The topic for discussion was:

Has your work, and the genre itself, been affected by the popularity of crime procedurals on television? Are true crime writing and crime fiction blurring? How closely related are they? Does new crime fiction follow true crime trends?

and the diverse group of authors we asked to give us their views are:

	Armand Cabasson, a psychiatrist working in the north of France, is the author of several novels and short stories, including the Quentin Margont series of thrillers set in the Napoleonic Wars. The third in the series, Memory of Flames will be published by Gallic Books in October 2009. Armand has also written the introduction to Napoleon Bonaparte’s only novella, Clisson and Eugénie, also published by Gallic Books in October 2009.
	Jay Dobyns, alias Jaybird, is an ATF undercover agent who infiltrated the Hells Angels motorcycle club from 2001 to 2003. He was offered membership into the gang after faking the murder of a rival Mongols Motorcycle Club member and providing ‘evidence’ of the staged murder to Hells Angels leaders. Dobyns and his partners worked undercover for 21 months leading to Federal arrests and search warrants on July 8, 2003.
	Born in Manchester in 1960, R.N. Morris now lives in North London with his wife and two young children. A Vengeful Longing follows A Gentle Axe in a series of St. Petersburg novels revolving around the character of Porfiry Petrovich, originally a character in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.

Armand Cabasson

Who-dunnit, or how-dunnit?

In my novels it’s both, because I can’t separate ‘how’ from ‘who’ and ‘why’. As I’m a psychiatrist as well as a crime novelist, I consider that if the ‘who’ is revealed but not the ‘why’ then the crime is not really solved. And the ‘how’ is necessary to understand ‘who’ and ‘why’.

I have met a few killers in psychiatric hospitals and in jails and I can say that there is nothing more different that two people who have commited the same type of murders.

Wow, what amazing experience and expertise to bring to the writing of crime fiction! I’ve never actually met a murderer – or at least not knowingly. These days readers do demand this kind of joined up sophistication between the who and the why. It didn’t used to be the case: I think it was John Dickson Carr who said that the solution of the crime doesn’t have to be psychologically plausible, just logically possible. Our readers demand more!

Has your work, and the genre itself, been affected by the popularity of crime procedurals on television?

I would say that the genre has very definitely been bolstered by the number of crime procedurals shown on television in recent years. My short crime stories have been influenced by television but not my historical crime novels

Are true crime writing and crime fiction blurring, and how closely related are they? ?

I do think that there is often an overlap between true crime writing and crime fiction.

For example, the diary of a serial killer has been published in France – let’s hope no one buys it. And there are novels written as if trying to make the reader believe that they are true stories. (I think this is partly linked to the huge success of movies like The Blair Witch Project, which was shot to look like a documentary put together from actual footage).

Some killers even find that their crime has been fictionalised and they are able to read their own story written up as a novel whilst still in jail.

All those tendencies blur the frontier between fiction and reality.

And also run the risk of glamourising the crime!

I believe that writing and reading crime fiction decreases the risk of commiting a violent crime, although I know that some people believe the opposite. For five years I have been part of a team working with violent teens and young adults (some of whom have committed crimes). Very often, violence erupts because a person experiences a sudden violent emotion (frustration, hate or fear, for example) and they find themselves unable to manage it. So they react with the “3 F response” : Fight / Flight / Freeze. For some of the young people I worked with, it was an all-too simple equation: intense unpleasant feeling = instantaneous violent gesture.

All our work is aimed at helping them to learn to express their feelings in words. Putting their thoughts into words gives them some distance from and some control over their initial violent reactions.

So perhaps a similar mechanic is at work in the writing of crime fiction. Perhaps it is partly an attempt to get close to real crimes in an effort to control the violence in our society. If that’s the case, we still have a lot of writing to do…

This is a fascinating theory, which certainly rings true to me. (My mum used to read a lot of crime fiction, and she never murdered anyone!) It’s obviously important that we, as a species, confront and process our violent feelings, and maybe crime fiction is one way of doing this. I also think it is a way of confronting, and dealing with, the idea of death. In the west, our society is not, generally, as exposed to the threat of sudden violent death as we used to be. But the fear of it seems to be hard-wired into us. I think we also need to acknowledge our own capacity for violence, or – if you like – evil. But we also, deep down, want good to prevail. Crime fiction can provide these complex consolations.

Does contemporary crime fiction follow true crime trends?

