Last year, I taught a workshop for the lovely Erskine Writer’s Group, where I talked about “writing the crime novel”, which of course meant that I started off by talking about what it mean to write a novel generally, and more generally, what it means to write a story.
I talked about finding a character with a strong need that was both specific to them, and universal for the audience. I talked about how plot really is about conflicting desires from characters, and how all of this can be applied to just about any genre.
But I also talked about what makes a crime novel unique. What is the “essence” of the crime novel. And to do this I asked people to try and define it.
As always when I asked this question, the main answer was, “There’s a crime that needs to be solved by a detective/police officer.”
And this is how many people view the genre, primarily because the driving popular force of the crime novel has been the detective story, and in particular the police detective story. In Britain, especially, we have become used to the idea of the crime story being one where a crime is solved and order is restored by the police office (a figure of authority, which is one reason why one can make the argument for crime fiction actually being quite conservative in its mainstream form — but that’s a post for another time).
But a crime novel is so much more than that (in potential, anyway). Yes, a very popular part of the genre is the police procedural, but beyond that you have stories where the criminals are the focus (heist novels), where ordinary people get caught up in bad situations (noir novels or domestic suspense, mainly), where serial killers tell their own stories (The “You” novels, American Psychopath etc), and even ones where murder isn’t part of the story, but rather criminal activity forms a central component of the novel (I used to make an argument that Trainspotting is actually a crime novel in its own way, albeit in a very on-the-edge kind of way!)
In essence, then, the crime novel is one where crime or a transgressive act that could be seen as a crime forms a central element of the plot. That is, a crime novel is a book where — without the crime — the story would not happen. And this encompasses a huge range and variety of styles of story, and a massive collection of subgenres. And it shows why crime is such an enduring genre… it can tell so many kinds of stories, explore so many settings and perspectives. All it requires is for the crime or transgressive act to be central to the book’s premise.
To believe that a crime novel is merely about “solving” a crime or restoring order is to really limit the genre. There’s room for these kind of books, of course (some of them are brilliantly well done), but I also think that as readers, writers, and lovers of the genre we need to start to expand our ideas and think more about the crime novel really is and what it can do. If we limit our crime stories to those where a a sense of “order” is restored or those where a police officer or person of authority must resolve a crime and in doing so represent the absolute moral authority of the story, then we are limiting the genre massively… and don’t start me on those genre purists who think that crime novels can’t exist with SF or fantasy novels, or those that think you can’t mix up a good bit of horror in there.
On that last point, horror and crime share a lot in common. Again, we limit horror by thinking of it as purely monsters and frights, but often horror is really about confronting our fears in ways that allow us to unpack them. Silence of the Lambs is both a crime and a horror novel. And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie is a kind of proto-slasher story in which a group of people in an isolated location are picked off one by one by an unseen killer. And of course John Connolly, James Oswald a number of others mix the supernatural and crime with ease, perfectly fighting against the accusation some people have that using “ghosts” is an excuse of some kind of for lazy plotting (It isn’t, in the same way that using technology doesn’t somehow make a crime novel “easy”).
Crime novels and horror novels are often really about the same things: testing the boundaries of our sense of safety and confronting what happens when those barriers are removed or pushed against. A killer coming after you or a monster in the shadows? Those push very similar buttons.
I guess what I’m saying is that crime fiction is a broad Church. Despite preconceptions, it can cover a huge variety of stories, characters, themes and approaches. It can show us how the world should be, how the world is, how the world could be. It can show us our darker natures, or how to be better versions of ourselves. The only limit, really, is our imagination, our empathy, our expectations…
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