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The Moral Compass of the Crime Novel

       Frances Fyfield

      Murder most foul! Read all about it! Distract yourself from daily boredom by reading of people whose lives are infinitely more dramatic and dangerous than your own.

      The Victorians loved a good murder and the love of the reportage of same marks the beginning of this popular fiction. Read all about it, the more brutal the better. Revel in repugnance of dreadful deeds and personal tragedies and let the crime writers make money out of it. Is this really a high calling, or a base occupation? Is it exploitative, rather like being a salaried voyeur?

      Once, when I was working in a legal office, a senior colleague came into my room and slammed one of my books down on the desk. ‘Filth!’ he roared. ‘Absolute filth!’ Fact is, some regard the fictionalization of murder as dirty work, while the majority of readers know better. Murder, that subject of universal fascination as being ranked the most abhorrent of crimes (I don’t always agree with that; think there could be worse) is the best subject you could ever get for a novel. The crime novel explores extreme emotions, the root causes and the effects of untimely death. It reflects its own society, and in the case of historical crime fiction, other societies. There is nothing wrong with murder as entertainment. P. D. James, writing about Dorothy L. Sayers, said of her, ‘She wrote to entertain and make money; neither is an ignoble aim.’

      You may as well say, don’t write about war, or anything involving pain. When P. D. James (my role model in all things) wrote and talked about the morality of writing about murder as a subject, she was never ambivalent. You wrote the truth was all; you wrote a story in which moral dilemmas were paramount, so that the morality of the thing was implicit in the text. In other words, she wrote about characters who made a choice either to kill or to engineer the death of another. With her characters, there had to be a choice. Maybe the decision to do it seemed irreversible at the time, because of the imperatives of revenge, survival, reputation, jealousy; a whole range of motives that lead to eradication by homicide as the only solution for the perpetrator. When really, with her characters, there was always another choice, i.e. to refrain and … take the consequences, however dire they might be. The worst consequence of all was to go ahead, because as P. D. James said in so many words, in the act of taking life, the thinking murderer is changed. He or she remains damned, haunted, guilty, unloved, on the run and lonely. Murder is akin to suicide.

      Unless the perpetrator happens to be psychopathic, with no emotions on the normal register, who likes pulling wings off things and killing for fun. His choices are limited: his capacity for regret no more than damage limitation and evasion. An all-too-convenient device in a crime novel, but not, to my mind, nearly as interesting as the examination of choice and regret.

      The crime novel always has a moral compass. It cannot be self-indulgent: the rule is, tell the story, and above all, add more than a dash of pity.

      P. D. James wrote about choice and consequences; about retribution, revenge and the enduring power of love. She said in her memoir, ‘The intention of any novelist must surely be to make that straight avenue to the human heart … every novelist writes what he or she needs to write, a subconscious compulsion to express and explain his unique view of reality.’

      P. D. James again: ‘The crime novelist needs to deal with the atavistic fear of death, to exorcize the terror of violence and to restore at least fictional peace and tranquillity after the disruptive terror of murder, and to affirm the sanctity of human life, and the possibility of justice, even if it is only the fallible justice of men.’

      Most writers do not make a conscious decision, moral or otherwise, to write about crime. The subject matter chooses them. If you are going to write, write about what fascinates you, a matter of taste and compulsion. P. D. James never considered writing any other kind of novel than the detective kind and this was not because her career in forensic science gave her a taste for death, but because she saw the detective/crime novel as the very best of all vehicles to write a good, strong novel about human passions. Of all writers, she is the most steeped in English Literature and the most rooted in Samuel Johnson, Austen, the Book of Common Prayer and more. And yet she wrote crime novels. She did not write romantic fiction, poetry, or novels of espionage, because murder chose her.

      Murder chose me. I did not choose to write about crime, although I chose to write. During my day job which featured homicide on paper, I moonlighted with short stories of a romantic nature. In which boy and girl take a walk on the cliff path of an evening, hand in hand, happily contemplating the pretty sunset of their future. Only I could not let them do it; the pen failed. They argue; he pushes her over, and she falls, she falls, she falls.

      I had sat through several trials of carefully prepared and honestly compiled evidence, only to conclude that facts alone don’t do it. At the end of it all a compilation of facts and witness statements will not tell you exactly what went on that fateful night. I wanted to bring order into chaos and fill in the gaps that evidence alone cannot fulfil. Only imagination and putting yourself in the shoes of another can do that. Also, I wanted to write about good people as well as bad. I think the crime novel has to acknowledge and celebrate goodness as well as badness, and always allow for the possibility of redemption. Because good people outnumber the bad by a long, long way. Only problem is, they have the inhibitions of decency, whereas evil has none. Says Raymond Chandler, ‘Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean.’

      There are no rules. The only moral compass is honesty, writing to the best of your ability.

      A straight avenue to the heart.

       Beginning

      Deciding to write a crime story is one thing. To make a start and then keep going is quite another. Tackling the blank page demands drive and determination. How to banish the self-doubts and maintain confidence? Or, as Peter James puts it, to keep the dream?