by Peter Corris
Sometimes the matter in the past is very distant and obscure. The plot of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (1930) is embellished by a myth about the gifting of a golden bird by the Spanish king to the Knights Hospitaller during the Crusades. The details don’t matter. This was a brilliant exotic touch, providing a backdrop to an intricate, sordid contemporary story.
A misplaced trust, rooted in family history and tradition, with details provided, is a good backstory setting. Then, in the here and now, A assures his lifelong friend B that he had nothing to do with the death of C in the past. B defends A to detective E who doesn’t believe him and comes to suspect B. Then A’s unreliability becomes clear, probably through the intervention of love interest F and things move towards a resolution. Examples abound.
B is also for blackmail. This is not as popular a theme as it once was. Decriminalisation of homosexuality removed one avenue for this form of extortion and our expectation of ethical behaviour from politicians and business leaders is now so low their transgressions don’t need to be hidden. It was a very useful crime for writers, because, unlike others, it forced the perpetrator to maintain some form of connection, however temporary, with the victim. This provided opportunities for the blackmailer to make mistakes and gave the investigator a sporting chance.
When blackmail featured in crime novels it was usually as a precursor to murder, as in The Big Sleep.
B is also for Bradshaw’s. For over a hundred years, Bradshaw’s was the bible of railway travellers in Britain. It was consulted by investigators like Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Sexton Blake, ‘Bulldog’ Drummond, and others who needed to move around the country.
Bradshaw’s provided writers in the ‘Golden Age’ with plot points (see Agatha Christie’s Death in the Clouds, 1935, using the continental Bradshaw’s). The publication issued frequent amendments and updates. Woe betide the suspect whose alibi relied on the arrival of the 8.15 from Kings Cross to Ely at 9.10 who’d failed to recognise Bradshaw’s notice of the cancellation of the 8.15 service on the day in question.
The chief exponent of the railway mystery, in which timetabling figured along with other aspects of the railway system, was the former railway engineer Freeman Wills Crofts.
A contemporary writer, Edward Marston, has attempted to revive the railway mystery (see H for historical).
B is also for butler. Did the butler ever do it? I can’t recall an example but I haven’t read Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Georgette Heyer or Dorothy L. Sayers exhaustively. Given the convention that it’s where suspicion should fall in the country-house story, if he had it in for the master or mistress of the house, other family members or a guest, it would be unwise for the butler to do it. Better to sublet the act to a footman or gardener.
In 1933 Georgette Heyer worked a twist in Why Shoot a Butler? The butler is the first victim.
C is for car. Given the tedious prevalence of car chases in crime stories on film and television, it is surprising to see that cars play a comparatively insignificant part in books. Police detectives just use the pool cars, except for Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse, who drives a venerable Jaguar. Ian Rankin’s John Rebus drives a battered Saab when not using a pool car. Lee Child’s Jack Reacher has no car at all. How could it be otherwise? He doesn’t have a licence or a fixed abode. When he needs wheels, he borrows, usually from a woman.
C is also for CCTV. Closed circuit television now keeps watch on vast areas of modern cities. London, in particular, is said to be intensely covered but so are capital and provincial cities in many countries. CCTV footage figures prominently in many crime novels, especially the later ones of Barry Maitland (Silvermeadow, 2000, and others). The footage is notoriously grainy and flickering, which allows technicians to play walk-on parts.
In the early days of CCTV, video cassettes were often wiped and reused, to the frustration of investigators. Now, with high-capacity disks and hard drives, the images can be captured and held for all time. Contemporary criminals in fiction can use the footage to their own advantage, a good example being in Lee Child’s One Shot (2005).
C is also for clue puzzle. Coined by the pioneers of mystery fiction, Wilkie Collins, Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle, this was the dominant mode until the advent of the hard-boiled style (see H for hard-boiled). Agatha Christie was the queen of the clue puzzle but there were many contenders—Ngaio Marsh, Georgette Heyer, Margery Allingham, Dorothy L. Sayers (the latter two with upper-class protagonists) and others. Most of the writers in this mode were women, but some men contributed—John Dickson Carr, Freeman Wills Crofts and the Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis, who wrote under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake.
