The rewards of crime
Raymond Chandler once praised Dashiell Hammett for having given murder back to the sort of people who committed it. One knows what he meant; away with murders at the vicarage or on the Orient Express (where, however, a good few have doubtless taken place). Yet it wasn't really a very intelligent observation because all sorts of people, even little old ladies and clergymen, do in fact commit murder. In any case, what used to be called `the hard-boiled crime novel', even Chandler's own, marvellous as the best three or four of them are, is often as far from realism as the classic English detective novel. Marlowe himself is a romanticised figure, which is why he was best played by Bogart, and the Hollywood scenes in that sometimes brilliant but flawed novel, The Little Sister, are as embarrassing to read now as the exchanges between Lord Peter Wimsey and, well, anyone with whom Wimsey is in conversation.
Nevertheless it's surely unsatisfactory that the crime novel is so often dismissed as 'genre fiction'. Of course most crime novels are poor — but then so are most novels categorised as 'literary'. They may bear reading once, but rarely twice. Again, crime novels, especially those of the police procedural type, are easily weighed down, and often sunk, by pseudo-realistic detail which the reader may well choose to skip. None of this alters the fact that the crime novelist deals with essential and metaphysical realities. That very fine writer, Nicholas Freeling, in a collection of essays entitled Criminal Convictions, went so far as to claim that 'in prose fiction, crime is the pre-eminent, and often predominant, theme'. To prove his point the writers whose work he examines are: Stendhal, Dickens, Conrad, Conan Doyle, Kipling, Chandler, Sayers, Simenon. Only four of the eight are likely to find their books in the crime section of your local bookshop. Yet Freeling makes his argument, cogently to my mind, and might have included books by Scott (The Heart of Midlothian) , Balzac (almost any volume of La Comedic Humaine), Trollope (The Eustace Diamonds), Dostoevsky (Crime and Punishment and The Devils), Ford (The Good Soldier) and Greene (The Quiet American). 'Crime,' Freeling wrote, 'is the pathology of the human condition, the moment after, it may be, a long drawn-out disturbance or perversion, at which the delicate balance of metabolism tilts into morbidity': an exact definition.
The difficulty for all novelists is to go on. It's not only that you use up material, or that you seem to have said everything before; not only that you may become, as Greene put it, `the prisoner of your method'. It's that it becomes ever harder to devise new situations and new characters, even to take this task seriously. When this happens, some stop writing; but they are few. Others turn to preaching, concerning themselves with 'social issues'; others abandon the attempt to portray the world as it is, and retreat into extravagance or whimsy. You can see this happening, sadly, with crime novelists whose plots become ever more far-fetched or elaborate, whose criminals seem to amuse themselves with setting fantastic puzzles for the police. The writer who once stayed close to experience and so presented murder as an offence against everything that we value now begins to treat it as a game. This may be entertaining but it is also frivolous. A good example of what I mean is offered by the fashionable French novelist Fred Vargas. Her latest novel, Wash This Blood from My Hands, is certainly enjoyable, but, alas, it is no more than highclass hokum because the metaphysical horror of murder — so perfectly realised in Macbeth or Crime and Punishment — has evaporated. The blood is washed all too easily from the hands.
Today the crime novelist has one advantage denied to writers of 'straight' or 'literary' novels. Unlike them he can range over all levels of society, for crime can easily breach the barriers that exist in our stratified society. Because of these barriers the modern literary novel, unlike its 19th-century predecessors, is often confined to the horizontal, dealing only with one class. But crime runs through society from top to bottom, and so the crime novelist can present a fuller picture of the way we live now. His weakness is that, wedded as he often is to a formula and dealing with the same chief characters, there is a tendency for his work to become mechanical, a danger too that he will sentimentalise his central figures. A good example of this is offered by Reginald Hill's Andy Dalziel. Originally a convincing character, tough, clever and rather nasty, he has become in the later books a comic pussy. Nevertheless Hill at his best is one of those who has shown why the crime novel deserves to be taken seriously and not dismissed as genre or entertainment.
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