Kitabı oku: «Howdunit», sayfa 3

Why Do It?
James Runcie

Since Aristotle there have been numerous attempts to provide a rulebook for crime writing. Most famously, Ronald Knox wrote his famous ‘Ten Commandments’, which recommended no twins, no undiscovered poisons, no supernatural agencies and no Chinamen. Dorothy L. Sayers wrote a historical survey in her introduction to The Omnibus of Crime published in 1928, outlining potential murders and possible plots: ‘Here is a brief selection of handy short cuts to the grave. Poisoned tooth stoppings; shaving brushes inoculated with dread diseases; poisoned boiled eggs (a bright thought); poison gas; a cat with poisoned claws; poisoned mattresses; knives dropped through the ceiling; stabbing with a sharp icicle’ (that melts – I recently noted melting ice in the drama series Death in Paradise on BBC One); ‘electrocution by telephone; biting by plague-rats and typhoid carrying lice; boiling lead in the ears … air-bubbles injected into the arteries; explosion of a gigantic “Prince Rupert’s drop” (that’s molten glass dropped into cold water – a swimming pool might be ideal); frightening to death; hanging head downwards; freezing to atoms in liquid air; hypodermic injections shot from air-guns; exposure, while insensible, to extreme cold; guns concealed in cameras; a thermometer which explodes a bomb when the temperature of the room reaches a certain height; and so forth …’

Then, crucially, she adds, ‘There certainly does seem a possibility that the detective story will some time come to an end, simply because the public will have learnt all the tricks. But it has probably many years to go yet, and in the meantime a new and less rigid formula will probably have developed, linking it more closely to the novel of manners and separating it more widely from the novel of adventure.’

Here, I think, she understands that what matters is not so much plot, but character. Crime fiction cannot work if we do not care about the people involved. The story has to be more than a puzzle. It can’t just be a conjuring trick with people’s lives, no matter how fictional they all are.

It’s my belief that we use crime writing to test the limits of our capacity for good and evil and to make sense of the world – and, as the writer of The Grantchester Mysteries, I think we turn to crime to contemplate our own mortality.

Here’s a thought …

One hundred years ago, in the United Kingdom, people used to recite the Book of Common Prayer at least twice a day, at morning and night.

Good Lord, deliver us from lightning and tempest, from plague, pestilence and famine; from battle and murder, and from sudden death.

Now, in a less Christian country, we think about death through crime writing. This has become the secular space in which we address our deepest fears and anxieties and, at the same time, we look for the consolation, justice and closure that is so often found wanting in real life.

As a result, I think crime writing has to be more than entertainment. It needs moral energy.

Think of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Raskolnikov’s killing of both the old landlady, Alyona, and then her sister, Lizaveta, provokes the questions: How much is it true that a murder can be justified? Can it ever be explained or excused by the argument that the murderer claims he was possessed by the devil? Can some individuals transcend cultural norms or contemporary ethics? Is it true that ‘without God everything is permitted’? Should confession and regret lead to a lighter sentence? Can a criminal ever truly repent of his crimes? Can a Christian?

For Christians the answer is ‘Yes’, but this forgiveness is dependent on the sincerity of penitence – and who, other than God, is to judge that?

The issues can prove so complex and disturbing that many writers bring the light of humour in to alleviate this moral darkness – even Dostoevsky does it. Think of the cynical giggling detective Porfiry Petrovich or Sonya’s dreadful old drunk father Marmeladov. They are the kind of figures you might find in Dickens; and it could be argued that Oliver Twist is a crime novel. Oliver is brought up ‘in care’ and is frequently kidnapped and kept in a place against his will. Fagin runs a criminal gang. Nancy is in an abusive relationship. Bill Sikes is a murderer. Monks dies in prison. Fagin is sent to the gallows. It’s a crime novel, a satire and a grim fairy tale all in one; but as with so much great fiction, the writer tests the characters by exposing them to crime, malpractice and misadventure.

Crime writing, if it is to be any good, is necessarily ethical. My own books are moral fables. You could even argue that they are sermons dressed up as fiction and social history. My hero, Canon Sidney Chambers, does not simply investigate. He considers the moral implications of crime and its effect on its victims. While keen to establish who dunnit, Sidney looks at the aftermath as much as the felony itself, regarding all those involved with compassion, bemusement and, sometimes, even comic detachment. His task is fiercely Christian. The whydunit. Hate the sin but love the sinner. There are traditional crime motifs in the stories, plot turns, twists, and heroes who turn out to be villains. There are several love interests. And while there are also jokes in these mysteries, there is also a teasing and tolerant humanity.

