The Crime Novel As Literature
If you want to know yourself, read a good mystery.
In the hierarchy of great literature, crime novels rate slightly above washing machine manuals but below the throwaway inserts that come with over-the-counter cold medicine.
For snobbery in action, you can’t go wrong with a group of New York Review of Books readers dissing the latest police procedural to hit the USA bestseller list.
Exceptions, of course, for Walter Mosley, who rose to fame after Bill Clinton exited Air Force One with a copy of an Easy Rawlins’ mystery tucked under his arm. But then…Walter Mosley.
Saying Walter Mosley is a crime writer is like saying Julia Childs writes recipes.
I write recipes.
Julia Childs changed the way we look at food.
In tribute, they installed her kitchen in the Smithsonian.
If Walter Mosley doesn’t get the Nobel Prize for literature one day, then…but stop me before I go on a rant about writers not getting their due because this is a rant about Mark Billingham.
A writer who shows us who we are, killer and victim, with all the insight, compassion, and humor of a Mother Theresa cum stand-up comedian using the device called a crime story.
First, let’s define some terms. I’m using crime story as a catch-all for a corner of the publishing market that defines genres as precisely as a diamond cutter sections a lump of hardened carbon into priceless gems.
You have your thrillers — the psychological, political, supernatural (a favorite of mine, forgive the plug), terrorist — both domestic, international. The stalkers and seekers of revenge stories.
And then police procedurals, FBI procedurals, flat out murder mysteries, such as romantic suspense, cozy mysteries, and on and on, very precise genres with code on the covers in terms of font and images, so readers don’t have to waste time searching through the virtual or actual stacks for their favorite flavor of escapism.
The world of crime writing is deftly controlled by formulas that give readers what they demand. Throw too much romance in your police procedural, and you’ll lose your shirt.
Fortunes are made by following the age-old marketing adage: give ’em what they want. For the typical crime story, it’s a protagonist with a scandal or two in his or her backstory who likes to spit on authority figures, has a soft spot for the down and out, but always gets their serial killer in the end.
Oh, and a writer who knows the devil is in the details, so the caliber of the bullet is always the one that would shatter a skull at close range but veers off target at fifty feet.
Many crime writers fit the bill. William Heffernan and his Dead Detective series come to mind. Ultimately forgettable, but let’s hear it for a good, well-written murder mystery that provides a leap into a world where we can forget our own messy lives for an hour or two, and who cares if the words on the page don’t ring out like lines of poetry.
Occasionally, though, a writer comes along who gives us what he or she wants. If we’re lucky, it’s a look into our own souls. Some of the best mysteries I’ve read contain characters pushed to the edge, so carefully detailed it’s as if they’re sitting in our living room, clutching a drink for dear life, pouring out their hearts to us because no one else will listen.
Showing us how like us they really are despite their drastic, hideous, unbelievable circumstances. Often, the folks that get under our skin aren’t even the killers but ordinary people drawn into a web of conflict just by the occasion of their messy lives.
Billingham, author of the Tom Thorne detective series, claims this territory as his own.
I picked up his first novel, Sleepyhead, on a random stroll through the SFPL in the early days of my library stalking. My little apartment couldn’t take one more book purchase, or the floor next to my bed would break through to the apartment downstairs (one way to get him to turn his music down at 2 am, though, right?).
At the time, I was used to running through my fave bookstore and scooping up as many 2-for-1s on the sale table as I could carry on my way to the info desk to ask for the current title recommended by the New York Review of Books (ask me how I know about book snobs).
But after I became a true believer, flashing my library card two or three times a week, I enjoyed impulse borrows such as Sleepyhead because…who knows why?
I didn’t know the author, but I read it from cover-to-cover one weekend when I should have been doing the weekend things a 9–5er normally does. Cleaning, laundry, fixing lunches for the week.
Instead, I inhaled that book, which by then had been out for a few years.
Upon returning it to the library, I proceeded to search for everything Billingham had written, smitten not only with Thorne, who ticked all the boxes of an alienated but lovable (to readers) detective, but how could I not howl at the moon over his best friend, Phil?
What’s not to love about a gay medical examiner with more metal studs on his body than US Steel, who routinely cries about his dysfunctional sex life into the mutilated corpses he evaluates on the scene with Thorne?
Every crime writer needs a trope, a quirk that identifies his main character. Was Phil’s sexuality a risky choice for Bellingham back in the oughts when he devised his series?
It’s not what sets him apart for me, perhaps because he makes the gay/straight bromance so natural. Because their sexuality, different in the most basic way, is never an issue, never even needs a conversation to call attention to itself.
It’s the way Billingham uses it to highlight their relationship and their humanity that breaks my heart in pieces.
Here’s the two of them somewhere near the beginning of a typical Thorne book. Forgive me for the fictional recreation, but it’s close to what can happen in a Thorne book, Phil bemoaning the guy he picked up last night in a gay bar who only wanted kinky sex, which Phil was down with, but then the bloke ran off with his credit card and spare key.
“Again, Phil?” Thorne might say, pulling on his latex gloves and stepping carefully to avoid contaminating the crime scene. “You promised me after the last time, you wouldn’t invite anyone home until after the third date. Oh, right. You never get to the third date.”
He scoffs and then points to the corpse bound with clothesline and hanging upside down in the kitchen, or bedroom, or wherever. “Listen, mate (Billingham is a Brit), before you take off to meet the locksmith, can you tell me if the killer lopped off this bloke’s hands and feet before or after he killed him?”
Phil packs up his kit, still on the verge of tears, and points to the disgusting, messy scene. “If you’d stop listening to that country music crap and pay attention to what I taught you about blood spatter, you’d know you’ve got a freak on your hands. Before. Definitely before.”
