Books to Die For

by John Connolly

  The Silence of the Lambs was a benchmark in the old-fashioned way, with strong characters, an interesting setting, and a gripping plot. Harris’s exploration of the workings of the human mind is perceptive and penetrating. His leading players are finely drawn, fascinating, flawed people. The reader is forced to look at things from their perspectives, even though the view is often unsettling.

  In their first interview, Lecter regards Starling with her expensive bag and cheap shoes, her concealed West Virginia accent, and her determination to appear confident. Lecter is drawn to her incongruities. Even as she strives to erase the markers of her humble origins, she is proud of her honest, hardworking family. Flash recollections of them, such as her mother washing blood from her father’s hat, feed her determination throughout the novel.

  Starling’s background gives rise to her insecurities. Though smart, educated, and driven, she is haunted by childhood memories of her helplessness to stop the slaughter of lambs on her uncle’s farm. Used to keeping people at arm’s length, and struggling privately with her doubts, she begins to learn that distance is limiting and isolation does little to bring comfort or alleviate pain.

  Starling’s adversary, Dr. Hannibal Lecter, is drawn with equal complexity. Lecter is a paradox—a suave, cultured gentleman, but also an unspeakable fiend of depraved self-absorption. He is mannered and monstrous, elegant and evil.

  Trained in psychiatry, Lecter has uncanny insight into human nature. He taunts Starling: “Back in your room you have a string of gold add-a-beads and you feel an ugly little thump when you look at how tacky they are now.” Yet Lecter is himself devoid of humanity: “I collect church collapses, recreationally. Did you see the recent one in Sicily? Marvelous! The façade fell on sixty-five grandmothers at a special Mass.”

  First introduced as the antagonist in Red Dragon (1981), in Lambs Lecter ricochets between protagonist and antagonist. He helps Clarice catch a serial killer, but he also savages innocents in his own escape. Harris’s skill is such that at times he actually has us rooting for Lecter, and makes us feel reluctantly pleased by his escape, though we shiver at the thought that there may be a Hannibal Lecter out there somewhere.

  Harris is also master of the scene, of “show, don’t tell.” At a victim’s home, Starling observes “everywhere boxes stacked waist-high filling the rooms, passageways among them, cardboard cartons filled with lampshades and canning lids, picnic hampers, back numbers of the Reader’s Digest and National Geographic, thick old tennis rackets, bed linens, a case of dartboards, fiber car-seat covers in a fifties plaid with the intense smell of mouse pee.” The owner explains that they are moving, but Starling notes, “The stuff near the windows was bleached by the sun, the boxes stacked for years bellied with age.” Though the word is never used, the reader smells and sees the neurosis known as hoarding.

  In a book that explores psychological darkness, Harris emphasizes the point by literally placing the reader underground. Starling descends into Lecter’s subterranean prison, footsteps echoing past shadowy occupants. Jame Gumb transforms into Buffalo Bill in his basement of horrors, his next victim crying out from the bottom of a well. The penultimate battle scene has Starling flailing blind in the pitch-black.

  These physical settings blend with the disturbing psychological portraits drawn by Harris. In 1989, Tempe Brennan didn’t exist, though I knew the chill brought on by contact with the violently killed through my forensic work. My experience didn’t quite prepare me for the horror of Hannibal the Cannibal. As he drawls, “A census taker tried to quantify me once. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a big Amarone,” the reader is slapped with the presence of true evil. Though Starling is physically secure from Lecter, she is not safe. His is a psychic landscape, and in every way Starling is within Lecter’s reach. He studies her as a lion studies the gazelle at the watering hole. He could maul her, play with his victim between large psychoanalytic paws, or he could devour her.

  The difference between a mystery and a thriller is the element of peril. In Lambs, Harris breeds a potent brand of terror. Like the gothic tales of Edgar Allan Poe, the locus of fear is turned inward to that which haunts us. There is no chance of escape, because the horror travels with us, the cries of the lambs burned in our memories. The hunt is for a serial killer, but the larger quest is to silence our inner demons.

