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Crime and the crime writer
Once again the weekend papers are full of crime. The figures for recorded offences for July are said to show the biggest rise for years. Street crime is becoming more common and more violent. Drug addicts are shoplifting and robbing to feed habits that cost thousands of pounds a month. Fear of crime is everywhere. And yet in the list of best-selling hardback fiction seven of the top ten are crime novels or thrillers. We hate and fear crime, and yet we want to read about it in both fact and fiction. Why?
Most people are afraid of crime, and anyone who has ever been a victim dreads a recurrence. There was a time when I lived in a roughish area of South London and was burgled so often that I could hardly bear to leave the house. There was never much to take - the toaster, the television, the few bits of jewellery I had left after the last break-in - but the value of what went was nothing compared with the loss of my sense of safety at home. I dreaded coming back to find the front door swinging on its hinges again, or another window broken. The fear was worse, of course, when the thieves broke in at night while I was there. That happened three times.
I was lucky. There were other people in the house each time and the intruders were scared off. But it was never hard to imagine a different outcome, even without news reports and accounts from friends who, not so lucky, suffered serious violence. Years later, I poured the remembered fear into my novel Fault Lines, in which a social worker is woken by a scuffling sound in the night and goes downstairs to investigate what she thinks must be an invasion of mice, only to discover a violent intruder.
Adult fairy tales
Writing that book provided a kind of therapy, and I find that reading other people's novels can have a similar effect. In many ways, crime fiction gives adults what children take from fairy tales: the reassurance that comes from seeing your worst fears acted out in the suffering of imaginary victims, whose tormentors are ultimately punished.
Fairy tales may end with those wonderfully familiar words, 'and they all lived happily ever after', but these days a large number of adult crime novels have open endings, in which it is very clear that some criminals will escape and few victims or investigators can expect unalloyed happiness. While that takes something away from the reassurance, it makes what is left more convincing because the stories themselves are more realistic. Anyone who reads the papers knows that less than a quarter of all crime is ever solved, although the clear-up rate for violent offences is much better at two-thirds.
Some realism is essential in crime fiction, but too much destroys the pleasure that all readers have a right to expect. They have to believe in the imaginary world writers create and enjoy it, as excitement drives them on towards the denouement. Too much research, too much detail, too much reality can destroy all that.
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