Why we’d all KILL for a great crime novel

AS a crime writer, I’m delighted, but not surprised, that crime fiction has been declared the most popular of all fictional genres.

I’ve been an addict since the late Fifties and though I’m pretty broad in my tastes, it is almost always crime books — many by authors I know — that I’ll load up with for a holiday.

I’m thrilled, rather than envious, to see my friends doing so well. Because we crime writers — I’ve written a dozen crime novels myself — get so fed up with being patronised by literary types, it’s hard not to feel triumphalist at the news that last year we represented 36 per cent of book sales and for the first time ever we’ve have beaten general and literary fiction (35 per cent).

and we’ve also seen off other runners-up such as romance and sagas (10 per cent) and science fiction and fantasy (six per cent).

Since the likes of Edgar allen Poe, Wilkie Collins and arthur Conan Doyle gripped the public imagination in the 19th century, people have speculated — often disapprovingly — on why stories of mystery and wrongdoing are so popular.

In the early Thirties, as what became known as the Golden age between the wars was in full swing, the great Dorothy L. Sayers was a giant of the genre.

‘Death in particular,’ she noted, ‘seems to provide the minds of the anglo-Saxon race with a greater fund of innocent amusement than any other single subject.’

But at the time there were good reasons for it. Millions of people had died in a terrible war that had caused intense suffering to many British families, and there was an acute consciousness of the unfairness of life along with a hunger for order, stability and justice.

There were dark forces of communism and fascism threatening from the east, and people looked back nostalgically to an often mythical pre-war existence of sunshine, peace and security.

The Golden age books tended to offer a serene and familiar social setting and then rudely disrupt it with a gun, a knife or a blunt instrument.

Yet you knew that at the end of all the bloody events, suspicions and shocks, the mystery would be solved, the murderer would be unmasked and duly despatched to jail or an early grave. Justice would prevail and order and harmony would be restored.

PErHaPS it is the uncertainty of the world we face today that has once again kindled our love of crime fiction. When faced with news of the terror attacks and bombs of ISIS, the horrors of the war in Syria, the bellicose behaviour of world leaders such as Presidents Putin and Trump — and on a more parochial scale the violent stabbings and shootings on our streets — perhaps our hunger for justice has led us again to these novels.

Of course, many of the books today are more violent, and very often darker, than in the Golden age. The so-called Scandi-noir genre — in which Scandinavian authors such as Stieg Larsson (The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo) and Henning Mankell (Wallander) heighten the tension by combining the region’s bleak landscapes, lack of sunlight, dour, small-town policemen and hard liquor with grisly homicides — are very much of the modern age.

But it seems to me the premise remains the same. Crime novels exploit our longing for stability. They do so by inflicting on us the shock and anarchy of the crime followed by the slow — but unpredictable — restoration of calm as the perpetrator is finally brought to justice.

So bewitched are we in this process that we involuntarily try to help solve the puzzles laid by the best writers as to who the murderer is and how they can be caught.

One of the joys for me as I raided my mother’s well-thumbed library was to find how ruthless and egalitarian the writers were in their choice of villains. I was brought up in the republic of Ireland, at the time an intensely conservative and religious country where authority was revered and rarely questioned.

But in the books into which I escaped the murderer was more likely to be a judge, a vicar or a professor than the local thug — and since the rule of law was sacrosanct, high social status did not save anyone from justice.

In fact, the more respectable the characters were, the more suspect they were. What was more, for I was a feminist before the term became synonymous with manhating and victimhood, I loved the strong female characters one found in so much crime fiction and not just in those written by women.

Of the first four presidents of the Detection Club — the pre-eminent club of crime writers — it is no coincidence that two (Dorothy L. Sayers and agatha Christie) were women.

I read all the great agatha’s detective novels until in my late teens I decided I was an intellectual and wrote her off as no more than a puzzler.

I sneered at her stereotyping and pedestrian style. But she had the last laugh when as an adult I got bad flu, someone brought me a clutch of Christies and I fell back in love with a genius who outwitted and humbled me in almost every book.

Having forgotten almost all the plots, I was condemned once again to being unable to sleep until I had found out whodunit. The excellent P.D. James, whom I greatly

admired, remained rather sniffy about her, but good though James’s books are, my guess is that Agatha will still be read in 100 years though James may not be.

Agatha Christie was middle class, but in the ensuing decades crime writers emerged from an ever-wider range of backgrounds and began to address every social problem I had heard of and many I hadn’t.

I’ll never forget the effect on me of Ruth Rendell’s 1977 A Judgement In Stone, a whydunit which began: ‘Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she could not read or write.’

Rendell’s extraordinarily skilful writing has that Scandinavian sparseness, those whiffs of cold air we see from the Nordic noir writers. Perhaps it is because her mother is a Swede, or simply that she was ahead of her time. Whatever the case, almost none of her 80-plus books is a dud.

The fact is that female crime writers were, and are, as ruthless, adventurous and successful as men. Patricia Highsmith, a predatory lesbian, invented the spine-chilling psychopath Tom Ripley, and is rightly revered.

What’s more, she has an army of female readers. The irony is that, despite so much of crime fiction’s unbearable tension, despite descriptions so gruesome they make your flesh creep, more women turn to it than men.

Last summer, a study by the University of Wolverhampton found that more than twice as many women read crime novels as men. Is it because women are the stronger sex? Or because they have a stronger yearning for justice and order? Possibly both.

Whatever, Patricia Highsmith’s books proved too frightening for me, for I inhabit what my late friend, the great crime writer Reginald Hill, christened the Jane Austen end of the crime writing genre.

No one ever suffered a nightmare from reading my books, the last eight of which star a tough woman who says whatever she likes and thumbs her nose at the respectable and the politically correct. My books are mostly satires on the British establishment, an expression of my urge to make fun of authority, pretension and narrow-mindedness.

I don’t do the gore, the heart-stopping suspense and often terrible sexual violence towards women that is so popular at the moment — although I have many female crime-writing friends who do, and whom I love, but whose books I’m afraid to read.

Yet this is the great strength of a literary genre that is, to my mind, way ahead of literary fiction in taking up contemporary issues and scrutinising them mercilessly — it is so impressively wide-ranging.

And as the reading public turn to crime books for reassurance, in these scary and uncertain times, that the baddies won’t win, that surely is a cause for celebration.

n RUTH Dudley Edwards is the author of Killing The Emperors (Allison & Busby, £7.99)