the left room

Finally added the ‘Press This’ button to my toolbar, which, in theory, allows me to grab stuff from the web that interests me and generate a quick blog post from it. If nothing else, it might mean that the site updates more frequently, and anyone visiting gets at least some insight into what’s on my mind.

Anyway, I figured I’d try it out with this video I found. Ceux qu’on aime is the French title for Cry For Help.

I have no real idea what she’s saying, but it’s nice that she’s saying anything at all.

YouTube – La chronique de Carole S. – Ceux qu’on aime.

No, not the new book – although that is on its way – but my son Zack, who was born on Sunday 21 February, weighing a whopping 8 pounds 9. Currently, he looks sort of like this:

Although, you know, more turbulent and full of cry. Anyway, after a hardcore hospital experience, both he and mum are doing well. And I’m very proud/happy/fucking knackered (delete as applicable).

So there’s been two weeks, more or less, off writing Book Six (The Blue Flower? The Black Flower? Black Flowers? Not sure of my working title yet), but that’s going to start up again soon. And I’m figuring the sleep deprivation can only add an extra pinch of spice to proceedings.

There are also a few other things on the horizon, not least of which is a trip to Germany at the end of April to promote the German version of Cry for Help. That’ll be a week long affair, and I’m looking forward to it, albeit with the understandable reluctance to leave Zack and Lynn. I’ll post more details of that soon.

Aside from that, I know I owe a more interesting blog post to the handful of people still attending here. The room hasn’t been left, honestly; if you listen carefully at the wall, you’ll hear the sound of a baby crying next door, and an exhausted writer smashing his fuzzy head into furniture to keep himself awake.

I’m sorry, in the meantime, for any emails or comments – here or elsewhere – that have gone unanswered, or congratulations that appear to have gone unacknowledged. They’ve all been noted and very, very much appreciated.

Over the past couple of months, I’ve been thinking a bit about my writing process. There’s no point, but I have. I get asked about it every now and then. Sometimes by email; other times in interviews. And when I did the interviews in Amsterdam at the end of last year, the question came up a few times: “what’s your writing day like?”

I wish I had a writing day.

I wish I had any process at all, in fact, as it would make things a lot easier (or maybe not; maybe the safety net of a tried-and-trusted schedule is the last thing you need; and these maybes are examples of my overall problem). Whatever, I’m working on my sixth book now, and the fact remains that each one has been written in a different way. I know the first one – The Third Person – was the easiest, but only because I wasn’t published, there was no deadline and I was on my own time. I guess the same problems and difficulties were there, but I can’t remember exactly. I came up with the ending (which would eventually be changed totally after acceptance) while sitting on the back-step of a house that’s now four homes behind me and part of a life so distant it’s uncanny to imagine it was ever mine at all.

Possibly because I’ve never settled on a process, I tend to think the whole idea is bullshit: talismanic and self-deceptive, like the academic I used to know, a Leeds fan, who parked his car in the same spot by Elland Road before every match. Or at least so individual that there’s no point asking. But people are often interested, and I remain no different. I like knowing what other writers do. I keep thinking there might be something I’m missing.

Anyway, there are two things I think I understand. The first, I’ve thought for a while; the second, I’ve just figured out, and although I know it applies to my writing, maybe it applies to everyone else’s too. Neither are all that helpful, but here goes.

The first is about that whole planning/writing business. You often see this discussion: are you a ‘planner’ or are you ‘driving with headlights through the fog’? At one extreme, you have a guy like Jeffery Deaver, who plans his books out meticulously, down to the paragraph level. At the other, you have someone like … I don’t know – someone who just sets off writing and sees where it takes them. My theory is: it doesn’t matter which you do or whether, like most of us, you’re somewhere in between, you’ll end up doing the same proportions of both. Writing involves getting the paragraphs in the correct order; the most extreme planner still spends time doing this. The planner spends time getting the plot right in advance; the extreme writer has to address this further down the … lines (cough). Basically, the same questions are being asked and answered, and each takes the time it takes. I think books emerge for every individual author with – basically – the same amount of each activity, however you tackle it.

