2: Crimes Against Crime Fiction

Hello dog walkers, cooks, drivers. Lovely to have you back. This time the focus is on crime fiction. I should warn you that while we’ve tried to keep spoilers to a minimum, this podcast may include a couple. Also, we should mention that we have affiliate links to some of the books that we mention which will appear in the description for this episode. it seems a bit mean to benefit from some of the books that we’re talking about which we absolutely can but we’re not proud. So this episode focuses on crime fiction. Why is it so popular?

You’d think that the state of the world is terrifying enough without us having to scare ourselves silly with murderers and kidnappers and serial killers, but the reality is that we love it. And there are plenty of reasons why it continues to. It reassures readers that even in a world of uncertainty, crime, and violence, a logical investigation can provide a resolution.  This can be really comforting, explaining why crime fiction tends to surge in popularity during any period of upheaval or social unrest. Justice is restored, at least in the vast majority of cases. in a chaotic world where justice seems elusive, for the most part, the villains are caught and are banged to rights.

Even in no fiction where the resolutions are ambiguous, it provokes reflection on human morality and motivation which are endlessly fascinating. Literary fiction can be introspective and slow burning. Whereas crime fiction almost always has a gripping highstakes plot that keeps the readers hooked. Twists, reveals, clues, and red herrings keep the tension boiling, making it really hard to put the book down.  Crime fiction allows a safe exploration of our shadow selves, of our dark side. We can engage with the darkest aspect of human nature, violence, deceit, greed, power mongering, jealousy, vain glory without real world consequences. It provides a release for fears and anxieties in a controlled and structured way. It harmlessly indulges our inner voyer.

Rubbernecking is pretty contemptable behavior, but we all have the impulse to do it. There’s the pleasure of solving a Clever crime fiction harnesses readers deductive reasoning and critical thinking powers. We love patterns, order, and logic, and how satisfying it is to solve the crime before the detective manages it.  Sometimes we’re presented with an impossible scenario, such as a closed room mystery or an airtight alibi that really challenge our logical thinking. Unraveling a perfectly constructed mystery really adds to the allure. Modern crime fiction delves into morally gray areas, forcing readers to question themselves. Often, there’s an aspect of real politic involved in the choices that the protagonists are forced to make.

A thoughtful reader may take some time to reflect on what they themselves would do in a similar situation. Anti-heroes like Dexter who only kills the Anti-heroes like Dexter who only kills the bad guys or Hannibal Lectar, clever, charming, calculating with a heartbreaking backstory challenge traditional notions of good. Great crime fiction is exciting, a way for us to liven up our humrum little lives. Just like horror, that spike of fear or adrenaline is utterly thrilling, and we can enjoy a physiological response to suspense. the elevated heartbeat, spike in blood pressure, a tingling spine when we know that the danger isn’t real.

Crime novels can double as social commentaries involving issues like corruption, class divides, systemic in injustice, social issues, and inequality. The outcome for a middle-class person committing crime is often very different from that of someone from a working class background, even if they’re guilty of exactly the same offense. Crime fiction can do a great job of opening readers eyes to some pretty grim realities. It can be an indirect study of forensics and psychology.  It lets us peer into the criminal mind. Why do people commit crimes? A cookie cutout, downright villain is never interesting. What’s fascinating is what shapes a criminal. Is it nature or nurture? Have they inherited that criminal gene? If indeed that exists, or did their granny step on their favorite dinky toy? Were they spoiled as children? Were they abused? Under what circumstances would an ordinary person commit a crime?

What would push you, dear listener, into criminality? If you grew up in a community where crime is the norm, would you walk the straight and narrow? Would you buck the trend and become a abiding citizen who pays their dues when everyone else around you is as crooked as a corkcrew? Great crime fiction makes you reflect on these questions.  There are endless sub genres of crime which blend with mystery, t horror, social commentary, historical fiction, even romance. Yes, sometimes there’s a romance strand running through crime fiction and once in blue moon it’s even done well, but we’ll come back to that.

