clad in snow-shoes and furs, and be able to tame savage huskies and shoot bears; a world of chill pallor, of an illimitable white sky, both only saved from a cruel rigour by the rosy all-pervading light.
To end with this passage seems particularly appropriate,
because Jesse demonstrates so well in her writing how fiction has an important
part to play not just in bringing information about true-life crimes to public
awareness, but in digging deeper into the personal psychology, historical
background and possible motivations that might have had an impact on the case.
The glorious thing about fiction is that it sets you free to imagine beyond what
is already known.
As a final postscript, Edith Thompson’s heir and executor, Rene Weis, who has long petitioned for an official pardon for Edith, finally had his application referred to the Criminal Cases Review Commission in March of this year. I hope that it succeeds. Nothing can make amends for the horror of her execution, but I like to think at least that Edith – imaginative, romantic, adventurous Edith – would be pleased to know that a century after her death, she is a poster girl for women’s justice as well as a figure of inspiration for writers and film makers. Edith Thompson was unjustly killed, dying well before her time, but she has ended up becoming immortal and of that we can be glad.
Although she has pulled away from the self-destructive behaviour patterns of her early twenties, Charlotte has not yet discovered her true direction in life. She is at that awkward stage: filling in time, working as a barista and waiting for something to happen. When a once-beloved childhood friend gets back in contact suddenly, Charlotte is cautious about renewing the relationship. Danielle was important to her – as close as a sister – but when she lost herself in heroin addiction, Charlotte felt forced to distance herself. When she meets up with Danielle for a drink, she begins to feel more hopeful. Her friend has finally kicked the heroin, and seems in a much better place generally. Could be things have changed for the better, after all.
But less than a week later, Danielle is found brutally murdered in a motel room. Charlotte is shattered. She cannot help asking herself if she might have triggered something – if Danielle’s murder might in some mysterious way be her fault. As the police investigation gets underway, Charlotte wonders who stood to profit by her friend’s death: her estranged mother, Sally, her pornographer boyfriend, Brandon, or someone else entirely, someone from the past Charlotte doesn’t even know about. Her friend’s death has raised demons – not least her own grief. And as with any mystery, there are some questions it might be better not to learn the answers to.
Melissa Ginsburg is a published poet, and her awareness and love of language is a defining feature of this, her first novel, an economical and neatly wrought piece of Texas noir from 2016. As fully befits more modern iterations of the genre, she has some fun reversing and reinventing classic noir conventions: men, for the most part, take secondary roles. Centre stage belongs to the women, and so do the drug and alcohol problems. There is a detective – the suitably rugged and likeable Ash – but he always seems to be one step behind the action, as Charlotte’s deeper, sometimes disturbingly intimate knowledge of the suspects in this case bring her closer both to the truth and to personal danger.
The action I would describe as intense rather than fast-paced, although there are moments of violence and genuine tension, and enough surprises to keep trad noir fans happy. The plot is well thought out, coming together in a way that is satisfying and without any of the eleventh-hour stupidity that so vexes me in generic crime fiction. I warmed to these characters, even when I found myself completely at odds with what they were doing – and that is entirely down to Ginsburg’s skill in characterisation, her obvious sympathy with the situations she is describing. Above all I would praise her sense of place. As in all the greatest noir, this is a novel of the city – of urban grime, debauched glamour and moral ambivalence, and if Sunset City belongs to anyone it is to Houston, Texas. Ginsburg finds poetry in the most mundane of subject matter, in small details and moments and sensory impressions lesser writers might skip over or simply not notice.
A short book, but an impressive one, and in spite of the horror at its heart, moving and humane.
2021 is a difficult year to describe. 2020 felt fraught, urgent, dangerous and tense. 2021 has felt more nebulous, more fractured, characterised by uncertainty and an increasing sense of restlessness. In terms of personal achievement, I delivered a new manuscript, a book that for me feels very much like the product of 2020, seamed and studded with all the furious contradictions that year brought but referenced obliquely rather than colliding with them head-on. It’s a novel I’m hugely proud of, and one I look forward to sharing with you in 2023.
In the months since completing that book, I have begun inching my way towards the next work, a transition that has felt more complex and troublesome even than usual. The times we are living through throw up searching questions; as a writer, it does not seem altogether surprising if those questions end up being framed around the process of writing, not just the how but the what and the why. There is never any doubt in my mind that writing – art – has value, that whatever trauma is being addressed, the practice of reflection and analysis, of creative re-imagining inherent to all art is intrinsic to the experience of being human.
Such knowledge should not prevent us from being robust in our seeking out of our own best practice. I count myself fortunate in that this period of not-knowing – familiar in its outline, yet different in its particular details every time – has always felt energising to me. I never quite know how I will come out of it, or what will result. If I can feel certain of anything, through this time as all times, it is the joy I find in the power and the talent of other writers. Discovering new works, new directions, new attitudes, visions and modes of expression – the excitement and the gratitude never lessens.