By the end of the series, I hope to have written a loving portrayal of a man who moves between the world of the spirit and the all-too-mortal world of the flesh, bicycling from Grantchester to Cambridge and back, attempting to love the unloveable, forgive the sinner, and lead a decent, good life.

I believe that detective fiction has to have this moral purpose and that, however lightly it is done, it should also enable people to think more deeply about the world and what matters within it. No crime is ever cosy. All good writing has to count. As Dorothy L. Sayers observed, ‘The only Christian work is good work, well done.’

We write, and we read, not just to be entertained, but in order to work out who we are and how we might live a better and more meaningful existence on this frail earth. And then, in confronting death imaginatively and unflinchingly, we learn to contemplate what we believe in, what we value and what we cherish.

It should make us all the more glad to be alive.

Frances Fyfield’s background is in the law rather than the church, and she has created two series characters, Helen West and Sarah Fortune, who are lawyers. Like her friend the late P. D. James, she is interested in detective fiction’s moral dimension, and the calibre of her books prompted Ian Rankin to say, ‘Her knowledge of the workings of the human mind – or more correctly the soul – is second to none.’

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?

Motivation
Peter James

One writer asks the other, ‘What are you up to these days?’

He replies, ‘I’m writing a novel.’

The first one says, ‘Neither am I.’

The easiest thing in the world for a writer to do is to not write. Most novelists I’ve ever talked to could procrastinate for England. I’m just as much a culprit – I could captain the British Olympic Procrastination Team. Our motto would be Anything but writing!

Social media has been a wonderful boon for all of us procrastinators. We can avoid getting those first words down by checking email, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, whatever. When we’ve exhausted that, it’s time to let the dogs out again. Then make a cup of coffee. Next we remember something we need to order on Amazon. Then with a flash of guilt, we realize we forgot to call an old friend back two days ago. We know she’ll chat for ages, but get it out the way, and afterwards we’ll have a clear morning for writing. Or what’s left of the morning. Ooops, what’s that van pulling up outside? Aha, the plumber! Have to go down and let him in, make him a cuppa, find some biscuits …

But at the end of the day there is no escaping that if we want to make a living as authors, then we need to write. A mantra that always spurs me on is You cannot edit a blank page. It’s a sign that all of us should have on our desks. But that business of getting started in the morning is always hard. Graham Greene, one of my favourite authors, had a neat solution to this issue: he would always stop writing in the middle of a sentence. That way, his first task the next the morning was to finish the sentence – and it got him straight back into the flow.

It may not sound it, but I do actually love writing, although it took me years of perseverance before I could make a living from it, and during all that time I had to do a day job. My first three novels were never published (luckily, in retrospect!) My next three, not very good spy thrillers, were published but sold a negligible amount of copies – around 1,800 in hardback and 3,000 in paperback. But I kept going because I believed in myself. I changed direction, wrote two more novels, one a kidnap story and one a political assassination which were never published. Then, with my ninth novel Possession, a supernatural thriller, I struck lucky. Every major British publisher bid for the book and it was auctioned around the world, going into twenty-three languages. Finally, twenty-one years after I had sat down to type the first line of my first novel, I was able to actually make a living as an author.

Possession hit number two on the bestseller lists. But it was to be another fourteen novels and twenty years before I finally achieved my dream of hitting that coveted Sunday Times number one spot.

I’m seldom happier than when I’m hammering away at my keyboard and the story is flowing. I especially love the satisfaction of coming up with an inventive description for something, or a character I’m pleased with, or a plot twist that makes me punch the air with excitement. But it’s not been easy and writing never is. The hours are long and often lonely, and when I’ve finished I’m a bag of nerves waiting for my agent and my editor’s reactions – and then, much later, the reactions of my readers. Those nervous peeps at Amazon to see how the star ratings are going. Followed by an anxious wait for the first chart news … Plus the knowledge that I’m on a treadmill to turn out a new book every year – and my one golden rule is that with each new novel I want to raise the bar.

So, what is my motivation? Simple. First and foremost, it is the way I know best how to make a living. And that I want to do my best to try to please my loyal readers by making each book I write better than the last. I could list a dozen other factors, such as getting even with teachers at school who never thought I would amount to anything. Getting my revenge on the bullies who tormented me at school. A sense that I have something to say. A mission to try to understand human nature and why people do the things that they do. It is all of these and more. But at the end of the day my wife and I need food on our table and our animals need food in their bowls.

The late, odious film director Michael Winner was once asked by a precious actor, whom he had instructed to walk down a street, what exactly his motivation was in walking down the street. Displaying all his normal charm, Winner bellowed at him, ‘You’re walking down that street because I’m fucking paying you to walk down that street!’

