by Peter Corris
T is also for texting. A modern crime novel without texting would be like Sherlock Holmes without twice-daily mail delivery.
T is also for threat. Without threats there is no story. In a serial killer book (see S for serial killer) the threat is that he or she will kill again. In a kidnap story the threat is that the victim will die. In the police procedural the threat may come from within the police department; superior officers may be stupid, corrupt or both. In the best PI stories the protagonist should be placed under threat of some kind but another threat lies within his or her own character—in the balance between weaknesses (drink, sex, misplaced loyalty) and strengths (courage, persistence, honour). Threats are everywhere in crime fiction, as in life.
T is also for title. Titles are crucially important. The Maltese Pigeon doesn’t work nor does The Long Sleep, not because of the familiarity of the real titles but because the wrong words don’t carry the right resonance. Crime writers choosing titles have a multitude of choices.
Some, like Garry Disher, go for the impact of a single word—most of Disher’s novels in the Wyatt series have one-word titles.
The most common crime fiction title is one starting with the definite article. There are thousands of examples. A very long list of famous titles of this kind begins with Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860). Michael Connelly uses the style throughout his Mickey Haller series from The Lincoln Lawyer (2005) to The Gods of Guilt (2013).
Five words seems the ideal length for a longer title—James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) or James Hadley Chase’s No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1939), for example. Six words, as with The Far Side of the Dollar (1965) seems a touch too long. Ross Macdonald should have dropped the first definite article.
The violent vigilantism of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer is unambiguously announced in titles like I, the Jury (1947) and My Gun is Quick (1950), while the even more violent intent of Hannibal Lecter is totally masked, indeed deflected, by Thomas Harris’s title The Silence of the Lambs.
As mentioned, John D. MacDonald colour-coded his Travis McGee novels. He said he did this to make it easier for buyers to remember what they’d read and recognise a title as new. Why Sue Grafton chose to alphabetise her titles—A is for Alibi (1982) through to Y is for Yesterday (2017)—and Janet Evanovich to adopt a number code—One for the Money (1994) to Hardcore 24 (2017)—is not clear. If Grafton had wanted to continue the series beyond another book (she died before she could get to Z) she’d have had to think again about titles, but Evanovich won’t.
T is also for tobacco. Holmes, famously, smoked a meerschaum pipe; Sam Spade rolled his own (presumably Bull Durham or something similar) and other Hammett characters smoked Fatimas like their author; Marlowe (like Chandler) smoked a pipe and cigarettes. Poirot did not smoke but his offsider, Captain Arthur Hastings, was a pipe smoker, as was Simenon’s Maigret. Simon Templar smoked because it was the sophisticated thing to do. Mike Hammer smoked Luckies, what else?
Smoking gave writers useful punctuation points in the scene—pauses, distractions, opportunities for reflection. It’s been sorely missed as an aspect of sympathetic characters since the US Surgeon General’s report of 1984. Smoking is now reserved for dubious characters more flawed than the protagonists—women in particular.
Some reformed smokers, like Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch or Lee Child’s Jack Reacher, have stressful moments when they wish they still smoked but they don’t. This is in contrast to recovering alcoholics like James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux, who have similar moments of temptation and succumb.
T is also for torture. Torture is more common in spy and historical novels than in crime fiction but in books involving ruthless organisations such as the Mafia and drug cartels, torture is used to gain information or expose traitors. Seldom, though, is torture there as a sadistic indulgence or a fit punishment.
For most serial killers, dismemberment and display are postmortem. ‘Buffalo Bill’, the serial killer in The Silence of the Lambs, subjects his incarcerated victims to severe mental torture but this is not his object. He wishes to fatten them so that their flayed skins will help him in his transgendered delusion to create a ‘girl suit’. Their physical pain simply does not figure in his calculation and is all the more horrifying for that.
Mutilation occurs, as when fingers or parts thereof are sent to solicit ransoms, but this is not torture per se. Torture takes time and crime fiction is, or should be, fast-paced.
