Lynne Patrick
Which, literally translated, dear blog-followers, comes out as You shall have the (or a) body.
Yeah, I know it’s more usually a bit of legalese which means you can’t charge someone with a crime in his/her absence. But it’s also useful in other ways – like today, when I have a question to ask.
The precept of You Shall Have A Body seems to lie at the heart of crime fiction. If not absolutely all crime fiction, then an overwhelming majority of books which fall into that category.
My question is – why?
There are plenty of answers, of course, the main one being the excitement factor required for good crime fiction. Murder is the ultimate crime, therefore a sleuth tracking down a murderer makes for the ultimate crime fiction.
Which would be just fine – except that it rarely stops there. So now we have a crime fiction world in which authors seem hell bent on outdoing each other; like the catering at a Welsh funeral (trust me, I’m Welsh), each one has to go that little bit further than the last, and you begin to wonder where it will end. Serial killers bury more bodies; psychos find more ingenious (and unlikely, if not impossible) ways to kill their victims; the violence level is ramped up and up and up.
I ask again – why?
I suppose there’s an answer to that too. Some people are entertained by blood, gore and detailed accounts of violence, though I worry about the kind of mind that reacts like that. Don’t they have nightmares? And doesn’t crash-bang-wallop-punch-stab-stamp-on-his- head become tedious when it happens on every page?
And the multiple victims thing... Here in the UK we have a TV show called Midsomer Murders, in which the body count began to rise so high (in a beautiful, rural, traditional thatched cottage area of England where one murder a decade is pushing reality to extremes) that the scriptwriters had no choice but to start to send it up.
When I was in publishing, like all the best publishers we gave prospective authors guidelines on what we did and didn’t look for. They included these lines:
We love to see books that don’t slavishly follow the herd; a string of murders is not compulsory. A cracking confidence trickster yarn would really excite us.
Sadly, no one ever sent us one. In seven years, I can’t recall a single submission without a murder at its core. More usually multiple murders.
So what brought these questions to the front of my mind? There’s always something, isn’t there? A trigger moment, a spark that kindles the blaze. (That’s kindle in its real sense, not piece of technology which is trying to do away with real books.) In my case it was a book. No surprise there. It was a book by one of my favourite authors, which narrows it down a little for people familiar with my reading matter of choice, but that’s all I’m giving away, because you might read it, and I’d hate to spoil the ending.
The following words appear a couple of pages from the end:
Bodies in the morgue: none. Bodies in the cells: none. Crimes committed: any number.
Be assured the author doesn’t let the reader’s attention flag for a moment. The sleuths spend four hundred pages believing they’re chasing a murderer, and there’s a glorious piece of misdirection right at the beginning which leaves the reader wondering right to the final chapter. But the body count is nil, therefore there can be no murderer.
Intriguing, isn’t it?
And that, dear blog-follower, is surely what the best crime fiction is all about. Intrigue. Not more bodies, or gorier deaths, or more beatings up, than the last thing you read. Oh, you need engaging characters and a credible background – they’re part of the fabric of any fiction. For crime fiction the USP is intrigue.
But intrigue doesn’t always have to mean violence and lots of bodies.
Does it?