  Most of all, Harris is a master of plot, and he spins a spellbinding story. A psychopath is kidnapping and murdering young women. The FBI sends a young female agent to interview an imprisoned serial killer. She thinks it’s to gather information, but we know it’s to gain insight into their quarry. The prisoner, a brilliant and murderous cannibal, will help only if the agent shares intimate details about her own life. She agrees. The twisted relationship between interviewer and interviewee forces the agent to consider her own psychological demons.

  That’s the surface story. But the real theme is mutual need.

  Lecter is driven by his need for freedom. He glimpses an opportunity in Starling, the green FBI trainee, and pursues his goal with cold brutality.

  Starling is driven by her need for distinction. Motivated by the memories of her past, she strives to honor her father. Running from her past, she strives to bring honor to herself.

  Lecter dangles the hook, a taste of being a real agent. Starling bites. Through iron bars, the mad doctor and the trainee become analyst and patient, teacher and pupil, father and daughter, while always remaining cat and mouse. Their respective quests bind them, for neither can succeed without using the other.

  In the end, the characters slake their thirst. The killer is caught, the madman escapes, the trainee is promoted, the story closes. For them, the lambs fall silent. But Harris’s masterful characterization, chillingly descriptive prose, and captivating storytelling leave the reader thirsting for more.

  For me, Harris’s detailed character portrayals and tense plot development were benchmarks of thriller writing, and his Clarice Starling was a landmark example of a new breed of female protagonist. His writing greatly influenced mine.

  Kathy Reichs is a professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina. As a forensic anthropologist, she testified at the UN’s International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Her first novel to feature the series heroine Temperance “Tempe” Brennan, also a forensic anthropologist, was Déjà Dead (1997), which won the 1997 Arthur Ellis Award for Best First Novel. She has subsequently published seventeen novels featuring Tempe Brennan, the most recent being Bones Are Forever (2012). Reichs produces a TV series called Bones, which is loosely based on Dr. Temperance Brennan, a forensic anthropologist with a sideline in writing novels about a fictional character called Kathy Reichs. Visit her online at www.kathyreichs.com.

  Toxic Shock (aka Blood Shot)

  by Sara Paretsky (1988)

  N. J. COOPER

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  Sara Paretsky (b. 1947) is a pioneering figure in modern mystery fiction. She is responsible for taking the traditional male archetype of the hardboiled novel and transforming and reimagining it to create one of the earliest, and most iconic, of female investigators, V. I. Warshawski, the heroine of most of Paretsky’s books. Her novels combine thriller conventions with astute social commentary, and this year marks the thirtieth anniversary of Warshawski’s first appearance in print.

  * * *

  Rage has always driven crime fiction. One of the reasons why women like the genre so much is that for generations we have had so few outlets for fury, and crime fiction offers a splendid one. Traditionally we were allowed to be ill or unhappy, but not angry. Any feelings of violence had to be swallowed or turned against ourselves. We were supposed to be gentle, kind, forgiving, and nurturing, however we actually felt. And we, like Eve, were told over and over again that it was all our fault. Whatever happened, went wrong, or didn’t happen was down to women. When I was working in publishing I had a true-crime author who thought it acceptable to write in his introduction that “All murder is women’s fault; even
little girls can flirt.” He was both puzzled and hurt when I told him why the comment had to go.

  Educated at a convent school, I had had all this nonsense fed to me so effectively that I barely even knew how angry I was until I discovered Sara Paretsky’s work. Reading it, I felt myself not only understood but also vindicated in all kinds of ways. I was so excited by her novels that I read three back to back during one night, never even tempted to sleep. I have not had such a reaction to any other fiction before or since. The three novels were Killing Orders, Bitter Medicine, and Toxic Shock, all led by Paretsky’s PI, Victoria Iphigenia Warshawski, who chooses to be known as V.I.

