Last night, along with two of the other authors entered for this year’s Ngaio Marsh Award, I had the pleasure of taking part in a “Murder in the Library” event in Takapuna. Besides describing our own books, we discussed some questions about crime fiction in general.
My husband came along for moral support but he is not a fan of this genre, and had asked me privately why on earth people enjoy reading novels about something so unpleasant as murder. I agree it is a challenge for writers to create entertainment out of such a serious subject. But crime novels are enduringly popular, and I think there are several reasons for this. They have a clear structure and focus, with a mystery to be solved and a solution at the end. They can provide insights into criminal psychology, and raise ethical and moral issues. The good ones have interesting characters and settings as well as convincing plots.
The crime genre as broadly defined covers novels of many different kinds. The traditional whodunnit, often featuring a private detective who is more competent than the police, begins with discovery of a body and ends with unmasking of the killer – usually the most unlikely of suspects from a circle of middle-class characters. This format may now seem old-fashioned but the books of “Golden Age” writers such as Agatha Christie are still very readable. Modern sub-genres of crime fiction are many: cosy, hard-boiled, police procedural, courtroom, spy, psychological thriller, and “noir” from diverse places including Scandinavia, Scotland and New Zealand.
There may be an overlap with other fiction genres, as with my own entry Unfaithful unto Death which combines crime with black comedy, and touches on the themes of corruption in medicine and the pharmaceutical industry. It could almost qualify as a historical novel, because I wrote the first draft in the 1980s following a spell of working as a doctor in general practice in rural England. I had nearly forgotten about the manuscript until I found it among some old papers last year. Reading it through again, parts struck me as rather outrageous compared to my more recent work, and the practice of medicine has certainly changed a great deal since it was written. All the same I decided to publish it without changing the content too much.
The protagonist is Dr Cyril Peabody, who also made a brief appearance in my other two 1980s novels. He is a clever and hard-working doctor who means well but has developed a hefty dose of the arrogance and cynicism which besets his profession, and his bedside manner is appalling. Having failed to gain promotion as a hospital cardiologist because of his awkward personality, he takes what he considers to be an inferior position as a country GP. Predictably he soon clashes with his partners, his patients and his wife. He sets out to improve his status by mounting a trial of a new drug, but finds it has some unexpected side effects. One of the men who has been taking it dies, apparently from a heart attack. Cyril is called to his house in the middle of the night. Having examined the body and considered the history he decides that a post-mortem is indicated, but encounters vehement opposition from the dead man’s wife …
As discussed in a previous post the medical setting provides ample scope for murder both in fiction and in real life.
Jennifer Barraclough 