the left room

I wasn’t going to do this, but hey – I’m bored, you’re probably bored (why else would you be here?), we’re all bored. And it was a sad day, in terms of another blog post by another writer, which we’ll get to in a minute. So I’m going to do it after all. Hang onto your hats.

I started thinking about the Curzon Group again yesterday. To be clear, I thought about them a bit when they formed, and then I’ve thought about them sporadically in the time since. Most of the time when my idle mind turned to them, the thoughts it had were generally derisory but had no real malice. And that’s still the case. I don’t dislike these people, because I don’t know them. And I don’t dislike their books, because I haven’t read them. Individually, all things being equal, I wish them well.

Collectively, however, I do have a slight problem.

Before we start, I don’t have any problem at all with writers banding together. There are loads of groups, collectives and ‘squads’ out there, and I can see how it makes total sense. Most of us don’t get very much, if anything, in the way of a publicity budget – paradoxically, the bulk of that money tends to go to the sure-fire writers who’ll make the bestseller list regardless. It’s one of the odd facts about the publishing industry you learn very quickly. Similarly, you can buy new titles from well-known authors for around £8.99 in hardback, whereas – to sample an unknown like me – you’d need to shell out upwards of £18.99. Faced with that choice, I know how you’d spend your money, and – frankly – I don’t blame you. The explanation is simple: that well-known author will sell many copies anyway, so his or her book can be priced more cheaply (and therefore becomes more appealing to an impulse purchaser). As Kurt Vonnegut would say: so it goes. But in such a climate, it makes total sense for authors to promote themselves as heavily as they can, and if you group together you can do that more efficiently: an event with five mid-list authors is going to be far more appealing to organisers than five separate events with one author each. And so on. These days, even best-selling authors often do events together. I get it. It’s sensible. It’s fine.

And it also fits in with something you’ll often hear said at crime writing festivals. “Crime writers are like a gang”. I can’t remember who coined it. Mark Billingham? Ian Rankin? Whoever, it’s an appealing image. However much the noir crowd might dislike the generic, formulaic serial killer books, or the fainter-hearted might dislike the violent stuff, or people who actually write their own books might have a pop at the James Patterson brand, or the way everyone hates the much-maligned-but-rarely-actually-ever-seen cat mysteries – we’re all ultimately in it together. There’s a communal atmosphere at crime fiction festivals. We all get on. We even tolerate the people who don’t drink.

So why is the Curzon Group different? Why does it annoy me? Simply because, as it was originally formulated, it flies in the face of all that. Actually, I’ll go further. It pisses in the face of all that. Their website is here. Their blog is here. On the face of it, you’ll notice no obvious piss, but some history is required. The Group was started by the top three writers listed on their website, based on the mission statement you can still find on the site. It says this:

From Wilkie Collins to John Buchan, Eric Ambler to Hammond Innes, Ian Fleming to Alistair MacLean, and from Len Deighton to Frederick Forsyth, the British thriller is one of the richest traditions in world literature.

But in the last decade the British thriller has fallen into a sad decline. The market has been colonised by production line American thriller writers.

… likes of James Patterson, Dan Brown and John Grisham have taken over the market.

The Curzon Group is dedicated to reviving the traditions of Buchan, Fleming, MacLean and Forsyth, bringing the British thriller bursting back to life in the twenty-first century. Formed by Matt Lynn, the author of the military thriller ‘Death Force’: Martin Baker, the author of the financial thriller ‘Meltdown’: Alan Clements, the author of the political thriller ‘Rogue Nation, The Curzon Group is dedicated to Five Principles:

1.    That the first duty of any book is to entertain.
2.    That a book should reflect the world around it.
3.    That thrilling, popular fiction doesn’t follow formulas.
4.    That every story should be an adventure for both the writer and the reader.
5.    That stylish, witty, and insightful writing can be combined with edge-of-the seat excitement.

At its best, British thriller writing combined pace, humour, drama and insight to create stories that were of their moment yet timeless: that could capture a snapshot of history, yet could keep reader awake for half the night. Through competitions, promotions, publicity, talks, and, most of all, through our own writing, The Curzon Group is dedicated to restoring its finest traditions.

