How do you approach writing ‘baddies’? How do you keep them rounded and believable, and do you try to make them to some degree sympathetic?

Craig Robertson

In my novel Random, the story is told in the first person from the point of view of a serial killer. It demanded that I didn’t write him as being an out and out bad guy because he doesn’t see himself as one – even though his actions talk a lot louder than his words. His thought processes, motivations, desires and fears are in line with our own. But even though that line is blurred, we know that he has crossed it.

Most people come in shades of grey and that goes for serial killers as well as saints. While it’s comforting to think that killers are a differently wired species from the rest of us, it’s much more likely that they aren’t as dissimilar as we’d like to believe. That’s why I try to write villains as people first and foremost. Hopefully this makes the character rounded and real, given that you offer up both sides of his personality and the reasons why he does what he does.

Anyway, these guys are much more interesting than a one-dimensional goodie or baddie. Partly because it is easier to identify with the other side of them, whether you like it or not and even if they end up doing the most terrible things.

Attempting to make a serial killer sympathetic is a tricky business and probably not to be recommended. However it is possible that readers may sympathise with his motives if not his methods of putting them into practice. If that leaves the reader in the uncomfortable position of siding with something they know to be very wrong then I can live with that. It’s fun to play with people’s moral compass by putting them on the side of the devil, if only for a while.

That means as a writer putting yourself in an uncomfortable position as well, putting on the devil’s shoes. The saving grace is that you can take them off again once you are done.

AG: With serial killers, I wonder if it’s more fascination than sympathy we end up feeling – but a fascination that runs so deep we’re sometimes not sure what it is. Is it the fear of identifying with evil, and maybe even of admiring it? The fear (and thrill) of recognition? If a serial killer is well-drawn and believable, spending a few hours with them can be disturbing and stimulating in equal measure. Who could ask for anything more?

Andrea Japp

It seems to me there are two sorts of ‘baddies’ in thrillers and my approach depends on which kind I am dealing with. There are ‘ordinary baddies’ and ‘extraordinary baddies’ – those who are so extreme they appear to have lost their humanity.

When thrillers deal with ‘extraordinary baddies’, serial killers for example, I think they very often depart from reality and enter the area of dramatisation. A particularly successful example of this is the brilliant ‘Silence of the Lambs’. The main reason for the dramatisation is simple: no one wants to read about the bloody exploits of real serial killers for entertainment. The second reason is more complex and derives from the very essence of the crime novel, which is actually akin to the Greek tragedy (or the Western!): good is pitted against evil, with man in the middle – which way will he turn? The fictional serial killer has come to symbolise evil, which Man must combat. So very often the literary version of the serial killer becomes all-powerful, extremely intelligent (although really many serial killers have a lower than average IQ), rather attractive, completely lacking in either fear or remorse, breaking all the taboos and prohibitions, in short the Devil, even in societies that no longer believe in the Devil. The important thing when writing such a character is not to seek to ‘understand’ them but to destroy them. Of course, that’s a generalisation. Some authors have created serial killers that are very closely based on reality.

AG: Yes, I think since The Silence of the Lambs the serial killer has become the great secular bogeyman – the devil for infidels, and as a result has perhaps been romanticized and troped out of the realm of the realistic. In more recent times I think the serial killer may have been supplanted by the predatory paedophile as a more disturbing repository for all our fears. The psychic damage caused by sexual abuse is a remarkably widespread theme in modern crime fiction writing.

The ‘ordinary baddy’ on the other hand, is simply someone who has taken a wrong turning. From a novelist’s point of view, writing a character like that provides the opportunity for a detailed psychological study. What is that makes a human being turn to wrongdoing? The writer tries to understand the criminal’s motives, even where their crimes are unforgivable, and sometimes even forms a certain amount of compassion for the baddie. It is all within human reality (our dark side) unlike with the fictional ‘extraordinary baddie.’

AG: I find this easily the most interesting and satisfying kind of baddie. Take old Philip Mathers in Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman – his motive for killing is that he needs the money, but he then spends the rest of the novel in a maelstrom of guilt. Our closeness to his psychological state means that we suffer the torment with him. Another good though very different example of this might be Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley – he’s not evil and twisted in any cartoonish sense, the murders just seem to present themselves as necessary solutions to inconvenient circumstances, and of course Highsmith’s genius is to create the sort of suspense where we find ourselves rooting for him and willing for him not to get caught. Then we find ourselves implicated in the crimes and exploring how we could be on the side of such a vile, amoral character. Luring us into this kind of psychological quicksand is what the best crime fiction does.

In my own novels, whether contemporary or historical, my ‘choice’ of baddie is a function of the impetus I want to give the story and characters. Human nature fascinates me; especially it’s capacity for change. How will Mr and Mrs Average, like you and me, who lead a more or less peaceful life, who are good citizens who wouldn’t hurt a fly, react when faced with a terrible event or a situation of extreme danger (a murder, or the disappearance of a child etc), a situation they could never have imagined themselves being faced with? Will they try to fight against it, will they collapse, will they be cowardly? How will the experience transform them? If I want to explore such transformation I will choose to create an ‘extraordinary baddy’ – the perfect catalyst for such a transformation. On the other hand if I want to explore the dark side of humanity, I would paradoxically create an ‘ordinary baddy’. Most often I have both types of baddy in my novels.

CR: I like the distinction between ordinary and extraordinary baddies although I’m less sure of my ability to always know where one finishes and the other begins. Perhaps within every extraordinary baddie there is an ordinary one, still in touch with their humanity, bursting to get out. It may be that readers fear the extraordinary baddie but identify with the ordinary one – and that is something which might frighten them even more.

I think Andrea is absolutely right in that exploring the dark side of human reality through someone ordinary is what makes baddies particularly interesting. The extraordinary baddie’s dark side is obvious and as a result less appealing. It’s exploring our own dark side that is fun.

Alan Glyn

With baddies, I think, before sympathetic or believable, must come interesting – and baddies tend to have an edge in this department. The devil, it turns out, has all the best tunes, and even someone of John Milton’s stature couldn’t help making Satan the narrative engine of Paradise Lost. It’s the bad guys, after all (or, indeed, the bad ladies, as my six-year-old son likes to call them) and not the good ones, who instigate things, who commit the crimes, and transgress, who take us on these wild, headlong rushes into the darker cess pools of human nature and then give us permission to wallow there. So these people pique our interest from early on. But of course on its own this isn’t enough, and in order to make a baddie believable – and then perhaps, even sympathetic – what you need to give him or her is a psychologically and intellectually developed interior life. The bad guy in Avatar doesn’t have one of these, and is therefore one-dimensional and like something out of a pantomime. Macbeth, by contrast, does have one – as does his wife – and here are two enduring characters we feel we know and are able on some level to understand. The bad guys in my novels have tended to be businessmen, property developers or politicians, and I’ve written them from a close third-person point of view, which allows the reader to spend time in their heads – a place where the characters themselves tend not to be judgemental about their own actions. My bad guys have also tended to be somewhat tortured – racked with anxiety, guilt and paranoia. Either that or they are the sort of socialized psychopaths who are wholly unaware that what they are engaged in might be perceived as evil, or even criminal, at all. And when you mix this kind of moral ambivalence or lack of moral sensibility with a vivid interior life – observations on everyday concerns, health, family, work – you draw the reader into a type of looking-glass world, but it’s one where they can easily identify with the characters and even sometimes sympathise with them.

CR: I agree entirely with Alan that one-dimensional bad guys are less interesting and far more difficult to engage with. The same goes for unsophisticated heroes but the obvious difference is it’s relatively easy for us to understand a good guy’s motives without an insight into his interior life. With bad guys we need to know the ‘why’ before we can identify, sympathise or even properly condemn.

Like Alan, I’ve placed readers inside the baddie’s head where the character is not judgemental about his own actions and left them to deal with that. It doesn’t mean that they have to sympathise but hopefully they will at least understand the thought processes that took him to the place he’s at.

AJ: When you speak of characters being ‘tortured – racked with anxiety and guilt’ would you agree that that could never apply to ‘real’ serial killers, the kind that are the subject of criminologists reports? In other words, in order to write a criminal character that readers can engage with, the author has to create a literary version of the super-horrible-baddy.

The panellists

Alan Glynn is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin, where he studied English Literature, and has worked in magazine publishing in New York and as an EFL teacher in Italy. His first novel, The Dark Fields (2001), was described in the Daily Telegraph as ‘fast, clever – and horrifying’. He is married with two children and lives in Dublin.

