Here's my insight for the month: crime writers don't do war.
OK, so there's the odd exception. Anthony Horowitz is the most obvious, with his massively successful Foyle's War TV series. But he's about the only one I can think of whose sleuth operates during wartime, cracking civilian crimes.
It's quite true that, from Dr Watson onwards, lots of crime busters have been former active participants in war. Perhaps most of them. And there is a sub-genre of military courtroom dramas which involve detective work - A Few Good Men springs to mind. But hardly any crime writers opt to place their civilian sleuths on a genuine wartime footing.
I didn't notice this until I was some way through my own novel, THE WARNING BELL. And at first I found this battle shy attitude a bit odd. After all, war offers homicide, intrigue, and violence in industrial quantities, and not just on the battlefield. Civilian landscapes flooded with hyped-up young men, armed and trained to kill, are breeding grounds for all sorts of mayhem. Take the Black-Out Ripper in WW2 London, a serial rapist and killer who turned out to be Gordon Cummings, a mild mannered RAF cadet with no record. Or US Army deserter Karl Hulten, the GI Gangster, who went on a killing spree with a Welsh stripper in tow. Or for that matter John Christie, who was busy gassing and raping women during the Blitz.
So why do crime writers avoid mining this rich lode?
One reason is that while war is the ultimate violent crime, it's also legal. Which throws the moral compass off a bit. On a practical level, the sheer scale of wartime horror is so vast that it eclipses the moral resolutions we seek.
And crime fiction does seek resolutions, and not just in terms of cracking of some malfeasance and locking away the perp. Indeed you might say that crime fiction was invented to reassure us, against all the evidence, that the world around us isn't sheer bloody lunacy.
It's comforting to think that someone, even a crumpled cop who's borderline alcoholic and rubbish at relationships, is out there pitching on our behalf to create some semblance of order. It doesn't matter that he fails most of the time; failure only makes him more human. It's the very act of trying that's important. His efforts hold up the hope that somewhere there is a Great Scheme of Things which can be restored, repaired, redeemed.
This isn't anything much to do with reality. It's simply that we're hard wired to find conspiracy less terrifying than confusion: conspiracy at least implies that somebody knows what's going on, even an evil genius.
So crime writers don't do chaos. They don't deal in unsolved murders. They don't mess with the supernatural. And they don't mention the War.
None of this mezzobrow analytical stuff was at the top of my mind when I started THE WARNING BELL. It should have been, though, for at the novel's heart is an atrocious crime committed in World War Two and hidden ever since. A son must uncover and then solve this crime if he is to have any chance of reconciliation with his estranged and ageing father, who may or may not have been involved. In the process the son finds that the past can cast a long and dangerous shadow over the present.
As I worked away at my own book I came to see that mixing up war with crime sets the writer a whole lot of special challenges. My story was going to need a good deal more thought than the murder of the Reverend Snodgrass in the rectory library.
On the other hand, I also discovered that I was presented with a fertile field for dramatic and psychological tension which raised all kinds of tortured questions.
In short order I found myself and my characters looking for answers to some of these. In wartime, for example, is it a crime to kill people who are beyond your help and whose fate otherwise is unspeakable? What if their very existence threatens the lives of scores more innocents? Is it relevant that millions all around are dying unremarked deaths at the hands of people they never see, or that far worse killings are performed daily by men in uniform? And is my central character right to blame himself? How far is he at fault? Could there be any flicker of extenuation for the perpetrators, driven to extremis by years of enemy occupation? Or is this the only truth: that a crime is a crime is a crime?
Strange to think that to people who actually take part in war, questions like this may become commonplace, if just as unanswerable. The story goes that Air Marshall 'Bomber' Harris, the man tasked with the flattening of German cities from 20,000 feet, was stopped by the police one night for speeding. When the constable remonstrated with him that he might have killed someone, Harris coolly replied that he routinely killed thousands of people every night, the implication being that another couple could hardly make much difference. As an answer, it is simultaneously rational and appalling.
For my part, I tried to tackle this moral confusion head-on, by making it the defining theme of my story. My main character, Iain Madoc, has first to find out what happened in Brittany in 1944 and why it has haunted his father ever since. Then he must decide what he will do with this knowledge, and whether - from the viewpoint of safe modern day Britain - he has the right to pass any judgment at all.
Horowitz addresses the issue by making his cop part of the war effort. Foyle isn't looking back, as Iain Madoc is. He's directly involved, and wants to be more so. He's is forever trying to get back into the military, though he ought to know better, having served in the First World War. At the same time he is a good man holding the line for some sort decency on the Home Front, thus reinforcing the Allied Cause against the atrocities being committed by the Other Side.
But Foyle and Madoc are both very much the exceptions. Most crime writers keep their creations clear of the moral morass of war.
Conspiracy theory, they'd argue, is easier to handle than chaos theory.
Maybe they've got a point.
Tom Macaulay's novel THE WARNING BELL has recently been released in paperback by Orion