Oscar Wilde, another writer whose work I love and admire, lamented on his deathbed, ‘I’ve lived beyond my means so I suppose I will have to die beyond my means.’ His drive to produce his great work was produced largely from his need to make money. He used his gruelling American lecture tours to help boost his sales there, and once famously said, ‘Of course, if one had the money to go to America, one would not go.’

Helping his nation to win the Second World War did little to help Sir Winston Churchill’s bank account. Having financially stretched himself buying his beloved country estate, Chartwell, much later he began writing the first of his six-volume opus, The Second World War, because he needed the money.

In 1974, scammed out of everything he had by a Ponzi scheme and left deeply in debt, Jeffery Archer penned Not A Penny More, Not A Penny Less in a last-ditch attempt to stave off bankruptcy. It worked, launching a career that would make him one of the richest novelists on the planet.

It is pretty simple. If you are a professional author, money is going to be pretty high up your motivation list. Over the years I’ve met a number of people who told me they have writers’ block. But I cannot remember a single author who writes for a living ever telling me that. What other profession complains of block – other than perhaps plumbers? You don’t hear of solicitors complaining they have solicitors’ block, or taxi drivers saying they have cab drivers’ block, or accountants having accountants’ block.

I can’t imagine any professional author I know saying to his or her family, ‘Sorry everyone, I have writer’s block, I’m afraid there’s no food today.’

Sure, writing isn’t easy – if it was, everyone would be doing it. As it is, a great number of people do, mistakenly, think it’s a doddle. Margaret Atwood tells of the time she was at a cocktail party and had a what-do-you-do-what-do-you-do conversation with a rather pompous man. In response to her question he said, ‘I’m a brain surgeon. What do you do?’

When she replied that she was an author, he immediately responded, somewhat arrogantly, ‘Actually I’m planning to write a novel when I retire.’

‘How very interesting,’ Atwood retorted. ‘Because when I retire, I’m planning to be a brain surgeon.’

I often wonder, did he ever write that novel? And if he did, was it published? I’m doubtful of both, for one simple reason: lack of motivation. As a successful brain surgeon he was probably wealthy, living a nice lifestyle. In his mid-sixties, was he seriously going to lock himself away in his study for months and months of hard grind, trying to forge a whole new career, then go on the road and engage in social media? And then spend the next ten years writing more books to try to build his name? I doubt it, because I just don’t think he would have had that crucial motivation.

Thirty-five novels on, I still get a huge buzz out of the page proofs arriving. Out of seeing my publisher’s first cover ideas. It was a dream when I first began writing that one day I would see a copy of my book on an airport bookshelf. Now that dream comes true pretty much every time I enter an airport bookstore. I know I’ve been lucky, but I also I know how easy it is for an author’s sales to slide if they don’t keep up their standards. I guess my biggest motivation of all today is to keep that dream.

One question facing all writers is: how do I make a living? For anyone who isn’t independently wealthy, the challenge is to strike a balance between time spent writing, often with little or no immediate financial reward, and working to put bread on the table.

Many people dream of becoming full-time writers. Research undertaken in recent years, most notably by the Society of Authors, is discouraging: authors’ earnings seem, in broad general terms, to be low and in steady decline. And even if giving up the day job were feasible, would it be such a good idea?

Not according to Celia Fremlin, a Detection Club member who coped with demanding domestic commitments while pursuing a successful career as a writer. On her family website is a letter she sent in 1984, in which she said, ‘The first bit of advice I’d give to anyone aspiring to be a writer is to start by deciding what else he/she is going to be? It always saddens me to hear a talented young person saying: “The only thing I want to do is to write” – because this is virtually a guarantee that this is just the one thing they won’t do.

‘Writing (I’m talking here about fiction, of course – text-books and such are another matter) is, and must be, an off-shoot, an out-growth, of a full and interesting life, lived among all sorts of tiresome and uncongenial people, and beset by all the problems, difficulties, pressures and pre-occupations that real living involves. The best writing is, and always has been, squeezed out somehow from the turmoil of a demanding and absorbing life – happy or miserable, in sickness or in health, loved or hated – it doesn’t matter, so long as you are right there, in the thick of it.

‘Peace and quiet is fatal. Tuck yourself away in a country cottage, with a private income and freedom from all interruptions and distractions – and you’ve had it! Sorry, but you have!’

So how to get started? Janet Laurence is the author of, in addition to a variety of novels with contemporary and historical backgrounds, Writing Crime Fiction; in an introduction to the book, Val McDermid said it ‘will teach you to flex your writing muscles … and offers guidance on developing your own voice so that you can tell the stories that clamour in your heart and your head.’ Here are Janet’s thoughts about how to get started.