Andrea Japp is one of the grandes dames of French crime writing with over twenty novels published. She is a forensic scientist by profession and weaves this knowledge into her books, giving them particular authenticity. She is the author of The Season of the Beast, The Breath of the Rose, and The Divine Blood (read an extract), published in English by Gallic Books.

During his 20-year career with the Sunday Post in Glasgow, Craig Robertson has interviewed three recent Prime Ministers; attended major stories including 9/11, Dunblane, the Omagh bombing and the disappearance of Madeleine McCann; been pilloried on breakfast television, beaten Oprah Winfrey to a major scoop, been among the first to interview Susan Boyle, spent time on Death Row in the USA and dispensed polio drops in the backstreets of India. Random is his first novel.

Note: this author panel first appeared on our sister site, Bookdagger.com.

Welcome to the real world. When using real places and real historical figures in your fiction, do the familiar elements make it easier for the reader to focus on the core of the story? How do you stop it becoming a distraction? And do you take liberties to meet the needs of the story?

Nicola Upson

It was Josephine Tey herself who, writing as Gordon Daviot, said that to write fiction about historic fact is ‘very nearly impermissible’ and – for someone who wrote several historical plays and novels – she took a dim view of mixing the two. Ironically, her life is the perfect place to do just that: Tey’s work is known and loved, but she rolled up the carpet of her personal life quite beautifully behind her, leaving those of us who are fascinated by the woman as well as the writer to argue over a few known facts. Her great genius as a novelist was to create stories that could be read on many levels – thought of as products from the Golden Age and remembered with fondness or nostalgia, or recognised as subversive and unsettling, way ahead of their time and the product of a very modern voice; the more I find out about her, the more I realise that she played that trick with her life, too, and just as effectively. Even the name ‘Josephine Tey’ is a fiction, one of two literary personalities which she created to distance her work from her real identity as Elizabeth Mackintosh; the creation of a persona extended into her private life, and who she was at any given moment depended on where she was and whom she was with; her neighbours in Inverness would scarcely have recognised the woman who was sought-after company in London’s West End, and vice versa.

These books unashamedly mix what I know about her life with an invented murder mystery, but, rather than using facts as a signpost into the story, I’m using fictional situations to deconstruct some of the mythologies about her. The plots for the crime story always emerge from her state of mind or particular events in her life; she was a complex, often contradictory woman, easy to fall in love with but sometimes hard to like, and telling her story over a period of time, allowing her to change and develop in response to the people she meets along the way, feels more truthful to me now than the straightforward biography which I originally set out to write.

Joe Kanon: I hope you haven’t given up on this. Her many fans, of whom I’m certainly one, would love to read a good biography and who better than you to do it?

There are several other real figures in the books, but very few real names: they’re detective stories in the classical English sense, and the puzzle is a crucial part of the story. To ask a reader to believe that it might be John Gielgud ‘whodunnit’ at the end of the novel is a leap of faith too far; but to suggest that the culprit may be John Terry, who just happens to share a lot of Gielgud’s characteristics, is another matter altogether. There’s no question that guessing what’s real and what isn’t is part of the attraction for some readers, although the elements which people single out as being my invention are, more often than not, part of a real biographical thread; but if the story is compelling enough, if the characters are believable within the context of that story, they will always be real to the reader – and that’s what matters most.

James Bradley: I think that’s absolutely correct: what matters is that a book work, not whether it’s accurate. Part of the process of working with real characters and real places is managing to find the spaces into which you can insert your story, and making it fit with what really went on, but the really important thing is never to lose sight of the fact that the story and the characters are the thing that really matters

Place is vital to that – the creation of a real environment provides a context for your characters to live and work in, love and hate in, and the more believable the setting, the more true to life the people; in Angel With Two Faces, the characters are all created by the Cornish community in which they were born and – because it’s a real place, and one that’s very special to me, it’s important to reflect it honestly. With the exception of the central murder – it’s a necessary evil of crime novels that you pay tribute to places you love by filling them with violence and death – all of the stories in that book are true; liberties are taken with when and how, because the structure of a novel is artifice – but the essence, I hope, is authentic.

If there’s ever a day of reckoning, and Elizabeth Mackintosh and I get to have that conversation , I’ve no doubt there will be a list of points which she’ll want to discuss with me – but I hope the overall picture for the reader is fair and sympathetic. With Tey herself, there’s only one hard and fast rule that I make myself stick to – and that’s never to make her do or say something which I know in my heart goes against her true character. Except, of course, to involve her in a series of unpleasant murders.

Claude Izner: The way you write about mixing fiction and reality is very interesting, for that’s exactly what we – Liliane and Laurence – like to do. We’re sorry to kill people in our stories, but, as you point out, it is alas necessary in a crime story! In fact, what we like most is visiting 1900 Paris with our book-seller, Victor Legris, who has to solve a mystery, but who also meets real or imaginary characters living in this wonderful town, (at the time, a patchwork of villages) some very poor, some very rich, some both. We too have a pseudonym, Claude Izner; in “reality” we are two sisters, Liliane and Laurence, so Claude Izner sometimes seems to be a third person, very mysterious to us!

Claude Izner

Our Victor Legris series of murder mysteries is set in late 19th century Paris, and we love to use real historical figures and events. The realistic framework allows us to imagine some very unrealistic situations for our detective, a bookseller who finds himself having to solve murders, every year from 1889 to 1900.

In France we are published by a collection called ‘Grands Détectives’. It is a collection of titles in which an epoch and a country or town is recreated and a detective story introduced into the setting. Readers of the collection are fond of the authors, many of whom are not French, because they know they do their best to be historically accurate but at the same time to invent sleuthing adventures that will carry the reader away on the wings of the past. Fantastic stories provide a nice escape from day-to-day reality. Sometimes people need to forget the present, but of course, even stories set in the past have lessons for the contemporary world.

We do our best to get into the skin of our heroes, and to see the ‘Belle Époque’ through their eyes, without being too didactic about facts or details; we try to integrate real-life events, that might be boring if told factually, naturally into our stories.

James Bradley: It’s fascinating the way we increasingly ask novels and works of fiction to do the work of history (and indeed the way history, particularly television history, is now so infected with the methods of fiction). In a way the novel’s come full circle since it’s beginning: early novels such as Robinson Crusoe were facsimiles of factual narratives (though in Crusoe’s case, it was a facsimile of a brand of factual narrative that was often fake, in a James Frey, Million Little Pieces kind of way). It then mutated over a very long period of time into a creature of the imagination which created a world which so resembled the real we accepted it as real. But here. Yet here we are, at the beginning of the 21st century, and we’re trying to create fictional narratives that resemble reality, not just by incorporating real events and people, and by educating, but – often as not – by pastiching the tone and language fo the period we’re writing about. We don’t just write historical novels, we write historical novels that do their best to look and sound like novels of the period they’re set in. It’s totally fascinating, not just because of the wonderful inventiveness and variouness of books such as Claude’s, but because it seems so much a part of a series of other shifts that are taking place in the way we think about truth and reality and fiction.

We do take some liberties to meet the needs of the story (not many!). For example, we have real writers and painters coming into Victor Legris’s bookshop – Anatole France, Georges Courteline, Jules Renard, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec amongst others). But in the main, we are very precise about the period we have chosen, and we are particularly careful to avoid anachronistic vocabulary, and to introduce our readers to popular nineteenth century expressions and songs.

Joe Kanon: I’m very much interested in the vocabulary question. One has to keep contemporary slang out (I’m sure we all agree) but where do you draw the line about what to use from the past? I find that some slang is so dated that even though it may actually have been used its appearance in the book draws attention to itself, not the narrative. An example: the word “swell” which people really did use but which now sticks out, an obvious attempt at ‘period detail’. How do you decide what to use? A case by case basis?

Nicola Upson: Despite their being period fiction, people often comment – some as a compliment, others as criticism – that there’s a modern feel to the books I write, that the characters’ morality is not of its time – and I’m always pleased to hear that; the books are detective stories but they’re not Golden Age novels, and they’re not meant as a pastiche of that genre – they’re novels written in a modern voice about people who happened to live in the 1930s, 40s and 50s, and one of the most interesting things for me in developing the series has been to write about lives in a more honest and less judgemental way than it was possible for contemporary authors to do. It may mean that attitudes to, say, violence, homosexuality, incest or adultery are differently or more overtly expressed in my books than they would have been in crime novels of the time – but that’s not to say that the attitudes themselves are at odds with what really went on. It’s easy to be patronising about period fiction, to look at people through a glass screen as if they never swore or had sex or understood what it meant to cross a moral line, but you only have to read the letters and diaries of women from that period to know that the public image was very different from the private reality. As far as language goes, I probably do use the odd anachronism in speech, but it’s important for me that the characters feel real to a modern reader; they need to sound to us as they would have sounded to each other, and that means removing the barriers which would be created by a more formal, artificial style.

