I like this photo of Megan Abbott looking retro

It was my husband that brought me back to crime fiction after childhood dabblings in Nancy Drew and Sherlock Holmes, and our mutual interest has spurred some unusual holiday choices. When his research took us to the US in 2009 to meet James Ellroy in LA, we included a day of visiting famous murder scenes (my father’s SAT NAV and Ellroy’s My Dark Places came in handy here). But this year, in the spirit of austerity, our ‘staycation’ will also involve crime fiction. Most notably, we’re on our way to Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Festival in Harrogate from July 19-22nd. We’ve booked tickets to see my favourite Crime Fiction author (and fellow former suburban Detroiter) Megan Abbott, whose novel Die a Little will be part of the reading list on my Women in Crime Fiction course next year. If you can’t make it to the festival, but are looking for a great summer read, Abbott’s intense, almost poetic prose can’t be beat. Here are some reviews I’ve done on her novels: Die a Little, The End of Everything and The Song is You. Although the courses for 2012-2013 Continuing Education at the University of Liverpool aren’t listed yet, you can keep an eye on what’s coming through this link.

Cross-posted from The Prevailing Westerlies.

This cover of American Tabloid caught my attention in a Bournemouth bookshop, if it hadn’t my life might have been very different

At school I struggled with maths and sciences. I enjoyed subjects such as history, religious education and sociology, where ideas could be debated and nuance and conflict shown. No subject combined all of the ‘big ideas’ of life more thrillingly than English Literature. But, as in most English literature curriculums, the focus of my high school literature course was almost exclusively on authors in the literary canon. Genre is, or at least was, a dirty word. So I had little concept of modern popular fiction until I started reading my father’s collection which included Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, Clive Cussler’s Dirk Pitt adventure series and Bernard Cromwell’s Sharpe novels set during the Napoleonic Wars. These novels liberated my sense of reading. For the first time I began to experience the excitement and danger of the narrative as though I were a character in the story. I learned that great stories could be told through action, rather than just thought and dialogue, and  still possess the potential for leaving a profound emotional impact on the reader. But I was soon to read a novel which kickstarted my fascination with the one genre that brought together my favourite character-types of genre fiction: spies, adventurers and detectives.

At some point in my mid-teens I was holidaying with my parents in Bournemouth in South West England. In a bookshop I noticed a book on the shelves and recognised the front cover as being a rather blurred still from the Zapruder film depicting President Kennedy’s assassination. The book was titled American Tabloid and was written by James Ellroy, who I knew very little about. A novel about the Kennedy assassination seemed interesting, so I bought it and started reading straight away. I was immediately hooked. The portrayal of intrigue and corruption in the Kennedy era was riveting. Ellroy told the story from the perspective of protagonists on the very fringes of society: Mob hitmen, rogue intelligence agents, Cuban exiles. The men who, in his fictional version of events, eventually conspire to kill Kennedy. It was from reading this novel that my obsession with and knowledge of crime fiction began to develop. Reading the novel felt like being plunged into a secret world where different rules apply. To understand these rules I needed to go back and read earlier crime novels. After reading all of Ellroy’s novels, short stories and articles, I read Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett to trace the development of the hard-boiled private detective, and how these stories were a reaction to the quaint style of the predominantly British Golden Age of Detective Fiction. I came to appreciate how Ed McBain discarded the private eye and developed the police procedural sub-genre with his 87th Precinct series. I was floored by the works of Elmore Leonard and George V. Higgins, and how they moved the genre away from mystery plotlines towards dialogue-driven storytelling with an emphasis on humour and sudden, unpredictable outbreaks of violence. I began reading contemporary Scandinavian crime fiction and British espionage thrillers.

That being said, I maintained my interest in canonical literature and studied for an MA in Victorian Literature. However, upon completion of my MA, I returned again to the writer who had first introduced me to the world of crime fiction, James Ellroy. So I’m now in my final year of PhD studying the life and work of James Ellroy. I’ve edited a book about Ellroy, details here, and have edited an anthology about American crime writers released later this year. My obsession with crime fiction has gradually transformed into my profession, and I can’t think of anything else I’d rather do.

