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The Point
30.10.07
Saving this here, as it were, because it ties into something I’ve been kicking around my head for the past few days (sure, sure, I hear you say, coming from Mr “Incidental Cannibalism”) and I don’t want to lose track of it. Sandra’s already commented on it, and it appeared here courtesy of Mr Mosby.
There is a real question here that bothers me as a crime writer: what are we doing? Because you hear so much about the value of our stories, and what we ‘have to say’ about real-life violence, and so on. So why would be bothered if a real-life case reflects our writing? Surely, we’ve got things to say that people need to hear? We’ve got insight.
And it bothers me because I’m not sure we have. We want to be taken on literary terms, but where there might be a Roth or a DeLillo - even an Amis - who’s unafraid to tackle confrontational themes in their fiction, where’s the crime equivalent? Where’s the guy or girl who can stick out their novel in the midst of media furore and say “fuck you, I’m not exploiting this, you are, and I’ve got interesting things to say”? Can you think of a single mainstream crime author, and - if not - what does that say about our genre?
Playing devil’s advocate, of course, but I do wonder. If we’re not exploiting real-life tragedy to make entertainment, why would be ashamed of what we do?
Something to come, but probably not until tomorrow at the earliest.
Books
A dozen people trapped in a roadhouse during a storm, three corpses buried in a field, and a good chance no one's going to make it through the night alive. Burial Ground is the last Alex Rourke novel.
One mistake. Seven years of a child's life. In The Darkness Inside, Alex finds out the missing kid in a case he worked on in his FBI days may not have been killed after all. And that the man he crossed the line to put away may not have worked alone.
A single bullet blows Alex's world to pieces. He finds himself in the strange Vermont town of Bleakwater Ridge trying to piece together what's happened, alone except for the dead and The Touch Of Ghosts.
A silent murder suspect, caught red-handed at the scene, draws former FBI agent Alex Rourke back to his home town of Winter's End in northern Maine. But it soon becomes clear that there's far more to the place, and to his own past, than he ever realised.
Short Fiction
Wish, featuring gay Nazis and the terror of living urban myth, appears in the Ken Bruen-edited Dublin Noir, as well as in 2008's Best British Mysteries anthology.
Twenty Dollar Future, about the tragic making of a child soldier in east Africa, appears in Jen Jordan's Expletive Deleted anthology.