Warning - long, dense and somewhat muddled post
At the end of UK month I've been thinking a bit about the
differences between UK and US hardboiled/noir. As a critic in
the late eighties it seemed to me that US hardboiled - as
written by Leonard, Higgins, Ellroy, Crumley et al - was the
most vital literature being written in the English speaking
world. British crime fiction in particular - with the
exceptions of William McIlvanney and Derek Raymond (neither
of whom really set out to be a crime writer), seemed stuck in
a cosy neverland. So at the time I wrote a book, Into The
Badlands, in which I proselytised for this viewpoint and
talked to most of the leading writers of US crime
fiction.
And at that time it seemed to me self evident that what we in
the UK needed to do was to follow the American lead, and
write crime fiction that explored the darker side of life in
the UK in just the same way as the American writers
did.
A decade or so later on it's interesting to take look around
and see what has developed. There's certainly a younger
generation of British crime writers with an explicit American
influence. Ian Rankin is the most successful of these,
commercially speaking, with his canny fusion of traditional
British police procedural and just a little of Ellroy's dark
stuff. (while John Harvey's Resnick series are at least as
good as Rankin's and his relative lack of success a
considerable injustice) . David Peace , meanwhile, with his
sui generis Red Riding Quartet seems to me far and way the
most successful artistically.
Moderately sucessful - though generally morally and
artistically bankrupt - are the burgeoning ranks of the
serial killer specialists - but that's a US blight as well
(then again I suppose serial killer novels more properly
belong to the horror tradition than the h/b). Least
successful, both commercially and artistically, tend to be
the most explicitly US influenced writers - UK private eye
writers. These days the private eye is hard to take seriously
in American fiction let alone British fiction. Val McDermid's
Kate Brannigan novels are probably the best but generally
there is only so far suspension of belief can go.
So, somehow it seems to be more complicated than it looks -
this translation of the American idiom to the UK - and it's
not just our lack of guns and palm trees and lost highways (
though it may the case that our climate and gloomy victorian
cities may contribute to the fact that contemporary horror is
a very natural British genre - especially the noir-horror
crossover as written by the likes of Chaz Brenchley, Stephen
Gallagher and Iain Banks).
But then again, when I come to think of it, I'm not sure that
US crime fiction is what it was a decade ago either. It may
just be that the seventies and eighties writers were lucky to
come up at a time when crime fiction as a genre was moribund,
while newer writers - in the US just as the UK - have to
struggle to emerge from the shadows of Ellroy, Leonard et al
- and are, ironically enough, in some ways limited by the
very strength and popularity of the genre. .
Now and again, new writers - like George Pelecanos or David
Peace - succeed in this struggle thanks to exceptional skill
and freshness of milieu, but it strikes me - talking right
off the top of my head now - that maybe the most interesting
way for the noir/hb writing to develop is to move out of the
genre confines. The challenge, certainly, that interests me
as a writer, is to apply the things I like about noir/hb -
the sense that the world is not OK, that the underdog
viewpoint is the one to take, that corruption is everywhere,
that the evocation of place can be crucial to the creation of
character - to novels that do not neccessarily need to
revolve around a dead body or a zillion dollar coke
deal.
Apologies for the rambling nature of the above. Any
thoughts?
John
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