Do you see my problem? Well, maybe not. It’s not that they were promoting themselves – with the initial patronage of perjurer and all-round fucking scumbag Jeffrey Archer – but that they were doing so at the expense of other writers. They were going to ‘save’ the British thriller – as though it was ever in decline – from the invasion of allegedly crap US-style writers, which you, the great British public, were either stupid or brain-washed enough to buy. From the beginning, it was very transparently a marketing strategy that had nothing to do with quality – or even those five ‘principles’, which any writer worth his or her salt would endorse, but which, looking at some of the titles and descriptions, you might wonder whether the Curzon Group itself actually does. Because they don’t look that fucking different or exceptional to me.

Anyway. You’ll notice the website now lists eight members of the Curzon Group. And two more have joined: Zoe Sharp and Elizabeth Corley. I quietly weep. Yet the whole enterprise becomes ever more transparently ridiculous. Who else will join? Is there a limit? What would happen if Simon Kernick or Lee Child requested to join? They’re both best-selling British thriller writers, after all. Would they be welcomed in the Curzon Group’s quest to save British thriller-writing from … well, ultimately their own writing? It’s tedious to point this out again, but – just for clarity – I have nothing against the individual writers here – just the mission statement they’ve drawn themselves together under. Saving British thriller writing: by replacing what’s popular, and which apparently is shit, with – well, themselves.

Today, the crime writer Declan Burke wrote a moving piece on his blog, Crime Always Pays. Declan is the author of two great crime novels. But – rather than ever solely promoting himself – he’s used his blog to promote the best of Irish crime writing (and beyond: he also included an interview with me). Scroll through his site, and you’ll find the same thing, time after time: the promotion of other writers; discussion, disagreement; but never a real hint of overt negativity when someone else succeeds  - because it’s not about that, is it? Or it shouldn’t be anyway. Quite the opposite. And yet, as you’ll see when you read that piece, he literally can’t afford to write anymore, not even in his spare time.

So I guess my current thought is this: when people like Declan, along with other great writers like, say, Ray Banks and Allan Guthrie, are storming the bestseller charts, maybe then I’ll start worrying about the plight of certain self-promoting writers bleating about the state of the industry. Whose fucking books can be found on the shelves in Asda.

Okay?

Okay.

… and relax.

There are only a handful of popular debates you get within crime fiction – by which I mean subjects that keep coming up, and which you’ll usually find covered in at least one panel at every single crime festival, year after year, as well as getting occasionally covered by the media. The ‘crime versus literary fiction’ debate (“Why isn’t X on the Booker list? Whine, whine”) is an obvious example. Trumped – arguably – by only one other: ‘violence in crime fiction’. And, of course, its offspring: the ‘women write more violent fiction than men’ discussion, and the ‘lesbians write more violent fiction than straight women’ gambit, first deployed, to universal acclaim, by Ian Rankin here.

There was a new article, skimming this subject, in the Observer today (here). Crime novelist and reviewer Jessica Mann has announced (back in September, actually) that she won’t be reviewing certain crime titles anymore because:

… an increasing proportion of the crime fiction I am sent to review features male perpetrators and almost invariably female victims — series of them.  Each psychopath is more sadistic than the last and his victims’ sufferings are described in detail that becomes ever more explicit, as young women are imprisoned, bound, gagged, strung up or tied down, raped, sliced, burned, blinded, beaten, eaten, starved, suffocated,  stabbed, boiled or buried alive … So however many more outpourings of sadistic misogyny are crammed on to the bandwagon, no more of them will be reviewed by me.

The Observer begins by saying:

Crime fiction has become so violently and graphically anti-women that one of the country’s leading crime writers and critics is refusing to review new books.

Mann’s original article briefly touches on the sex issue, (“The trend cannot be attributed to an anti-feminist backlash because the most inventive fiction of this kind is written by women”), whereas the Observer piece delves a little deeper, accepting the premise that the most violent crime fiction is written by women and getting quotes from female authors to explain why that might be. Natasha Cooper says it might be “to establish their credibility and prove they are not girly” – a kind of ‘fitting in with the lads’ approach – while Val McDermid says “women grow up knowing that to be female is to be at risk of attack. We write about violence from the inside. Men, on the other hand, write about it from the outside”. (Which also harks back to this Julie Bindel piece, where similar explanations are presented. To the point I assumed the quotes had just been lifted, before I crossed myself, took a stuff drink and checked).

All of which ties in – at least slightly – to the recent article on feminist blog The F-Word about Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, which I blogged about here, and which, if nothing else, goes to show that some people will see “sadistic misogyny” everywhere if they look hard enough – even in a mild-mannered and much-celebrated Euro-crime novel. As the old maxim goes: if all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. Anyway.

