by Peter Corris
P is also for poison. Once popular as a murder method—the more exotic the better—poison is now little used.
P is also for police procedural, a subset of the genre more or less invented by Ed McBain in his 87th Precinct series (Cop Hater, 1956, and following). These books reproduced facsimiles of documents—reports, mug shots, fingerprints, letters etc.—to represent the nitty-gritty of the materials the cops had to work with. McBain had an engaging set of characters, particularly Steve Carella with his deaf-mute wife, Teddy, and Cotton Hawes, prey to certain weaknesses (though the writing could get sentimental). There was also a potent recurring villain, the Deaf Man.
The term now applies to any book featuring teamed, organised police work as exemplified by Stuart MacBride, Ruth Rendell, Reginald Hill and Barry Maitland. R.D. Wingfield’s novels about Detective Inspector Jack Frost (Frost at Christmas, 1984, and following) and Ian Rankin’s Rebus novels are not strictly police procedurals because the protagonists typically do not follow procedure.
P is also for politics. Politics and crime intersect in life as well as in fiction, as any newspaper will affirm. Politicians rarely make heroes or favoured characters but they make excellent perpetrators and victims because so many people dislike them and there are so many possible motives for their crimes or victimhood.
Generally speaking, conservative politicians make the best villains because, as the saying goes, ‘reality has a left-wing bias’.
P is also for primal scene. Psychiatrist Geraldine Pederson-Krag theorised that the addictive appeal of mystery fiction relates to the primal scene—the child’s witnessing of or curiosity about sex between the parents. She argued that the child’s observation of the clues—closed doors, nocturnal sounds, clothing disturbances etc., excite the child’s curiosity, which contains strong oedipal elements.
Mystery fiction reactivates this interest, leading to the compulsive reading of crime stories. Whether sound or not, this is an extremely useful theory for crime writers, who are frequently asked to account for the popularity of the genre. The usual answers go to a vicarious thrill from reading about crime and violence and its all-pervading presence in the world. Ho hum. A writer could advance the psychiatric theory and either stop the questioner in his or her tracks or open up an interesting discussion, according to whether the questioner is worth talking to.
P is also for probable cause. A version of this rule exists in many jurisdictions, with varying effects. In general it provides that a law officer must have reasonable grounds to arrest a person, search a person or a person’s property, or have a search or arrest warrant issued in respect of a crime committed or in prospect.
Non-observance of the rule and the difficulty of applying it figure prominently in American crime fiction (see C for courtroom drama).
P is also for profiler. Profilers are often to be found in police procedurals. As with identikit drawings, it is fairly unusual for the profiler’s work to crack the case. Profilers are very passive, mostly to be found at their desks clicking keys. They have, it seems to me, a fairly interesting but very cushy job. Like weather forecasters they are never called to account when they get it wildly wrong.
The compelling exception to this is brilliant, sexually dysfunctional psychologist Dr Tony Hill in the novels of Val McDermid (The Mermaids Singing, 1995, and following).
P is also for pseudonym. Some crime writers adopt pseudonyms to cope with and conceal their enormous outputs, as in the cases of John Creasey, Edgar Wallace and others (see O for output). But sometimes it is done for a variety of other reasons. Alan Yates, for example, wrote as Carter Brown simply because he thought the name sounded better. Gore Vidal produced several crime novels under the name Edgar Box to mark a separation between his popular and literary work. Kenneth Millar wrote under a couple of closely related names before settling on Ross Macdonald. The reason was to avoid confusion with the work of his wife, who was published as Margaret Millar.
The multiplicity of the pseudonyms of Creasey and Wallace are long forgotten, and who now knows that Georgette Heyer also wrote as Stella Martin, or that Martin Cruz Smith also wrote under the name Simon Quinn? Pseudonyms are hard to maintain—crime readers now are well aware that Jack Harvey is Ian Rankin, Barbara Vine is Ruth Rendell and Robert Galbraith is J.K. Rowling.
