The Case for Crime: Dan Anthony
According to W, H, Auden crime fiction is a guilty pleasure, an addictive form of storytelling which, whilst it can be enjoyable, doesn’t go anywhere. Auden wrote that ‘the reading of detective stories is an addiction like tobacco or alcohol.’ It makes us feel good, but only when we’re consuming it. Stop reading and the gulf between the uncertainty of the real world and the fictitious version of truth and justice on offer starts to widen. Auden said that: ‘the story must conform to certain formulas’. Joking that he ‘found it very difficult, for example, to read one that is not set in rural England.’ [i]It should present the reader with an alternative reality, one in which right, wrong and reasonableness always triumph.
Of course, Auden was wrong; everybody always is when they try to generalise about fiction. We’ve just lost a great exponent of cutting-edge crime fiction who signally failed to confirm any template. Trying to answer the question: ‘Who killed Laura Palmer?’ led us into David Lynch’s Twin Peaks and a televisual exploration of strangeness and the human condition that made us feel uneasy. As Steve McQueen said in a radio interview after Lynch’s passing – Lynch homed in on the psychological trauma of the USA. We tended to hit the booze and the tobacco as a result of his work.
For me, I’ve a soft spot for the works of Cardiff’s very own Chandleresque hardboiled merchant, Bill James, or Jim Tucker as he was known when he wasn’t undercover. His Harpur and Isles stories appear to be coated in a sheen of 1970s cynicism from a hooligan’s spray can. The 35 novels weren’t about moral certainty, quite the opposite. The cops weren’t admirable, and the robbers seemed to be less hypocritical and conflicted than the great and the good.
Bill James’ detective fiction is interesting to me because I know where his stories were set, and therefore what they were about. Although James never said so, they weren’t about Auden’s ‘rural England’. The location of James’ Harpur and Isles stories was never referred to in the books, although you can find the unusually spelt and, no doubt inspirational, Harpur Street just next to Cardiff Station. It’s now part of an isolated clutch of terraced streets on the way down to Cardiff Docks, the secret source of inspiration for the stories. Characters like Panicking Ralph are straight out of the public bar of the Admiral Napier, a Cardiff pub where James often went fishing for phrases. The suburbs of James’ nameless town, full of morally ambiguous characters on the make, were inspired by the rurban fringes of the Welsh Capital. Bill James’ series is essentially an homage to Grangetown, the place where Jim Tucker grew up. Although he never said so – I guess that was his joke. Nothing, for Jim, was ever like it seemed: that’s what he wrote about.
It’s quite possible to enjoy Harpur and Isles stories without ever connecting with Cardiff, indeed that’s how their author wanted it. I once asked Jim what was the secret to writing great detective fiction? ‘Plot,’ he said. ‘It’s got nothing to do with place. I can’t stand all these writers who can’t do plot.’ Jim used to teach at Cardiff University, so I believed him. Now that I teach in the same subject in a different university, I’m not so sure. Because the sense that behind the net curtains some other truth lurks is very Tuckery, very Cardiffian, very bi-lingual, very unplottable.
I tried to explore this idea in my own crime novel The Pumpkin Season. Like Jim, I set my story in an unnamed town. In this case it was situated in what we used to call the Eastern Bloc, just after the fall of the Soviet Union. Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, was my secret setting for a story about a crime set in the peripheral reaches of the government of a small, provincial European country. Ljubljana was the stage – but the inspiration came from Cardiff, where, if you know where to look, you can find the great hanging onto the good with their fingernails until, eventually, they let go.
The character of a place is very important. Without knowing that I could find most of the locations for Bill James’ fiction within a mile or two of the Coal Exchange in Cardiff, I wouldn’t read them, as I do, with the cadence of a Cardiff accent in my mind. Unlike Auden, I enjoy the middles of crime stories – rarely their resolutions. Like Jim, I see crime fiction as inherently entertaining, possibly even funny. And like the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, whose crime fiction short story Death and the Compass I share with our students at UWE, I find our fundamental problem – that we can’t deal with the tragicomic nature of existence – a scenario worthy of investigation.
[i] Auden, W.H. (1948) The Guilty Vicarage Notes on the detective story, by an addict, Harper’s Magazine May 1948
Crime Cymru 