Joseph Kanon

Place is important to me – I’ve even used endpaper maps in my books. Getting the streets right, the buildings, the distances. anchors the narrative, gives it that first layer of plausibility. This is especially useful if you write in period, when the look of a place also positions you in time.

Of course, in the end the settings are still imaginary reconstructions, particularly if the place has changed a great deal. Both Los Alamos and Berlin (The Good German) have been completely rebuilt since 1945 so photographs become the key source. Stardust presented a different challenge. Los Angeles is virtually the poster city for impermanence, but in fact a lot of 1945 Hollywood survives. Almost every setting in the book still exists (see the video about this on my website). What’s changed is the sprawling scale of the city itself. In 1945 there were no freeways. Orange groves still covered most of the valley. People rode streetcars. So the streets, even the buildings, may be the same, but they exist in a different world.

My usual location scouting for a book is simply walking the city (or, in L.A., driving it), getting a feel for it on the ground. By the time you’re ready to write, you should know where your characters live, what they eat, everything that will make them real to the reader. But this can sometimes produce disconcerting results. I went to Berlin to film a promotional TV interview for The Good German and the director (a fan of the book) would say, “Let’s shoot this in front of Lena’s flat,” and I’d answer, “Well, it would have been on this stretch of Pariserstrasse, probably a building like that.” “Yes, but which flat? Which is her window?” “But you understand she’s a character. She didn’t really live anywhere. I made her up.” At which point, he would look at me skeptically, a little disappointed, as if I were holding out on him. I suppose I should have been flattered. Lena had become ‘real’ for him, what we always hope fiction will do—until you have to supply an actual address.

James Bradley: I’m always interested by the way imaginary versions of cities overlay the real ones, and by the desire of readers to pin the imaginary versions to the real ones. In a way I suppose it’s part of the same desire to make the experience of a book concrete you see in the desire to make pilgrimages to authors’ homes. But it’s not quite the same thing. There’s a whole society of people who spend their time poring over Conan Doyle’s stories, trying to pin down where precisely 221B Baker Street is, but somehow missing the point that there isn’t a 221B Baker Street because Conan Doyle made it up. What is it they’re looking for? The experience of the books to continue? To make the books real, in some more concrete sense? Or just a sort of cultural completism, sort of a literary train-spotting? Whichever it is, it’s a strange desire, and not one I suspect, that’s really able to be satisfied.

Yet at the same time, our ideas of cities and places is inextricably connected to fictional representations of them. It’s almost impossible to imagine early to mid-19th century London without it being the London of Dickens’ imagination, or late 19th century London without it being the London of Conan Doyle, all gaslight and fog and murder in alleys. These fictional representations sit alongside the real, and alter it, shaping our cultural memory.

Using real places is crucial, but using real people is another matter. The problem here is that the reader inevitably brings his own idea of the character to the page, and yours often doesn’t mesh with the character already in his head. At best this is a distraction, at worst, an argument with the reader that interrupts the narrative. (Of course, writers may do this deliberately, to challenge preconceptions.)

But sometimes using real figures is unavoidable. In Los Alamos, only the head of the Manhattan Project could have authorized the investigation at the heart of the story. I had mixed feelings about using Oppenheimer and planned a quick scene just to just past this plot point, but the moment he appeared—one of those writing clichés that is sometimes true—he took over the book and I realized that for me he was the story, that he embodied all the contradictions and moral ambiguities about the Project that had drawn me to the subject in the first place.

I also used some real figures in Stardust—it seemed impossible to write about Hollywood without using any boldface names—but I deliberately chose people who had been real stars in 1945 but would be less well known now. Paulette Goddard, for instance, has a speaking part and at a party we see Ann Sheridan, Alexis Smith, et al. The idea was that movie buffs would have fun spotting the celebrities, but that the line between the real stars and the fictional ones would be blurred (making the fictional ones more real). But this backfired slightly: younger readers hadn’t heard of any of these people and so assumed that everyone in the book was fictional. So I succeeded in blurring the line, but at the expense of making me feel a lot older.

Claude Izner: Yes, place is very important. In our novels, Paris is the real first character. To help us to recreate this vanished 1900 town, we like to walk a lot together, to notice every small details, to take notes and photos, and to invent the past behind the present. We also look at people in Paris today and try to change them into characters that could fit into our stories. We think that, whatever book you write, it is full of what you are, what you like, read, saw, heard, your desires, your fears. And, as we are two, all this is multiplied by two! We also use old Paris pictures and maps, to set a more realistic scenery. And famous people do appear from time to time. But it is true that, for young readers, all this means little. Once again, the challenge is always the same: to invent a good story and characters that are like no others. That is the core of all books, historical or not.

James Bradley

I think it’s fascinating how agitated we’ve all become about the whole question of how fiction draws upon the “real”, and about what’s legitimate and what’s not. In my darker moments I think that agitation is about a loss of faith in the idea of fiction itself, an anxiety about what it is, and what it does (certainly it’s not accidental the first question you get asked about a book these days is always about research, not about the writing, or the aesthetics), but it’s equally related to the way our culture is being reshaped from the ground up by media technology, and the increasingly blurry line between what’s real and what’s not.

Joe Kanon: I couldn’t agree with you more. The research question has come up so often over the past few years that I came up with the following theory: the more we’ve come to accept spin and fantasy in our public life (Iraq, anyone?) the more we’re demanding authenticity in our fiction. This is a joke (sort of) but it does lead to the larger question you raise: what do we expect fiction to do? And it’s a special kind of authenticity that seems required. People are invariably disappointed when I answer that all my research was taken from print or photographic sources (memoirs, letters, histories, etc.). What they want to hear is that I interviewed people who might actually have been in the story (e.g., a scientist at Los Alamos), that only this sort of direct testimony is ‘real’. When I point out that, faulty memories being what they are, print sources (especially a variety of them) are more reliable, they seem unconvinced. Hard to say why this is so but it somehow shades into the current mania for memoirs—and the subsequent outrage when it’s discovered the memoirs aren’t actually ‘true’ but (let’s be generous here) shaped by literary considerations. It’s as if our popular culture is moving away from what literature can do—the re-ordering of experience to reveal a larger truth—and opting for a Facebook kind of authenticity, supposedly intimate but no more reliable or truthful than a personal ad.

All of that said, as a writer I’ve always been a bit wary of over-emphasisng the role of research. At some deep level it seems to me that as a writer your responsibility is to the story, and to the way you’re telling it, and everything else is subservient to that. Indeed often too much research can be a trap, because you begin to feel constrained by it, as if you have a responsibility to what really happened.

Nicola Upson: That’s very true and I certainly feel a responsibility to Tey, perhaps because I like and respect what I know about her and the way she chose to live her life, or perhaps because she’s so well-loved by her readers. But as the series goes on, I find I’m much less self-conscious about that – and, ironically, the less I worry about making the character an accurate portrayal of the real woman, the more authentic she becomes. Readers who come to the series looking for clues about her life will probably find more facts in An Expert in Murder – but more truth about her personality in Angel With Two Faces and Two for Sorrow.

I’ve had at least one novel fall over because I let the research overwhelm me, so generally I try to learn enough to write the story and then fill in around it. You need to know enough to feel comfortable in the world you’re writing about, but ultimately it’s imagination that will make a story breathe, the sense that the writing and the characters are alive.

That doesn’t make everybody happy. When The Resurrectionist was first published in Australia, a historian who’d written a book about the body trade took the novel to task in a major newspaper for reducing real figures such as Sir Astley Cooper to mere essences, and for its supposed haziness about the specifics of how surgeons were trained in the period I was writing about. It was a curious moment, not least because I could understand where she was coming from: if I was a historian and some upstart novelist came along and published a book which played it fast and loose with the facts I’d be irritated too. But I was almost more than a little bemused: in fact I wasn’t hazy about the specifics of medical education in the period, it was just that they were complicated, and boring, and trying to represent them accurately made the book more convoluted than it needed to be, so at some point I’d taken a decision readers weren’t going to care about them, and I’d just streamline them to make the story work better. I was writing a novel, after all, not a thesis, and what mattered was that it live as fiction, not that it be accurate in every respect.

In Australia the situation is doubly problematic because our history is so vexed. There’s been an ongoing debate here about the rights and wrongs of Australian novelists trying to talk about the past, and in particular the history of first contact and colonisation through the prism of fiction. This debate has been part of a much larger ideological struggle over what sense we’re to make of our past (and indeed what that past actually was) but it also seems to me to come back to our increasing anxiety about what fiction is, and does, and a failure to adequately respect the sorts of ecstatic truths fiction aspires to.