(Occasionally, you encounter a writer who claims to plan nothing, sit down and write and not change a word. These people, in my opinion, are vicious liars: one step up from the kid in school who assured me the three utilities problem could be solved and I should try harder. However: even after I knew it was impossible, I still kept trying, and I solved it in a dream once, so the joke’s on him).

The second thing I’ve realised is, like I said, personal to me. And I hate it, but it’s true. I haven’t worked out the exact percentages, because that would be silly, but it goes roughly like this. In the days spent writing a book, 50% will be ‘okay’ days. Not good, not bad. Just plodding along. 10% will be ‘good’ days: that fabled kind where everying feels natural, the words flow and the book comes alive. And 40% will be utterly shit days, where I sit at the computer and nothing happens. There’ll probably be a poor word count, but, regardless, whatever is there will be dreadful. I’ll hate the book. I’ll wonder what I’m doing with my life. I’ll speculate on how, when this one is published, I’ll finally be found out.

Those percentages are rough – in every sense – but more-or-less correct for me. Every book I can remember, the writing can be divided up like that. That’s my actual writing process, no matter how I divvy up the planning, writing and editing. And the unfortunate thing is that I have to go through that 40% of shit days one by one. If I don’t have it today, it’ll still be there tomorrow. Which is why the only piece of writing advice I’ve ever felt confident enough to give is “get your arse on the chair and fucking write something”.

The lack of a universal process makes sense to me. The way I see it, a finished novel – the text in a book – is an instruction manual for understanding a story. The story itself might – shock! horror! – even be an instruction manual for understanding something else: themes; ideas; emotions; a sense of wonder. But whatever, you’ve got so many levels to work out, it makes sense that it takes time and feels difficult. It needs to be figured out. That’s encouraging; it would be weird and unrewarding for everyone if it was any other way. An easy solution – a schedule; a typical writing day; a formula; a process – makes a nonsense of the whole enterprise. Reduces it to data-entry.

Nietzsche said “one must still have chaos inside oneself to give birth to a dancing star”. I like that. And I guess that’s my definition of a writing process – at the keyboard and away from it.

I don’t really agree with ‘best of’ lists, but I’m happy to flag up a few books I read this year that I think are worthy of mention. However, if I was going to pick a best novel, it would be a two horse race. On the one hand, Memoirs of a Master Forger by William Heaney. (Actually by Graham Joyce, but the artifice of the pseudonym reflects the levels of self-deception and forgery in the characters and the plot). It’s a fantastically written book about a decent, troubled man who makes a kind of living from forging books – while also drinking wine, caring for the people around him, seeing demons, and gradually struggling towards a kind of redemption. More than anything else, while never losing the genuine heart of its characters or becoming frivolous, it’s fun. An enjoyable, original, moving story. Original should certainly be applied to the other book I’d ‘single’ out: China Mieville’s stunning novel The City & The City. There’s a temptation to reveal the wonderful conceit at the heart of this – what? – urban-fantasy-crime-mystery-thriller, but I won’t. It’s about two cities, with a detective investigating a cross-border murder. It’s brilliantly-realised, enthralling, intriguing … and like nothing else out there. You’ve probably read it by now, but if you haven’t, then you really should and you won’t regret it.

Having said that, aside from a few disasters, there’s not been much I’ve read that hasn’t impressed me on some level. So – what else?

First off, It’s always nice to be able to say good things about people you know or have met. With No More Heroes, Ray Banks takes his Cal Innes series up another notch. Talking about how clever and knowing the series is would detract from the fact they’re just great books, taking the familiar notion of the PI and doing really credible and surprising real-world things with it. Claire Seeber’s Lullaby doesn’t look, on paper, like the kind of book I’d like, but I enjoyed it a lot: the story of a woman whose baby is abducted, it’s well-written, psychologically smart and, in places, dark as pitch. A preview copy of Sean Cregan’s The Levels provided my last great read of the year. It has a hint of Mieville’s novel about it, actually, and it’s also reminiscent of Jack O’Connell’s best stuff. A tough, action-packed, chemical-stained urban thriller, it creates a believably fantastical mythology in a destitute US estate and lets its characters loose within it. Look out for it in January – it’s ace. And if you haven’t read Sarah Pinborough’s wonderful The Language of Dying, then – again – you should. You’re missing out. It’s a wonderfully observed, perfectly controlled piece of fiction about a woman tending to her dying father, and is one of my favourite reads of the year.