If anyone else remembers fondly how they first discovered crime fiction, please share your story in the comment thread.

‘And we still haven’t seen a serial killer in Norway.’ Skarre glanced at Bratt as if to make sure she was following. ‘Is it because of that FBI course you did on serial killers? Is that what’s making you see them everywhere?’

‘Maybe,’ Harry said.

‘Let me remind you that apart from that nurse feller who gave injections to a couple of old fogeys, who were at death’s door anyway, we haven’t had a single serial killer in Norway. Ever. Those guys exist in the USA, but even there usually only in films.’

‘Wrong,’ said Katrine Bratt.

The others turned to face her. She stifled a yawn.

‘Sweden, France, Belgium, Britain, Italy, Holland, Denmark, Russia and Finland. And we’re only talking solved cases here. No one utters a word about hidden statistics.’

The Snowman succeeds not by avoiding the clichés of crime fiction, but by embracing them. Hole is such a maverick that practically none of his investigative techniques would lead to admissible evidence; he breaks into a suspect’s office, then her house. He drives his car through a huge glass door during a chase scene. In one gloriously comic scene, Hole’s superiors march into his office with the intention of firing him and find Hole seemingly injecting drugs. The perfectly composed Hole informs them that he is injecting water, not drugs, as part of an experiment in which he proves that one character’s supposed suicide by drug overdose was in fact murder. As the narrative progresses, the clichés become more pronounced as Nesbo unleashes an anarchic style upon the story’s thrilling but preposterous climax.

Anders Breivik in Court

Part of the appeal of ‘Scandi-Noir’ in the UK and US is it gives the reader a glimpse of the dark underworld of societies which we have somewhat naively regarded as almost utopian. However, reading the coverage of the Anders Breivik trial, I cannot help but feel that Norway is still years ahead of us on some social issues. Despite committing mass murder, Breivik can by Norwegian law serve no more than 21 years in prison (unless he is declared insane), and the prison where he will serve his sentence will not be some fearful penitentiary but an institution in which prisoners are treated humanely with a focus on rehabilitation. Granted the Norwegian system was not designed for killers like Breivik, but to make it more repressive runs the risk of playing in to Breivik’s own demented views. By contrast, here in the UK people are now being given prison sentences for saying stupid and offensive things on twitter. A needlessly harsh reaction to a minor problem. Nesbo has said his country’s reaction to the Breivik case has made him proud to be Norwegian. You can read some of Nesbo’s views on the Breivik case, and how it will influence crime writing, here.

Introduction; V.Miller & H.Oakley

From the Locked Room to the Globe: Space in Crime Fiction; D.Schmid

The Fact and Fiction of Darwinism: The Representation of Race, Ethnicity and Imperialism in the Sherlock Holmes Stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; H.A.Goldsmith

‘You’re not so special, Mr. Ford’: the Quest for Criminal Celebrity; G.Green & L.Horsley

Hard-Boiled Screwball: Genre and Gender in the Crime Fiction of Janet Evanovich; C.Robinson

‘A Wanted Man’: Transgender as Outlaw in Elizabeth Ruth’s Smoke; S.E.Billingham

Dissecting the Darkness of Dexter; H.Oakley

The Machine Gun in the Violin Case: Martin Scorsese, Mean Streets and the Gangster Musical Art Melodrama; M.Nicholls

In the Private Eye: Private Space in the Noir Detective Movie; B.Nicol

‘Death of the Author’: Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö’s Police Procedurals; C.Beyer

‘Betty Short and I Go Back’: James Ellroy and the Metanarrative of the Black Dahlia Case; S.Powell

Index

You can find out more details about the book here.

Then, as part of Waterstones ‘Lunchtime Classics’ series I shall be reading from Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential and talking about the novel. This will be at Waterstones Liverpool One store on 18 July at 12 noon.