Claude Izner: It’s true that research can be a problem! When we began the Legris books, we had never written historical novels, and we were frantic about the documentation. We had to learn to resist the temptation to write a thesis, as you say, and remember that we were writing a novel. The most important thing for us is to create a good detective story, and it is also, for us, the hardest. The history has to seem natural, we have to give the right details at the right time, so that the result is not too didactic.

The panellists

James Bradley was born in 1967. He has twice been named as one of the Sydney Morning Herald‘s Best Young Australian Novelists and has won the Fellowship of Australian Writers Literature Award, the Kathleen Mitchell Literary Award and has been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award. He is the author of a collection of poetry called Paper Nautilus and the novels Wrack, The Deep Field and The Resurrectionist. In 2008 The Resurrectionist was chosen as a Richard and Judy Summer Read, becoming a massive bestseller. James lives in Sydney.

Claude Izner is the pen-name of two sisters, Liliane Korb and Laurence Lefèvre. Both booksellers on the banks of the Seine, they are experts on nineteenth-century Paris. They have co-written Murder on the Eiffel Tower, The Père-Lachaise Mystery and The Montmartre Investigation. The fourth Victor Legris Mystery The Marais Assassin was published in March 2009. The Predator of Batignolles, the 5th Victor Legris title, will be published in April 2010.

Joseph Kanon was  born in Pennsylvania and was educated at Harvard and Trinity College, Cambridge.  While still an undergraduate at Harvard, he began a career in publishing. In 1995, on a visit to the Southwest, he visited Los Alamos and conceived the ideal for a novel about the Manhattan Project.  Los Alamos, published in 1997 was a best-seller, translated into 20 languages, and won the Edgar Award for best first novel.  Now a full-time writer, he followed it with The Prodigal Spy , The Good German, Alibi, and Stardust.

Nicola Upson was born in Suffolk and read English at Downing College, Cambridge. She has worked in theatre and as a freelance journalist, and is the author of two non-fiction works and the recipient of an Escalator Award from the Arts Council England. She lives with her partner in Cambridge, and spends much of her time in Cornwall.

How did you use your experience in a fictional setting, and how much did you have to change it to fit your creative vision? How much did others want to change it for creative or commercial reasons?

Aly Monroe

My setting, Cadiz, a very old island town founded by the Phoenicians along the Atlantic coast from the Straits of Gibraltar, is not fictional. I had to fit the story to the place, in one sense make use of what was already there. But since the story was both historical (set in 1944) and a reaction to many things about the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) and its aftermath that I had heard when living there, I have to admit that wasn’t too difficult.

This is fiction in history – and for reasons I can’t quite explain it is of great importance to me to get the history accurate. The history provides a framework for the creative vision.

My difficulties came in making the story both immediately comprehensible and interesting to English readers. This was because I was my own translator and the past is not just a foreign country; in this case it really did come with a foreign language and you really don’t begin to know a people until you know their language. I was anxious to maintain the feel and the flavour as an essential part of the setting.

The book went through about three versions. My editor asked for more explanation and less irony, acted as a bridge so that I felt happy I was not disrespecting the Spanish while I learnt to help an English speaking reader, who might not be too familiar with the situation of Spain at the time. Some changes were structural. Big example? The first chapter to set up what was happening. And there was a certain de-Spanifying. That some Spanish swear words translate badly for English sensibilities was easy enough, but certain expressions sounded falsely exotic and/or slowed the book down.

In my second book, set in Washington DC, this process continued but I had learnt a lot more before writing and was not dealing with a foreign language – or at least only the ‘divided by a common language’ business. Indeed, not knowing Washington nearly as well as Cadiz and dealing with a much larger city much changed since 1945 was something of a relief – and very exciting to research.

AC: I applaud you when you say : “for reasons I can’t quite explain it is of great importance to me to get the history accurate” ! I share your point of view. I believe history is history, I don’t allow myself to change it. And I don’t find this golden rule oppressive when I write fiction, on the contrary, I feel free to write.

I am also very interested in what you say about two languages, Spanish and English. I love comparing French and English, listening to their “music”… I believe that if a novel is written “between” two languages, it creates something unusual … At the moment I am writing a novel where the hero is both French and American. He lives with those two cultures, he speaks both languages and I’m enjoying making him play sometimes with English, sometimes with French words.

Helen Walsh

I really admire those writers – McEwan (Atonement), Hilary Mantel (Wolf Hall), Michel Faber (The Crimson Petal and The White) – for their corporeal depictions of the past. I’m too lazy a writer to invest emotionally, in a time and place that I have no direct experience of or at least some visceral connection with. The geographical settings of my stories are as important as the psychological make up of my characters. Brass was as much a love letter to Liverpool as it was a coming of age novel, and Once Upon A Time in England could only have been set in the Seventies and Eighties in a small northern satellite town like Warrington. Shift forward ten years or west ten miles and you have an entirely different story with an entirely different outcome. In setting Brass in Liverpool, and in South Liverpool in particular, my editor at the time warned that I was potentially alienating readers, not least because the everydayspeak of my characters was too specific to the area. He was eager to dilute the ‘Scouseness’ of the novel but I resisted. There was no middle ground in which we could meet either. It would have been impossible to write a novel set in the city – written in interior monologue too – and not use local dialect. This is where writers and editors come to blows often enough. A writer is concerned about matters of authenticity, getting the argot and rhythm of the language pitch perfect, whereas an editor is forced to think more cynically on a more commercial and critical level.

AM: I understand Helen’s striving to retain the ‘Scouseness’ of her novel, Brass. If you dilute that to make it ‘comprehensible’ to readers, you can run the danger of losing the whole atmosphere of the time and place of your chosen setting.

On the other hand, you do want to help your readers to appreciate your characters and the story you are telling.

My editor was a useful ear. I do mourn the loss of some things, but there comes a time during the process of writing and editing when you have to make yourself shift your perspective towards the readers. I think this may have been easier for me than for Helen, because it is easier to accept that readers are not familiar with Spanish, than to accept that they won’t understand a local English dialect.

AC: “The rhythm of the language”: I love it! When I write, I listen to the rhythm of the language, when I listen to my patients, I listen to the rhythm of the language (in this case, the rhythm is dictated by feelings, and I can use it to help me find a cure…). The music of life is the rhythm of the language.

Armand Cabasson

How did you use your experience in a fictional setting, and how much did you have to change it to fit your creative vision?

I have been fascinated by psychology for many years and I draw heavily on my experience as a psychiatrist in my writing. But when I create a character, I never use one person in particular (that would be to steal someone’s private life).

I’m interested in the way the mind works – in the contradictions, the obsessions, the stratagems the mind employs to deal with traumas, the way it controls its impulses, and how and why these sometimes, in spite of everything spill over … I also try to understand the causes of violent behaviour and to work out the psychological roots of such behaviour.

I pay close attention to the way we communicate with each other, to the words we use and the resulting dialogue.

I love to explore the dynamic when two people meet each other for the first time. It’s interesting to see the way they act on each other and how their relationship will play out, to find which aspects in them can be changed by the other person and which will remain unchanged.

Everyone’s personality is complex and unique, so I make sure that this applies also to my characters. When I read a novel I can’t bear one-dimensional characters (or metro tickets as I call them because you can sum up their characters in two lines on the back of a metro ticket).

In fourteen years of working in psychiatry I have never come across a single uninteresting person. But over the same period I have encountered a certain number of dull characters in the books I’ve read.

AM: I would never base a character directly on a real person – I agree with Armand there. We are writing fiction. But a real person may occasionally provide the initial inkling for a character. This was the case with my character Ramirez, the local police chief in The Maze of Cadiz, whose starting point was a few words, a voice from a real person, that remained with me over the years but developed into a completely different, fictional character. More often, though, characters arise from accumulative observation of people in different contexts. They then flesh themselves out as they interact with one another and the circumstances you have placed them in. So yes, they are a product of experience, but not drawn directly from life. The process definitely has an important subconscious element.

How much did others want to change it for creative or commercial reasons?

I’ve been fortunate so far in that I have never had too much trouble in this respect. An author’s first reaction on being asked to change something is often indignation and the thought that commercial considerations are the reason for the request. But I have found that in reality the criticisms are often apt and that once I have dealt with them the novel actually improves. When I find myself in this situation I say to myself, ‘I don’t agree with this criticism, but I’ll go with it and redo the passage as requested and then compare it with my original version.’ Mostly I find that the new version is better, and that my ‘test-readers’ also prefer it. But in the small number of cases where I find that the change isn’t better I stick to my original version. As you English say ‘I don’t give an inch’!