I despise myself for quoting myself – no, I really do – but I mentioned in that blog entry some of the reasons I think women are often the victims in crime novels, with special reference to the Larsson -

1) It appeals to women: the primary audience for crime fiction. Not the victimisation, but the vanquishing of the predator, often by an empowered female figure. They get to explore their fears and have them confirmed and, ultimately, set right. The monster is gone. Beaten. Dead. Life returns to normal.

2) It appeals to guys, for a mixture of reasons, some of which are implicitly sexist but not misogynist. Women are vulnerable. We like saving women. Aside from that, we like strong women who save other women. We like imagining a strong, righteous female character who might kick a bad guys’ arse and still want to know us. It’s a kind of macho competition, but with zero effort. Measuring up, in some ways, to what we’ve absorbed as a feminist ideal of what a woman and man should be.

3) A female victim has better narrative value than a male one. Guys are expected to defend themselves. Women are seen as more fragile, vulnerable and valuable.

4) All of the above because, despite the advances, we still live in an at least vaguely patriarchal culture. And possibly we always will.

- and, while I’m sure there are a multitude of other reasons, I still think that more-or-less covers it. And it’s not “misogyny” in the true sense of the word. I don’t believe that vast swathes of male or female authors are crafting these particular stories, and graphic scenes in particular, because they hate women. I imagine Jessica Mann doesn’t think so either, although you’d be forgiven for thinking so after reading the links. At worst (and, I think, realistically) the traditional format is somewhat sexist - but I don’t believe that reflects the writers either, so much as the culture we live in, from which those authors necessarily draw. When Mann finishes her anecdote with “brutalised women sell books, dead men don’t. Nor do dead children or geriatrics”, it’s intended as damning, whereas I see it more as a comment on the way dramatic fiction works in our current social situation. The books might be sexist, but they’re effective because our underlying attitudes are too.

Moving away from the victims, what about the escalation of violence? Okay. First off – do you want to know who writes the most graphic violence? Drum roll… Horror writers. There, I said it. Sorry, and all, but the violence in ‘crime fiction’ debate is pointless. You think Mo Hayder is shocking? Go read Edward Lee’s The Bighead. Chelsea Cain too full on? Have a look at Poppy Z Brite’s Exquisite Corpse. Because trust me: you’re arguing about who is the most violent in a nation crammed with relative pacifists. And I don’t believe the horror genre is a detour here. Thomas Harris, with The Silence of the Lambs, showed how a horror-style monster could function effectively in a crime narrative. Yes, the desensitisation of the audience is a key factor across the board, but I also think it’s relevant that the horror genre ‘busted’ slightly over the last decade or so (aside from a few authors, obviously), and that many of the books that would previously have been published as horror are now shelved under crime, often following Harris’s template, if not his talent.

Is it a good thing? Ah, who cares. You read what you want to, don’t you, and you write what you want to.

There are, however, a few things I’d note.

1) Saying something like “it’s far more horrible when it’s left to the imagination” in this kind of argument is at best disingenuous – if that was really true, violence wouldn’t be a problem for you. In fact, you’d feel let down. It’d be the subtle books that would freak you out.

2) These aren’t real people. They’re characters. Even less than that, they’re words on a page, stuck together in a line to create an effect in your head. It reminds me of something else crime writers often say. “My books are filled with violence but the reader objected to the word ‘fuck’!!!!”. Well, yes, that’s because the word ‘fuck’ is there on the page and is offensive to some people in itself. Whereas the violence isn’t really happening. Nobody was harmed in the making of this crime novel.

3) There’s nothing clever about violence. Show the effect of the violence on the family and friends by all means, and on society as a whole. Develop that sense of loss and anguish. But if you find yourself saying “I included explicit violence because real-life violence is horrible, and I felt a duty to present it realistically, and…” then you’re (probably) making excuses and underestimating your audience. I know violence hurts; I don’t need a crime writer to tell me. Especially if your book is, say, about a kid who gets abused at a funfair then grows up to murder people based on the different rides while dressed as a clown. You’re not Dostoyevsky, okay? I think we can all see that.

4) Last but not least – and I repeat myself again – I know violence hurts. And while I appreciate women, en masse, experience a different kind of fear than I do, I also think: a) male violence, as a whole, is something we all suffer from at some point, along with the fear of it; and b) there’s something inherently demeaning and disempowering about the whole “women know what it’s like to be prey” business. When an interviewer asks “why do women write more violent fiction than men?” I don’t think the correct answer is an explanation that ignores the complexities and nuances of individual life in favour of sweeping, sex-based generalisations. The correct answer is “why the fuck are you asking me that?”. Because the question itself is implicitly sexist. And, by accepting the premise, the answers are too.