The writer to most successfully achieve long-term anonymity through the use of a pseudonym was Rodney William Whitaker, an American academic who published best-selling novels like The Eiger Sanction (1972) and The Loo Sanction (1973) as Trevanion. Whitaker also published academic works under his own name and books in other genres under different pseudonyms.
P is also for pulp. The name derives from the poor quality of the paper on which mass-market magazines were printed. Those on better paper, like the Saturday Evening Post or the New Yorker, were known as ‘slicks’ and cost a lot more. The leading American crime writers James Ellroy (until he ran off the rails), Michael Connelly, Harlan Coben, Jeffery Deaver, Dennis Lehane and Elmore Leonard (before he became a parody of himself ) owe much to the pulp writers of the 1930s and 40s.
I take Chandler’s remark that ‘Hammett gave murder back to the people who commit it’ to mean that the pulp writers democratised crime writing. Henceforth murders would be committed and investigated by ordinary people using ordinary language, or people only marginally out of the ordinary experiencing the pressures of everyday life.
The same is true of the Britishers like Rankin, MacBride and others. Crime investigation as the province of the aristocracy and gentry lingers on, though, in the Adam Dalgleish books of P.D. James (Cover Her Face, 1992, and following), and the Inspector Thomas Lynley (who is the Earl of Asherton) books of Elizabeth George (A Great Deliverance, 1988, and following).
Q is for question. Questions are the warp and woof of crime novels. ‘Where were you on the night of …?’ The subject had better have an answer. Private-eye novels, in particular, amount to the detective making house calls and asking questions. The questioner may get truthful answers, untruthful ones or a beating but the questioning will persist. The list of questions is almost infinite—who, why, when, where, how, how much, how often …?
R is for rape. Rape is sometimes, but not always, an accompaniment to serial killings. Semen analysis is high on the list of pathologists’ skills. The rape of a prostitute can sometimes be the subject of jokes by hard-bitten cops, but the rape of a child never. Homosexual rape occurs in prisons and the threat of it—‘You know what happens to smooth-looking guys like you in the joint?’—is often used as a threat to suspects, who mostly cooperate. Who wouldn’t?
R is also for research. Some crime writers carry out extensive research, some do very little. Elmore Leonard took to using professional researchers to take photographs of places and provide descriptions and impressions of them, their transport systems, weather, and so on.
Most writers, I suspect, as I do, research in the way a bird builds its nest—selecting precisely and only what is wanted. Best-selling authors need to produce quickly and regularly, and the last thing writers need is to get bogged down in research. Chandler kept a book about guns on a shelf above the typewriter and found what he wanted without needing to join a pistol-shooting club. Because crime is in the air, on the street and in the media, simply being alive and able to see and hear provides material.
Fiction writers have a great advantage over journalists and non-fiction writers. When an actual place that is otherwise just right for atmosphere and sociology is wrong in some crucial aspect, the solution is simple—use the real stuff, make up the rest and invent a name. This saves a lot of work looking for somewhere else. Ed McBain went further. His city was totally fictional though very detailed. It had the illusion of reality and left him free to model locations on real places and tweak them as he pleased.
R is also for robbery. This is a minor crime in the writer’s lexicon but it often acts as a precursor to the central business, which is murder.
R is also for rule. Many cri
me writers have suggested rules for the craft, such as Chandler’s celebrated ‘When in doubt have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand’ (see G for gun), which was surely tongue in cheek. Agatha Christie’s tip for the clue-puzzle writer, though never explicitly stated, was her practice of writing the last chapter first.
Elmore Leonard’s ten rules3 are justly celebrated (see W for weather) but writers should also take note of one golfing guru’s overriding tip—‘Ignore all tips.’
S is for security. In the best crime fiction no important characters are secure.