All welcome.

The novel and the film both begin with Detective Mark McPherson visiting renowned columnist Waldo Lydecker to question him about the murder of Laura Hunt.  The backstory introduces us to a woman adored by the men around her.  The proofs of Laura’s attractiveness, which give the men in her life motive and make them suspects, are made plain to the detective, who in turn, develops morally dubious and unprofessional feelings for Laura.

Clifton Webb as Waldo Lydecker and Dana Andrews as Detective McPherson

It was not the eponymous heroine, nor Detective Mark McPherson, that I had trouble revising when I began Caspary’s novel, (perhaps because in the film McPherson is a close-lipped, hard-boiled type, and Laura seems ephemeral, and changeful, a point emphasized by her adapting to each man she is with). Instead, it was the cultured essayist Waldo Lydecker that proved too difficult to break from Clifton Webb’s 1944 performance.  In the film, Webb sparkles with the acerbic wit of Oscar Wilde or Noel Coward. He is at once loathsome and entertaining, pathetic and controlling. The audience’s own interest in him absolves Laura for not seeing his faults more clearly. In the novel, Waldo is fat from his indulgence in fine cuisine, and his physique is compared to McPherson and Shelby Carpenter, Laura’s intended, in a way that makes his inferiority seem too great a hurdle to overcome even in the duality between riches/poverty and brains/brawn that Waldo and Shelby represent as competing forces.  Webb’s confidence in the film, however, is ebullient. That is not to say he’s unaware of his age, and his relative frailty, but that he thoroughly believes his intelligence will eventually win out.

Yet in the novel, Waldo, and Laura’s fiancé the impoverished Southern gentleman Shelby, are given the additional flaw of being of the wrong era.  Caspary creates an unfavourable comparison between Victorian and Modern ages that aligns Laura with McPherson. I don’t think I’m spoiling the ending by saying that one-third of the way through the novel it is revealed that Laura is not dead. Diane Redfern, a love rival of Laura’s, has been killed and her corpse initially mistaken for Laura, who becomes a suspect once she turns up alive. In a fight between the newly resurrected Laura and Shelby, the characters make explicit references to ‘Victorian’ and ‘hardboiled’, creating tension between the Golden Age detective fiction and the hardboiled style:

Shelby: ‘He [McPherson] ought to be hardboiled. You’d expect him to be tougher. I don’t like him trying to act like a gentleman.’

‘Oh, pooh!’ I said.

‘You don’t see it. The man’s trying to make you like him so you’ll break down and confess. That’s what he’s been working for all along, a confession. Damned caddish, I’d say.’

I sat down on the sofa and pounded my fists against a pillow. ‘I hate that word. Caddish! I’ve begged out a million times to quit using it.’

Shelby said, ‘It’s a good English word.’

‘It’s old-fashioned. It’s out of date. People don’t talk about cads any more. It’s Victorian.’

‘A cad is a cad, whether the word is obsolete or not.’

‘Quit being so Southern. Quit being so righteous. You and your damn gallantry.’ I was crying. The tears ran down my cheeks and dripped off my jaws. My tan dress was all wet with tears.

McPherson’s thoughtfulness crosses the class divisions important to the tropes of the Golden Age, but his character is not typical either of the hardboiled style, i.e. he is interested in reading and high culture. Shelby fights against such subversion. Waldo, likewise, uses class and his education of Laura as a means to defeat his opposition. Yet in the novel, Laura is a gutsier, more defiant woman, who will not be bound by past structures; however, her cinematic counterpart is more malleable, and she almost remains a creation of the men around her even after her reappearance.

In Caspary’s novel, the narrative is out of Waldo’s control, an important point to her ‘defeat’ of the Golden Age/Victoriana through him. Caspary’s unique and unsettling approach breaks from a tradition of trusted narrators to rotate between the main protagonists, with Waldo offering a part of the story. By contrast, in the film Waldo is the only narrator, a shift created and fought for by the director Otto Preminger. Although the other characters reveal their feelings through conversation and interrogation, the story remains his, even in his downfall.  