Yes, two of the most striking examples of this can be seen in the fashion for writing about serial killers and the fashion for writing about detectives employing the most sophisticated detection methods (perhaps in the highly optimistic belief that technology will conquer crime).

I think that this is a good point for discussion. In my opinion a determined and relentless investigator relying on wits and guile is always better than an average cop with the most cutting edge technology. For me, the human beats the ‘robot’ hands down.This would be an interesting fiction story for someone to write: A crime is committed. The crusty and experienced detective is a ‘dinosaur’ of an investigator. A young hot-shot who doesn’t know as much has all the gadgets science can offer. They are both trying to solve the crime.  The opportunity to create interesting characters with tics and quirks is endless. Throw in the element of a countdown or deadline and, in the hands of a skilled writer, you probably have a commercially successful book.

Jay Dobyns

I have firsthand experiences that in fact television, movies and books have affected real life crime fighting.

Fictional adventures have exposed America’s real-life jury’s to extraordinary crime fighters with incomprehensible technologies. Satellites that peer down from miles above to capture hand-to-hand drug transactions. The fictional ‘Jack Bauer’s’ of our television and movie screens take chances that are only exceeded in risk by their heroism.

In real life and in non-fiction writings, the heroes are only mere mortals. They are human beings who make mistakes and don’t always win or complete their assignments with a happy ending. The technology we can dream up as writers would be wonderful if it were available. Those jury’s judging our cases are sometimes ‘brainwashed’ by our entertainment creations and simply can’t accept that the AAA batteries in the transmitter duct taped under my nuts gave out.

Very unglamorous but very real.

I think this chimes in with my own thoughts (below)! As I say there, it’s not just juries’ preconceptions, its readers’ too.

R.N. Morris

My own work, as a historical crime writer, is in some ways a reaction against ultra-modern technology-driven shows such as CSI. I was a fan of the original series set in Las Vegas, but not so much the Miami and New York versions. It all comes down to the characters. Without great characters, when it’s just about processing DNA samples, then it becomes boring. But these shows do have a tremendous influence. I know one young man who is training to be a crime scene investigator as a result of watching them. Now that he is undergoing the proper training, he complains that they don’t represent the reality at all. And I believe that there is a concern in judicial quarters that juries are bringing the ‘knowledge’ of procedure that they acquire from such shows to the courtroom, with totally unrealistic, and unhelpful, expectations. I think people take similar expectations from TV to the books they read, and authors are bound to be influenced in the same way.

I agree with perspective wholeheartedly. When i became a Federal agent I wanted to work undercover. I envisioned myself as Sonny Crockett in the Miami Vice television episodes – driving a Lamborghini; nice clothes; poolside at a South Beach mansion; super models serving me cosmos while i negotiate for huge shipments of Columbian cocaine – not! Reality was that i was driving an ’83 Chevy Malibu and the windows didn’t operate up or down. I was dressed in cut off camo shorts with a wife beater t-shirt and flip flops to fit in with my ‘clientele’.  No mansions, just trailer parks. The pools and cosmos were replaced with kids in a mudhole with a garden hose and canned beer. No super models, just women who appeared to have survived a collision with a high speed cement truck.  And, no giant drug deals. Instead i was buying an 8-ball of meth for a hundred and fifty dollars from a guy with a large caliber pistol stuffed in the front of his waistband.

As for true crime writing and crime fiction blurring, this certainly happened in the case of the Polish writer Krystian Bala, whose book Amok was based on the murder of Dariusz Janiszewski. Bala claimed that he had got the information from newspaper reports, but the police proved that actually he knew so much about it because he was the murderer. This is an extreme example, but it’s inevitable that writers of fiction are going to turn to real crimes for inspiration. However, it seems to me that true crime (considered as a literary genre) and crime fiction are fundamentally different, in both aims and effect. Crime fiction has a tendency to restore the disrupted universe. It needs resolution, which true crime can’t always provide.

I agree with the end of your analysis, particularly when you speak about “the disrupted universe”. But I would describe the disruption as being to the human spirit rather than the universe. We see our societies as disrupted, whereas in fact they are only mirrors in which we do not recognize our own disrupted spirit. I mean that if we can first succeed in changing ourselves, then we will change our societies. So yes, my point of view pretty much coincides with yours – I believe that crime fiction (and also many other kinds of fiction) do help to restore the disrupted universe/human spirit.

Let us know your thoughts by leaving a comment below.

Bookmark to

Add your comment