“Yeah,” Thorne says, “but if you’d listen to Hank Williams instead of that electronic garbage that’s gonna rot your brain, you’d know you always go to his place until you’re sure he’s a keeper.”
And then Phil leaves with Thorne calling out behind him, “Curry at mine tonight?”
“I pick the music, though,” Phil says.
End of scene, or an approximation of hundreds like it.
I’ve now read all the Tom Thorne books and many of the standalones. Billingham is the only author for whom I will search through the internet every three years to see if he’s put out another book yet.
Call me addicted; I don’t care. But it wasn’t until I started his most recent, Cry Baby, that I realized what made his books stand apart as literature and not just crime writing.
The above sample of a typical interaction between besties Phil and Tom is a perfect example. Billingham shows us in Phil a character much like ourselves. We may not be a gay man, a medical doctor, or wear twenty pounds of metal inserted into our skin to lure likely love interests at the local pickup joint, but if you don’t see yourself in this sweet, funny fallible guy, it’s because you’re not looking.
I mean, have you never showed up for work needing to be at the top of your game but so crushed with heartache and disappointment you could barely breathe?
When was the last time you made the same stupid mistake for the 57th time, after telling yourself: never again?
Haven’t you ever made the same stupid mistake for the 57th time because something inside of you just needs in that moment affection, caring, love, and yes, sometimes hot sex more than you even need air?
How often have you screwed up royally and considered yourself unfit for human contact only to have your best friend, who can piss you off like nobody else, rescued you from the edge with an invite for take out and bad TV after work because he can’t even remember what stupid mistake you’d made for the 57th time?
It doesn’t matter whether you’ve analyzed Billingham’s books and written a master’s dissertation on why he bears comparison with Anton Chekhov as a diagnostician of the ills of the human heart.
You just have to read the mysteries and sort through the clues as Thorne does, as he dispenses with the red herrings and closes in on the only inevitable character of many intriguing ones who could have done the dirty deed.
Along the way, Billingham, through the sensibility of the aptly-named Thorne, will school you on relationships, the smooth and rocky and those both successful and riddled with enough dysfunction to educate the issue of many therapists to know you’re in the hands of a writer with rare skill, the ability to educate, entertain, and elevate your emotional intelligence.
You’ll soak it up, whether you’re aware Thorne is making you think or not.
Take, Cry Baby, the prequel I’m reading now. We’re in the early days of Thorne’s career. I can’t tell if he’s met Phil yet, and he hasn’t honed the wit that will stand him in good stead in future books, for example, when colleague Bridgstocke actually becomes his boss, and Tom becomes a “thorn” in his side.
But in the first chapter, we meet two women whose close friendship is shattered when the son of one is kidnapped, apparently through the neglect of the other.
The observations Thorne makes about friendship after his first interview with the angry, terrified mother of the lost boy belong in a therapy handbook, so acutely drawn is the fraught line we cross when we trust the care of our most beloved possession to another.
There’s no doubt that Thorne is about the business of finding the perp. If you read mysteries, you know not to take seriously Russell’s insistence that the heroin-addicted neighbor with a prior sex conviction nabbed the kid. A nice digression, but it’s much too early in the book to resolve the crime.
But let’s take a look at the suspect.
If you’re an upstanding member of your community with no substance abuse issues who’s never laid a hand on any human being without consent, nor has any consenting human ever been underage, you may wonder why you’re relating to a member of a marginalized group.
I have the answer to that one. And not because I think you’re a closet perv. Far from it.
If, however, you put yourself this guy’s ratty sweat pants and smelly fuzzy slippers as he’s hauled off to the slammer for kidnapping and worse, you just might hear yourself in his plea.
This story takes place in the 1960s, light years away from the photogenic Mayor Pete when the public had nothing but scorn for homosexuals and their “needs.” Faced with the ignominy of his past indiscretions, he answers the interrogator who asked why, in a voice dripping with judgment, he approached a young boy in a public toilet.
His response doesn’t make for easy reading, his deliberate set up by an adolescent who appeared older than his years, in fact, old enough for consent.
But when the suspect describes the only way to get what he needed, a moment of human connection in a tawdry setting, Billingham lays it out so we can see this wretch as the common man. He’s not a pedophile, it will turn out, but more than that, he’s someone caught in a moment of need, but like so many of us in such moments, forced to do without.
The worker without the raise in minimum hourly pay.
The student without a passing score on a test.
The high school senior without a date for the prom.
The married couple without viable embryos.
The single mother without the rent.
Unlike typical crime stories who use the downtrodden as placeholders or fillers in their march to the denouement, you dismiss the secondary characters in Billingham’s books at your peril. They are ones who are often a reflection of ourselves, or the moments of raw humanity, even when it’s hard to see the likeness in the mirror.
And if we don’t, can’t, or won’t see ourselves in these stories, Billingham still makes it hard not to see the humanity in those caught in fate’s bear traps. The homeless. The addicted. The mentally ill.
Billingham isn’t the only writer who raises crime writing to an art. There’s Mosley, of course, using Easy Rawlins and his band of troublemakers to raise awareness of racism and to show that a black PI from the projects can discuss Dante and Catcher in the Rye with the same ease as the dudes who get featured in The New York Review of Books.
And let’s not forget John LeCarre, or Ursula LeGuin, who did it with science fiction. Billingham, I think, though, is a little deceptive or maybe subversive because he doesn’t stand on soapboxes to call out social evils or moments of common grief.
He just shows who we are, who we aren’t, who we try to be in a world we didn’t invent and, in many cases, didn’t ask to inhabit.
And if that isn’t the province of literature, then I’ve been reading wrong this last half-century. Or the snobs who read rags like The New York Review have.
Because to my mind, just like the big dogs in literature, writers who use plain talk and simple folk can show us who we are, what life is all about, as well as anyone else.