Anyone who is nominated for the Inspiring Blogger award is required to say a few things about themselves and nominate some bloggers who have inspired them. Here goes:

I was born in Chester, UK, and I have spent many a pleasant day walking on Chester’s famed Roman Walls and Tudor Rows. I now live in Liverpool, which is a mere twenty miles away, but, as any Liverpudlian or Cestrian will tell you, worlds apart in terms of culture. I enjoy the busy, vibrant lifestyle in Liverpool, but I still like to escape every now and then to quaint old Chester.

Crime fiction is my main passion in life, but I did once harbour ambitions of becoming an actor. Although I was nowhere near good enough to become a professional, I was fortunate to act in many amateur theatre productions in Chester and several at the University of Liverpool. One of my friends and fellow thespians from those days is now on the brink of movie stardom.

If I ever decide to emigrate, it will probably be to Thailand (where my wife lived for five years) as it is the most beautiful country I have yet visited. I have written some thoughts on one of Thailand’s most enduring mysteries which you can read here.

Regular readers will be aware that my first book, Conversations with James Ellroy, was released in February and my next book, 100 American Crime Writers, will be released later this year.

Of the blogs I follow here are a few which I find to be inspiring:

J. Kingston Pierce’s The Rap Sheet is essential reading for any crime fiction researcher or fan. Pierce posts almost daily updates of crime fiction news, promotes the work of many of his fellow bloggers, and has an encyclopedic knowledge of the genre.

Steve Hodel is a former LAPD homicide detective who wrote one of the most extraordinary true crime books I have ever read, Black Dahlia Avenger. He blogs about the Black Dahlia case and many other LA based cases at his Squad Room Blog.

I began following The Great Balancing Act when its author, Susan, started chronicling her struggle with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. After six months of chemotherapy she has now made a full recovery.

Dickens’ walks seemed to have initially been taken out of necessity but grew into a form of voyerism, an outlet for frustrations, a means of escaping family, and a way to spend time with his male friends. He began wandering the streets of London as a ten-year-old boy when his parents were unable to fund his schooling, and his independence grew when his father was imprisoned for debt, and twelve-year-old Dickens lived and worked apart from his family. Dickens observed the glories and trappings of late-Georgian and early-Victorian London, and his writing reveals his facination with all levels of society including the criminal underworld, jails and prostitution. Although some of his walks as a married man were idyllic rambles through his boyhood county of Kent, in Paris, he visited the morgue at sundown and walked the streets all night.

I am a great fan of walking, rambling, and generally viewing a city by foot, but the time and length of Dickens’ walks, seemed to go beyond enjoyment to compulsion or obsession. Parenthetically, Robert Frost’s poem, ‘Aquainted with the Night’ states that ‘time was neither wrong nor right’, but the idea that the night walker is largely apart from society (or good society) and in a largely voyeristic role, seems to indicate something brooding and forbidden. Dickens taps into these ideas himself in his last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend (1864-5). The novel is divided into two love stories, although many prefer the John/Bella plot that harkens back to medieval or Shakespearean drama of disguise, I have always preferred the love  triangle of the bored gentleman-barrister Eugene Wrayburn (who always puts me in mind of a fin de siècle Oscar Wilde character), the severely passionate schoolmaster Bradley Headstone, and the self-sacrificial boatman’s daughter Lizzie Hexam. Obsession is key to the story, and Lizzie becomes the object at which the two men’s seperate madnesses unfold. Although they both ’watch’ Lizzie, and try to cast it as watching over her, they become more and more entangled with each other. When Lizzie escapes London following Headstone’s forceful proposal and Wrayburn’s pursuit of what would result in her becoming his mistress, Wrayburn takes to walking the streets at night, taunting Headstone, whom he knows follows him in the absense of Lizzie. Below is a clip of the BBC’s version of the night walk from their 1998 adaptation of Our Mutual Friend.

