John Rickards writes thrillers and crime fiction, as well as dabbling in short stories. Read samples or catch the latest news here, get in touch, or see what's going on at his personal blog.

This is a long one. As noted in my previous post, it arose partly out of Steve’s comments on Sandra’s site, and partly out of things I’ve been kicking around my head for a while. I don’t often do essays, though, so do read it all. Not to say it might not be bollocks, though.

Crime fiction prides itself on reflecting reality, and on being both character driven and on having “something to say”. Lending the genre a certain weight and pretensions to being taken seriously. So the story goes, anyway. I’ve lost track of the number of writers I’ve heard say that they wrote their latest book because they wanted to explore a particular real-life situation. The effect on a family of having one parent killed by another. How old atrocities committed during WWII or the Stalinist purges can bubble back to the surface in the modern day, affecting the descendants of those who committed them, and inform the present. (And what a phrase “inform the present” is.)

If crime writers are striving to mirror reality and to say something about what they see, then frankly, in the main, we’re doing a piss pathetic job.

If we’re hoping to explore new and previously untouched areas of morality, experience or human emotion then most of us are failing badly.

I’m not talking about individual stories or plots - the “there are only X number of stories” argument is as old as the hills; in any case, the finer details of a given story can vary ad infinitum - but about the overall theme or the whatever-it-is we’re trying to say. We’ve covered how crime can tear a family apart many times. There have been hundreds of books in which suspicion falls upon the wrong individual. I doubt there is anything more to say about the tragic loss of a child that hasn’t already been said.

If we’re writing purely to entertain, to grab the imagination of the reader and give them a story they want to follow through thick and thin, isn’t it about time we took a few more risks, did things a little differently? If this was music, not writing, crime fiction would have reached Little Richard and, maybe, just maybe, Elvis, and stopped developing. If this were theatre, we’d still be making do with repeated performances of Shakespeare and Arthur Miller would be no more than a pipe dream.

We have worlds, characters and the form of writing to play with as far as our imagination can take it. If we’re incapable of expanding the boundaries of the type of stories we tell, of venturing beyond the happy little comfort zone in which 99% of modern crime and thriller fiction resides, we should wonder why.

We already use our imaginations, regardless of whether we write for entertainment or because “we have something to say”.

Very, very few of us have been cops or gangsters or killers. Very few of us have lived in slums or were born beyond the boundaries of the First World. We are almost all white, middle class and middle aged, or older. Reasonably well educated and from a background that might, just maybe, have been economically difficult at times, but which almost certainly wasn’t one of chronic poverty.

Our existing readership, those our genre’s existing comfort zone relies upon, is overwhelmingly middle class and middle aged or older and they’ve been that way all their lives.

In the main, we reflect that mindset. If you’re writing crime fiction with a message, chances are what you have to say is what we’ve all been saying for decades, to people who’ve heard it time and time again and who are quite happy never to hear anything else from anyone else.

We imagine other backgrounds, other situations, other lives. Of course we do. And as soon as we do that we have - usually - vaulted beyond the realms of realism and into pure imagination. Our social comment is, in this case, no more meaningful than that of people in Hollywood who believe that every prostitute in the world looks like Jessica Alba or Julia Roberts.

With a very few exceptions, those of us who claim to be doing something important with their fiction, something greater than the mere stories they tell or the quality of the language they use, are fooling themselves.

And we all slap ourselves on the back and say how we really wanted to “explore” this or that, or that the “message” of our books is this or that, and that we hope we can communicate “some of that reality” to the oh-so receptive readers. Readers clamouring, one could almost believe, to be educated and informed about our terribly important and valuable discoveries.

The same readers, lest we forget, who make James Patterson, a man whose work is entertainment formula fiction in its purest form, the best selling thriller writer in the world. The same readers who’ll pick up any old shit with Patricia Cornwell’s name on the cover because that’s what they like.

And fair play to them. We all know what we like, and that’s what crime fiction’s core readership want to read. Their choice is as valid as yours, mine or anyone else’s.

Our editors, whose jobs depend on selling a large enough volume of books to the same readership time and time again, are aware of this and encourage us to slot into the standard groove or a close approximation of it. To do otherwise is commercial suicide. On the rare occasions that we do have an unusual and valuable message to communicate or a valid and interesting moral point to explore, or a different sort of story to tell, chances are it’ll be softened, the edges taken off to keep it within the interest range of the limited readership pool that publishers feed from, time and time again.