One of the many variants of the clue-puzzle style was practised by Erle Stanley Gardner in his Perry Mason stories (The Case of the Velvet Claws, 1933, and following), where witnesses could be tripped up by apparently minor discrepancies (see C for courtroom drama).
C is also for coincidence. To be avoided at all times.
C is also for complication. Raymond Chandler’s plots were complicated because he often cobbled together bits from short stories to form the narrative and because he didn’t care. ‘Scene is more important than plot,’ he wrote, and I agree with him. Some critics suggest that a death in The Big Sleep is unattributable. Others disagree. I don’t care.
In the Golden Age of crime writing, the time of Christie, Sayers, Marsh et al., complications were often resolved in the last chapter when characters were called together, often, interestingly, in the library. Unreality was entrenched.
As a yardstick, no plot should be so complicated that an experienced crime reader cannot explain it within twenty-four hours of finishing the book. After that, with the reader almost certainly deep in another book, explanation cannot be expected.
C is also for courtroom drama. Setting aside the formulaic contrivances of Erle Stanley Gardner, the courtroom drama as an acknowledged contemporary subset of the crime genre was kicked off by Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent (1987). Understandably, the style has flourished most in the United States where the legal system, with its elected judges and district attorneys, plea bargains, bail bondsmen and capital punishment making for corruption and high stakes, has provided a rich field.
John Grisham became a leading practitioner with a series of novels (A Time to Kill, 1989, and following) that became hit films—little Tom Cruise in The Firm, big John Cusack in The Runaway Jury, for example. Other contributors are Steve Martini, Michael Connelly and John Lescroart.
C is also for criminal protagonist. E.W. Hornung, brother-in-law of Arthur Conan Doyle, began publishing stories in the Cornhill Magazine about gentleman thief A.J. Raffles in the 1890s. These were collected and published as The Amateur Cracksman in 1899. This ‘soft’ approach to having a hero working outside the law was continued by Leslie Charteris in his Simon Templar (‘the Saint’) novels (Meet the Tiger, 1928, and following).
In The Killer Inside Me (1952), pulp writer Jim Thompson created one of the most psychotic of criminal protagonists. A sane and in that way tougher criminal protagonist was introduced by Donald E. Westlake, writing as Richard Stark, in his violent novels about Parker, who steals and kills. The first of these, The Hunter (1962), was filmed as Point Blank in 1967, with Lee Marvin perfectly cast as Parker (renamed Walker).
Australian Garry Disher’s character Wyatt, who first appeared in Kickback (1991), is violent in a violent world but has a personal moral code in which his most violent actions are directed towards those who deserve it.
This style, as practised by Stark and Disher, is perhaps the epitome of hard-boiled, in that the protagonists’ emotions, if any, are screwed down tight.
C is also for Crockford’s Clerical Directory. This listing of the Anglican clergy, which began publication in the mid-nineteenth century, was an essential tool for investigators when the bona fides or the career of a clergyman character needed to be checked in the clue-puzzle mysteries of the early twentieth century. Many a vicar was
exposed as an imposter, and some were found to have either shady pasts or dubious connections. Vicars figure less frequently in crime fiction now but otherwise nothing has changed.
D is for death. The British Crime Writers Association stipulated on its formation that a book must include a murder to qualify for a Golden Dagger award, and I agree. An induced suicide might just do. Then the question arises of how soon the murder should occur. Some books, of course, have it on the first page. Unless the murder has occurred before the story begins, I would say it should be within the first quarter of the book.
D is also for doctor. Very useful characters, doctors. Absolutely essential in police procedurals where one is needed at a crime scene and a pathologist is needed to perform an autopsy, at which some investigators, like Chief Inspector Morse, feel queasy (see S for squeamishness). Others, as in Stuart McKenzie’s books, for example, indulge in mordant humour. Doctors may be good guys, family friends, the possessors of knowledge like hidden abortions and secret children, or bad guys—Dr Feelgood drug providers, dodgy plastic surgeons and torturers.