HW: On reading Aly and Armand’s responses it’s clear that ‘experience’ prompts different writers to privilege different aspects of the novel. Aly Monroe pays great attention to place and historical detail through the medium of fiction whereas Armand Caisson’s background in psychology renders the psychological/emotional construction of his characters, of utmost importance to him – both as a writer and a reader.

I found myself smiling when I read Carbasson’s comments on the editorial process. I remember how utterly devastated and deflated I felt when my editor first suggested changes to my second novel, and worse, the removal of certain peripheral characters. With my first novel, Brass, the novel you see in print is pretty much the manuscript I sent off to agents and publishers. The writing is messy, over emotional, rambling and chaotic in places, badly written in others! I was able to justify it because it was written in interior monologue and the writing therefore reflected the characters’ psychological states which were often enough chemical states. The editor I had back then allowed me to run with it but my editor for Once Upon A Time in England, Anya Serota, brought me to book! I am guilty of going off piste when I’m writing and there are occasions when I know that I am not in total control of my characters. When Anya first sat me down and told me she wanted to cut the length of the novel – and drastically too, my initial reaction was hurt, anger. I was straight on the phone to my agent: “They can’t ask me to do this can they?” He told me to sleep on her suggestions. Looking back now, most of her suggestions were right for the novel and I feel very smug about the fact I had such a brilliant editor who although I didn’t always agree with, I trusted completely. I don’t hail from the creative writing course route, all that I know about writing comes from reading I suppose. I do believe that writing is instinctual but story telling is not. My editor taught me the basic grammar of storytelling. Now when I’m writing, whether it be screenplays or novels I am always thinking to myself, how does this move the story along? How does it justify itself in relation to the text? Whereas before I would be thinking more about my characters and the quality of the writing.

AM: I wonder how different the experience was for you, Armand. You have two filtering processes – first with your editor in your own language, and then with a translator. Were there some things that had to be modified to be better understood by English readers? I wonder how you felt about this.

Armand Cabasson replies: I can say that my English publisher, Gallic Books, is especially respectful with their translation. That’s because they exist as an English publisher publishing French writers, so they have clearly understood that the question of the translation is key. Another positive point is that the “Gallic Team” loves French culture and many of them speak French. So when I read my novels in English, I am really pleased with the translation.

We have decided not to change anything in my books – this is “pure French culture” and I hope that English readers will enjoy my books as much as I enjoy English novels and English culture (I come to Great Britain as often as possible!).

But there is in fact quite a lot of discussion at the moment in France on this subject, because some English publishers who publish translations of French novels, prefer to rewrite them. For example, an English publisher may want the story to be moved from Paris to London (with all the changes you can imagine that entails…). Personally, I prefer to stick to the original novel. And I say this not just as a writer but also as a reader!

The panellists

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 was published by Gallic Books in October 2009 (read an extract). Armand has also written the introduction to Napoleon Bonaparte’s only novella, Clisson and Eugénie, also published by Gallic Books in October 2009.

Aly Monroe was born and educated in England. She has lived in several countries – mostly Spain – and speaks several languages. She is married and has three children. The Maze of Cadiz, her first novel, is part of a projected series that begins during the Second World War and follows the process of decolonisation and the aftermath of Empire. The series continues with Washington Shadow.

Helen Walsh was born in Warrington in 1977 and moved to Barcelona at the age of sixteen. Working as a fixer in the red light district, she saved enough money to put herself through language school. Burnt out and broke, she returned to England a year later and now works with socially excluded teenagers in North Liverpool.

Do you need to dilute the essence of the subject matter to make science popular? How do you make your topic accessible without ’dumbing down’?

Gary Marcus

The answer to the first question is easy: “No, not if I am doing my job”. To paraphrase James Bond, good science writing should be distilled not diluted.

The answer to the second question is a good deal harder. Saying that an aspiring science writer must “write clearly” or “communicate the essence” is like asking a novice stock trader to “buy low, sell high’; nice advice, but not very specific. Good science writing is like good teaching — the trick is to meet your audience in the middle: suss out where they are likely to be, and try to connect where they are with where you’d like them to be.

In my experience, analogies and metaphors are often the best tools — but also the most dangerous. Analogies are powerful because they allow us to draw a whole slew of connections simultaneously. If you can tell a reader that orbiting electrons are like orbiting planets, you can immediately allow them to almost build a new system of understanding, based on another idea that they already know well.

But analogies must be chosen with care, and they often aren’t. Take for example the common metaphor of genome as a blueprint; every reader knows what a blueprint is, and there’s a clear relation between blueprints (which give plans for building houses and skyscrapers) and genomes (which give plans for building butterflies and puppy dogs). At first glance, it seem like a fine metaphor.

In reality, the genome-as-blueprint analogy is a perfect example of dumbing down. The blueprint metaphor leads readers to think of genomes as fixed, passive, even static; each notation in a blueprint has a direct counterpart in the finish object; this line makes a wall, that one becomes a window. Genomes contain nothing of the sort; there’s no diagram of a finished product. Instead, genomes are made of individual genes, and those genes are nothing like the pixels in a drawing. Rather, each gene is sort of like an IF-THEN line in a computer program, specifying a particular protein that can be built (the THEN) and a set of conditions for when and where that protein might be built (the IF).

The net result – omitted entirely from the blueprint metaphor – is a system of incredible beauty; each of the 25,000 or so genes in our genome acts on its own, as a part of grand self-organizing dance, responsive to the environment, yet capable of underwriting vast complexity.

MC: I agree with this. In my case I always stress that the metaphors give only a partial picture – a glimpse, if you like – of reality. Take the big bang and the universe. These are fundamentally 4-dimensional things – that is, they exist in 4 dimensions of space-time – and so, as 3-dimensional creatures, we can never grasp them in their entirety. It’s possible to explain how it is that all the galaxies are flying away from us yet we are not at the centre of the universe by using the analogy of galaxies as raisins in a rising cake. If you could sit on any raisin, you would always see all the other raisins receding from you. Of course, then people say: what about the edge of the cake? and then I say, well, maybe it’s an infinite cake! This is an example of a metaphor being stretched too far like the gene blueprint metaphor. But I think it’s liberating to realise that all metaphors have their limits (except the mathematical metaphor because, for some mysterious reason, the universe dances to the tune of mathematics!) and that, if you can’t completely grasp something about the universe, that may be because it is fundamentally ungraspable and all we can get is glimpses of the truth.

Good science writing, like good teaching, is about finding out what’s truly interesting about some aspect of nature, and then communicating it as directly as possible.

Marcus Chown

Nature’s true language – for reasons nobody really understands – is mathematics.

So, strictly speaking, all translations of mathematical equations into words dilute the subject matter and dumb down. Nevertheless, it is always possible to communicate something useful in a popular book. There are levels of understanding. To really understand Einstein’s theory of gravity you need to understand the mathematical intricacies of the geometry of curved space-time. But, actually, the deep ideas that underlie the theory are remarkably simple, even obvious (of course, it took the genius of Einstein to notice the obvious!). So an awful lot can be conveyed in words. It’s not quite the full understanding of the mathematical theory. But it’s still very worthwhile. The important thing, as Einstein himself recognised, is not to go too far. “Things should be made as simple as possible but not simpler,” he said.

I think I’m fortunate that, when I write, I am actually struggling to understand things to my own satisfaction. And my criterion of whether I really understand something just happens to be whether I can communicate it to someone on the number 23 bus (an unlucky person, if they happened to sit next to me!) or my wife, who is a nurse and has no physics background. If her eyes glaze over and she starts looking for the TV remote control, I know haven’t succeeded and ought to try again. So I’m lucky, really, that my trying to get my head around things – and I think in visual terms – is the same thing as trying to communicate science to a non-scientist reader. Long may there be that overlap because, even if no one reads a book I’ve written, it will have still served a purpose for me!

Jonah Lehrer

I think “diluting the essence of the subject matter” is the exact opposite of good science writing. The job of a writer, after all, is to amplify the essence of the subject, to minimize those extraneous details and focus instead on the story, the newness, the big idea. So if you’ve diluted the essence you haven’t just failed as a science reporter – you’ve failed as a writer.

That said, there are particular tradeoffs that all translators of scientific research must learn to navigate. It’s inevitable, of course, that facts and information are left on the cutting room floor – the audience doesn’t need to know every acronym. The only secret I know – and I’m afraid this is a very banal secret – is to focus on the larger narrative and then pick and choose your details accordingly. My job, in other words, is to find the story and then be true to the story as justified by the facts. But not every fact that makes up the story need to be in the story itself. That doesn’t make the story “dumbed down” – it just makes it a better story.