Cozy crime is hugely popular where you have characters like Agatha Raisin puzzling over the poison carrot cake at the Village Bait or the Thursday Murder Club where a bunch of oldies pour over cold cases without anything other than their own intrepid persistence and nosiness. And guess what? They solve them. Would you like to live in Midsummer? With a death rate like that, I wouldn’t set foot in the place.  We love an outsider, a rogue detective, someone who challenges authority, bureaucracy, or the established order to get at the truth. We love the idea of a lone genius, the underdog, or the rebel fighting against corruption, willing to break the rules for justice. Not glory hunters, you understand? They do it for the victims. There’s a huge interest in true crime media, books, podcasts, documentaries, video clips that blur the lines between fiction and reality.

Many modern crime novels are inspired by real cases, offering a fictionalized but insightful look into true crime psychology. Clare Macintosh’s debut, I let you go, is based on a hit and run accident where a little boy was killed and the driver was never found. Macintosh was a police officer at the time, and she was shocked by, amongst other things, the social media pylon against his innocent mother. She just lost her child to a rogue driver, but somehow it was her fault. We’re all fascinated by police procedurals giving us an ideas to how crimes are solved. We’re riveted by forensic science, criminal profiling, and investigative techniques.  Years ago, I read The Jigsaw Man by Paul Britain, a forensic psychologist who worked on some of the most high-profile crime cases in the country, including the murder of little Jamie Bulier. Unlike crime fiction, where the serial killer seems to have a type, real life crime, is often horribly random. When one perpetrator was asked why he’d killed one of his victims, a woman completely unknown to him, he just said it was because she was wearing red shoes.

The great crime writers such as Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Raymond Chandler still exert huge influence on modern crime writers. The classic who done it when done are still incredibly satisfying even with modern twists. So in short, you have a genre with endless appeal. You have a lot of readers. Next to romance, crime fiction is the most popular genre. So why aren’t we all writing crime? I’ll tell you why.  It’s because there are so many ways you can magnificently cock it up. Lazy plotting, convenient resolutions, predictable twists, one-dimensional characters. So many authors simply fail to understand what makes crime fiction compelling. Here are some of my pet peeves in no particular order. Shock value. Trying too hard. Gratuitously gruesome crime scenes. Horrible descriptions of maming and torture.

Satanically evil villains overcome by frenzy blood lust or who calmly torture their poor victims who then take forever to die. How about a bit of cannibalism? I mean, it worked for Hannal Slasher stories. Killers who like axes or chains. No thank Deadly secretive cults that indulge in human sacrifice. Not horrifying enough? I know. Let’s make the victims children. You get my drift. Obviously, the plot lines have to be high stakes.  And there’s nothing more high stakes than the life of a child. But seriously, shock value for its own sake is repellent and should never trump the telling of a good story. The premises of some crime novels are becoming increasingly unbelievable. As crime writers have to scrabble around for new ideas and push new boundaries as readers become more and more unshockable. Many try too hard to be dark, disturbing, and twisty, but they end up just being rather silly instead.

Any story that relies too hard on emotional manipulation rather than on proper character building is not going to be convin or satisfying to read. The Chain by Adrien McKinty. Your child is kidnapped and the only way to get your kid back is to kidnap another child, thereby continuing the chain. It’s any parents worst nightmare. But this chain would very quickly fall apart. People would go to the police people.  It’s a brilliant idea, but what kind of cartoonish villain would execute a plan like this? One in a bad crime fiction novel, apparently. Behind closed doors by BA Paris, a perfect couple hiding a dark secret. Grace is married to an utter sadist who she can’t escape. Her husband Jack is another totally evil cartoon villain.