  Warshawski rejects almost all personal claims. She cannot bear the idea that families assume the right to their daughters’ domestic labor, or that society dares to tell women whom they may sleep with or how they should deal with unwanted pregnancy. She refuses to be tied down by obligations of any kind. She is the embodiment of pure rage. If she’s pissed off, she says so, however benevolent the pisser-off may be. If she’s threatened, she takes action to defend herself. If she’s assaulted physically, she hits back physically. In fact, to be wholly rational about all this, I do not suppose that any human being, male or female, however fit and well trained, could survive everything V.I. suffers, from endless wallops on the head to burnings, drownings, and innumerable fights. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that V.I. Warshawski takes no crap from anyone. I loved her—and still love her—for that.

  She has none of the traditional female virtues: she makes love where she wants and with whom she wants and then waves her lovers good-bye. Although she can cook, she only occasionally does so. She leaves her clothes where they fall, rarely cleans her apartment or does the washing-up, and never bothers to moderate her language. Although a lot of the rage is her own, much is also felt on behalf of other people, the clients for whom she goes to extraordinary lengths.

  In Toxic Shock, the client is Caroline Djiak, eleven years Warshawski’s junior, whom she babysat in the old days and who endlessly infuriates her. Caroline wants V.I. to find out who her father was, even though her dying single mother has forbidden any such search. V.I.’s inquiries lead her to a quite different mystery, where she must investigate industrial pollution, corporate fraud, and manipulation of vulnerable workers, but the most involving elements are those that deal with V.I.’s discoveries of the cruelty that was visited on Caroline’s mother.

  Brought up in an emotionally abusive but physically pristine household, Louisa Djiak and her elder sister were required to scrub the undersides of toilets and sinks among their other pointless household duties, to obey their violent father without question, and to entertain their pedophile uncle. He impregnated Louisa when she was fifteen. Her virtuous parents threw her out of the house to protect the family’s honor and to disguise “her shame.” They are absolutely certain that it was Louisa’s fault her uncle raped and impregnated her, and believe their repudiation of her and their grandchild in some way repairs their moral status, which, in their eyes, she has chosen to damage.

  This encapsulates much that has enraged women crime writers for generations, including the appalling doublethink around women and sex: if you won’t have sex, you are frigid and mad; if you do, and take pleasure in it, you’re a whore. And in many cultures, if you are the victim of rape, as Louisa was, you are to blame. In a more lighthearted vein, Joan Smith dealt with this doublethink in her first crime novel, A Masculine Ending (1987). Here academic Loretta Lawson is in Paris for a meeting of a feminist editorial collective and is eating alone in a restaurant. A stranger tries to pick her up. When she declines his proposition, he calls her a whore.

  Attitudes to female celibacy also enraged Dorothy L. Sayers, who was writing half a century before Paretsky and Smith. Sayers’s Gaudy Night (1935) is unfashionable now, and much criticized for pitting the well-off dons of a fictional Shrewsbury College in Oxford against their poorly paid domestic servants as suspects in a nasty case of anonymous abuse, which causes an undergraduate to attempt suicide.

  Within the novel it is generally assumed that the author of the poison-pen letters and some accompanying crude, sexually explicit drawings must be one of the academics, driven mad by frustration. Sayers goes to considerable lengths to set up this suspicion, even in the mind of her sleuth, mystery writer Harriet Vane.

  Harriet, who is adored and pursued by the absurdly rich and absurdly aristocratic Lord Peter Wimsey, shows him how disturbing she finds her suspicions of the dons. Peter sums up her fears, saying, “Isn’t it a fact that, having more or less made up your mind to a spot of celibacy you are eagerly peopling the cloister with bogies? . . . What are you afraid of? The two great dangers of the celibate life are a forced choice and a vacant mind. Energies bombinating in a vacuum breed chimaeras. But you are in no danger. If you want to set up your everlasting rest, you are far more likely to find it in the life of the mind than the life of the heart.” It is not only Lord Peter’s antecedents and enormous wealth that make him a figure of fantasy.