Forcing crime fiction to fit the existing market because it’s the only market there is, well, that’s bullshit and cowardice, mostly. There’s an audience for just about anything so long as you can make it aware of and interested in your product. This, of course, is a matter of publicity; something that publishing is, as far as I can see, pretty poor at. Good at preaching to the choir, not so great at getting fresh people inside the church (to continue the metaphor).

Nevertheless, that’s the world we work in. And the crime, thriller and mystery genre is terribly stagnant as a result.

It’s become a closed feedback loop. Books like Book A sell well, so Book B should be like Book A. Book B sells well, so Book C should be like Book B. Like politics and the mainstream news media, we’ve become scared of losing our existing market rather than searching for fresh ones.

The existing readership, one writer (Sarah should know; I’ve forgotten, but it was her who told me) said, wants us to be performing monkeys, doing the same trick time and time again. They want their preconceptions reinforced, not challenged. And fair enough; it’s what most of us look for when we want to be entertained rather than stimulated. I’m no different and I’m sure you’re not either.

Surely, I hear you cry, there have been some changes in our genre? Some ebb and flow, the rise and passing of fads and subgenres? Of course there have been. But we’re talking window dressing here.

The rush of serial killer novels of the early 90s were not functionally different to the puzzle mysteries of Poe or Conan Doyle, for instance. Instead of politely bludgeoning an innocent victim to death off-camera, ten or twenty would be gutted and strung up over the course of 300 blood-soaked pages, and rather than divulge the identity or future moves of the killer through his brand of tobacco or the mud on his shoes, they would use forensics and dubious profiling methods.

The basic messages remained the same: order is restored in the end, evil may arise from the smallest beginnings but it is still, man-made or natural, evil, and anyone can be either the victim or the killer; appearances mean nothing.

Hardly insightful stuff, if that’s your cup of tea. Hardly original, if you prefer just to settle for something ‘different’.

The two main developments in the genre since its beginnings were probably the rise of hard-boiled crime from the pulps of the 1930s and the switch away from the puzzle as the focus of the story to the characters involved (seen, perhaps most obviously, in the formula for the modern police procedural and the interplay between members of the department or team), which really took off in the 1950s or 1960s.

In both cases, while the nature of the criminal became more blurred, less black-and-white, the core messages once again remained the same. Order was still restored - even if, in the case of the classic hard-boiled stories, the outside ‘order’ was actually terribly corrupt or criminal itself and it was the internal moral code of the protagonist that had to be enforced to repair the situation - and good still mostly conquered evil. In rare cases, evil conquered good despite good’s best efforts, but even then the underpinnings were then and are still now functionally the same.

Middle class, middle aged writers continued to provide a middle class, middle aged readership with middle class, middle aged concerns, or, where they touched elsewhere, kept those people and places safely within the bounds of the simple fictional construct, at arm’s length, the realism tempered heavily by the middle class, middle aged views of the writer whose imagination they inhabited.

Books that were, and still are, considered shocking or daring were considered so not because they actually were, largely, by any objective standard but because there’s nothing a middle class, middle aged readership likes more than something a bit naughty but basically unthreatening they can complain about (and, in many cases, guiltily lust after).

What a revolution.

On occasion, of course, there have been genuinely effective and powerful social messages or insights delivered through fiction, in our genre and elsewhere, just as there have been through theatre and film. But they have always been rare, and it’s the ineffective majority who claim to be doing work of some intrinsic value which concerns me.

I mentioned before where we’d be if crime writing were popular music. Let’s take that further. Poe and his ilk, as well as Christie and the puzzle mystery writers of her era, are the equivalent of jazz and swing music from the 1920s and 30s - the first real mainstream pop. Hard-boiled was 1950s and 60s rock ‘n roll. And character-driven ‘modern’ crime fiction is somewhere between the two - easier on the ears, less raw than rock ‘n roll but with more depth and complexity than 1920s dance music. 1960s guitar pop, probably. And just as in 1960s music, for every innovative Beatle or Stone, there are a thousand faceless imitators.

And we’ve been stuck in that position for 40 years now. There are plenty of books written 20, 30, 40 years ago in our genre whose theme or message plenty of people would describe, and do describe, as “still fresh and valid today”.