The book presents the reader with one miserably sadistic scene after another. There’s no nuance, no complexity, just one shocking act of cruelty after another. Cla Macintosh’s I Let You Go was much more realistic on the domestic violence storyline where it was powerfully written and deeply unsettling. The layered narrative and alternative perspectives misled the reader in a very clever way. In fact, I don’t think any of her other books have come close to that  Going back to behind closed doors, the donamont is completely unbelievable and could so easily have been strengthened. I think a lot of authors get three quarters of the way through writing and then suddenly get bored and race to a lazy convenient ending. This book certainly lends credibility to that theory. Here’s another for shock value. Pretty Girls by the appropriately named Karen Slaughter.

A woman investigates her sister’s disappearance and uncovers a horrific underground scene of extreme violence and snuff movies. The violence is so excessive and graphically described that it stops being disturbing. It’s just gratuitous. The villain is yet another cartoonishly sadistic creature that just plums new depths of depravity. The horrific scenes are just Torture and extreme gore are no substitute for good st storytelling. It’s just too much.

one-dimensional characters. Bad crime fiction is full of characters who exist only to serve the plot. They aren’t fully fleshed out people at all. Every character, no matter how minor, should have a life outside of the plot. Merry’s books are brilliant in this regard. Even the babies and the mules in his stories have personalities, which is why his books are such a pleasure to read. You don’t have to give their whole life story. A detail or two is all that’s required.  Closely related to this is victims as props. Crime fiction is littered with the bodies of beautiful young Women and girls are often reduced to plot devices existing primarily as props to highlight the protagonist journey. Crime writers often objectify young women and girls, raising important questions about these narratives being turned out as entertainment.

In the first place, women are portrayed as victims. And secondly, some of these stories, especially the gory ones, desensitize readers to real world violence against women. You can’t take this argument too far as we shouldn’t forget that it’s often women who are creating these fictions and women consuming them.

Women certainly aren’t above objectifying each other or themselves. And that’s fine as long as it’s great storytelling with nuance female characters. Showing women as complex characters with agency. That goes for the victims, too. In fact, crime writers miss an important trick by not fleshing out their victims. If you can make us care about your characters, that heightens the drama, and we’re far less likely to put the book down.  

Fortunately, there’s a growing movement to subvert these traditional portrayals. Authors and creators are increasingly focusing on stories that highlight women’s resilience, agency, and complexity. There are now a lot of female protagonists who are not only survivors, but also investigators. No longer passively waiting around to be casually murder  More and more women are taking up the levers of power and this is being reflected in fiction. At the risk of sounding sexist, women and children will always be overly represented as victims in crime fiction simply because they’re more physically vulnerable and will therefore pull more on a reader’s heartstrings. Whereas the reality is that around 70% of murder victims are men mainly killed by other men. This is probably a good time to pause and discuss crimes against children.

Kidnap, abuse, trafficking, murder. These are among the last taboss that still provoke near universal horror. Crimes against children will always have visceral shock value as harming them is so cruel and unnatural. There’s an ingrained cultural and biological instinct to protect children. And anyone who lacks this instinct appears  Good crime fiction attempts to empathize with criminals and explore often very complex motivations, whereas harming children is unambiguously morally wrong. News flash, it’s bad, people.

Real life crimes against children remain in the public consciousness for decades. Just think of Maline Macan or Jean Benet Ramsay for instance. Crimes against children transcend all class, cultural, and political norms. It’s horror without the thrill. Heists, assassinations, and even serial killing carry an element of excitement or adrenaline. And a good author or director can even make you root for the bad guy.  But child crimes are simply disturbing and tap into deep-seated fears, playing on parental anxiety and the ideal that the world is a dangerous place. Still, it’s very popular in fiction, as there are few stakes higher than the life of a child, as we’ve already established. The twist, for the sake of a twist, a great twist should be surprising but inevitable. When the reader looks back, they should see that the clues were there all along.