(Quick edit to add thanks to crimeficreader for the link to the original article, which Martin Edwards also talked about here)

You know what happened today? You’ll never guess. I went into Leeds, is what happened, to pre-order my eagerly-anticipated copy of Dan Brown’s next novel, The Lost Symbol. And out of all the bookshops I could have picked, I went into W H Smiths. Don’t ask me why. (It was because I also needed some sellotape, a jotter and a copy of Timecop for £1.99 … but anyway, that’s not the point). The thing is, I went in there. And I took my order form to the counter – a pre-order for this book I know isn’t going to be published for, like, fucking months - and then the woman at the counter said “Do you want this for free?”. And it was a new Dan Brown book called Simon Kernick: Deadline.

And so I said “Yeah, I will have that for free actually, now you mention it. Thank you very much.” And I was thinking to myself, well, maybe now I don’t have to pre-order The Lost Symbol at all, because I’ve got the new Dan Brown novel, but the woman said “Well, no, you do. You just get this book for free … it’s not by Dan Brown. But you might like it while you’re waiting for the actual new Dan Brown novel”. And so I said all right.

Imagine my disgust when I got home and found it wasn’t the new Dan Brown book for free at all, but a free Simon Kernick book! (And it wasn’t even fucking well called Simon Kernick: Deadline. It was just Deadline).

So anyway, I called up W H Smiths, and the phone was answered by Hitler, and he said “… Well, you will get the Dan Brown book. The one you actually … you know, pre-ordered, but this is just a free book by another author in the meantime”. And even though it was free, and I hadn’t lost anything at all, I said “Well, you’ve, like, totally misled me,” and then he said “Hang on – why are your pre-ordering books anyway when you obviously can’t read?”, and then I said …

Oh, I can’t do it anymore. Jesus wept, honestly.

… wails “broad-minded” and “strongly libertarian” twat Christopher Hart in a Daily Mail article about Lars Von Trier’s new film Antichrist.

They have given the film an 18 certificate. As we all know, this is meaningless nowadays in the age of the DVD because sooner or later, thanks to the gross irresponsibility of some parents, any film that is given general release will be seen by children … As soon as it’s released on DVD, Antichrist will harm children anyway, deeply and irrevocably.

So, in other words, we need to move towards a bland world containing no adult material whatsoever. Now normally, when someone urges a film to be banned, I get in a huff because it means someone who’s seen a film  thinks he or she is superior to everyone else and that, although they can watch it without turning into violent, slavering perverts, a certain other section of the community isn’t up to it. But in this case I can’t even do that, because he hasn’t fucking seen it!

You do not need to see Lars von Trier’s Antichrist (which is released later this week) to know how revolting it is.

I haven’t seen it myself, nor shall I.

Well, good for you. The film is violent, of course, but the Mail seems mostly concerned by the “many” “grotesque” sex scenes, for which it provides a handful of stills of Defoe and Gainsbourg having what looks suspiciously like normal sex to me. The horror! Hart goes on to hang the entire future of the world on this film:

It doesn’t shock or surprise me in the slightest that Europe now produces such pieces of sick, pretentious trash, fully confirming our jihadist enemies’ view of us as a society in the last stages of corruption and decay.

And then has a pop at Bruno for containing “pictures of babies in the bath with a group of gay men”. I haven’t seen Bruno, but I can imagine the scene might be there to play on exactly the kind of stupid, latent homophobia that Hart is displaying with that very comment. But I shouldn’t comment because I haven’t seen it.

Oh god. You’ll notice there isn’t any kind of coherent thesis to this post, by the way, and that’s because the article has pissed me off so much that I’m incapable of logical thought. “Isn’t that good enough reason to ban it?” asks Hart. Cover your ears, children. No – it’s a reason for banning you, you patronising, dickless fuck.

Aaaargh!!!!

EDIT TO ADD:

It’s kind of gratifying to see the top-rated comments on the article think it’s as stupid I do. But I particularly like this one:

To be honest, its not the fact that there is violence or sex or murder or intensely graphic horror (why wasnt there this outcry at the Saw series then? – which by the way I enjoyed thoroughly) that would put me off seeing this movie. Its Willem Dafoe…