This week Crime Cymru’s Rhys Dylan explains the appeal of UK Crime Fiction and how Welsh Crime Fiction now plays such a part
I write Wales based British crime fiction.
Whereas the latter is a well-established niche, the former is less so. For years, writers were told that we needed to base our fiction in the big city centres where people lived cheek by jowl with the whole spectrum of lifestyles, cultures, earnings and the like. To allow the characters to rub up against as diverse a group of other characters as possible. But I find it fascinating that, though my work is confined to a part of one of the smallest countries (Wales), the books sell as much across the rest of the world as they do in the UK.
So, what is it that makes a Welsh crime book attractive to readers in the United States, where they are used to a grittier kind of fiction? Fiction where the gun is so often fetishized as the ultimate dispenser of justice. The absence, with a very few exceptions, of firearms in mainstream UK fiction might be one of the factors. It is a stark comparison in real life, too. In 2021, 35 homicides were committed by shooting in the United Kingdom. 11% female, 89% male. In the USA, gun related homicides ran at 21000, and suicides were up at 26000.
The idea that law can be enforced in the absence of a deterrent like a gun carries a certain fascination for those who are faced with the real prospect of coming up against such a weapon. Not that UK police officers go completely unarmed. There’s PAVA spray and batons and of course armed response when needed. And let’s not forget the dogs. But the gun, or rather its absence, means that British police officers must employ a more nuanced approach. Some might argue a more careful approach.
My protagonist is a male senior police officer, and a Welsh speaker. Unfashionable perhaps in the clamour for diversity that is modern literature, but, telling it like it is. And, like a lot of senior people, he’s been around the block. He’s worked in urban areas and, in terms of crime, though parts of Dyfed Powys—the Force I write about—has huge swathes of sparsely occupied territory to police, it also has more populated towns which score poorly in terms of violent crime when compared to the rest of the UK.
A spread-out melting pot in other words. Excuse the oxymoron.
Police officers, by their very nature, have cultural skin in the game. And though an author can’t help but inject some of their own sensibilities, it’s the protagonist’s that remains under scrutiny as the story progresses.
By their nature, procedural thrillers depend upon enticing the reader into the vicarious helter-skelter ride that is a crime investigation and the police’s attempt at solving it. Books must offer up that pact, the contract between the reader and the protagonist(s). A strange bargain indeed, because said protagonist is a fictional creation, imbued, hopefully with some kind of code, but still imaginary. The only real people involved in this transaction are the reader and the author, but the heavy lifting lies with the protagonist. His(her) job is to offer the reader some kind of gratification, or consolation for what they must live with in the real world. The frustrations of seeing injustices and crimes committed in the media and at almost every turn. A DCI in the Dyfed Powys Force must be a man of the people to carry out and deal with the immorality that the rest of us see on our screens or on the radio, even on the streets, almost daily. Most people, a majority that encompasses my readers, are good people. But they are good people who cannot get involved even when they see the wrongs that are being done around them. Crime novels plug into these frustrations. Add to that a man who seems to know right from wrong and there’s already chemistry. It is not a difficult equation.
But the trick is to invite the reader in and make them not want to leave. Basically, it’s a sheriff and his posse trying to round up the outlaws. Who knew I could transpose all that to 21st century Carmarthenshire? There’s a joke there about there being enough cowboys around to start a stampede. The point is that we all yearn for redress in this world and I hope that DCI Warlow fits the bill.
The most recent novel, #8, released in June, and entitled A Body Of Water, centres the action around the dam at Llyn Brianne, the old stomping ground of Twm Siôn Cati. Another thief with a moral code, or so we’re supposed to believe. But we don’t have a YouTube of TSC to fall back on.
Only legend.
And that, too, lends itself to what might make UK crime books attractive. We have history, and language, that goes back a long, long way. And a landscape inextricably tied up with that history. There is no escaping it.
Some people find that enticing.
Long may that continue.
You can read more about Rhys Dylan here
Crime Cymru 