Ridiculous unearned twists are cheap tricks in fiction which are employed far too often. Too many writers are trying to operate as twist factories. Step forward. Alex Michael, Cla Mintosh and Shie Leenna. The monologuing villain. James Bond villains are particularly guilty of explaining themselves, but there are so many otherwise decent crime novels who fall into this lazy trap. The monologuing v villain has been parodyied so often that it should tell you why you should never ever have the villain explaining himself or Buddy in the Incredibles says, “You sly dog. You got me monologuing.” When the catstroking Dr.

evil in Austin Powers begins monologuing. Mini me shouts, “Just shoot him!” Quite right, too. Why would a real life villain bother explaining themselves to someone who will certainly in a second or two be dead? Why would you want a dead person to appreciate your cleverness? It’s lazy writing. It’s a boring, lazy way to dump exposition. Please, folks, let your villains reveal themselves through action and dialogue like all other characters.  I just finished listening to Jack Gatlin’s letter from the dead where the baddie is about to shoot the DI. Before you kill me, at least let me see if I’ve got this right. The baddie then considerately lowers the gun and says, go on then. Let’s see how clever you are. There’s no getting away from it. It’s still an exposition dump. The rogue detective who should have been fired years ago.

Michael Conny’s Harry Bosch breaks every rule, disobys every order, and ignores every procedure, yet he’s still in a job. In reality, law enforcement officers can’t go around doing whatever they like. Crimeolving is really hard work and is even harder because your hero can’t just march around like some rogue vigilante. If your detective is going to break the rules, then he or she has to take the consequences. They’ll be fired or suspended or at least blacklisted from Plum Cases.  Very related to the rogue detective is the dumb police trope. The police are so incompetent that it takes an amateur detective to swoop in and solve the crime. The police have enough problems. They’re overworked, underfunded, and they’re drowning in paperwork. And they have to go through procedures. They have to answer to authority, and they have to consider internal and external politics. These are the real reasons why cases go unsolved.

the convenient clue that solves everything. Agatha Christie was a master at this and there have been many knockoffs over the years. The protagonist struggles through the entire narrative, then suddenly a bit of evidence turns up which magically solves the case. As if the author wrote themselves into a corner and needed an escape route.  In reality, instead of one Eureka moment, investigations are usually pieced together bit by bit like a tapestry, and thorough investigations bring all the different elements into a coherent hole. But fiction loves a shortcut. Overuse of tropes without subverting The dead girl in the woods, the alcoholic detective, the creepy small town with a dark secret.

All of these can still work, but only if they’re used in a fresh way, or if they are addressed headon. The woods are a natural place to hide a body. If I didn’t have a ple of pigs to devour a body hole, I’d hide the body in the woods. Detectives are frequently alcoholics because of the horrible things They see humanity at its very worst. It’s really enough to drive anyone to Convoluted Convoluted plots that lose their believability. I don’t need to elaborate on this as the plots are complicated enough already. The unkillable protagonist. James Bond, Jack Reacher. The hero never gets seriously injured, always comes out on top in a fight, and always gets his man. If the protagonist is invincible, the stakes immediately deflate. Why worry about them if they’ll survive? Real life fights have consequences.

serious injury, wounds, concussion, brain damage, even death. The reader has to doubt the protagonist’s ability to survive. I think this is one of the main reasons I prefer standalone books to series. The randomly introduced killer. Agatha Christie was guilty of this in the ABC murders. If the killer is introduced right at the end, it makes it impossible for the reader to solve the crime.  Readers want to walk beside the protagonist, and if the answer is suddenly dumped into the book from nowhere, they feel completely cheated. The best mysteries leave subtle clues throughout. So when the reveal comes, the reader thinks, “Of course, I should have figured that out myself.” Or you may have a highly unlikely killer. Shi Le Penn is the couple next door. It built the tension really well, but the villain’s motives make no sense at all. If you’re not keen on your daughter’s husband, just don’t go around for Sunday lunch.