If you’re after horror, then Kaaron Warren’s Slights delivers. More of a character piece, in some ways, than an easy, straight-forward narrative – but fuck me, what a character that is. The book is disturbing, occasionally funny (although I’m warped), and never less than totally absorbing. I’d say the same about Toby Barlow’s Sharp Teeth, a prose poem about warring werewolf packs that has a sweet and rewarding love story at its heart. Both read like genuine one-offs: I hope they aren’t, and I’m sure they’re not. Gillian Flynn’s Dark Places proves she certainly wasn’t: while not quite – for me – as good as Sharp Objects, it shows beyond doubt how excellent and capable a writer she is. It’s another book that’s massively strong on character and voice. As, in more of a subdued way, is Amy MacKinnon’s Tethered, about an undertaker who is drawn to the case of a murdered girl. Using flowers as a metaphor, the novel is gorgeously-realised and entirely earns its moving finale.

Two of my favourite writers had new books out: Mo Hayder with Skin, Michael Marshall with Bad Things. Neither were the best books either writer has written or will write, but both are head and shoulders above most other crime novels out there, and are well worth your time. In fact, both stand out as best-selling writers resolutely following their own paths and producing the stories they want. And I like that a lot. I also – finally – read David Morrell’s First Blood. Couldn’t put it down. Most other action-based thrillers I’ve read seem like pale imitations now. Such a good book.

Finally, a special mention for Sum by David Eagleman. It’s a slim book, containing forty conceptualisations of the afterlife. From an afterlife lived backwards to an afterlife divided into the activities of your life (however many years spent sleeping, etc), it succeeds because it makes you reflect on your life right now. Like most of these books, in fact. I’ve probably forgotten a few, but fuck it. To the writers involved – seriously – thank you, one and all.

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)

Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is the last book I finished reading, so I was planning on talking about a few of the others first. However. Life is what happens while we’re making other plans. In this case ‘life’ is an article about the book on the esteemed and popular UK Feminist website The F-Word, which asks: Feminist or Misogynist?

Go read. Although there are spoilers.

Back?

Okay.

Well, the first thing I’d note is the false dichotomy that’s set up in the article’s title and then followed through in the article itself. Feminism covers a lot of ground, after all. At its heart, all sensible people agree with feminism (if you don’t, you can fuck off now). But then, like any political system that’s had a chance to shake the rain out of its coat and settle in, there are factions. For example, there are strands of feminism that say, in order to be a feminist, women should choose lesbian relationships. Etc. So asking “Feminist or Misogynist?” is a little like saying “England or Scotland?” – and then arguing that, since there aren’t Cornish pasties on every street corner, we must be in Scotland.

I think there are a few good points in Melanie Newman’s piece: points that, as a crime writer, I’ve pondered myself. As a whole, though, I can’t help feeling it lacks a coherent argument and ultimately descends into absurdity. In this blog post I’ll attempt to explain why, and maybe explore some related issues along the way. But it’s a big topic, I’m only human and things may get missed.

1) “But I have difficulty squaring Larsson’s proclaimed distress at misogyny with his explicit descriptions of sexual violence, his breast-obsessed heroine and babe-magnet hero.”

My reactions first. It shames me to admit it, but a part of me wanted to dislike the book, simply because of the level of hype surrounding it. The general consensus, among the negative, seemed to be “It’s good, but it could do with some trimming. Well … a lot of trimming”. Basically, the book was 300 pages masquerading as 500. I didn’t feel that myself. I loved every bit of it. I can see the objections, but I was hooked from the first page, and it’s one of the few longer books I’ve been able to sink into recently. On a plot level, I thought it was very organic and natural. And, with the exception of one or two plot developments, I found the progression of the story remarkably natural and unforced. The occasional bursts of violence were convincingly unpleasant. Despite the description given by Melanie Newman, this isn’t a “birds stuffed in vaginas” novel; the murders she refers to in graphic detail actually occur outside the timeline of the narrative. In fact, as many words are probably devoted to them in her own article as in the book itself.

