by Peter Corris
L is for laboratory (see D for doctor and S for squeamishness). Since the advent of Patricia Cornwell’s medical examiner Kay Scarpetta (Postmortem, 1990, and following), crime writers have increasingly felt obliged to introduce laboratory scenes into their stories—white coats, petri dishes, latex gloves. There is a variety of ways to handle these scenes—humorously, clinically, sceptically. Perhaps the best approach, a challenge yet to be met, would be to combine all three.
L is also for Latin tag. Some of the most common are habeas corpus, in situ, modus operandi, sub judice, in flagrante delicto. Most crime writers have little Latin and less Greek but they must know these terms.
L is also for loan sharking. This peculiarly American practice occurs in many crime novels where the debt incurred has to be paid one way or another. The Vig (1990) by John Lescroart has loan sharking as its central theme.
L is also for locality. Some writers are intensely identified with their chosen localities—Dashiell Hammett with San Francisco, Raymond Chandler with LA, Georges Simenon with Paris, Ian Rankin with Edinburgh. Some writers (see R for research) invent their localities—Ed McBain, Ross Macdonald and Sue Grafton for example. The only rule is that the localities be interesting in their own right and believable.
L is also for locked room. Introduced into what was then called ‘sensational fiction’ by Edgar Allan Poe in ‘Murder in the Rue Morgue’ (1841), the locked-room mystery was popular in the Golden Age—the 1920s to 1940s. The exemplar of the device was American-born John Dickson Carr, who mostly lived in and wrote about England. His 1935 novel The Hollow Man was voted the best locked-room mystery of all time in 1935 by a panel of seventeen crime writers. It is likely to retain the title because the style is out of fashion, although some contemporary writers employ it; examples are Peter Lovesey’s Bloodhounds (1996) and Kerry Greenwood’s Murder in Montparnasse (2002). Carr’s protagonist, Dr Gideon Fell, lectures on the subject in the book and this is sometimes published as a stand-alone essay.
The device in the hands of Carr and others always strains credulity.
L is also for love. Love suffuses crime novels—except those of James Ellroy, where nobody loves anybody or anything. Characters kill for love and die for love. They love their jobs, their houses, their money. Investigators love their wives (often estranged) and their children—more often one child and usually a daughter. Some investigators love the natural world, as James W. Hall’s Thorn loves the Florida Keys.
Morse loves classical music, Bosch loves jazz, R.D. Wingfield’s Jack Frost loves sausage sandwiches. Dr Watson, of course, loves Sherlock Holmes but doesn’t know it, while Robert B. Parker’s Spenser loves Hawk but can’t admit it, even though Susan Silverman might be tolerant.
M is for mean streets. ‘Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.’ Raymond Chandler’s stylish famous formulation is odd, given his work. Philip Marlowe is initially seen in Chandler’s first novel, The Big Sleep, not in a mean street but outside General Sternwood’s mansion. Marlowe, in fact, spends more time in high-class gambling joints onshore and afloat, respectable apartment buildings, doctors’ rooms and out-of-town resorts than on mean streets. But the formulation could hardly go, ‘Down these mean streets a man must sometimes go …’
Streets are meaner in Hammett and much meaner in later writers like James Ellroy.
M is also for Miranda. The Miranda warning has been a part of police procedure in the United States since 1966. There is no precise text for arresting police to follow but they must advise suspects of the following: they have the right to remain silent; anything they say may be used in evidence against them; they have the right for an attorney to be present at any interrogation and, if they cannot afford a lawyer, a court-appointed attorney will be provided.
In crime fiction police observe or violate these rules as circumstances dictate.
M is also for mob or mafia. The quintessential mob book is Mario Puzo’s The Godfather (1969), which laid down the ground rules, introducing us to consiglieri, ‘made’ guys and the code of silence. The mob is a very useful device, allowing organised crime to be a threatening and controlling presence without ever having to specify details. The mob can be thought to be behind a series of murders for two-thirds of a book before it becomes clear that the perp was a rogue cop or a CIA guy or a lawyer.