The threat of torture is another matter. A powerful example occurs in Don Winslow’s The Winter of Frankie Machine (2006) when Frankie takes a man out into the desert, strips him naked, and sits in front of him sharpening a knife to a flaying keenness. The guy talks.
T is also for trench coat. The trench coat, usually with the collar turned up and the belt loosely tied, has been de rigueur for private eyes in films, on television, in comics and in illustrations ever since Humphrey Bogart shrugged into one in the film of The Big Sleep. But I cannot think of a book in which a PI wears one.
T is also for trial (see C for courtroom drama).
T is also for true crime. The shelves in bookshops groan under the weight of books about crimes that have actually happened. I cite a selection with which I am familiar. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966) and Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song (1979) are sometimes designated ‘non-fiction novels’ or ‘creative non-fiction’ but I regard them as true crime books. Also in this category is Robert Lindsey’s The Falcon and the Snowman (1979). True crime shading into memoir is Mikal Gilmore’s account of the crimes and death of his brother Gary, Shot in the Heart (1994). More strictly true crime are Dominick Dunne’s The Two Mrs Grenvilles (1985) and Gerold Frank’s The Boston Strangler (1966).
Ten Rillington Place by Ludovic Kennedy (1961) details the murders committed by John Reginald Christie in the 1940s and 50s in London. Fred and Rose (1995) by Howard Sounes, deals with the multiple killings by Fred and Rose West, one of the victims being a cousin of English writer Martin Amis.
In Australia, Lindsay Simpson and Sandra Harvey wrote a number of widely read true crime books including Brothers in Arms (1989) and The Killer Next Door (1994). John Dale’s Huckstepp: A dangerous life (2000) about Sallie-Anne Huckstepp, prostitute, drug addict, associate of criminal Warren Lanfranchi and murder victim, is a compelling work.
True crime books often provide the basis for film and television treatments.
U is for undercover. Undercover cops occur frequently in crime fiction. They are usefully ambiguous characters treading a fine line between criminality and law enforcement. Quite often they fall over the line to the wrong side, at least for a time. Undercover cops are under intense pressure from both sides of the line and many do not make it to the denouement. If an undercover cop dies early, interesting questions arise—was the death caused by the good guys or the bad guys and does it matter which?
U is also for underworld. This term is now little used. It comes from a time when the criminal classes were thought to be located in ill-favoured parts of big cities such as the East End of London or the Bowery in New York. Now the crooks are to be credibly found everywhere, in Mayfair and on Park Avenue as like as not. Generalised terms like organised crime or the mob (see M for mob) now serve the purpose.
U is also for university. The university or campus mystery has had capable exponents from Dorothy L. Sayers’ Gaudy Night (1935), set in a fictitious Oxford college and featuring her characters Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane, onward. Robert B. Parker’s first Spenser novel, The Godwulf Manuscript (1973), was set in a university and reflected Parker’s years as an academic.
Robert Barnard, another academic who became a successful crime writer, wrote Death of an Old Goat (1974), set in a thinly disguised University of New England, where he had held a teaching position. Don Aitkin, a distinguished academic political scientist, wrote a light mystery novel set in a university, The Second Chair (1977).
The campus mystery pr
ovides a ready-made set of characters—academics, administrators, students, and such elements as ambition, career and examination pressures, plagiarism, cheating and sexual misalliances that make a heady brew. Several of Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse novels involved doings in Oxford colleges where these forces come into play.
V is for vicar (see C for Crockford’s Clerical Directory).
V is also for victim. Victims can be drawn from either sex or anything in between and from all walks of life. They are preferably young for sympathy’s sake and, if old, are best depicted as either helpless or rich. Dead criminals are not necessarily victims. Their criminality may have deprived them of that status unless they have some redeeming features, such as a firm, long-standing friendship with an unblemished (or slightly blemished) protagonist.