Of course, these elisions are entirely a matter of judgment, and require experience and good editing (and a good editor!)

The real problem I have with most science writing isn’t mere accuracy – not getting facts wrong really isn’t that hard. The much more difficult challenge is accurately conveying the struggle and toil and thrill and humanity of the scientific process. Nobody likes to read about PCR’s and Western blots and the mechanics of fMRI and all those technical details but I believe that describing the process is essential. Otherwise, all you’ve got is a stripped down set of dry information lacking context. We can’t just summarize the shiny new facts – we also have an obligation to show where those facts came from.

The panellists

Gary Marcus is a Professor of Psychology at New York University and Director of the NYU Infant Language Learning Center. A high-school dropout, Marcus received his PhD at the age of twenty-three from MIT, where he was mentored by Steven Pinker. He was tenured professor by the time he was thirty. The author of The Birth of the Mind and editor of the Norton Psychology Reader, he has been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. His writing has appeared in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, among other American newspapers.

Marcus Chown is an award-winning writer and broadcaster. Formerly a radio astronomer at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, he is currently cosmology consultant of the weekly science magazine New Scientist.

His latest book is We Need to Talk About Kelvin. About Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You, The Times said ‘readers will experience happy eureka moments.’ The Never-Ending Days of Being Dead, was called ‘a limousine among popular science vehicles’ by the Guardian, ‘a masterpiece’ by Astronomy Now, and described as ‘like being at a party … with an almost perfect DJ’ in the Independent. Marcus Chown has also written a work for children, Felicity Frobisher and the Three-Headed Aldebaran Dust Devil.

Jonah Lehrer is editor-at-large for Seed Magazine and a contributing editor at NPR’S Radio Lab. He has written articles for Nature, New Scientist and the MIT Technology Review. He graduated from Columbia University in 2003 with a degree in neuroscience, and spent two years studying 20th Century Literature and Theology at Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship. His first book, Proust was a Neuroscientist was published in the US by Houghton Mifflin in November 2007. He also writes a highly regarded science blog, The Frontal Cortex.

”How do you balance the needs of the story with the historical milieu in which you have chosen to set it – not just in terms of historical events and characters, but issues of period detail such as language and naming?”

Here’s what they said…

Margaret Elphinstone

The story grows directly out of the historical setting, so it’s not really a matter of balancing opposites. Sometimes, as in The Sea Road, the story comes ready-made: my novel is a re-telling of the tenth century Norse woman Gudrid’s story, bringing together the versions of her life found in Greenland Saga and Eirik’s Saga, but also giving Gudrid, in a fictional first person narrative, my own interpretation of her story. I had to be more pro-active with the plots of the other novels, but all of them were worked out in response to a historical situation which interested me.

Fiction allows one to explore characters from the inside; one is imagining all the time what it is like to be them. Of course it’s speculation – the real people from the past are dead; we can only reconstruct their inner worlds from the external evidence that they have left behind them. That’s where the research comes in, and I hope that none of my fictional characters think, say or do anything that a person of that time couldn’t have thought, said or done. As a novelist, not a historian or archaeologist, I’m free to explore the spaces between the evidence – the unrecorded thoughts and dreams of past people – but I think fiction, in its own way, can be just as true to the evidence as any other kind of narrative. The Gathering Night is set in Scotland in 6000 BC, so of course there are no records at all. The spaces between the archaeological evidence are huge, but I’ve done my best to find ways to reconstruct what people did think about, say and do. I did this mainly through ethnographic parallels: looking at recent or contemporary hunter-gatherer cultures and extrapolating from them what our own past hunter-gatherer society might have been like.

Decisions about language and names are important. Naturally I write in C21 English. My Norse characters would have spoken Old Norse; we have no idea what kind of language my Mesolithic characters spoke. I had to find a satisfactory way of naming them, when we have no names. In the end I used Basque names, because Basque is the only extant pre-Indo-European language on the Atlantic seaboard. Of course they didn’t speak basque in Mesolithic Scotland, but that’s as near as I could get. An archaeologist who reviewed The Gathering Night was struck by the fact that of course I had to call my characters something, just as I had to made definite decisions about what they wore, ate, spoke, believed etc. A novelist can’t just say ‘there’s no evidence so I don’t know’. She was kind enough to say that my guess was as good as anyone’s – but that was only because I’d immersed myself in the historical milieu as much as I possibly could.

Andrea Japp: I agree with Margaret. The story grows out of the historical setting and we need to be as accurate as possible with the facts, no matter where the fiction takes us.

Rory Clements: In some ways, it sounds as if The Gathering Night must have offered Margaret a great deal more freedom as a writer than stories set in the past thousand years, where so much is documented. She did not have to worry which parts of the Low Countries were controlled by the Spanish and which by the Dutch in a certain month of a certain year, or when starched ruffs became fashionable and then fell out of fashion. But in other ways I would think her job was much more difficult: she did not have the clues to the daily lives and struggles of her characters that we do in more recent history. In the end, though, she had to do what all historical novelists do: create a world constrained by what we know and imagine to be the lives of our ancestors. Much of this comes, of course, from examining our own thoughts and emotions and realising that Mesolithic man and woman must have worried about feeding and protecting their families every bit as much as 14th century man, 16th century woman or 21st century author. In the history of life and earth, 6,000 years is a very short time.

Rory Clements

My book Martyr is set in 1587. I started from the premise that the late Elizabethans thought of themselves as the most modern people who ever existed – just as we do today.

To convey that up-to-the-minute feeling to the reader, I determined that language, actions and emotions must not seem quaint or old-fashioned. I immediately dispensed with ye, thee, thy, thou and verily. Likewise, no sword fights of the Errol Flynn variety (wheel-lock pistols were the big thing then) and no swooning maidens (English women were noted for being independent-minded and, let’s face it, Queen Elizabeth was no push-over).

Language had to be comprehensible to a 21st century audience without seeming anachronistic. I happily used words like wanton, lewd, bawdy and trugging-house because while they might not be common currency in 2009, most people know them or get the gist. I tended to give metaphors and similies a timeless agricultural tang. My aim, always, was to add flavour and texture without slowing the flow. I used my wife and my editor as sounding-boards. If either of them said something seemed too modern or too difficult, I changed it.

Margaret Elphinstone: Trugging-house is a great word; now I’m waiting for an opportunity to drop it into a conversation. I find the hardest words to get the balance right are to do with swearing or sex. Our taboo words are mostly about sex or excretion. Our ancestors were a lot more robust, and would have used four-letter words literally without the discomfort that we evidently feel – in print, anyway. In my Norse novels I’ve had my characters swear more by deities than body parts, but that can sound awfully stilted. I think I get round it by not having characters swear much at all.

Proverbs and metaphors – especially dead ones – are a minefield. I remember removing ‘not by a long chalk’ from my 1812 novel at the final proof stage. It comes from billiards, and is first recorded in the 1840s. That was a narrow escape…

As to the naming of characters, that was great fun. I found them in churchyards and history books and I tried to make them fit their characteristics and be memorable. Hence Boltfoot Cooper has a deformed left foot and is a cooper by trade.

In using real-life characters, I was careful to keep them as close to the original as possible. I portrayed Drake as a bombastic, bold, devious, money-grubbing hero – because that, as far as I can tell, is what he was.

Balancing the needs of the story with the historical milieu is right at the heart of what I do. Early 1587 was perfect for my purposes. No one knew that February what the reaction would be if/when Mary Queen of Scots lost her head. Would English Catholics rise up? Would Spain invade? It was a time as tense as 1940. It also just happened to be a time when Drake was exceptionally vulnerable, because he was in London fitting out the fleet. However, we already knew that Drake survived to raid Cadiz and fight the Armada, so the main tension in my story had to come from elsewhere. That’s where the invented characters and their storylines came in; they, more than the fate of Drake, should hold the interest. It was a similar scenario to The Day Of The Jackal; we knew de Gaulle survived, so it was the story of the assassin and other characters that intrigued us. Achieving that balance, I would say, is the historical novelist’s craft.

Margaret Elphinstone: This is spot-on. It’s about taking the reader back to what it was like not knowing the future, even though that future is our past. I’ve thought about this in relation to my own parents and family in the Second World War. It wasn’t until I started writing fiction about the past that I realised properly that in 1940 they didn’t know that Hitler wouldn’t invade Britain. They didn’t know the Allies would win. That was when it finally dawned on me how terrifying it must have been. It’s that feeling of not knowing that really takes the reader back into the past.

