At the start of this year, with the spectre of recession hovering over my shoulder, I decided to give up buying books for a while. Not for long and certainly not forever, but just until I had worked my way through the large number of books sitting on my bookshelves. So far so good. I thought that I would just chip away at the stuff that I had bought and never read and when every single sentence had been completed, I would look at what remained.
It didn't work.
I find myself still surrounded by books which I have bought on-line and in second hand bookshops and borrowed from my father (who is generous to a fault with loaning out his books and never looks to get anything back in a hurry).
When I looked over my bookshelves back in those dark January evenings, I noticed that the majority of the books I owned were crime novels. So, I decided to read all of them before moving on to something else (although I may have acquired more books in the interim, thus negating any benefits of my self imposed discipline).
While I can't say that I enjoyed everything, there have been far more jewels than clunkers.
I write this on the back of an interview I read recently with a Booker prize winning author where the author seemed to me to treat crime writing (which he does under a pseudonym) in a condescending way as almost a lesser endeavor or as grunt work. I think that this is a tremendously short sighted view.
I am no way going to suggest that all crime writing is wonderful. There is terrible writing in the crime section of Waterstones, just as there is Literary fiction or in Classics or in the theatre or on television. Surely there are examples which can transcend any limitations of the genre either through the craft of the writing or by saying something interesting about the world. These should be cherished in whatever form they come.
The late Donald Westlake was a wonderful stylist with the written word. His novel "The Hunter" is wonderful example of economy in writing. No words are wasted. Everything is pushing towards a goal, just like the main character himself, the imcomparable Parker. Writing under his Richard Stark pseudonym, Westlake never lets us into Parker's head. We never know what he's thinking, just how reacts. His characters are defined by their actions, not their intentions.
Before reading the Ian Rankin novels, The Hanging Garden and Dead Souls, I had happened to watch a TV adaptation of the former one evening. I liked it. I thought that it was pretty dark, but ultimately an enjoyable waste of a couple of hours. When I cracked the spine on The Hanging Garden I found myself with a proposition 10 times bleaker than anything on television. Rebus is not a good man. He's barely a good policeman, but for all that he is an interesting character. In Rebus's world, there is precious little justice- the innocent are victimised, the guilty get away with their crimes and victories are few and rarely satisfying. There is however the possibility of redemption and the smallest sliver of hope.
You know the way that some people will always argue that a particular book is far better than the movie and that the film-maker ruined the book. I usually take the the approach of seeing the movie first and reading the book later. That way you can enjoy the movie on it's own merits and judge the book later. In the case of LA Confidential, I didn't actually get around to reading the book until 12 years later. However it is an amazing novel. James Ellroy's punchy, full-blooded prose style is unusual to say the least, but it works. It is based in that period in American History after the World War but before Kennedy came to power. It's a time capsule, with Ellroy's fictional characters mingling with the real people from that time. It's a bold thing to do and it's a terrific book. Vast chunks of the novel are missing from the movie, but it is an adaptation of the novel and not a re-enactment and all the better for that.
This is only the briefest sample of what I have been reading. I would also add to that the works of Raymond Chandler, Ross MacDonald and Carl Hiassen (who a friend of mine switched me on to).
Are crime novels worthy of our time? I know that I enjoy them and they sit very comfortably on my bookshelves with the novels of Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Hardy, as well as more comtemporary novelists like Michael Chabon (who wrote the part crime novel/part alternative history The Yiddish Policeman's Union) and Jonathan Lethem (who wrote the book Motherless Brooklyn- written from the perspective of a Tourettes syndrome sufferer). I don't know that I am qualified to say whether should be classed as literature. However I think that it is interesting to note that both Dickens and Shakespeare were noted as purveyors of low entertainments in their day.
No comments:
Post a Comment