The mob can be located anywhere up and down the east coast of the United States, in California and Nevada but never in the mid-west except in Chicago or possibly Kansas. The best mob book in recent years is Don Winslow’s The Winter of Frankie Machine (2006) in which a mafia hit man tries to retire. There was talk of a film with Robert de Niro, who has played mafiosi so often he must sometimes think he is one.
The Russian mafia has begun to figure in American and British crime novels. In its home-grown manifestation it is best seen in Martin Cruz Smith’s books (Gorky Park, 1981, and following).
M is also for mobile phone (cell phone in the United States), which has changed the plotting and pace of crime novels. Where detectives used to have to locate pay phones or stay by a home, office or hotel-room phone, they can now move around freely. Mobiles are good for tracking people, which can work both ways—for good or evil. They are bad for the environment because characters throw them from high buildings or into the nearest lake or river to avoid being tracked.
There are dangers for writers here. Ian Rankin’s Standing in Another Man’s Grave (2012) makes a greater use of the mobile phone—calling, texting, messaging, photographing and sending photographs, voice recording—than I’ve seen before. It threatens to dehumanise, over-digitalise, the story.
The change wrought by the mobile was underlined in the British TV series Life on Mars where a character, thrown back to the 1970s, howls, ‘I need my mobile.’
‘Your mobile what?’ is the only response he gets. The short-lived American adaptation was deprived of this joke. ‘I need my cell’ just wouldn’t work.
M is also for morality. Investigators have an ill-defined, self-devised moral code, rarely spelled out. It can be very flexible, as in the case of Sam Spade, who is sexually amoral—he has seduced his partner’s wife and rejects her when attracted to someone else. But when the partner he has cuckolded is killed he says, ‘When a man’s partner is killed he’s supposed to do something about it.’ Who supposes this? He does.
M is also for morgue (see D for doctor and S for squeamishness).
M is also for motivation, of which there must be one, or several. Along with means, motivation is one of the big three (see O for opportunity) and the chief one is money.
M is also for multiple killings. These are usually the work of individuals (see S for serial killer) but occasionally take the form of massacres. Massacres are on the cards whenever Mexican and South American drug cartels are on the scene. The best exchange at a massacre scene is in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men (2005) where the deputy says, ‘It’s a mess, ain’t it, Sheriff?’
‘If it ain’t,’ the sheriff replies, ‘it’ll do till a mess gets here.’
The lines were reproduced word for word in the Coen brothers’ 2007 award-winning film of the book, something rarely achieved by novelists.
N is for name. For series characters, names are very important. Arthur Conan Doyle considered ‘Sherrington’ before settling on Sherlock, a wise choice. The names often encode the qualities of the characters. Raymond Chandler gave his detectives various names, including Malory, before settling on Marlowe. A theory that this was the name of one of the houses at the private school Chandler attended was exploded when it was discovered that the house name wasn’t used in his time. (Such is the interest of writers in this matter.) It seems most likely that Marlowe is resonant of Malory and his Morte d’Arthur. The name of Robert B. Parker’s Spenser is a deliberate and poetic evocation of the past. The same goes for Timothy Harris’s character Thomas Kyd in Kyd for Hire (1977) and Goodnight and Good-bye (1979). Kyd was an Elizabethan playwright.
The name Morse suggests codes and clues appropriate to the character; Mike Hammer and Tiger Mann, Mickey Spillane’s characters’ names, need no explanation.
Garry Disher says that he wanted a name with a ‘short whiplash quality’ for his series character Wyatt and that he probably had Wyatt Earp in the back of his mind when he decided on the name.
Michael Connelly and John Lescroart chose unusual first names for their series characters—Hieronymus and Dismas; the first is a fourteenth-century Dutch painter, the second the name given by tradition to the repentant thief on the cross in the biblical legend of the crucifixion. The names permit some amusing exchanges in the books and privilege educated readers—nothing wrong with that.