Andrea Japp: Unlike Rory, I used a lot of words that are now totally forgotten in France, giving their definition in notes that the reader was free to overlook or I used them in their ancient meaning, which is often opposite to the modern one. I had the feeling that the reader would like to know how things were called. Indeed, such was the case for many of them.

Andrea Japp

That’s a difficult question and I’m sure the answers will vary according to the historical periods chosen by the authors.

My answer deals with the fourteenth century, my chosen period. I really don’t think that it is possible to create a historical crime novel without FIRST taking into account the wider context. Authors of contemporary crime novels cannot ignore modern technology, but that is not constricting; on the contrary, technological advances can form the basis of the novel. But with a story set in the Middle Ages the complete absence of technology poses two problems that cannot be ignored. The first is the difficulty of transmitting information. You either used a messenger on horseback or a carrier pigeon, both very slow. The second difficulty is the slowness of medieval transport. These problems mean that the writer must, if they are to maintain a swift and taut narrative, construct a story within a restricted geographical area. An additional consideration is the difference in the way people thought. Although human nature with all its foibles does not evolve in the way that technology does, it is nevertheless difficult to conceive of a story set in the Middle Ages that does not relate in some way to faith and religion both of which were so intertwined with daily life. Even if there were some (cautious) voices raised against religion in the fourteenth century, faith of some sort was universal. It was the linchpin of society and of politics and so cannot be ignored.

Margaret Elphinstone: I’m very interested in what you say about religion and magic. The characters in The Gathering Night have a shamanistic spirituality which I’ve borrowed from accounts of shamanistic practice in hunter-gatherer societies ranging from South America to Siberia, from Greenland to the Kalahari. It’s amazing how similar some of the ideas are in widely dispersed societies. I had to think my way into a very different view of things – as close as I could get, given my own C21 post-industrial background. But I find I have to try to think as if I were one of my characters, and then I can follow where they take me. My Norse Viking novels are about people inhabiting a borderland between pagan and Christian religions. I’m very drawn to those kinds of borderlands. I get very involved, and find myself starting to think in ways that surprise me.

I also relate to what you say about slow journeys, slow communication. It’s hard to communicate that and yet hold the attention of readers from a much speedier world. One of the reasons I like Victorian novels is that there seems to be so much time to explore everything. As a reader you can dwell in that world a long time. But I can see that slow crime must be harder to sell than slow food.

Modern crime novels often rely on medical facts and the intricacies of the law, but neither of these is much use to the writer of thrillers set in the Middle Ages. Medicine was in its infancy in the fourteenth century and for religious reasons there were practically never autopsies (except in the case of suicides or for those condemned to death). On the other hand magic and the supernatural do have to be alluded to – they were an integral part of medieval society. Because our scientific knowledge has made us sceptical about such things, they have to be introduced to the story in a way that’s plausible and not ridiculous to today’s reader, and that is not easy to do. This is partly why I always create a ‘pseudo-scientific’ character (usually an apothecary or a doctor) who is able to put the innumerable superstitions of the era into perspective and who acts as a sort of intermediary between us and the Middle Ages.

My contention is therefore that the writer’s inventiveness is more restricted when creating an historical thriller than a contemporary one, but that if the writer embraces this, it can actually increase the pleasure of writing. The writer must accept the challenge of producing an intriguing, fascinating and diverting mystery, whilst working within the constraints and difficulties the period imposes.

I feel that the writer owes a duty of care to the reader to make sure that the historical detail is accurate, even though the story itself is completely invented. That poses another difficulty and demands rigorous research.

Margaret Elphinstone: I totally agree about the duty of care. Today, more and more people learn their history through fiction. It’s a big responsibility for the fiction writer; when I learned history at school, rightly or wrongly, reading historical fiction was regarded as light relief. Now I’m aware that for many readers my interpretation may be their first or only introduction to the period. Since I wrote The Gathering Night in particular, I’ve been astonished to find how little idea readers have of their prehistoric past. I owe it to readers to be as accurate as possible.

As for the question of language, fourteenth century medieval French is hard to understand. It is like another language altogether and is hard to translate without a good working knowledge of Latin. There were also significant regional variations with the ‘langue d’Oc’ being used in the south and the ‘langue d’Oy’ in the north, and of course there were many different local patois. So the language I use is invented and is closer to the French spoken at the end of the Renaissance than in the Middle Ages. It’s a language using a syntax, which is often the inverse of modern French syntax, and is sprinkled with words of the period, which I explained in the notes to the French editions of my books. The meaning of certain words has evolved out of all recognition since the era. So for example ‘coquin’ which is now used to describe a mischievous child was in those days a serious insult meaning a thug or a coward. ‘Manant’, merely meaning someone who lived on a manor in the fourteenth century, went the other way and became an insult meaning someone uncouth. Others words, mainly for objects now not used, have been lost and I have had to search for them. It has been an exhilarating search.

Rory Clements: I faced exactly the same problems as Andrea and I am delighted to see that she used similar methods to solve them. She says she ‘invented’ a language and I agree, there is no other way. A historical novel is, by its very nature, an anachronism. If you wrote in early 14th century French or late 16th century English, your reader would struggle to get past the first paragraph. By the same token, if you wrote purely in the language of the 21st century, you would lose the joy of time-travelling to another century. Andrea also brought up the problem of the slowness of communication and I agree that this is a constant struggle for the historical novelist. Her solution is to restrict the area of the narrative. I do that up to a point, but I also compress time and distance, a trick of film-makers down the ages which, I think, is acceptable so long as it is done with care.

The science is another matter and I would not want to take issue with someone I know to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of forensics, but I do believe we sometimes underestimate our forebears. My feeling is that they would have been as keen to get to the truth of a crime as our modern forensic scientists. I am sure that experience and common sense observation – of the sort used by Sherlock Holmes – would have been put to good use and that a searcher of the dead who had seen hundreds of bodies would very quickly have spotted the wound or signs of poisoning that the murderer wished to keep hidden.

The panellists

Rory Clements is a former national newspaper journalist. He now writes full-time in Norfolk, England. Martyr is his first novel (you can read an extract on Bookhugger), and his second, Revenger, following the adventures of John Shakespeare, will be published by John Murray in 2010.

Margaret Elphinstone is the author of nine novels, including The Incomer (1987), A Sparrow’s Flight (1989), Islanders (1994), The Sea Road (2000), Hy Brasil (2002), Voyageurs (2003), Gato (2005), Light (2006) and The Gathering Night (published by Canongate in 2009). She has also had published short stories, poetry and two books on organic gardening. She is an Emeritus Professor in the Department of English Studies at the University of Strathclyde and lives in Galloway. Photo: Billy Ridges

Andrea Japp is one of the grandes dames of French crime writing with over twenty novels published. She is a forensic scientist by profession and weaves this knowledge into her books, giving them particular authenticity. She is the author of The Season of the Beast, The Breath of the Rose, and The Divine Blood (read an extract), published in English by Gallic Books.

When recreating actual events through interviews – how difficult is it to stop your imagination running riot and what techniques do you employ to prevent this?

More information about the panellists

Ian Thomson

I interviewed more than 300 people for my penultimate book, a biography of the Italian writer and chemist Primo Levi. What for? I was determined to construct a life of Levi not found in his books. It seemed to me dishonest, as well as dangerous, merely to recast his printed words in a biography. (Levi contrived some elaborate autobiographical fictions.) So I set out to interview as many people as possible; under no circumstances would I take Levi’s own words as writ.

My ambition, in fact, was to chronicle Levi’s life and work through interviews. I used a tape-recorder, as it seemed important to keep a record, though that would later involve hours of weary-making transcribing. I began to worry that the mere act of translating (usually from the Italian) might distort the sense of what was intended by the interviewee, so I developed a scruple (probably an over-zealous one) for accuracy in the transcribing. Early on, I decided not to include any description of my interviewees in the biography, but to let their words speak on the page unadorned. That way I hoped to attain a degree of documentary verismo, and keep a lid on any imaginative tendencies.

(I still have two carrier bagsful of C-60 and C-90 micro-cassettes: an entire life – Primo Levi’s – is contained in them.)

Daniel Kalder: That is a monumental number of interviews and I shudder to think what the transcription process must have been like. Did you start bleeding from your ears and eyes? I admire your dedication and thoroughness, however. I met a Polish journalist once who told me that he had a two tier system of interviews. If he was talking to an ordinary schmuck, he just made quick notes freehand; only if he was talking to someone important ‘like the president’ would he crack out the tape recorder.

I also like the idea of carrying another man’s life around in a carrier bag, although I prefer a shoebox.