There are a small number of violent scenes. (Two, really: specifically, the anal rape of Salander (handled briefly) and the ‘final’, prolonged scene in the basement). They are shocking and uncompromising – but hardly unprecedented within the crime genre – and, as Newman notes, the latter is a reversal of expectations: violence by a man against a man, who is saved by a woman. In fact, the tension is undermined somewhat as we have such confidence in Salander (the female character) that her entrance into the basement – just her arrival – is presented as a catharsis in itself. The confrontation that follows is a foregone conclusion. She is, yes, an embodiment of vengeance: it’s all over. She tears the traditional crime finale a new arse without us worrying for a second about her safety. We know the woman will save the man.

Where I do agree with Newman, to an extent, is on the characterisation. Much has been made of the originality of Lisbeth Salander as a character but – for me – a skinny, mid-twenties, sociopathic, super-smart, tattooed, pierced computer hacker isn’t all that original. I can’t say where I’ve read the character before, but it seems familiar. Maybe I know her. But, sure, there is an element of wish-fulfilment there. Salander is the type of woman most men hope would fancy us. And Blomqvist, the mid-forties male journalist main character, is a bit too super-attractive and … well … nice to be true.

Having said that, what do you want? What do you want as a feminist crime novel? Newman complains:

At the start of the second book, we discover that Salander has had breast implants put in and that “six months later she could not walk past a mirror without stopping and feeling glad that she had improved the quality of her life”. Why a young woman who has been repeatedly violated by men would want to draw more attention to her breasts is not explained. Neither is the basis on which her quality of life is improved.

Well, at the end of the first book it’s not obvious that her violation is because of men (she has clearly had an abusive childhood, but not necessarily at the hands of a father figure as opposed to a mother). It’s also apparent that she has a tattoo done to remind herself of the harm done to her by a man. At this point, it should be clear that she’s not a triumphant goddess figure, but a character who’s happy to wear her experiences and weaknesses on her skin. Or, to put it another way, she augments her body to record one abuse of the patriarchy. Why not another? Just because the latter is subliminal? I’m sure we all know women – strong women – who feel compelled to conform to some ideal or other, and I don’t think that Salander’s desire to do so makes her any less real, justifiable or acceptable. A strong female character feels societal sexual pressure too? Call the cops.

My opinion of the novel overall? Politically, it’s about as liberal as you can find. Larsson’s anger at big business and men, and his compassion for the victims, specifically the female victims, is palpable. If you had to define crime thrillers by their politics, most feminists would want this book on their shelves. It’s not perfect on that level, maybe. But Jesus – what is?

2) “Male novelists have for decades been selling graphic capture-rape-torture-kill novels by chucking in ‘strong’ female characters for balance”.

True. I hate that. And there are books – cough-Shadow-Man-cough – where I’ve found it particularly unpleasant and – hey, I’m entitled to my opinion – inexcusable. But let’s be clear about this. I’m not familiar enough with James Patterson to say, but … Dean Koontz? Newman claims Koontz’s work is “fundamentally violently misogynistic”. Well … you know. (Inspects fingernails). He’s written a lot of books, Melanie. Like, a lot. And “violently misogynistic” is a fairly strong phrase to throw at a guy who mainly, if we’re being scrupulously honest, writes about labradors doing amazing stuff.

Regardless, the book of Koontz’s that Newman mentions is 23 years old. That could be evidence that the phenomenon is long-term. On the other hand, what’s Koontz writing these days? Plus, there are lots of female writers – Mo Hayder, Karin Slaughter, Chelsea Cain, Kathy Reichs, Patricia Cornwell – who write about violence against women in the here and now, and yet they’re conspicuous by their absence in the article. No female writers are referred to at all – not even referred to as mindless collaborators, never mind outright misogynists. Instead, it’s the male writers. The authors of ‘rape novels’.

