City as character

Reading Stephen Knight’s book, ‘Crime Fiction, 1800-2000; Detection, Death, Diversity.’

Talking about the origins, it’s interesting what he says about Poe’s stories, ‘They also have an important location. Paris, for English-speaking readers, was a city of excitement, and for Americans more exotically foreign than London… Poe is one of the many major crime writers who to some degree make a character out of a city – and they always seem to be writing about a city in which they were not brought up; there is a sense of thrill, of danger, of even shaping the self, in Doyle’s London, Chandler’s Los Angeles, Paretsky’s Chicago: the urban experience runs deep in crime fiction.’ (Page 28)

This idea of a city as a character is something I touched upon in my submission of Don Findy last year. And how Rankin wrote, ‘…it was always my mission to show people an Edinburgh that the tourist doesn’t see.’ (The Rough Guide to Crime Fiction, Introduction)

I hope to be able to shape Ipswich more as a character through my stories from my experience firstly in the way that Rankin wants to show another side but also in the way that George Pelecanos writes about the city he was raised in (see the Derek Strange trilogy).

I also think reading some local history books will help, so over the coming weeks I’ll be diving into a few.

A side note; recently I read two highly respected crime fiction texts. The first was Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Being completely honest I found the book, or at least my translation by David McDuff, fairly long winded and repetitive. Whole scenes, explanations and so on were often dragged or would appear in some form a few pages later. At its best though, it was gripping and interesting – that being inside the mind of a killer and experiencing his psychological process. But I also found it too soap-opera-esque, with people storming out of rooms or making sweeping statements and shouting and so on; very dramatic and over the top. I guess it’s just a product of its time.

The second was Camus’ The Outsider. I had waited a while for this to reach the top of my to-read pile and was blown away. It captures everything I appreciate about the minimalist style that I love so much about James M. Cain. I’ve read in several places that it was inspired by Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice but I’m yet to find a concrete source on this. There are some parallels with The Outsider and Crime and Punishment – namely we read a story from the killers point of view and are more or less trying to work out what we make of them and whether we despise them, can forgive and so on. Camus’ novel certainly appeals to me a lot more though as it’s swift, clean and to the point. It gets in without making a mess or lingering and, what I find more important, gives a lot more room for thought and interpretation. Having spent a few years reading and appreciating this, some might call it hardboiled, style it’s hard not to worship something like The Outsider. A great achievement in my eyes.