Crime in the Bath
Originally published in the Financial Times Life and Arts
Are the chips down? Has push come to shove? Is life almost too difficult to bear? Then listen to Dr Mendelson. If you are struggling, forget the gym, or the internet. Don’t even think of going outside. It’s almost World Book Day and here is your prescription: scented hot water, an interesting snack and a diverting beheading.
Some people enjoy being frightened. They are, it goes without saying, weirdoes. I was an easily frightened child, watching Scooby Doo from behind the sofa, traumatised by ET’s wistful homesickness. After overhearing an MR James story, whose title I still cannot bring myself to type, sleepovers became a challenge: actually, Lisa, it’s not a duvet but a rotting bandaged succubus and when you go downstairs for Hobnobs it will drag me to its foetid mausoleum.
Even now, at the slightest on-screen hint of supernatural forces, a misplaced limb, the least ratcheting-up of tension, and I’m hiding my eyes, turning off the television, waiting in the cinema foyer until the scary violin music ends. And then, so that my pulse-rate can return to normal I run a deep bath, select a modest pile of crime novels and read about good old-fashioned evisceration.
Once I too thought of myself as exceedingly highbrow, taking Gulag Archipelago on holiday, eyeing up the latest smart new slender volume of essays about fluid sexuality. My life was editing, criticising, writing literary fiction; Dickens, Laxness and Turgenev were my pin-ups, Muriel Spark and Iris Murdoch my heroes and the worst thing my (former) agent ever said to me was ‘face it, you’ll never write War and Peace’. I was no more likely to read crime than the other categories publishers call genre fiction: sci-fi, horror, sexy-fireman romance.
Snobs are ignorant. It’s easy to dismiss what we don’t know and I knew nothing about crime or thrillers. The greatest exponents have so often been overlooked by prize judges, while shoddy examples become colossal bestsellers, that it’s easy to assume most of it simply isn’t very good.
Then life became more complicated. Too puny to watch television, too sad for Tolstoy; as I recovered on the sofa visitors came, and the wisest brought not flowers but crime. Lashings of it: Margery Allingham, Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh. I was in extremis, a captive audience: these crime-pushers knew what they were doing. I was, essentially, groomed. Let me do unto you as was done unto me.
Because nowadays I may pretend to be at the cutting edge of fiction, nodding vigorously at the mention of Sally Rooney but, when the chips are down, and down is where they are once more, all I want to read about is bullet casings, heists in carparks and tired police officers drinking bad coffee in a blizzard.
Baths are the perfect place for murder, self-contained, soundproof, easily sluiced, and crime fiction is the greatest analgesic. When life is particularly grisly, we don’t have time for idiots falling in love, or Britain’s glorious hedgerows. Bildungsromans are out of the question; keep your coming-of-age to yourself. And don’t even try to make us laugh. What we, the troubled, the strife-worn, require is very simple.
First, plot. Isn’t the point of fiction, even the brainiest, to teleport us into other lives? Ruminative journeys into selfhood are fine, if you must but, in order to forget one’s pain one needs peril, tension, undetectable poisons, not dust-motes swirling in a beam of sunlight. Plots for the plotless; whether you fancy psychological or technological thrillers, neo-espionage, police procedurals or stand-alone lunacy, only in the Crime and Thriller section will you find enough drama to help you to forget. You may not care about decommissioned machine guns but, once an engaging protagonist is either for the chop or doing the chopping, you will.
Second, bad things happening to good people. Even without the pleasures of schadenfreude, one sometimes needs other decent people to suffer, too. Detectives suffer, are hunted, lose digits; perfectly nice couples are lashed to radiators. I draw the line at child suffering but suburban torture? Nothing better.
Third: retribution. Crime rarely pays, because there’s always a mournful intelligent detective on its trail, for whom one inevitably develops confused yearnings: tragic Morse, limping Cormoran Strike, monosyllabic Simon Waterhouse; the rankly unsuccessful spies of Mick Herron; Håkan Nesser, Arnaldur Indri∂asson and Yrsa Sigurar∂óttir’s miserabilist snowbound investigators. Even the drugged, amnesiac, pink-sweatered star of Joy Fielding’s unjustly forgotten See Jane Run triumphs in the end.
Fourth: diversity, to a point. For every Chandler there is Dorothy Hughes; for each Mankell there is Karin Fossum. Swap butch American thrillers for the early morning breast-feeding creepiness of Celia Fremlin; go west with Tana French, the Irish god of family misfortune; north to Denise Mina’s Garnethill; into London’s racist past with William Shaw or into the dark woods with Will Dean’s deaf bisexual Tuva Moodyson.
Fifth, supply. Unlike most of the best uncrime writers, great crime and thriller writers are both numerous and sickeningly prolific. However long and bad your troubles, you will not run out of reading.
Sixth, community. Reading crime is like gardening; it makes a family out of strangers. One minute you’re on the bus worrying about the divorce of a drunk Swedish detective; the next you’re exchanging Icelandic serial killers with the retiree in the next seat.
And seventh, most importantly of all, intelligent subtle writing combined with psychological insight. PD James’s Innocent Blood, Ruth Rendell’s Portobello or The Keys to the Street are unparalleled in their humanity, their understanding of ordinary derangement, the madness beneath the skin. You say you only like literary fiction? This is literary. It’s literature, but better. Believe me; you need it. Start running your bath.