Good for them, but bad for us, because that means nothing’s changed since they were written.

A good story is always a good story, but if your aim is to entertain then surely you should be doing more than merely copying what’s come before in your own damn genre, and if your aim is to do more than that then surely you should expand into and explore new moral, ethical or social areas rather than retreading the same ones in the same way as countless others before you?

I know it’s only human to think that our own perspective is unique, valuable in its own right, and that we have something worthwhile to add to a pre-existing discussion. But in reality, it’s not and we don’t. Not different enough to merit a whole new book.

We badly need something new in our genre. Punk is a label that’s almost as over-used and meaningless as ‘noir’, but the equivalent of the punk movement is precisely what’s lacking in crime fiction.

(Actually, the musical metaphor for the modern era of crime fiction might work better by comparing today’s writing mass with the 90s and 00s spate of manufactured identi-pop and R&B. In which case… well, we’d still need punk.)

Most of us lack, as crime writers, two things: daring and speculation.

Audiences don’t want anything original, as Fry says in Futurama, they want to see the same thing they’ve seen a thousand times before. Clever things make people feel stupid, and unexpected things make them feel scared.

Why do 99% of crime stories follow the ‘order out of chaos’ model? Why, at the end, is the pre-existing order restored or the protagonist’s pre-existing moral code imposed on the chaos they see?

I appreciate the need for resolution in a story, but why don’t more crime tales end with the chaos, such as it is, continuing, morphed or mutated in some way, or with something wholly new arising from the ashes?

Take Michael Marshall’s THE INTRUDERS, for instance. Cracking book. The main issue of the story is that the main character’s wife seems not to be her old self, could be harbouring secrets, et al. Come the end, we know what’s going on, what the secrets are. In that respect, we’ve reached resolution of the mystery. And it doesn’t solve anything. The main character is just going to have to live with it. There is no restoration of order, there is no imposition of the hero’s code on the situation. Brilliant.

If you don’t have a story that would still work without restoring matters to some semblance of normality, maybe you should dare to write a different story.

If you’re afraid that your oh-so-real depiction of the world you’re writing couldn’t take a major change to its fabric, maybe you should remember that it’s fiction you’re writing, and dare to change your fictional world as much as you want.

Crime fiction could, and probably, if it genuinely is a genre of social or moral depth (which is, at best, debatable), should touch on far, far more issues than it does. How many books in this genre, with the maturity and intelligence this genre can display, for instance, deal with highly emotive subjects like abortion or teenage pregnancy? Poverty, prejudice, the way we treat or raise our children, the way we live. The way life actually is for people outside the nice, comfortable, middle class and middle aged First World existence we all enjoy.

And I don’t just mean more of us should write about the ‘criminal classes’ or moderately disadvantaged members of our world; they still live within the reach and influence of the same social system we do. You might be a dole jockey from Liverpool who dabbles in debt collection and casual violence, but you still have to pay the rent, collect your benefits and live with everyone else just the same as we do. And if someone threatens your family with violence, your response I likely to be only marginally different that that of an accountant or a cop; perhaps with slightly more chance of dealing out a beating with a baseball bat.

If you’re afraid to touch a particular issue or scenario, regardless of its depth, interest or drama, maybe you should get over your fear.

Not only do we play safe with the stories we create, we seem to be very bad at speculating beyond a very narrow band of situations and outcomes within those stories. There are plenty of very interesting moral or social questions that arise from hypothetical situations which don’t necessarily exist, or exist that frequently, in reality but which are perfectly possible to describe, imagine and emotionally involve the reader. Some of the great pieces of social fiction have arisen from this kind of process. But generally we don’t do it, not often, and certainly not often enough.

Take the suggestions of your favourite failed political whackjob or no-hoper and extrapolate. Pretend it’s happened. Construct the world, the new moral order of things. Could be big, could be small. Explore the consequences. Explore the people in that world.

Take a little-understood area of world social history and bring it into a contemporary setting, make it the centrepiece to the story. If crime is about relatively ordinary people in relatively unusual, scary situations, you can’t get more unusual than the kinds of social upheaval that every part of the globe has experienced at one time or another. You can make it work in microcosm or macrocosm in a way that readers will still be able to relate to.

Take the pontificating of your favourite social commentator, philosopher or drunk in a bar and run with their ideas as far as you can.

If you’re unable to do any of these things, quit writing and get another job.