N is also for noir. A French film critic of the 1940s defined certain Hollywood films as film noir, pointing to the use of dimly lit scenes, shadows, and dark actions and motives. Since then film historians have argued that the style was accidental—an attempt by studios to save money on lighting rather than to add atmosphere. Whatever the truth of this, the term was taken up by later critics and reviewers of both films and books to describe a certain kind of morally ambiguous and dramatically tense story (see H for hard-boiled). This led to ridiculous descriptions, from a literal perspective, of films like the brightly lit Chinatown and books set in the high bright sun such as the Elvis Cole novels of Robert Crais (The Monkey’s Raincoat, 1987, and following) as noir. It remained a useful and more or less accurate term for books such as those by Philip Kerr in the gloomy Bernie Gunther series (March Violets, 1989, and following), which are aptly described as ‘Berlin noir’.
‘Tartan noir’ is a term loosely applied but best used to describe crime writing set in Scotland where the characters and the setting share characteristics—bleakness, toughness and harshness. The protagonists are of the anti-hero type—cynical and without illusions—and the social scene is unforgiving.
An early example was the work of William McIlvanney (Remedy is None, 1966, and following). The novels of Ian Rankin, Stuart MacBride and Denise Mina (The Field of Blood, 2005, and following) fit the category better than some other Scots writers like Val McDermid.
N is also for Nordic. After the success of the de facto husband-and-wife writing team Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö with their Swedish police procedurals featuring Martin Beck (Roseanna, 1965, and following), there was a falling away in translation of Scandinavian crime novels, although they continued to be written and to be popular locally.
That changed with the translations into English and popularity of writers like Peter Høeg, Henning Mankell, Anne Holt and others in the 1990s. Since that time there has been an avalanche of ‘Nordics’—from Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland and Iceland. The extraordinary sales of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl trilogy in the 2000s built on the success of earlier writers.
The best survey and appraisal of the Nordic crime-writing scene is Jean Bedford’s ‘The Nordic Phenomenon’ in the Newtown Review of Books, 28 February 2012. There is, she argues, a hunger among progressively inclined readers for stories from a part of the world that, in theory and to a degree in practice, has fairness-to-all social settings.
The exotic climate and geography, too, seem to exercise a fascination for readers, which has provided encouragement and a degree of success to writers basing their stories in Canada and Alaska. It hasn’t worked at the other end of the globe. As far as I’m aware there are no crime novels written and set in Tierra del Fuego.
N is also for nostalgia. Once a crime series is underway the protagonist inevitably expresses nostalgia for a time when he or she was younger and life was simpler. This can provide engaging punctuation points in the narrative and readers enjoy references to places they once enjoyed, music they once listened to, sports stars they once admired. It’s a device that bonds writer and reader.
It isn’t always appreciated that those writers who become tired of their characters, as Arthur Conan Doyle did of Holmes, Chandler did of Marlowe and Fleming did of Bond, generally yearned for the time when the enterprise was fresher. It shows.
O is for OMCG. This acronym for outlaw motorcycle gang is gaining currency in Australia, with governments becoming ever more enthusiastic about limiting the freedoms of the citizenry.
‘Bikers’ (the US term works much better than the Australian ‘bikies’) are usually associated with the manufacture and distribution of mind-altering drugs rather than crimes against persons or property. Increasingly, as with many criminal organisations, their violence tends to be directed principally towards themselves.
Hunter S. Thompson apart, not many writers have chosen to get close enough to motorcycle gangs to write about them. A common attitude is summed up by comedian Roseanne Barr: ‘I hate bikers. They’re dirty, they smell, they have tobacco juice in their beards, they shit by the side of the road—and that’s just the women.’
O is also for omniscience. In effect third-person narrators are omniscient in that they are in possession of all the information and control everything. This contrasts with the first-person style (standard although not universal with private-eye stories) where the action is seen from the point of view of the character/narrator—who only knows so much and must find out more. Certain detectives in what might be called the old school—Holmes, Poirot and Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe, for example—are omniscient in their inherent superiority over the forces they have to contend with. It is significant that they are sexless—attachment to a woman or women would constitute an impermissible weakness.
