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Gripping with Blood

The Nottingham Evening Post, 19 July 2003

Once, literary detectives like Hercules Poirot summoned suspects to the drawing room, solved the crime... and all was well in the world. Not any more, says Clare Littleford. The Nottingham-based novelist says crime writing today is grittier, more realistic - and more popular than ever.

Crime is everywhere, murder in particular. Television, film, books - as an audience, we like nothing better than to see characters come to a sticky end in ever more gruesome and inventive ways.

Crime fiction, in particular, is booming. Examine the shelves of best-selling novels in most bookshops, and it's a fair bet that a sizeable proportion will be crime novels. The pages drip with blood as psychopaths and serial killers stalk their victims and subject them to ever more horrific, graphically described fates. The reader is plunged ever deeper into the murky waters of the killer's world.

It's a long way from the early days of crime fiction. Between the World Wars, the 'Golden Age' of British crime fiction saw a succession of detectives, amateur or otherwise, unraveling clues to solve the case. When Hercules Poirot, Lord Peter Wimsey and Miss Marple were the models for investigators, the detective arrived on the scene after the crime had been committed and settled down to a dispassionate examination of clues, motives and opportunities. The detective was an outsider who was above suspicion - Hercules Poirot could never be the murderer. Detective fiction reflected the assumption that society was ordered and logical - the servants stayed below stairs, the local police kept a respectful distance, and the amateur detective confronted the murderer in front of the assembled characters in the drawing room. Murder was an interruption to the natural order of society, and solving the puzzle and unmasking the guilty party could restore the world to its previous certainties.

Since the Second World War, this 'cosy' type of story has given way to a proliferation of bloody sub-genres, and most of those share a common attitude: we cannot be returned to a safe, innocent world simply by piecing together the clues and identifying the murderer. In modern crime fiction, crime is disturbing and uncontrollable; anyone can be a victim and, correspondingly, any unassuming character can be hiding psychopathic tendencies. We are more interested in why than who; in how someone could behave that way than how they managed to carry it off.

While it makes little sense in the modern world to call in a private detective of the Hercules Poirot variety when someone is murdered, the idea of a smoothly operating police force where clever detectives use logic to unravel the mystery also seems to make little sense. The public perception in the real world is that crime is rising, despite figures showing that crime is actually falling. High-profile unsolved murders and perceived miscarriages of justice have undermined confidence in the police - and crime fiction reflects these changing attitudes.

Modern fictional detectives are just as likely to be a forensic pathologist, a profiler or a psychologist as they are a police officer.

Whatever their job, they usually battle police intractability alongside personal demons as they hunt down the killer. They have problems with alcohol, or are emotionally damaged by their experiences. They don't respond well to authority. They have to fight their superiors or their colleagues to remain involved in a case or to follow a line of inquiry. They bend the rules, follow hunches, disobey orders.

In short, they are mavericks. Where the earlier detective was an outsider to the world of the murder, brought in afterwards to solve the mystery, this modern detective is an outsider within the forces of law and order, sidelined and mistrusted by the ranks of the police. Characters such as Val McDermid's profiler Tony Hill have to think like a psychopath in order to catch a psychopath, and this isolates them from the police force and from society as a whole. They are damaged by the job they do - but in order to be effective they have to delve into the darkest parts of their own mind.

The psychological intensity of these investigators is matched by the experiences of the characters in crime thrillers. The central characters in novels by Nicci French or Minette Walters are often deeply involved in the story from the outset, as a potential victim of the killer, or as someone with intimate knowledge of previous victims or serious suspects. The characters are in mortal danger, or believe that they are, as all their certainties are shaken by the unfolding story, and we readers experience the fear and disorientation with them. The police may be of no use, absent or disbelieving, and the characters are left to rely on their own resources as they uncover dark truths about their own lives. The reader goes with them to the terrifying heart of the action, where the killer lurks and secrets are revealed.

When I was writing my first novel, Beholden, it was this journey to the heart of the story that drew me to writing crime fiction. I wanted to take the reader to a place that most of us never visit outside the imagination; where the normal rules of human behaviour no longer apply. In Beholden, the main narrator, Peter, catches the same bus to work every day as a woman, Sophie, who writes in her diary on the journey. On the day the story begins, Sophie gets off the bus at the railway station and disappears. She drops her diary on the bus - Peter picks it up, intending to return it to her, but when he realises she has disappeared he begins to read the diary. Gradually, he gets drawn into the circumstances that surround her disappearance, taking him away from his ordered, safe existence and into a world where things are not as they seem and fear and obsession lurk.

Peter's character fascinated me while I was writing the book. He appeared to be an ordinary, unremarkable man, and yet as the story began to unfold, he became more disturbing, a much darker figure isolated from those around him, operating at the margins of ordinary behaviour. Like the central characters in a crime thriller, he is increasingly in jeopardy - physical and psychological - as he delves further into Sophie's story; like the investigators in modern detective fiction, he becomes an outsider whose own obsessions lead him to uncover the crime at the heart of the story. In Beholden, I wanted to explore why and how an otherwise ordinary person could become entangled in a disturbed and threatening version of reality, where murder is possible and desire becomes dangerous. This, I think, is the question at the heart of modern crime fiction.

The scarred and damaged characters of modern crime fiction seem to be the opposite of the intelligent, dispassionate detectives who assembled the suspects in the drawing room of the country house. The modern killer is usually damaged, obsessive, psychopathic, driven by motives and desires that appall. In order to defeat the killer, the characters are forced to confront the darkest aspects of human behaviour, and the reader is there with them, enjoying the ride. A sense of menace pervades, and as an audience this menace has seized our collective imagination.

The Golden Age of detective fiction may have reinforced the idea that society is structured, ordered and safe, but the best of modern crime fiction explores the idea that we are not safe, that the world is dangerous, and that unpleasant things happen to innocent people. Characters are pushed to their limits and rarely come back unscathed; even if the killer is caught, the world does not return to innocence and safety. In real life we avoid situations that scare us, but by exploring fear within our imagination, we can control it and turn it into something else, something fascinating and compelling. Crime fiction opens up the dark side of the imagination, touching on our deepest fears and desires - and we keep turning those pages, breathless to find out what will happen next.

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