And no mention at all, strangely, of their predominantly female audience.

3) “Face it, Stieg Larsson, James Patterson, Dean Koontz: only misogynists make money from rape.”

Fuck off. What an intellectually empty and nasty little … hang on. Sorry. Here we get to the nub of the issue, where Newman leaps the shark and heads off into the far blue yonder. Never mind the fact that these male authors could be substituted for female writers of equal acclaim, sales and alleged misogyny, what we have here is a massive confusion between the fictional and the real. It feels strangely childish to have to point this out, but apparently it’s necessary. People in books aren’t real. A rape in a novel, however vividly described, is not real. It never happened. It is words on a page designed to create an image in the mind. Nobody was harmed as a result of the novel being produced.

There are two objections – that I can see – to including violent acts in fiction.

a) They may incite people to real-life violence.

They don’t. There is no evidence that they do. End of story.

b) They’re distasteful, exploitative, and so on.

Yeah, well … what are you going to say – that writers can’t discuss difficult issues? Only women can write about rape or male violence, even though men are the most likely victims, statistically, of male violence? I get that women can be afraid walking down a dark street at night in a way that men can’t; but the same holds true in reverse. Both sexes have their own types of fear. And then what? Only Black people can write about Black issues? Only mechanics about mechanics?

So why does so much crime fiction involve women being the victims?

My guess x4.

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.

The one reason I’m willing to discount – unless further evidence is presented – is that men just like to write and read rape and torture fantasies about women. Because that’s just offensive bullshit, surely? And if that was all there was to it – obviously – then women wouldn’t write those books and women wouldn’t read them. And nobody on a famous feminist website would need to write a stupid, brainless article on the subject.

I thought I’d post this – just for shits and giggles, as they say. Long-time readers of this blog will know that, despite being a hard-line skeptic, I’m interested in supernatural stuff, and hang around various forums reading, and usually laughing, at various reports. UFOs, aliens, Bigfoot, monsters. I don’t actively believe in any of it. But still. The whole subject fascinates me. And so I figured I might as well – occasionally – post stuff along those lines that I find interesting. And the Gable film is one of them.

It has a habit of disappearing from Youtbe, but you can currently watch the full version here.

Now, this has been online for about two years. The story behind it is an elaborate one, linked (at least slightly) to the ‘legend’ of the Michigan Dogman. The video was allegedly – a la Blair Witch – found in a garage sale. It’s fairly easy to pick the story out of the video, at least after the initial dicking around, and to note that the last few frames, where the mouth appears on camera, are a little too opportune, and therefore most likely fake. Not necessarily, but most likely.

However.

The video of the alleged ‘creature’ is quite compelling. (One of the few videos you’ll find, in fact, where it is). Theories persist as to whether it might be a bear, dog, big cat, gorilla or whatever, and it’s hard to say because it’s blurry and brief. But it ‘attacks’ without warning, and, from the way it moves, it doesn’t look much like a man in a costume or CGI. If it’s faked – say for a movie viral – it’s pretty damn good. My guess, if it is faked, would be a fucking big dog with a bear hide strapped to it.

Anyway, that’s been around for a bit. Then, a couple of months back, following TV coverage, someone posted this on Youtube:

I was at my little brother’s house Friday June 10th and my sister-in-law was watching Fox News. (She’s madly in lust with that Sean Hannity guy). A short segment came on about “the Beast of Bray Road”. Hannity then played a clip from a film named…”The Gable Film”.

Sirens went off in my head.

Our only uncle was a film nut in college, back in the seventies. He was always making home movies and beer commercials. He was even hired, (not for pay), to help the Michigan Department of Natural Resources investigate and document a bear attack, just north of Bellaire. (Our Grandmother worked in the Antrim County Courthouse,…. she had a hand in getting him the gig). The victim’s name was Aaron GABLE.

…..GABLE!!!

My mother tells us that after filming the attack scene, our Uncle John was so distraught that he packed up his stuff and moved to Florida, two weeks later!. Mom says his behavior was becoming very psychotic, he couldn’t sleep at night and he kept going on about how “bears have FIVE toes,….. dogs have four”!. Just a week after he left, a DNR officer hand-delivered the film that Uncle John made to my Mother’s house. It’s been in a box in the basement ever since.