John Geiger: This is admirable. As someone who has written biography, Nothing Is True Everything Is Permitted: The Life of Brion Gysin, I realized as Ian obviously did with his Levi book the necessity of interviewing people who knew Gysin and not to rely on his own accounts. Gysin, an artist and hipster, was also a self-described mythomaniac and storyteller, so everything had to be tested with people who knew him. Interviews are critical in such a work, and I really admire Ian’s exhaustive efforts. In the case of my new book, The Third Man Factor, an account of an unseen “Third Man” who intervenes to save people in life and death struggles, I also interviewed as many people as possible, those who had the experience. So while it is a book about an idea, notably that there is a mysterious force for survival in apparently impossible situations. But in a sense, also, The Third Man Factor is a biography of the Third Man, the central character of the book and the source of the mystery.

My most recent book, The Dead Yard: Tales of Modern Jamaica, was a very different sort of animal. This time I gave lengthy (I hope, vivid) descriptions of some of my interviewees, and allowed for a degree of license in the descriptions. There is always a special risk when putting real-life people into books, however, and not all those whom I interviewed for The Dead Yard appreciated what they clearly saw as a transformation. But, at the risk of sounding pretentious, each of us is three different persons: the person we really are, the person we believe we are, and the person other people see us as. How to reconcile all there strands a description? Complaints about fictional distortions and misrepresentations are an inevitable part of the whole process of transposing life and literature, I should say, not least because the process is so subjective.

As for the techniques I used to avoid fictional distortions, none springs to mind in particular, though I tried at all times to be alert to the dangers of caricature (not always easy, as many of my interviewees were larger than life.) The truth is, most writers – of both fiction and non-fiction – make life more interesting than it is, by telescoping, selecting and transmuting the facts into something approaching semi-fiction. As the Italian proverb has it: “The tale is not beautiful if nothing is added to it.”

Daniel Kalder: No doubt about that last point although it would be interesting to come up with a list of authors who magically transmute gold into lead, by taking fascinating events and making them dull. Obviously none of us is in that number (ahem), but I encountered a lot of such books while I was at university. For example anyone who writes about WB Yeats but neglects to highlight his occultism and love of self-injection with monkey glands is guilty of the crime of dullification; politicians turned self-censoring memoirists likewise. I think a snobbery factor can sometimes intervene when historians stumble upon lurid material which they find embarrassing or incomprehensible – thus biographers of Isaac Newton often gloss over his overpowering obsession with the apocalypse, although that is one of the most interesting things about him – the existence of a mythical, religious frame of mind in the head of a man feted as a scientific genius of the enlightenment, etc. Authors who render their subject dull are unreliable in a different way, and their motives far more suspect.

The Dead Yard is not “the” truth; it’s only as I saw it.

Daniel Kalder

I first faced this problem while writing my book Lost Cosmonaut. During the research phase I had visited a republic in Russia called Mari El which is home to an ethnic group called the Mari. About 30% of the Mari never converted to Christianity and still follow their ancient, traditional religion which revolves around numerous gods, regular animal sacrifice, appeasing evil nature spirits and various rituals carried out in sacred groves. This makes them more or less the last true pagans in Europe, much more interesting than the various bearded men and ladies who have cooked up their own wishy-washy brand of pseudo-paganism since the 1960s.

Anyway, before going out there I had planned to reconstruct in graphic and haunting detail the sacrifice of a horse, which was carried out by the Mari every five years or so in order to regenerate the world. As the dead animals mediate between men and the gods, the degree of their suffering during sacrifice is directly related to the degree of pain humanity is feeling at the time. In Russia, this is usually quite a lot. As I was arriving out of season I figured I’d conduct interviews with priests and witnesses about the most recent horse sacrifice and then pull together an evocative reconstruction that would horrify and yet fascinate the reader, while totally up-ending the fashionable, warm and fuzzy ‘noble savage’ view some people have regarding the nature of pre-Christian religions in Europe and elsewhere.

Then I met the Chief Druid, only to discover that he was a totally eccentric not to mention hilarious character, sometimes very open, only to suddenly turn very, very cagey- and he was a total egomaniac to boot. Although he spoke for hours I quickly realised that it would be totally impossible to come up with anything even faintly resembling what I had planned. The reality of the human personality and the flaws of memory and perspective had intervened. The solution came to me quite quickly however- rather than try to reconstruct past events from an imaginary ‘objective’ point of view, I would simply use his words, juxtaposed with my own experiences in his company, and data I had culled from other interviews and ethnographic studies to give a much more partial and subjective view of what happened at Mari rites. The result would be fragmentary, ambiguous and contradictory version of reality. I set these fragmentary mini chapters alongside each other, allowing different tones and viewpoints to collide. That’s generally how I construct my books – as a collage of alternating perspectives and styles, some of them clashing with mine.

John Geiger: This can be a very effective, even brave, approach. I admire the confidence of a writer who uses such techniques. Although as a reader, I confess that I like to be led around by the nose to a certain extent. I like to know what the writer thinks, not to the point where dissenting views are ruthlessly suppressed, or facts distorted, but I do tend to look for direction. This is what news reporters do every day. They collect various, often conflicting statements, but the key is in the “selecting”, as Ian calls it.

That was pretty much my epiphany when it comes to reconstructions, and I used the technique again in my book Strange Telescopes, which depicts encounters with lots of Ukrainian exorcists and the followers of a Siberian Messiah, as well as a meeting with the Messiah himself. Here what I had discovered in Mari El was reinforced a thousand times. As the subjects of the book were living in worlds filled with demons, or occupied by the living Son of God the only way to get close to the world as they experienced it was to report it through their own words. And so once again I cleaved religiously to the principle of only using edited versions of our conversations to evoke all past events in the book. However I didn’t just let them blather on. As I use the collage approach I am able to set one account alongside another contradictory vision, or interject my own thoughts, or maybe insert something apparently unrelated – and it’s in the tension between all these contrasting perspectives that the meaning arises.

I’m not advocating this approach for everybody of course, but it fits my view of the world – as a random, disjointed and chaotic place, where multiple versions of reality vie with one another for dominance, or simply to be heard. I freely admit that as the organising mind I have more say than anyone else in the book, but even so I do my best to let everyone have their chance to get their viewpoint across. From out of the apparent cacophony and discordance, a strange symphony of voices and visions emerges.

John Geiger

Recreating real events is an activity that is fraught for writers at the best of times. But when the real events involve interaction with incorporeal beings then the danger is greatly increased. The subject matter is sufficiently incredible. To allow imagination to run riot would cast serious doubt on it. If there is a topic less in need of dramatic license, then, it is appearances by the Third Man, a benevolent companion who aids survival. Invariably the people I interviewed had overcome harrowing ordeals, often of the life-and death variety. As one reviewer wrote, with evident distaste: “Pus shoots from an infected foot like a fountain when a mountaineer saws off his boot on Kilimanjaro; the skin of a Finnish deserter from the French Foreign Legion sheds in the manner of a lizard as he desiccates on a raft in the Indian Ocean; and an American trekker cuts off his trapped arm with a Swiss Army knife.” In other words, I did not need to make them empathetic by kind-to-small-animal-type devices. It’s not hard to develop empathy for people in such situations. We all feel for people in peril, and most of us are pulling for them to get through it.

Daniel Kalder: I think you’re right about empathy for people in peril. It would be interesting to conduct an experiment in which the hero of a book in such extreme situations was a Nazi or serial rapist. Would readers find themselves developing sympathy for such lowlifes, even against their better judgement? That would be an intriguing aesthetic and ethical dilemma.

My job, then, was to go where the action was, to tell their stories accurately, and with as few adjectives as possible. I did not need to pretend to read their minds, because the Third Man seems very much to reside there anyway. Besides, I remember something that a writer I knew, William S. Burroughs, told me. He said, “you can’t write a best-seller with your tongue in your cheek.” I took that to mean readers will very quickly see through you. It’s enough that they can see through the book’s protagonist.

The panellists

Ian Thomson – ‘a chronicler of formidable power’ (Guardian) – is the author of Bonjour Blanc, an acclaimed book about Haiti, and of Primo Levi (‘one of the best literary biographies of the year’, Observer). He lives in London with his wife and children.

Daniel Kalder was born in Dunfermline and currently lives in Texas. His first book, Lost Cosmonaut, was published in 2006. His most recent work is Strange Telescopes, published by Faber in 2008.

John Grigsby Geiger was born in Ithaca, New York, and graduated in history from the University of Alberta. The author of four books of non-fiction, his work has been translated into nine languages. He is Editorial Board Editor at The Globe and Mail, and was 2004-05 St. Clair Balfour Fellow at Massey College, University of Toronto. He is a Governor of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society and Chairman of the Society’s Expeditions Committee, and a Member of the Advisory Board of Wings Worldquest.

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.