Nicky Charlish
posted 4 May 2007

The roadkill remains that we see lying in the gutter both fascinate and repel us. We don’t like what we see, but we keep looking anyway. Crime’s the same. We know it’s bad, but we enjoy looking at it – or, at least, reading about it from a safe distance. Why is this? One of the discussions organised for writers as part of the annual Spit-Lit Festival centred around Spitalfields in London’s East End and celebrating women’s writing, gave us some clues.

To start, the assembled crime-writers – Martina Cole, Natasha Cooper, Dreda Say Mitchell, Cathi Unsworth and Laura Wilson – were asked by moderator Marian Kilpatrick (writer and sometime performer) about what had led them into a life of crime-writing. Unsworth mentioned her interview, when a young rock journalist, with veteran crime novelist the late Derek Raymond – a one-time criminal associate of major London gangland figures – as the beginnning of her career. She especially emphasised Raymond’s compassion for the victim. Cooper applauded the crime novel as a vehicle for expressing anger, whilst Wilson mentioned that in crime novels – as opposed to literary ones – plots played a role of major importance. Mitchell (brought up in a local housing estate when the area was still riddled with racism and poverty rather than, as today, trendy shops and watering-holes) and Cole (who had a famously tough upbringing in Essex) mentioned crime writing as giving a picture of the perpetrators of crime brought up in a culture of low expectation and whose drift into crime was almost inevitable.

This led onto the question of what led people into crime, and what the writers wanted to depict about this in their work. Cole spoke of wanting to write about small criminals and people living at the bottom of society who broke under pressure because they’d been pushed too far, reminding us that people were capable of anything. She viewed the idea of a classless society as ‘crap’, pointing out that there would always be a black market, and also reminding us of the way some people seek a sense of ‘respect’ for being criminals because they can see no other way of obtaining it. This brought us onto a discussion of education, with Cole emphasising passionately the importance of our free education system as a way for people to improve their lot: ‘if you want it, take it’.

When it came to questions from the floor one question elicited from Wilson the interesting point that plotting was a messy business, a comment which was probably reassuring – and stimulating – for all those in the audience who might have considered writing, or attempted to write, a novel themselves. Cole mentioned the dangers of over-writing, emptying a text of its original, inspirational freshness, and said that writers should write for themselves – a writer should discard his or her work if they found it bored them: ‘write for you’ should be a writer’s watchword. Wilson made the interesting point that one of her future novels is to be set with flashbacks to the 1970s when the police could use more, shall we say, robust methods in questioning suspects. One sees her point – there’s little for the crime-writer to go on with a detective who is endlessly box-ticking or going on diversity courses!

Mitchell praised London as a setting for crime novels because of its energy. And London Noir – a recently-published collection of crime short stories edited by Unsworth, gives a collective snapshot of the metropolitan sexual, social and political underbelly that forms a welcome antidote to the happy, shiny, no-warts image of the capital that spin doctors will doubtless attempt to inflict on us in the run-up to the 2012 Olympics.

What emerged from the discussion was that crime-writing is a serious business. The old accusation that it was an elitist form of escapism – ‘snobbery with violence’ as one commentator has called it – was never really true: the great ‘golden age’ writers such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers had no qualms abut exposing skeletons in upper-class cupboards. By contrast, literary fiction seems to have lost the pre-eminence it used to have either in providing comment on what made individuals and society tick, or in providing pleasurably stylish reading. Perhaps fiction editors need to reconsider a world beyond the bounds of literary taste, or the constraints of dubious literary theories. Because today, crime seems to be leading the field when it comes not only to reader popularity, but to exposing the skull beneath society’s thin skin.