Now, I seem to recall that these films usually lasted about five minutes or so, but the film we have is only about a minute long… and the end of it was obviously torn off, not cut clean. I wonder just how much is missing? We almost threw this film away just a couple of years ago, but I wound up buying a vintage projector on eBay, just to see what was on this film. (Boy, was I suprised). NOW,….. I find that there’s this “Gable” film out there?

I wonder if these two films are related. I’ll see if I can get it in better resolution, other than with Wifey’s camera-phone. (It might be expensive,….. but I’m sure it’ll be worth it).

One thing’s for certain, whatever it was on that clip that they played on Fox News,….. it sure didn’t look like no Bear.

Along with this clip, which – regardless of truth – is possibly a tad disturbing/distressing, so I’m not posting a preview image. It’s a body-find, matching one of the figures from the first video. Upper torso. No lower torso. No defensive wounds or blood-soaked ground, but – for those who have seen such images in the past – reasonably convincing. The car is supposed to be registered to an Aaron Gable, which means the victim in the film might be the woman from film one, rather than Aaron Gable himself.

It’s a curious case. And you can google it for more details. There’s nothing really supernatural about it, but the final seconds of the first film are intriguing. What the fuck is that?  I hope it’s a neat upcoming film, rather than what it all appears to be.

The whole John Banville at Harrogate thing just fills me with a furious sense of face-palming apathy.

For the handful of you who aren’t aware, Banville is a Booker-prize winning author of literary fiction, and he also writes crime fiction under the pseudonym of Benjamin Black. As an interviewee, he is never backwards about coming forwards – for which we should all be grateful – and he stirred up a mild amount of controversy, apparently, at Harrogate this year, for claiming he managed a couple of thousand words a day as Black, but only a hundred or so while writing as Banville. I think there have been various other interviews where he’s got people’s backs up for insinuating his crime fiction is just a bit of fun for him, whereas the Banville novels are more serious and head-scratching affairs.

My view on this pointless, brain-murdering shit-storm coincides – almost word for word – with Declan’s here. I’ve never really understood the crime writer’s need for acceptance by the elite. Who cares? Speaking generally, I’m very happy with my life, and if I walk into a party where people look down on me for being a bit common, I tend to think “oh, just fuck off”. I don’t start going “oh, but look at my lapels and cufflinks…”. No. I have enough friends, thank you. I am, despite how it may well often read, not that needy a person, and I feel the same way on behalf of my books.

Ruth Dudley Edwards is quite right to correct a misinterpretation, of course, but beyond that I don’t get it. Of course Banville spends more time on his Banville sentences than his Black ones. I mean, have you fucking read them? Of course he does. Very few, if any, crime writers exhibit that intensity of prose. The ones that get held up tend to be for intelligent simplicity rather than constant – constant – complexity, and I’d go so far to say that if you sent in Banville-level prose as a crime novel you wouldn’t get published. Banville as Banville writes fiction that is, effectively, poetry in prose form. Every sentence requires concentration; in general, and certainly on the bestseller lists, the exact opposite is celebrated within the crime genre. The debate is whether you see that as more worthwhile than an emphasis on plot and (perhaps) character. Now, I personally don’t, although there are certainly nuances within various theories of aesthetics you could discuss ad fucking nauseum, around and around, until everyone wants to kill themselves. But even if you’re of a mind to bother fighting the ‘genre vs literary’ battle, I’d respectfully suggest that prose is not the front to challenge your imagined enemy on. You are going to lose. In fact, you are going to get trounced. Because you are fighting by rules you shouldn’t be accepting at all, and which are loaded against you by default.

Or, to put it another way, how much time does Banville-as-Black spend working on his plot? Would the literary community be up in arms if he said he spent more? And why – while we’re on the subject – do you care anyway? If he said “crime fiction is harder to write than literary fiction”, why would anyone care? He is, after all, just a man you don’t know called John Banville. Or Benjamin Black. Or whatever.

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.