O is also for opportunity. This is very much needed by a would-be murderer, but in most cases it needs to be contrived or set up. The danger here is in leaving behind evidence of the arrangement. With the opportunity taken and the murder committed, it becomes necessary to cover the tracks. One method is the alibi, but it can be tricky. Alibis can be broken down. Another method is to deflect suspicion onto someone else. This only works if the murderer is considerably smarter than the investigator, which may appear to be the case, but only temporarily.
In the clue-puzzle mystery the opportunity is crucial and must be uncovered. In the weakest examples it can be done by a coincidental meeting or a chance remark. This is shaky ground. In the hard-boiled school, the opportunity may be given, even admitted, by the perpetrator, and the challenge becomes, ‘Prove it.’ Then it turns into a battle of wills and other forces intrude (see V for violence).
O is also for output. Like many authors of Westerns, some crime writers have been notable for the extraordinary number of books they’ve published. Belgian Georges Simenon published over four hundred novels; Agatha Christie about sixty-six, and others, like Erle Stanley Gardner and Leslie Charteris, also have long bibliographies to their credit.
Edgar Wallace produced so many books, dictating them and once publishing eighteen in a single year, that an English newspaper printed a cartoon in which a bookseller offered a volume to a customer saying, ‘Have you read the midday Wallace?’
The biggest producer was British writer John Creasey, who started late, did not live to a great age, and published more than six hundred books. Creasey, who also had an active political life, wrote under a variety of pseudonyms and had a number of serial characters. His books written under the name J.J. Marric are competent police procedurals, while others, like many of the Inspector Roger West books, are superficial and unconvincing. There is no detailed biography of Creasey, and how he was able to write so much remains a mystery.
By contrast, Arthur Conan Doyle, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler produced comparatively few books, but their place in the crime-writing pantheon is secure.
P is for passion (see L for love and S for sex).
P is also for pastiche. Pastiches of popular crime stories have often been written, with the most notable source being the work of Arthur Conan Doyle. A recent count listed close to a hundred Sherlock Holmes pastiches, parodies and imitations, of which one of the earliest and possibly the best was Nicholas Meyer’s The Seven-Per-Cent Solution
(1974).
Pastiches have been written of the work of Rex Stout, Agatha Christie and other leading lights. To mark the centenary of his birth, the estate of Raymond Chandler commissioned Robert B. Parker to write a continuation of ‘The Poodle Springs Story’, which Chandler had left unfinished at his death. This was published in 1989 as Poodle Springs. In 1991, also with the estate’s approval, Parker published Perchance to Dream, a sequel to The Big Sleep.
P is also for perpetrator. Arch-villains like Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor Moriarty, Sax Rohmer’s Dr Fu Manchu and Ed McBain’s Deaf Man (see P for police procedural), are long out of fashion. The lone serial killer is probably the most favoured subject of all in contemporary crime fiction (see S for serial killer).
Perpetrators can be male or female, black, white or Asian or a mix of any of these. A skilful writer can enlist the reader’s sympathy for a perpetrator, as when young Vito Corleone kills the Mafia street boss in The Godfather, but only up to a point. Perps can be rich or poor but, as Sophie Tucker famously observed of personal circumstances, ‘rich is better’, which holds true for crime writing.
P is also for photograph. Scene of crime officers (see S for SOCO) take photographs of crime scenes, some of which can be blown up to reveal detail, but that is about the extent of the usefulness of photography in modern crime fiction. The ‘Brownie and bedsheets’ era, where private detectives took photos of actually or spuriously cooperative adulterous couples (see G for gumshoe) is long past. Ever since suspicion was aroused about the photograph of alleged John F. Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald posed with a rifle (was the shadow in the right place?) the potential for doctoring photographs has limited their usefulness as either evidence or accusatory material. With digital photography, any misrepresentation of arms, legs, faces or sexual organs is possible.
P is also for plot. One of the greats of crime fiction, Raymond Chandler, made a pronouncement on this subject that aspiring crime writers should take into account: ‘Scene is more important than plot.’ This is sage advice; many tyros become frustrated and bogged down trying to devise and control complicated plots. Many, perhaps most, crime readers are interested in the elan of the story rather than the twists and turns.