According to the TV weathermen, summer officially starts today. And yes, folks, I ate my first strawberry of the year this morning. The patch devoted to the scarlet beauties in our garden has been liberally festooned with green fruit for about a week; a couple of days of sunshine has reddened a few up nicely, and this morning I picked two, dug a small slug out of one (I don't like to discourage the wildlife too far, and it was very small) and enjoyed the taste of the new season.
In other news... Chatting with my daughter last night (she's visiting her aged parents for a few days in lieu of the vacation in France we were all supposed to be enjoying round about now) brought about some thoughts about themes and trends in crime fiction plots. She mentioned Ronald Knox's Chinese villain trope (see here, if I've made it work if I haven't, maybe Google it if you're interested?: Decalogue ), and it sent me into musing mode. Not about Chinese villains, particularly; rather, about what Knox really meant. We discussed it at length, and arrived at the conclusion that the Chinese part is irrelevant; the point is not to fall into cliché, by using the current bad guy, either in real life or in fictional trend, as an easy option, or worse, as a bolt-on plot which results in a resolution but carries a whiff of deus ex machina.
Meriel mentioned Isis as an example of the current real-life bad guy. In fact I've come across remarkably few instances of this appalling phenomenon being translated into fiction: two, to be precise, which is a tiny proportion considering my voracious appetite for crime fiction. And both of them were very well done, certainly weren't bolt-on plots, and had some interesting things to say as well as being damn good thriller fiction. The two books are The Silence Between Breaths by Cath Staincliffe, a much underrated British author; and The Absence of Guilt by Mark Gimenez, a slightly less underrated American author of brilliant legal thrillers. Find them. Read them. You won't regret it.
So, what is the modern equivalent of Knox's Chinese villains, I wondered. That's when I realized how many of the books I've read recently seem to have child abuse as a theme. Huge quantities of evidence of this most heinous of crimes in real life have been crawling, slinking and oozing out of the woodwork in the UK for several years and in many walks of life; a major enquiry is currently in progress (as long as it hasn't gone pear-shaped again, as it has several times), and one incidence has already been turned into a major TV drama. And it keeps coming up in fiction.
Which is fine, as long as it's well done. And as long as it isn't done to death, as it were; the more of it there is in fiction, the less impact it has, and that would be seriously worrying. It's something which needs to have an impact; people need to know it's really happening, and still be as appalled and horrified by it as they are now in a year, five, ten years, in fact forever.
So, crime writers, while you're enjoying your summer strawberries and contemplating your next plot, do you think you might bear that in mind? Once a theme begins to elicit yawns and cries of 'Oh no, not again!', you not only lose your reader's attention, you also divert it from what really matters. Enough child abuse, already. In life as in fiction.
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