S is also for sentimentality. Literary critics define sentimental writing as that in which the emotion generated is excessive for what is being described or dramatised. It is the besetting sin of American crime writers since the 1950s such as Ed McBain, Robert B. Parker, James Lee Burke and others. The problem seems to be that, having been let off the leash to use violence and obscenity as much as they please, some writers feel a sense of guilt about this freedom and balance it with sentimentality about parents, children, lovers and country. The British and Australian counterbalance of cynicism and disillusion is more appropriate.
S is also for serial killer. Writers outdo each other in devising motivations and methods for serial killers. Probably the most bizarre example occurs in Lee Child’s novel Running Blind, in which several young women are found dead in their own bathtubs, which are filled with green paint. There is no apparent cause of death.
Jack Reacher is dragged in by the FBI to help the investigation. Only a spoilsport would give away the reasons for, and causes of, the deaths. It’s sufficient to say that Child has to be credited with inventing a completely original and very unpleasant mode of exit.
Following the example of the Whitechapel Killer, a twisted hatred of women is a powerful trigger. Such killings give the writer scope to explore subjects like DNA, semen traces, mutilation patterns and to speculate about the enormous spectrum of human sexuality.
A spate of serial killings gives an opportunity for a differently motivated single-focus killer to insert a joker into the pack to deflect attention and investigation from the serial killer.
S is also for series. Whether or not to write a series is not always the writer’s decision. After the success of a first book, publishers often desire a sequel and the writer refuses at his or her peril. Once launched, a series is hard to stop for a variety of reasons. When a potent character has been created, it’s tempting to simply put him or her through the paces again and again. In a sense the books write themselves.
Publisher pressure can be relentless because it’s easier to market a book in a series than a one-off—it takes less thought, which appeals mightily to publicists. The dangers to the writer come if he or she wishes to branch out, to write one-offs, start a new series or, even worse, write in another genre. Type-casting, stamping the writer as ‘the creator of ’, may cripple the ambition.
John D. MacDonald, creator of the colour-coded Travis McGee series (The Deep Blue Good-by, 1964, to The Lonely Silver Rain, 1985, and many others in between) found a way around this. When his publishers gave him grief over a non-McGee novel, he said he’d written one called A Black Border for McGee and would kill the best-selling character off unless the publisher gave the non-McGee effort the full treatment. It was in his safe at home, he said.
MacDonald died and no such manuscript was found. He was bluffing. Travis would have approved.
S is also for sex. A distinction has to be made between sexual language and sexual action. James Ellroy’s books, for example, are awash with four-letter words but even the usually mild sex scenes are few.
Spenser and Susan Silverman fuck a lot but the bedroom door is firmly closed. In fact very few crime writers do R-rated scenes. Most attempt a minimalist approach:
‘Want to?’ she said.
‘Yes,’ I said.
So we did.
That kind of thing.
S is also for SOCO. Scene of crime officers (SOCOs), or crime scene investigators (CSIs), are important minor, atmosphere-providing characters in crime novels. They wear white protective suits and booties, latex gloves and shower caps. They work within an area taped off by the first cops to arrive at the scene and spend a lot of time bent double looking for footprints and cigarette butts. They drop what they find into evidence bags, which, contrary to many writers’ beliefs, are made of paper. Plastic has the capacity to pollute the evidence but it may be used when it is raining, which it usually is in crime scenes in Ireland, Scotland and the north of England.
S is also for Southern Africa. There are a large number of South African crime writers. The only one I’m familiar with is James McClure, whose series about detectives Kramer and Zondi (The Steam Pig, 1971, and following) enjoyed international success in the 1970s.
Rhodesian-born Scots writer Alexander McCall Smith has enjoyed enormous success with a series of novels set in Botswana beginning with The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency (1998, and following). My attempt to read the first book failed; I found it impossibly twee and paternalistic.
S is also for sport. Dick Francis’s racing novels (see H for horses) are the most prominent example of the sports mystery—if horse racing can be considered a sport. Other sports are less suitable; there have been good and less good crime novels centred on golf and tennis, with perhaps the most notable being Martina Navratilova’s Total Zone (1994) and others. The books received a lukewarm reception.