D is also for dream. Dreams provide useful punctuation points for writers, allowing the action to slow down or be reprised in the consciousness of a character. It is permissible for an investigator to gain an insight through a dream. A dream is a handy way to invoke a memory, which can deepen characterisation, suggesting perhaps a vulnerability not before glimpsed, but the device should be used sparingly to protect the illusion of reality.
D is also for drugs. Drugs have figured in crime fiction from day one. Not surprisingly, given his own addiction, opium figures in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868), and think of Sherlock Holmes and his ‘seven-per-cent solution’. Opium was inevitably part of the picture when Sax Rohmer’s Dr Fu Manchu was around.
Drugs have figured more prominently in American than in British crime fiction. Raymond Chandler adopted the ‘reefer madness’ stance, in which a marijuana smoker was inherently unreliable.
Once Mafia novels came on stream (see M for mob), drugs moved to centre stage. Drugs figure interestingly in Mario Puzo’s The Godfather (1969), where older mafiosi shy away from drug trafficking while the younger, ‘made’ guys see it as where the money is. The young guys win the battle and, in fiction and in life, the big city mob and drugs have always been closely associated.
In more recent times, writers’ attention has shifted to the importation of drugs across the southern border of the United States. Don Winslow’s The Power of the Dog (2005) is a powerful example with an enormous body count.
E is for email. A contemporary crime novel without email would be like Sherlock Holmes without telegrams.
E is also for empathy. With a couple of notable exceptions, most crime novels have at least one empathetic character—someone to like, if not love. This is built-in with partnership stories. If Holmes is too cold for your taste, Watson’s bluff affability may appeal; if Morse is too acerbic, sensible long-suffering Lewis may excite your sympathy.
But there is no one to like in The Maltese Falcon ( John Huston and Bogart humanised Sam Spade somewhat in the film) or in Hammett’s Continental Op novels. It is a similar situation with James Ellroy. His cop hero Lloyd Hopkins (Blood on the Moon, 1984, and two others) is virtually a psychopath. This was deliberate. After he’d stopped writing about Hopkins, Ellroy was asked what had happened to him. He replied that he’d probably died of AIDS.
Also eschewing empathy as far as his protagonist was concerned was Andrew Vachss in his Burke series of novels beginning with Flood (1985). The theme was child abuse and Vachss said of Burke that he was writing about a vision of hell and didn’t want a knight-errant as the guide.
E is also for exercise. There are no half-measures here. Detectives either do or don’t. Robert B. Parker’s Spenser does. He spars with Hawk in the gym and, as he says tersely, ‘Lifts some’. Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone jogs to work off the effects of her disgusting fast food diet.
Spade and Chandler’s Marlowe, operating well before Jim Fixx’s The Complete Book of Running changed the world, stayed in their suits throughout. Ian Rankin’s Rebus knows he should exercise but has another drink instead; Morse wouldn’t dream of it. At the extreme end is Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe, who is so obese he can hardly move and has to use Archie Goodwin to do the legwork.
It’s a matter of which demographic the writer is appealing to—jock or slob.
E is also for expertise. Early detectives like Holmes and Poe’s Dupin were experts in things like ciphers, poisons and determining the brands of cigars from the ash. Later practitioners were more like Ross Macdonald’s durable Lew Archer—handy with their fists perhaps and bright enough, but with no special skills. A change came with Jonathan Kellerman’s psychologist Alex Delaware and Patricia Cornwell’s pathologist Kay Scarpetta. Their skills were central to cracking their cases. Chief Inspector Morse was an expert at cryptic crosswords and classical music, which helped occasionally, but mainly gave him opportunities to be smart at Detective Sergeant Lewis’s expense.
F is for father. The worst father in crime fiction (filmic) is Noah Cross in Robert Towne’s superb screenplay of Chinatown. Cross fathered a child on his own daughter and has designs on the resultant daughter/granddaughter. Few others come close.
General Sternwood in Chandler’s The Big Sleep combines a louche decadence with a likeable cynicism. He admits to having passed on his own vices to his daughters but believes they may have cultivated a few of their own.