It is another night walk that will drive Headstone, in his passion-for-Lizzie-cum-hatred- for-Wrayburn to attempt a murder.

In this post I will discuss briefly a television production which I found to overrated by critics and also a film which I consider to be underappreciated. This is just my opinion and it would be hypocritical of me to try to force it on you so please feel free to disagree and give some of your own overrated / underrated examples in the comment thread.

Overrated – The Wire

The Wire was given ‘the best television series ever made’ label some years ago, but I resisted watching it for the longest time as I thought to myself that another cop drama with ghetto gangsters couldn’t possibly be original and exciting. Then I finally saw the first season and realised what all the fuss was about. Creator and writer David Simon brilliantly brings to life Baltimore’s crime-ridden streets with finely-realised characters– from drug addicts to dope pushers, violent enforcers, drug kingpins, the police who chase them and the innocent families who get caught up in the crossfire. Another eye-opener was the complex relationship between the local politicians and the Baltimore police department which more often than not leads to bureaucratic nightmares and miscarriages of justice.

However, being labelled ‘the best television show ever made’ is bound to make The Wire seem overrated, and, like all shows, it suffers from several structural problems. One is an overdependence on montages, with all five seasons ending with a montage it feels like a repetitive, crude way of telling the story. Also, ironically for a show with such a high mortality rate, the writers seemed to have a sentimental attachment for characters who have outlived their dramatic usefulness. Finally, despite its reputation for realism, there are several scenes which depict police procedure and the court system which are unrealistic and would never happen in real life, such as in season five when a lawyer, who is the live-in partner of a judge, tries a case in her court. Sometimes this can be dramatically justified, but I wonder if any other police drama would have been allowed to get away with this so easily. I would recommend Season one and four as the best seasons, with season two easily being the worst and plain boring, and three and four well worth watching.

Below is a clip from one of my favourite scenes is Season one, where the Major Crimes Unit are closing in on the Drug Kingpin Avon Barksdale:

Underrated – U-Turn

Sean Penn plays Bobby, a drifter who gets stranded in the small town of Superior, Arizona, after his car breaks down. He is on his way to Vegas to pay off a gambling debt to a mobster who has already cut off two of his fingers. But then the money he’s carrying to pay off the debt gets shredded when Bobby is caught in the middle of drugstore heist cum shootout, and he finds himself caught in the strange town with no money, no car and no way out. Directed by Oliver Stone, U-Turn received mixed reviews and was even nominated for two Golden Raspberry awards, but to me it’s one of Stone’s greatest films. It’s a film of great storytelling as Stone has no political axe to grind. He deftly mixes several genres, displays real technical flair and evokes an atmosphere which is simultaneously claustrophic and ironically sprawling, as there are a multitude of strange characters in Superior. The film is a good twenty minutes too long and it is far from flawless. However, as U-Turn has several noir elements, perhaps this is the reason I like the film so much. In film noir an evocative milieu is arguably more important than the story itself, and U-Turn, with its many memorable and bizarre moments, lingers in the memory long after viewing.

One such moment below:

As many readers will know, Arthur Conan Doyle’s former home, Undershaw, is in a state of disrepair, and under threat of being converted into apartments by its owner, Fosseway, a Virgin Islands registered property company. The Undershaw Alliance brings together two groups, Academics for Undershaw, and Crime Writers for Undershaw to campaign to save the house for the nation in its current form, and establish a Conan Doyle Museum and centre for British crime writing. The planning permission granted to Fossway is going to the High Court on 23 May, 2012. There is an alternative:

But what better or more appropriate place could there be for a Conan Doyle Museum and Centre for British and Irish Crime Writing, thus affirming its cultural value and Conan Doyle’s place in the literary heritage of Great Britain and Ireland, and beyond, open and accessible to the public all year round (including school visits), with a library, conference facilities, crime writing courses and a writer in residence?

Join the campaign here: Undershaw Alliance.