I had a really sad conversation with a literary agent the other day. She’d taken on an author who she was clearly very, very excited about: great writing, brilliant storytelling, first novel a real pageturner, you won’t be able to put it down – the praise just kept on coming. But every big publishing house she’d approached had come back with the same answer: it’s cosy crime, and cosy isn’t selling; tell the author to ramp up the bloodshed and violence.
Well, this wasn’t going to happen; the novel worked just fine as it was, and the author prefers to leave most of the bloodshed and violence to the reader’s imagination – which she actually does a great job of stimulating.
So the agent was doing the rounds of us smaller guys, in the hope that we might be willing to look a little further than yet another ingenious form of graphic torture.
It appears that, here in the UK at least, the explicit stuff that leaves nothing to the imagination is what sells best. The question I ask myself over and over is – why?
I know reading, like theatre, is about the suspension of disbelief – but surely criminals who spend their time dreaming up ever more creative and disgusting ways to damage or kill their victims is a step too far? The odd psychopath maybe – but not your common garden variety murderer.
And – small digression coming up, but it really is only a small one – am I the only person in the world never to have sat through a complete episode of MASH because I couldn’t take the fountains of blood or the horribly realistic maimings created by the props department? (Or is everyone reading this too young to remember MASH?)
I sometimes get the impression that authors who produce that kind of thing regard it as a competition: a test of who can cram the most violence into 80,000 words, or invent the goriest, most appalling fate for their victims. And the result is that it moves beyond imaginative: way beyond viable, in fact. I’m all for a bit of escapism, but surely fiction has to stay within the bounds of the possible?
Don’t get me wrong: I’m the last person to tell someone else what they ought to be reading. If graphic violence lights your candle, that’s your prerogative. But cosier varieties of crime fiction have a lot going for them too. Maybe, just for a little light relief, you could move past Simon Kernick and take a look at, say, Kaye C Hill? You might be pleasantly surprised.
It appears that in the USA the trend is different. I don’t claim Crème de la Crime is a totally typical case, but we try to come up with something for most tastes (though I have to say we steer clear of anything that actually makes me feel unwell), and our grittier strands, for some reason I’ve yet to figure out, are not the titles that do best over there. People seem to love Kaye C Hill’s sparky accidental PI Lexy Lomax and Kinky, her chihuahua who thinks he’s a rotwelier. They like most of the others as well, but not quite as much.
I hope the story I began with ends well for the author. There were various practical reasons I couldn’t take her on for Crème de la Crime, but after I’d read the first few chapters it became plain that the agent’s praise wasn’t just hype; my reasons for rejecting it had nothing to do with the writing or the storytelling.
The tide has to turn on ever more graphic violence soon. Doesn’t it? Please?