Victims have to be identified, which allows pathologists, computer freaks and old-time cops (particularly in the case of dead prostitutes) into the act. Victims can be either hidden or ostentatiously displayed, according to the perpetrators’ particular needs. Occasionally a victim may leave a clue to the killer—a bloodied word on a wall, a scrap of clothing clutched in a dead hand—but an efficient killer will clean up properly afterwards.
V is also for violence. In crime fiction, violence has escalated since the time of Sherlock Holmes and the sedate Golden Age. It took on a mindless, fascist character in the work of Mickey Spillane and a psychologically disturbing tone in the pulp novels of Jim Thompson, Cornell Woolrich (The Bride Wore Black, 1940, and others) and other pulp writers like Steve Fisher (I Wake up Screaming, 1941).
Violence is more nuanced in the hard-boiled school of Hammett and Chandler. In the work of the post-Chandlerians and the legions of crime writers now operating, it becomes a metaphor for the state of society, a pointer to personal and institutional corruption.
W is for Washington, DC. Washington is often described as the crime capital of the United States and not only because the government is based there. It is the setting for most of the novels of George Pelecanos (A Firing Offense, 1992, and following).
W is also for water. It’s amazing how many fictional killers persist in drowning people in baths and dumping their bodies in the sea. Child’s play to the pathologist. Such murderers also fail to realise that bodies thrown into the sea, rivers and lakes will rise to the surface unless properly trussed and weighted. They deserve to be caught.
Water is good for showering after a hard day’s investigation and for having sex while doing so. It’s also good for crossing in ferries, and allowing investigators, informants and even perpetrators to have safe conversations.
Some writers specialise in water-borne stories. Anne Perry has the Thames River Police while Travis McGee often takes to the water in his houseboat, The Busted Flush.
There is a good deal of water about in the novels of James Lee Burke, James W. Hall and Carl Hiaasen, in the forms of the Gulf, the bayous and the Florida Everglades. There is also shrimp at cook-outs and po’ boy sandwiches.
W is also for weariness. Investigators are often described as ‘world weary’ and why not, given the number of jobs they’ve undertaken. Maigret is the world-record holder at 76 novels and 28 short stories; Spenser 40 novels; Lew Archer 18 novels and about the same number of short stories; Harry Bosch, 18 novels and counting.
The weariness, of course, is metaphorical for pragmatism and lack of illusion. Investigators are not physically weary when long stake-out hours are required or a man comes through a door with a gun.
W is also for weather. It would be interesting to do a survey, but I doubt if there has ever been a crime novel that does not mention the weather. Like the state of traffic on the roads, fluctuations in the stock market and current news events, the weather provides a useful punctuation point, slowing down the narrative and providing texture while plots thicken and develop.
Weather is even more useful as a signifier of the mood of characters, the physical surrounds to the action, the atmospherics of the story. However, Elmore Leonard’s first rule of writing in his list of ten is: ‘Never open a book with weather’.
W is also for witness (see C for courtroom drama).
X is for xenophobia. Xenophobia was a mainstay of early crime writers like Sax Rohmer (towards the Chinese). Interestingly, xenophobia is two-edged in Sax Rohmer—Fu Manchu plots the elimination of the ‘white race’ while a white character screams at him, ‘You yellow devil.’ We have Sapper’s Bulldog Drummond castigating the Germans, while in the Sherlock Holmes stories lascars are never to be trusted. It’s less common now and writers take care to vary their villains—in the United States if the villains are Vietnamese in one book, they’d better be Cubans in the next; in Britain West Indians/Russians; in Australia Italians/Lebanese, and so on.
Unapproved characters give xenophobia full rein but their aversions are more likely to be directed at other races than nationalities, although everyone despises the Swiss.
Y is for Yeti. So far, to my knowledge, no Yetis have appeared in crime fiction but the range of the genre suggests that it might happen. I seem to remember some books that featured a sasquatch or the fear of the creature, but I retain no other details.
Z is for zeitgeist. The zeitgeist of crime fiction is that a world of violence, hatred and greed can be countered by intelligence, humour and courage, but only partly and temporarily because there are more books to write.