By far the most appropriate sport to provide a context for a crime novel is boxing. Budd Schulberg’s The Harder They Fall (1947) qualifies as a crime novel, with its plot involving deception, exploitation and death. Boxing features in several of Robert B. Parker’s Spenser novels and is a dominant force in the dark and violent world of one of James Ellroy’s best books, The Black Dahlia (1987).
Without actually featuring in the story, boxing is often used as a point of reference in crime fiction to suggest manly character, from Sherlock Holmes in ‘The Sign of the Four’, to Ross Macdonald, where Lew Archer claims to be the nephew of a man who went fifteen rounds to no decision with ‘Gunboat’ Smith, the ‘Great White Hope’ when African-American Jack Johnson held the world heavyweight title (Find a Victim, 1954).
S is also for squeamishness. As noted (see D for death) some investigators exhibit squeamishness at crime scenes and autopsies. Most writers do not, the exception being P.D. James who takes care not to have a witness to a murder be depicted as someone who cannot cope with the event—a child or a parent, for example. James is thus sparing herself, the characters and the reader. She is in this regard more the nurse than the queen of crime.
S is also for story. Crime fiction is mercifully free of the kind of writing that does without story in favour of … who knows what?
The very best of the pulp writers, Jim Thompson, provided a definition that embraces everything from his noir classic, The Killer Inside Me (1952), to Romeo and Juliet. ‘There is only one story,’ Thompson wrote: ‘Things are not what they seem.’
S is also for suicide, which is still a common fate for suspects who turn out to be perpetrators.
S is also for survival. Of stylistic necessity, first-person series characters must survive. The way to handle this is to make the threats to them credible enough for the reader to, in a sense, suspend this knowledge and feel the weight of the threat. Third-person stories about series characters are not hampered in this way and a writer may kill the character off, as Nicolas Freeling did Piet Van der Valk in A Long Silence (1972) and Colin Dexter did Endeavour Morse in The Remorseful Day (1999).
A writer who has killed off or retired a series character might revive him in a retrospective story and get away with it once or twice. Nicholas Freeling, unsuccessfully, tried a version of this with two books about Van der Valk’s wife (see N for nostalgia). Colin Dexter said he wouldn’t do it.
Another method of sustaining a series after a character’s retirement is to bring him back to work on cold cases, as Michael Connelly did
with Harry Bosch in The Narrows (2004) and as Ian Rankin did with Rebus in Standing in Another Man’s Grave (2012).
S is also for suspect. Some suspects are merely red herrings but they swim for quite some time before being caught and discarded. Too few suspects and the story can be too thin; too many and it gets cluttered. The red herring suspect is the chief legacy of the old clue-puzzle mystery and the trick is to develop the character or situation just sufficiently, and no more, so that the matter can remain open for a good part of the book.
Variations on the theme include the protagonist (even the first-person narrator) being an apparently credible suspect for a considerable time. Suspects may complicate matters by making confessions—sometimes to deflect attention from someone to be protected or through mental aberration. The disturbed false confessor is common in sexual cases, with offenders eager to proclaim their guilt. They are pretty easily spotted and become part of the sad backdrop in the tableau of modern urban life, as a serious critic might say.
T is for terrorist. Terrorists crop up in crime fiction from time to time—increasingly, these days—but never very usefully. Their inevitable failure and destruction limit their serviceability.
Black Sunday (1975), Thomas Harris’s pre-Hannibal Lecter novel, presented a fresh approach to the terrorist story. A deranged Vietnam vet who flies a television blimp over US sporting events plans to explode a bomb containing a vast number of steel darts over a Super Bowl game. He doesn’t.
After I read it I waited impatiently for his next, Red Dragon, and the rest is history. The film had Bruce Dern, as one critic said, ‘at his unhinged best’ as the nutter. Dern was every bit as good as Anthony Hopkins but, in the nature of things, there was no sequel.
