CRIME WRITER CHALLENGES MALE - DOMINATED GENRE.
Writer fights for right to inhabit male domain
LONDON — Some say Cathi Unsworth has written the crime novel of the decade.
The London Daily Telegraph called it “a gripping tale of adolescent angst and genuine evil” when it came out in Britain last year. The Catholic Herald applauded it for its “sad elegiac look” at youth and innocence. The Times was jolted by Unsworth’s “astonishing and disturbing insight into the minds of disaffected youth.”
That kind of praise both pleases and humbles the author of the darkly brilliant Weirdo, now published in Canada. But she knows she’s still fighting an uphill battle.
The fact remains that Cathi Unsworth, a major literary success story in her own country, still can’t afford to write full-time.
“I got really good reviews for this book,” she says. “It was really amazing. I think it really struck a chord because most everyone has been a teenager, so most everyone has felt alienated.”
Then she adds wistfully: “But I would love to be able to earn my living from writing and not need to have three day jobs as I do at the moment.”
Recently hailed as Britain’s “queen of noir” by one ecstatic critic, Unsworth identifies herself with a new era for the crime novel — one characterized by gritty realism and a readiness to explore the darker recesses of human behaviour.
Yet female writers like herself must fight for the right to inhabit this literary landscape.
“It can be very tough,” says Unsworth, who began her writing career at age 19 for Melody Maker and other pop publications, only to encounter roadblocks when she moved into realistic crime fiction.
Her first novel, The Not Knowing, dealing with the murder of a cult film director, was rejected by several publishers until it found a home with the innovative firm of Serpent’s Tail, winning widespread acclaim when finally published in 2005.
“My first editor basically said that if I had submitted it under a man’s name, I wouldn’t have had any problems whatsoever.
“But publishers don’t like women to write that sort of thing, and they especially don’t like it if you mix in pop culture.”
Pop culture, especially music, is important in evoking a powerful sense of time and place in her novels. In the case of Weirdo, which deals with dark doings in a bleak resort town in the early 1980s, its troubled teenage characters are listening to Soft Cell and Madonna, and the chapter headings contain tantalizing references to Sisters of Mercy and Crass.
“Music is my main cultural reference point,” she says.
But it’s a culture that can encompass some horrific happenings.
One earlier triumph, Bad Penny Blues, was inspired by a serial killer who stalked London in the early 1960s. In writing it, Unsworth felt she was living the story: She’s resided for years in Ladbrooke Grove, the neighbourhood where the murders occurred, but she cheerfully says it’s a lot more sedate now. Indeed, today she’s sipping coffee in one of her favourite local hangouts.
The Tabernacle has a fascinating history — 19th-century place of worship, a late 20th-century rehearsal space for Pink Floyd and The Stones, now a popular café and cultural centre.
The quietly elegant Unsworth is clearly in one of her comfort zones here. But she can still be a formidable advocate for her art.
There’s a velvet-voiced firmness in her dismissal of Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and other female writers from the so-called golden age of crime fiction. She deplores their “snobbery.”
When it comes to good female crime writers from the past, she looks overseas — to people like Canadian-born Margaret Millar or America’s Dorothy B. Hughes. Both remind her of noir master Jim Thompson, one of her literary heroes.
Up to now, her fiction has explored what she calls “the gulf of empathy” between men and women.
“That’s the reality of it for me. Why do men and women not get along? Why do men get to hate women so much?”
However, Weirdo takes her into more treacherous territory.
“This is more about women’s inhumanity to each other — which was finally something I felt brave enough to explore after I’d done a thorough examination of man’s inhumanity to women. Women’s relationships are much harder to work out than men’s, and I’m someone who’s been a woman for 45 years!”
Weirdo comes with a shifting timeline. There are the shocking events at a Norfolk seaside resort in the early 1980s — events saturated in the pervasive Goth culture of the day and climaxing with the conviction of 15-year-old Corinne Woodrow for the ritualistic murder of a classmate. And then there’s 2003, when private detective Sean Ward is hired to take a fresh look at what happened and concludes that Corrine — still incarcerated and dubbed “the wicked witch of the east” by the tabloids — didn’t act alone. So how did Weirdo come about? “In my day job, I work for these magazines (as a sub-editor) and there was this really horrible story about a bunch of 15-year-olds turning on one of their friends and torturing him to death. I was really haunted by that, and I thought I would quite like to explore this area.”
Then came the horrific 2007 case of Sophie Lancaster “who was kicked to death by a bunch of young boys because of what she looked like.
“Sophie Lancaster really got to me because I looked like her when I was 16, and it actually put boys off. They wouldn’t look at you in a sexual way if you dressed head to toe in black. So that was a shield and camouflage for me — but for her, it led to her death.”
In the age of social media, the possibility of such horrors happening has intensified, Unsworth says. But she doesn’t think the essential psychology of teenage behaviour has changed.
She looks at the frightening “dynamic” that existed 30 years ago between her three main characters and says it’s still there today.
“I think it’s pretty much how teenage girls work. One will be the queen and the others will be ladies in waiting. They’ll get the same pair of shoes and then they’ll have their hair cut the same. … This goes beyond friendship. But it’s where you are as a teenager. You’re desperate to find acceptance.”
Unsworth is working on a new crime thriller set during the London Blitz.