Detectives as fathers can work well, as with Rebus and his accident-prone daughter and with Michael Connelly’s half-brother characters, Harry Bosch and Mickey Haller, whose two daughters get together. The main function of a daughter in a crime novel is to make a father character vulnerable. Sentimentality can cause this to go badly wrong, as in James Lee Burke’s Robicheaux novels, where it oozes over Robicheaux’s daughter Alafair. The only acceptable attitude is tough love.
F is also for the FBI. Ever since Inspector Lestrade in the Sherlock Holmes stories, there have been incompetent policemen acting as foils to the brighter protagonist. In recent times this role has often been assumed by FBI agents. The G-men are seen as unwieldy and bureaucratic and sometimes corrupt. There is a reluctance to call the FBI in and scepticism about its methods.
A notable exception is Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs (1988) who is well and truly up to the job, at least until the foolishness of the novel Hannibal. The heaviest verbal put-down of the Bureau comes in one of the Jack Reacher novels where it is characterised as the Federal Bureau of Incompetence.
F is also for film adaptation. Crime fiction vies with the Western as the genre to be most adapted for films. Some of the best adaptations in my opinion are The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939), The Maltese Falcon (1941), Get Carter (1971), Death on the Nile (1978), True Confessions (1981), The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and LA Confidential (1997). Among the worst, for missing the style and essence of the original story, have been the 1978 remake of The Big Sleep, V.I. Warshawski (1991) and the 2000 remake of Get Carter (one of the worst films of all time).
Far and away the best original screenplay for a crime story is Robert Towne’s Chinatown (1974).
F is also for food. Investigators, criminals and suspects have to eat and many writers make eating part of the texture of their books. As noted, Kinsey Millhone eats fast food but also dines frequently at a local Hungarian restaurant where she has friends and sometimes learns things. Ian Rankin laments the sugar- and salt-laden Scots diet, but eats it. A popular takeaway for his characters is vindaloo and chips but Inspector Rebus himself, a purist, favours rice with his curry. Menus in southern novels, like those of James Lee Burke, Carl Hiaasen and James W. Hall feature shrimp, po’ boy sandwiches and dirty rice.
Harry Bosch eats on the run and buys take-out to indulge his daughter. He microwaves TV dinners and frozen pizzas. Robert B. Parker’s Spenser is a gourmet cook and we get recipes and descriptions of culinary activity. He is
also a beer snob but apparently knows or cares little about wine.
Lee Child’s Jack Reacher is a big guy, six-foot-five and a hundred and twenty pounds. He eats a lot, mostly in diners, where he favours cheeseburgers for dinner and pancakes with maple syrup for breakfast. Happily, he walks so far hitch-hiking that he keeps his weight under control.
Meals feature prominently in clue-puzzle country-house mysteries, where an absence at breakfast or the wrong use of an implement at dinner can set hares running.
G is for gambling. In his 1971 survey of British mystery fiction, Snobbery with Violence, Colin Watson has a chapter entitled ‘De rigueur at Monte’. This pointed to the frequency with which British writers in the Golden Age took their characters to Monte Carlo to gamble or to observe gambling. E. Phillips Oppenheimer’s Murder at Monte Carlo (1933) is a prime example. Gambling has not figured much since then in crime fiction, though it crops up in Dick Francis’s racing novels (see H for horses), and Peter Temple’s character Jack Irish (Bad Debts, 1996, and following) is a punter and variously involved in the world of racing.
G is also for ghost. Quite rightly, ghosts are almost entirely absent from crime fiction. The only acceptable ‘ghost’ is one that turns out to have a perfectly rational explanation as in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902).
In the novels of the mother-and-son team writing under the name Charles Todd (A Test of Wills, 1996, and others), a Scotland Yard detective, Ian Rutledge, a survivor of World War I, has on his conscience and in his consciousness a ‘ghost’ in the form of the voice of his dead Sergeant Hamish McLeod, who taunts and provokes Rutledge as he goes about his work. This is a device admired by some readers and deplored by others.
G is also for guilt. Guilt is no longer as popular as it once was in crime fiction. Once guilt could cause characters to confess to crimes, to name accomplices and to commit suicide. Guilt operated strongly when more people espoused versions of Christianity where guilt is in-built. Catholics could avoid guilt by confession but this could help a story along by inspiring guilt in priests who came into the possession of guilty knowledge.