By this same time last year, the document on my hard drive entitled ‘Books 2021’ was already filling up with upcoming works of fiction and non-fiction I was eager to read. Many of them were books whose publication dates had been postponed, pushed over from 2020 into 2021 in the hope that by the time they were released, in-person events and book festivals would be happening again. This turned out not to be the case, and on the far side of 2021, I cannot help noticing that the number of books on my ‘Books 2022’ list is considerably smaller. There is a sense of uncertainty affecting all of us: what shall we be reading, what shall we be writing? There is an eerie sort of silence.
Here also, there is opportunity. Not knowing – feeling less sure of what I’m going to be reading leaves more space for new discoveries. It also leaves space for me to go back and read more of the books I did not manage to get to in 2021. A year of regrouping, maybe. A year of finding out what is important.
I enjoy reading challenges because they give my reading a focus. This can be especially valuable if the challenge is related in some way to a problem or question that has a bearing on my work in progress. I also enjoy reading challenges because they provide me with a framework for talking to readers. With all of this in mind, I have created my own crime reading challenge for 2022. As regular readers of this blog will know by now, I am always on the lookout for original, challenging and imaginative approaches to genre archetypes, with the mystery archetype foremost among them. For pure reading pleasure, there’s nothing to beat a mystery. There is also no stronger template for withstanding the often punitive process of literary experiment.
I have created thirty prompts, some of them leaning heavily towards my particular interests, others designed to take me into less familiar territory. Thirty seems like a good number – big enough to make the challenge interesting, not so huge that it becomes burdensome, squeezing out all other reading. The individual challenges can be completed in any order, and can be based around any aspect of crime writing: fiction, true crime, journalism, history or memoir can be considered and included for any of the prompts. I am hoping to have completed and blogged all thirty by the end of the year. Here are the prompts. Let’s see how we get on:
Published in 2022
By a debut author
Translated from the French
Translated from the German
Translated from the Italian
Translated from the Spanish
Translated from the Japanese
Set in South America
Nordic
Set in Australia
By an author based on the African continent
By an African-American author
Historical mystery
Experimental published since 2000
Experimental published before 1980
Published by an independent press
Classic noir
Neo noir
Golden Age
Nineteenth Century
Published before World War 2
By a Scottish author
Legal thriller
Financial or military
With a speculative element
Award-winning
Has been adapted for the screen
Woman detective
Based on real events
Any crime but murder
I have some ideas already for how I might fill some of the categories, books I have been wanting to read for a while and now have the perfect incentive to tackle. Others I have not yet started to think about. Mainly I am hoping to be surprised. Surprised and inspired. Here’s hoping we can all find something of the same in 2022.
Yellow hands slid coffee cups across the table. At the next table a woman laughed. The moon had lost its battle with the clouds and retreated, leaving no trace of copper brilliance in the ominous sky. The air had grown heavier. In the window of a tenement a slim girl stood, her angular dark silhouette sharpened by a naked electric bulb.
When glamorous advertising executive Laura Hunt is found shot dead in her apartment, the crime instantly sparks shock and outrage among her friends and admirers. Suspicion falls initially on Laura’s fiance, Shelby Carpenter, constantly short of money and a known philanderer. But what of Waldo Lydecker, cantankerous older writer and possessive friend of Laura whose feelings for her may run deeper than the innocent affection he professes. Detective Mark McPherson, whose cynicism about women would seem to grant him the objectivity he needs to crack the case, finds himself drawn against his better judgement under the dead woman’s spell. A twist in the tale around its halfway point gives this neat whodunit an extra edge of mystery I was not expecting.
I am constantly surprised and delighted by how skilfully made these works of classic noir often turn out to be. Laura displays a beautiful economy of style and purpose, with the alternating points of view providing a well judged change of pace. There is extra interest to be found in Caspary’s feminist take on classic tropes. The author subtly reveals the way in which those who gossip about or try to solve the murder cannot seem to help – consciously or otherwise – pinning the blame on Laura herself, on her ‘lifestyle’ as an independent woman who has the temerity to enjoy nice things and who earns more than her dithering fiance. (Vincent Price’s Shelby Carpenter is the high point of the famous movie adaptation, which looks stunning but whose script is flat and rather lifeless and not nearly as intelligent or nimble as the original novel.)
Vera Caspary is no Patricia Highsmith but then who is? For fans of classic crime, Laura is well worth your time, and Lydecker’s section especially boasts some admirable writing. An absorbing afternoon’s read from a writer whose life story is every bit as fascinating as that of her heroine. I’m always interested in noir novels written by women and I’m glad to have finally caught up with this one.