Z is also for Zen. Buddhism figures very little in crime fiction because the word itself suggests peace and harmony, whereas the atmospherics of crime fiction stress violence, hatred and greed.
Australian Colin Talbot’s 1995 mystery novel is entitled The Zen Detective, and of course there is Michael Dibdin’s Italian detective Aurelio Zen (Ratking, 1988, and following).
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1 This is a rare example of sports fan Parker getting things wrong. Strictly speaking, Walcott did not have a twilight. He retired after his second loss to Rocky Marciano in 1951. The television series based on Parker’s book took years and weight off Spenser by having him fight José Torres, a light heavyweight world champion in the 1960s.
2 www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1475/
3 ‘Tips from the Masters’, Gotham Writers, www.writingclasses.com/toolbox/tipsmasters/elmore-leonard-10-rules-for-good-writing.
When Linda Funnell and I began the online review journal the Newtown Review of Books (https://newtownreviewofbooks.com.au) seven years ago, we thought we would like a regular columnist to add interest to the site. We asked Peter if he would do it and from our first post in March 2012 he only ever missed a few weeks when he was hospitalised. He ended up writing over 300 columns for us, usually of about 500–600 words. Many of them were snippets from a writer’s life; others were discussions of books he had read or was reading; some were social or political commentary. Some were personal history. Some were reminiscences of people he had known who had somehow impressed him. We gave him carte blanche. The selection that follows centres mainly on writing or writing-related themes.
In the last few years of his life, when he could no longer write for extended periods, these columns were his only outlet. He hated missing deadlines and we usually had several columns up our sleeves. We still had one unpublished when he died.
—JB
ON BEING REVIEWED
18 November 2016
The worst review I ever got was back in my academic days. My MA thesis, ‘Aborigines and Europeans in Western Victoria from First Contact to 1860’, a typically cumbersome title, was published in 1967 by the Institute of Aboriginal Studies in Canberra as an occasional number in a series of monographs. An academic at, I think, La Trobe University wrote a devastating critique pointing out its factual errors, inadequate research and faulty theoretical underpinnings. Although the thesis had gained me the degree and a PhD scholarship, I was chagrined but not humiliated.
I excused myself with the thought that I’d done the best I could under the circumstances—time and the pressure of teaching.
An easy out, perhaps, but I doubt that anyone ever writes anything under ideal conditions. Writing isn’t like that; those who wait for ideal conditions probably don’t ever write.
My subsequent academic books were respectfully reviewed without setting my career alight. When I embarked on a freelance writing journey, I had at first bad and then very good luck.
My history of prize fighting in Australia, Lords of the Ring (1980), probably took me longer than any other book to write. It involved a lot of research and recasting but my high hopes for it were dashed. It was published by Cassell, a publisher that was soon to be subsumed. It received almost no reviews and the one promotional event organised had me seated in a mocked-up boxing ring close to the cosmetics section in the David Jones Sydney store with a pile of books by my side. Not a single buyer! One woman, taking pity on me, chatted briefly about her son who had been a boxer.
The first Cliff Hardy novel, The Dying Trade (1980), was also made an orphan when the American publisher McGraw-Hill cancelled its Australian fiction list, of which my book was one of the two published. Happily, because of its novelty, the first homegrown, as it were, Australian crime novel in decades got positive reviews from all quarters and was picked up, along with the next two in the series, as a paperback by Pan and then, as I continued to produce rapidly, by Allen & Unwin, by then embarked on their enterprising and successful Australian venture.
Over the years, with many books in different genres, I’ve had no seriously damaging reviews. One reviewer of perhaps the tenth Hardy book suggested that the blows the detective received on the head would’ve been mentally damaging. I took notice and when it was sometimes necessary for the protagonist to be out of action, I found other ways. Stuart Coupe, a friend, wrote that reading Aftershock (1991), the Hardy novel about the Newcastle earthquake, ‘was like watching paint dry’. It hurt at the time. I console myself with the fact that it is one of the most popular of my books borrowed from libraries and as an ebook.