Violence is crime fiction's raison d'être. Other fiction may include scenes of violence and death. Mainstream novelists from Dickens to Martin Amis may write about murder. But only crime fiction depends for its very existence, in 999 cases out of 1,000, on the presence of violence in the narrative. (Try coming up with a list of five crime novels where the crime is not one of violence. It's not easy.) The ways in which different writers treat the violence, of course, are as various as the writers. Any genre which can claim to have both Ellis Peters and James Ellroy in its ranks is, as the Labour Party still occasionally claims to be, a Broad Church. Yet, is any of the violence so routinely portrayed in crime fiction 'realistic' in any meaningful sense? Critics of the genre have assumed so and have done so for decades. They have criticised crime writers for it. Which novel was described as 'steeped in cruelty and sexual perversion' and chastised for taking for granted 'the most complete corruption and self-seeking as the norm of human behaviour'? Some 1990s tale of serial killing and murderous mutilation? No, the quotes are from an essay by George Orwell and he was describing James Hadley Chase's No Orchids for Miss Blandish, first published sixty-four years ago and now no more than a quaint period piece. Critics who have lambasted crime fiction for its violence - most of them far less insightful than Orwell - miss the point. The violence in crime fiction, I would argue, is always stylised. Even when the writer makes claims to 'realism'. Violence is ever present in crime fiction, from the origins of the genre to the present day, but it is never 'realistic'. It is always shaped by the demands of plot and narrative. The classic crime stories of Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham and others, as well as the fiction of contemporary writers working in their tradition, are routinely described as 'cosy'. Well, it's not such a cosy world for the characters in these novels. Violent death stalks the pages of 'English village' crime fiction as relentlessly as it does those of the most noirish American thriller. The murder rate in Miss Marple's St Mary Mead outstrips that of the most deprived and depraved precincts of New York or Chicago. No theatre production, in a novel by Ngaio Marsh, is destined to end its run without half the cast done to death. Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane can't even go on honeymoon without stumbling across a body in the cellar. Or take, as an example, one of the lesser-known writers of the period. Gladys Mitchell - 'the great Gladys', as one fan, Philip Larkin, called her - was one of the most interesting and original writers of the classic English crime novel. Between 1929 and her death in 1983 she wrote more than sixty novels featuring her central character Dame Beatrice L'Estrange Bradley. In many ways these are prime instances of 'English village' fiction, peopled by eccentric characters and pervaded by fantasy ideas of an England that never really existed. But look at the outlandish acts of violence that shatter the comfortable world Mitchell creates. In Come Away, Death a severed head is found in a box of snakes. In Printer's Error assorted body parts - ears, a hand, an arm - keep turning up at a respectable printing firm. A cellar beneath an apparently charming country inn holds five mysterious skeletons in A Hearse on May-Day. Throughout Mitchell's work strange forces and atavistic violence threaten apparently stable communities. The violence, of course, as in the works of her peers, is mannered and stylised. No one, least of all Gladys Mitchell, would ever have claimed the books were documentary realism.
It was this stylisation which so much annoyed Raymond Chandler who famously wrote of Dashiell Hammett that he "gave murder back to the kind of people who do it for a reason, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not with handwrought duelling pistols, curare and tropical fish". The assumption behind Chandler's remark is that Hammett (and Chandler himself) had pushed aside the silly trappings of traditional crime fiction and introduced a new, ruthless realism to the genre. Violence was no longer to be bizarre and unbelievable, located in some fictional never-never land, but an integral part of a gritty portrait of urban life. Well, maybe this is true of Hammett (although it's worth mentioning that his most famous book, The Maltese Falcon, depends on a fanciful plot about mysterious statuettes and medieval knights) but it's not true of Chandler. The streets Philip Marlowe walks down may be mean but, in their own way, they are as unrealistic as the assorted Mayhem Parvas of traditional English crime fiction. Chandler was a wonderful writer - possibly the most gifted ever to devote his energies to the genre - but a realist he was not. Marlowe is a romantic -- even at times a sentimental -- creation and the violence in the novels is as ritualised and stylised as any duel with handwrought pistols. We know, just as we know that Poirot will work out the elaborate means of murder in a Christie novel, that Marlowe will pick his way through the more morally ambiguous terrain he inhabits, suffering beatings and threats, confronting men with guns and men with saps, only to emerge, bruised but unbowed, at the end. (We don't know that he'll always tie up the loose ends of the plot as comprehensively as Poirot. When Howard Hawks was making his movie version of The Big Sleep he was puzzled over the identity of the killer of one of the characters. He wired Chandler to ask him. Famously, Chandler didn't know either.) The violence in Chandler's novels and other books in the noir tradition he helped establish is as unrealistic as that in the ungritty fiction of Christie, 'the great Gladys' and the rest of the classic era English writers. Just unrealistic in a different way. This is most obvious when you look at the over-the-top travesties of hardboiled fiction produced in the fifties by writers like Mickey Spillane. Spillane was as massively ungifted a writer as Chandler was gifted but his fiction could not have been written without the private eye models provided by the early noir writers. Where Marlowe is a romantic creation, a latter day knight errant loose on the streets of LA, Spillane's Mike Hammer is the unsubtle product of a relentlessly macho imagination, but the violence in the books, by its very unsubtlety, shows the unrealistic roots of noir violence. Hammer, punching and shooting his way to a solution while fending off the attentions of pneumatically busty blondes, reveals, in the naïvest way possible, the conventions within which better noir writers worked. (Naïve it may have been but, commercially at least, it was incredibly successful. Spillane sold millions and remains one of the best-selling crime writers of all time.)