  We have all come a long way from Sayers—her fears, her rages, and her ideal of the perfect man—but crime fiction is still being used to explore the doublethink around women and sex, along with the reasons why some men are driven to kill or otherwise punish women they find sexually arousing.

  Some women writers of serial killer novels justify their voyeuristic descriptions of violence against women by saying that it is what their female readers want. Others choose to write about murder in a very different style and explore the rage of women who are not—and will not allow themselves to become—victims. For me no one has expressed that rage as thrillingly as Sara Paretsky.

  N. J. Cooper worked in publishing before swapping sides to write full-time. Her current series of crime novels features forensic psychologist Dr. Karen Taylor and is set mainly on the Isle of Wight, where she used to holiday as a child. As the sunniest place in the British Isles it is the ideal setting for the darkness and miseries of serious crime. The first four novels in the series are No Escape, Lifeblood, Face of the Devil, and Vengeance in Mind, published in the summer of 2012. Visit her online at www.natashacooper.co.uk.

  Possession

  by A. S. Byatt (1990)

  ERIN HART

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  Dame Antonia Susan Duffy (b. 1936), better known as the critically acclaimed novelist and poet A. S. Byatt, is a native of Sheffield, England. Since her first novel, The Shadow of the Sun (1964), she has published almost thirty books as writer or editor, including numerous works of fiction and studies of Iris Murdoch, George Eliot, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. She reputedly fell out with her sister, the novelist Margaret Drabble, over a depiction of their mother in one of Drabble’s books, as well as Drabble’s use of a family tea set as a plot point.

  * * *

  My love affair with A. S. Byatt’s Possession started with the title. Byatt herself has said that the title came to her as she caught a glimpse of the famous Coleridge scholar Kathleen Coburn at the British Library. As she watched Coburn circling the card catalog, Byatt began to ponder the relationship between scholar and subject, wondering, Does he possess her, or does she possess him? And that question got her thinking about a novel that conjured the ghostly connections between living and dead minds. One of the beauties of the word “possession” is that it’s fraught with meaning—connotations demonic, economic, and sexual that perfectly suit the era in which some of the story is set. The Spiritualism craze was going full-force in the mid-nineteenth century; it was also an era in which women were not independent individuals but mere chattels, possessions belonging to their fathers or husbands. And, of course, the sexual meaning of the word “possession” requires no vulgar explanation. Each of these various, delicious meanings comes to bear as the novel unfolds.

  For some reason, I’ve long harbored a secret penchant for the Victorian era; maybe it was cutting my teeth on Dickens, or perhaps it’s the richness of the incongruities and contr
adictions of that period, a prime example being the simultaneous abhorrence of, and fascination with, sex. I’m also interested in the Victorian fascination with fairy tales and folklore, reframing them as one way to contain the primal urges that they fought against within themselves.

  Possession certainly contains elements of literary mystery, but does it qualify as a real crime novel? I would argue that it does.

  Part of the explanation comes straight from A. S. Byatt herself. As she began writing Possession, she says that she thought about the pleasure principle in art: that all art exists not for political indoctrination or moral instruction, but primarily for giving pleasure. Almost more than any other genre, crime novels embody the pleasure principle. Their whole purpose in the great scheme of the universe is to provide readers with page-turning satisfaction.

  It’s probably no accident that Byatt took some of her inspiration from Umberto Eco, a fellow academic who began writing a murder mystery called The Name of the Rose because, as he himself admitted, “I wanted to murder a monk.” She also returned to her own reading pleasures as an adolescent, gobbling up Margery Allingham detective stories and Georgette Heyer romances, trying to understand what those forms have in common: a plot, a story, and yes, the pleasure of narrative discovery. With Possession, she began writing a story that managed to combine literature high and low, and actually parodied many of the world’s most enjoyable literary forms: detective story, epistolary novel, roman à clef, gothic potboiler, romance, fairy tale, and biography.