You don’t have to kidnap the baby. The improbable escape. Step Forward again. James Bond and Jack Reacher. But guess what guys? You’re not alone. In fact, there are hordes of protagonists who have escaped in the nick of time thanks to a monologuing villain, the arrival of the cavalry in the shape of a sidekick, the police, or some unexpected ally. Often someone the hero barely knows.  Or their escape could be due to the incompetence of the villain who makes some inexplicable error or who doesn’t finish the job. In the Silence of the Lambs, Clarice is captured by Buffalo Bill, but instead of killing her, he plays a silly cat and mouse game, giving her time to fight back. Note to villains, you have one job. Kill the protagonist. Do it as soon as you get the chance. Don’t collect 200. Just pull the trigger.

The only excuse for failing is because the protagonist is cleverer than you or better prepared. Whatever is delaying you is nothing more than a lazy writing shortcut. Closely related to this is the handcuffed escape. The hero’s restrained, bound, or locked in a cell, yet he picks a lock, bamboozles a guard, or somehow tricks his captives. Or a female prisoner somehow charms or blinds a guard with her amazing cleavage. This works well in comedy, but not in crime fiction.  The dodging a hail of bullets escape. There are plenty of offenders in this category. One of the worst is Terry Hayes, The Year of the Locust, where his denied all access CIA agent manages to escape his own execution in front of hordes of crazed jihadis. Neatly managing to get the girl out alive, too. It’s a thoroughly enjoyable book, but parts of it were I’m cheating, though, cuz that was a spy thriller rather than a crime.

Crime thrillers are full of baddies who couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn and who are rubbish at hideand The hero dodges every bullet, fights multiple asalants, and finds ridiculously convenient places to secrete themselves. The faking my death escape. this started way back with Romeo and Juliet and the Count of Monteto, but there have been plenty of other offenders.  Amy done in Gone Girl disappears and manages to convince everyone she’s been murdered, putting her husband in the frame. What are the chances of pulling that Quite high if everyone around you is completely brain dead. And here’s my biggest peeve of all. Crime novels with terrible endings. I don’t mind ambiguous. That’s fine. It’s lazy, ridiculous, or unsatisfying endings that really get my goat. Here are some of the worst offenders.

SJ Watson’s Before I Go to Sleep. Christine wakes up every day with no memory. She therefore starts keeping a diary to remind herself of what she needs to remember. Ben, is not her husband and has been deceiving her for years. The novel’s very well written and builds great psychological suspense, but the ending is beyond believable.  Jillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects is about a journalist who returns to her hometown to report on a series of child murders and in the process finds out disturbing secrets about her own family. Flynn deserves a special mention as a writer who starts out brilliantly but can’t sustain that element of realistic tension that really elevates a book above the rest. In Sharp Objects, the final twist is absurd.

Some of the descriptions are so extreme you suspect she’s going for shock value rather than character or plot development. And the reveal is crammed into the last few pages. So it is rushed and undeserved. I can’t help thinking that if she’d stopped before her final chapter and given herself a bit of breathing space, she would have come up with a far more satisfying resolution. Jillian Flynn is great at creating a brilliant setup and hook and is also very talented at creating atmosphere. Gone Girl was made into a film and was amazing at building suspense, but the ending was horribly anticlimactic. Amy fakes her own kidnapping, frames her husband, Nick, and manipulates her way back into his life. There’s clever resolution. The book ends with the two of them trapped in a miserable marriage, and Nick just puts up with it.

Amy deserves a satisfying downfall, but instead she just gets away with it. And for what? I certainly wouldn’t want to be chained to a wet white like Nick. Alex Walters Late Checkout committed a few sins against good crime fiction.  The protagonist is a psychic cop, which is cheating a bit, isn’t it? Not that his gift did him much good. At the end, the cops swoop to a spa hotel where the murderer is just about to claim another victim. 