Perhaps, the barriers to a realistic depiction of violence in crime fiction were the conventions imposed on the writer, the restrictions on what could and could not be written. Just as the last forty years have seen a relaxation of taboos about verbal descriptions of sexuality, so squeamishness about violence has disappeared. Certainly modern crime fiction includes scenes that must have the pioneers of the genre permanently spinning in their graves. Patricia Cornwell has invented a new sub-genre of crime fiction with her tales of post-mortem investigation. The faint of heart and those with over-delicate stomachs should steer clear of some of the pages of the Scarpetta novels and those by Cornwell rivals like Kathy Reichs and Linda Fairstein. Medical and forensic practitioners by the score, it sometimes seems, have deserted their microscopes and scalpels for crime fiction and they have brought their unsqueamish attitude to blood and guts with them. Meanwhile the serial killer genre becomes progressively more graphic in its descriptions of violent death, more visceral in its detailing of damage inflicted on frail human flesh. More than twenty years after his first appearance, Hannibal Lecter, dining on the census-taker's liver with fava beans and a fine Chianti (actually a fine Amarone in the original book - it was changed in the film script), seems positively mundane in his mania. More luridly deranged killers are on the loose. Yet this hyper-violence of the last twenty years is as mannered as the violence in earlier crime fiction. However much writers claim that their fictional characters have their imaginative origins in real-life serial killers, the process of writing fiction shapes the end product. Maybe Thomas Harris used his knowledge of Ed Gein, the Wisconsin handyman who made clothes and furniture from his victims' remains, to create Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs. Andrew Vachss may draw on his own experience of working as a lawyer in child abuse cases to provide material for his frighteningly intense novels. Yet the experience of reading a crime novel, by Harris, Vachss or anyone else, is very different from reading a non-fiction crime book. Real lives, and real murders, are often arbitrary, random and contingent. Non-fiction books sometimes reflect this - sometimes through a distastefully prurient dwelling on horror and mutilation. Fiction, by its very nature, can't be arbitrary and contingent. Stories have to have a shape. They have to have a beginning, middle and end. (Although some of the more interesting fiction may not place them in that order.) Perhaps it's in the 'police procedural' that the truth and reality of crime and murder can be found? The aim in the police procedural is to present a convincing portrait of official investigations. No eccentric amateur sleuth or wisecracking gumshoe. Just ordinary, everyday police going about their work, solving crimes not through dazzling feats of deduction but through painstaking attention to due process and detail. Since the 1950s Ed McBain's 87th Precinct novels, to take the obvious example, have been blending humour and harshness, social comment and personal drama in a way that has become familiar in later series and, especially, in the thousand and one American TV cop shows that have been influenced, however remotely, by them. Yet even the best police procedurals are not genuinely 'realistic'. They are fiction, not documentary, and the rules of the game apply to them as much as to the most extravagantly contrived puzzle narrative of the Golden Era. The novelist has to select and shape his material. He has to lead the reader through the book by crafting a narrative not just by presenting him or her with the messy arbitrariness of life. Throughout the history of the genre some crime novels have been described as 'more realistic' than others. The debate about 'realism' has usually centred on the depiction of violence and critics have used it either as a stick with which to beat other less 'realistic' novelists or as a weapon in an argument about what should and should not be described in fiction. The truth is that all the many different kinds of crime fiction - cosy classic, hard-boiled noir, serial killer, police procedural and any other kind you might like to define - share one rather obvious characteristic which is none the less often overlooked. They do not reflect reality in some magically direct way. They are shaped by the conventions and needs of fiction and by the selection, emphasis and organisation of the material the novelist uses. In this sense, the violence that is part and parcel of (indeed at the heart of) all crime fiction is never 'realistic'. It is always stylised. It has to be to play its all-important role in the novelist's unfolding of the story.
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