This is a real treat for me as I’ve been following Christina James’ blog for years and read the back stories and inspirations to her exceptional crime novels. If you haven’t heard or read any of Christina’s books, then read on. She has devout followers in the UK, her home, and a strong readership here in Australia, and her books are available on Amazon.
Today, Christina kindly shares the origins of Crime Stories, which is very interesting as I hadn’t realised how old the genre is. I had always thought Horror/Gothic and Sci Fi stories were the oldest reigning genres, but it seems Crime was around for just as long!
An act of crime or passion?
Received opinion states that The Woman in White is the first example of a modern British detective novel. Published in 1859, it tells the story of Laura Fairlie, a young woman who always wears white – and is the archetypal innocent female led like a (little white) lamb to the slaughter, totally manipulated by and in the thrall of her gold-digging fiancé, Sir Percival Glyde, and his shady pal, Count Fosco. (Modern taste finds the insipid if pure Laura less intriguing than her more robust half-sister, Marion Halcombe… but I mustn’t digress.) I am a greater fan of The Moonstone – Wilkie Collins’ second stab at the crime genre, serialised in Charles Dickens’ Household Words – than The Woman in White, largely, I suspect, because Collins, an intelligent and ironical writer, had by 1868 tired of taking the genre too seriously and decided to send it up a little. The discerning reader can hardly fail to smile when reading his descriptions of a posse of Indians lurking in the grounds of an English country house, trying to retrieve a rare gem ‘rescued’ by the British during the colonisation of India. At the same time, this topic gives the plot contemporary currency: the debate about looted national artefacts continues to rage hotly.
I could take issue with the claim that these two novels ushered in the crime fiction genre, because I have a theory that every novel, to a greater or lesser degree, is about a crime – not necessarily a statutory offence, but a crime nevertheless. Pre-Collins examples include: Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1748), whose eponymous heroine is abducted and raped and dies of shame (and about time, too, some readers may think, after eight volumes of it – but her death is a crime nevertheless); Humphry Clinker (1771), by Tobias Smollett, an – albeit hilarious – novel about a family of mutual confidence tricksters; and even Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811), in which the daughters of the Dashwood family are denied their father’s intended inheritance. Contemporary with Collins’ works are George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1861), a murder story, and Dickens’ Bleak House (1852-3), a masterpiece about all kinds of crime, both social and statutory. Post-Collins, are Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891- 2) and Jude the Obscure (1894-5), both murder stories.
I could go on, but, whether or not you accept that these books all belong to the crime genre, it is indisputable that they are not whodunnits. The Collins novels are mysteries; all the others I’ve mentioned make use of the omniscient writer convention, meaning that the reader understands most of what is going on right from the start. There is no puzzle to solve; no denouement when the villain is finally exposed.
Whodunnits were perfected during the so-called ‘Golden Age of Crime’, however that may be defined. It is most commonly taken to refer to crime fiction published between the two world wars, though sometimes novels written in the 1940s and 1950s are also included. Agatha Christie is usually referred to as ‘The Queen of Crime’; a phenomenally prolific writer, she wrote sixty-six novels and fifteen short story collections, many within this period. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) is still considered to be the most perfect crime novel ever written. Other writers belonging to the Golden Age are Marjorie Allingham, Ngaio Marsh and Dorothy L. Sayers. I have a particularly soft spot for the last of these, because many of her novels are set in my native Lincolnshire and Lord Peter Wimsey, her chief protagonist, has red hair, like my own detective (anti?-)hero, D.I. Yates.
It’s fascinating that all four main Golden Age crime writers were women and, although the books certainly attract male readers, their core readership is also female. I don’t want to get too bogged down in statistics, because I can feel your eyes already glazing over at the mention of the word, but it is interesting to speculate why this may be. I’d suggest that it is because the novels themselves are not raw and dripping with blood and because the authors don’t take themselves too seriously. It is primarily about the art of how to unfold the story within the crime convention – a convention which these authors perfected between them. Margery Allingham described this convention as a box with four sides – “a Killing, a Mystery, an Enquiry and a Conclusion with an element of satisfaction in it.” It was a convention which Christie, Marsh and Sayers wholeheartedly embraced.
Allingham’s description reveals more about the classic crime novel than how the plot should progress: the key lies in that final phrase: “an element of satisfaction”. To put it another way, when a serious crime – most often a murder – takes place in one of these novels, it upsets the order of things. Society is threatened. The surviving characters in the novel become vulnerable; some of them may also become victims. The denouement involves not only exposing the culprit, but also putting the conventional world order back together again: a murder has been committed; it is against the law and an outrage; the murderer is apprehended and punished; all is well. This is how the reader derives her or his satisfaction: s/he has had a glimpse of the abyss and has been thrilled and horrified, but can now sleep easy in her/his bed tonight and even feel a little bit smug.
After the Golden Age came a whole swathe of crime writers, right up to the present day, who bent this convention as far as they dared. Some even broke it. Distinguished among these was Patricia Highsmith, who wrote the mesmerising five-book series about Tom Ripley between 1955 and 1971. I don’t want to drop too much of a spoiler in case you have yet to read them, but the key thing about Ripley is that he is totally amoral. Time after time, he literally gets away with murder. How does Highsmith pull it off? I’d say, quite simply, through the superb quality of her writing.
Today, crime is the most popular fiction genre and includes many sub-genres: historical crime, cosy crime, the-woman-at-risk crime, noir, etc. And my own novels? Do they break new ground? I like to think so, though not in any outrageous way. They sit firmly within the psychological crime sub-genre – they are definitely not police procedurals or standard whodunnits. The two protagonists, Tim Yates and Juliet Armstrong, are both unconventional in their own way. The plots do not unfold in a linear fashion. Most have sub-plots and each is quite different from the others. The endings do not tie things up too neatly.
And that is all I probably can or should say as a guest writer on Luciana’s blog. I’m very grateful to you, Luciana, for inviting me to your blog and thus for giving me a generous opportunity to speak to your readers. I’m very happy to make the acquaintance of you all.
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