They spend ages cordoning off the corridor, reassuring the guests, getting the staff on arming themselves with Kevlar. So when at the Denuremont, the author writes, “Dca Morraine didn’t hesitate.” dot. I laughed, “Mate, he’s been hesitating for the last five chapters.” He also leaves a couple of very important clues unanswered. Not Meane, the author. This is who made the phone call that lured the victim to the hotel because it wasn’t the killer.  Why would a woman who’s meeting a stranger for lunch who’s already cautious and wary end up in a hotel bedroom? I mean, it happens, but we need to be told how it happened. Who killed the hotel owner, and why did they do it? To be fair, Raymond Chandler forgot who killed the chauffeur in The Big Sleep. But that was all about character, mood, style, and atmosphere.

If you’ve created Philip Marlo and you lay bare corruption in LA, you can get away with a few plot holes. Alex Michaelites the Fury had a lot to I especially like the intimate disclosures of the narrator, which worked really well, almost as if someone was confessing a dark crime to you over a beer. But the resolution was just ridiculous.

His other book, The Silent Patient, had a twist for the sake of a twist ending. The reveal felt forced and wasn’t set up properly. There are many ways to end your book badly. The predictable and boring killer ending, the wait, was it all a lie ending. The justice that never comes. If the baddie wins, it should be because he earned it, not because the author gave up.

Digressing a bit, here’s another eye roll for me. The female protagonist who finds an incredibly eligible man in a rural location. I live in the country and let me tell you, unless you b yo, sexy men are very thin on the ground. The place is full of toothless shepherds, grumpy farmers, and miserable pub landlords. Yet, Jenner in Clare Macintosh’s book I let you go finds a sexy single vet. Yes, a vet. He loves animals in the assend of Wales.  And one of LJ Ross’ characters meets a successful artist who’s good-looking, kind, and straight in a remote Cornish hamlet. He even saves her from the villain. I’m all for a bit of escapism, but I’d say the chances of winning the lottery without buying a ticket are actually higher. Tony Parson’s The Murder Bag is an interesting one. It almost gets it right. It starts off but ends up falling into some of the crime fiction pitfalls we’ve just been discussing.

A serial killer targets old boys from an elite school. The detective, Max Wolf, very aptly named as he’s a lone wolf who sees what others don’t. He’s likable enough. He’s a single dad with a small daughter and he has a cute dog. The style is very readable and it zips along nicely. So what’s the problem? Firstly, the victims are so detestable you don’t really care that they’re being picked off one by one. It’s not just that they’re toss from an elite school. They’re entitled, snobbish, twattish toss from an elite school. The stakes come from danger to Max and his daughter. And the dog, of course. Being English, we all care far more about the dog.

There are some terrible public school cliches, including the pedarastic school master. When the killer finally reveals themselves, The biggest mystery is why it took them so long to seek revenge. Still, it’s very readable despite the underwhelming ending. So, to sum up, a great crime novel keeps readers guessing, but should be satisfying. Even if the ending’s dark, it should feel logical.  When authors go for shock value over substance, it leaves readers frustrated instead of impressed. If you want a great crime story, show your readers some respect. Don’t Give characters depth, not roles. Make heroes and villains smart, not just lucky. The endings should be earned, not forced. Shock value really ruins crime fiction. Good thrillers build tension slowly and organically. They don’t rely on excessive gore or cheap tricks.

Great twist should feel earned, not clumsily crammed in. Villains should be complex, intelligent, and intriguing, not just evil to serve the plot. should pin Violence should exist to serve the narrative, and you should never be excessive or gratuitous, unless you like that sort of thing, in which case you have whole shelves to choose from.  You have to create relatable characters with depth that readers care about. Otherwise, they’re not going to be invested in the outcome. Violence and gore don’t make a story compelling. They make it exhausting. If you don’t care about the characters, then no amount of shock, blood, or over-the-top twists will make the book meaningful. So, who does it as we’ve been chatting long enough, that’ll be the subject of our next podcast. Thank you so much for listening to this one. Adios.