Meet four of the new generation of crime writers published by Faber and Faber: R. N. Morris, whose second novel featuring Dostoevsky’s celebrated detective Porfiry Petrovich has just been published in paperback; Andrew Martin, whose steam detective Jim Stringer has now embarked upon his fifth mystery; Jason Goodwin, author of the Edgar Award-winning historical thrillers starring the eunuch sleuth Yashim; and Nicola Upson, whose debut novel features real-life crime writer Josephine Tey in the leading role.

These four writers share something in common – all of their crime novels have a historical setting. And as if the crime writer’s stock in trade of careful plotting and attention to detail were not enough, these authors couldn’t wait to add the extra dimension of setting them in the past. The research is a labour of love for them. ‘It’s a really exciting part of the whole process,’ says Nicola Upson, ‘both the plots to date have stemmed from things that really happened.’ Goodwin’s three Turkish thrillers were inspired quite directly from his love of the place: ‘Years ago I made a pilgrimage to Istanbul, a city I knew from the poetry of Yeats and a course in Byzantine history. I wrote Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire, to understand who those people were.’

‘I was lucky enough to be able to talk to many of the key people who shaped the West End in the 1930s and 1940s,’ says Upson on the research for An Expert in Murder, ‘people such as Sir John Gielgud and Margaret Harris, one of the design team “Motley”.’

This kind of direct association is obviously not possible for people writing about books set further in the past. Roger Morris’s connection to his subject was rather more remote. ‘I knew very little about Russia when I started writing the first book,’ he says. ‘I read – and re-read – Russian novels of the period, of course: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Goncharov, Shchedrin, together with general history books, and social history books. I play this game of chasing footnotes – if I read something interesting in one book that references another book – I then track down that second book.’

Andrew Martin’s research has taken a similar line: ‘I read novels from that period with plenty of demotic language: Arnold Bennett, say, or H. G. Wells. I look at old maps and old photographs. I might see a man with a good face pictured in an old photograph, and I’ll think: “Right, I’ll HAVE him”, and he goes into the story.’

The gaps in the record, though, are the most challenging thing for any writer of historical crime to overcome. ‘History books are very good at omitting the very thing you want to know,’ says Andrew Martin, ‘such as “What did the Edwardians call ash trays?”.’ And Roger Morris recalls such a difficulty during the writing of his debut crime novel: ‘At one point in the writing of A Vengeful Longing I became very obsessed by the sanitation of St Petersburg at the time. It is relevant to the plot, I think.  If I’d had a time machine, I would have loved to go back to St Petersburg in the 1860s and use the toilet. You don’t get a lot about toilets in Dostoevsky.’

The challenges, however, do not stand in the way of the writers enjoying themselves with the research. ‘It’s a joy, says Nicola Upson. ‘My partner, Mandy, is a BBC arts journalist with a great passion for social history, and we do a lot of the background work for the novels together.’ For her new novel they have been in Cornwall researching the undertaking business. ‘It’s been quite detailed, ‘she says, ‘so, if the writing goes badly, I can now make a coffin from scratch.’

But Morris is wary about getting too carried away in the process. ‘It’s easy to get lost in the research, and to use it as a delaying tactic. “I’ll start writing, just as soon as I’ve found out about X …” But the truth is you never find out exactly what you’re looking for, exactly what you need, because the only way to get that is to be living in St Petersburg in the period – because what you’re looking for is what it felt like to be alive then.’ Andrew Martin explains that when writing historical fiction ‘you develop your own version of the period, accumulate a vocabulary and a range of references.’

It’s a huge imaginative leap to create the worlds for these stories and characters to inhabit, and readers and reviewers seem to have been struck by how convincing these writers have been, whether it be recreating Britain in the Edwardian era or the 1930s or visualising 19th-century Istanbul or Russia.

How do you approach writing ‘baddies’? How do you keep them rounded and believable, and do you try to make them to some degree sympathetic?

Craig Robertson

In my novel Random, the story is told in the first person from the point of view of a serial killer. It demanded that I didn’t write him as being an out and out bad guy because he doesn’t see himself as one – even though his actions talk a lot louder than his words. His thought processes, motivations, desires and fears are in line with our own. But even though that line is blurred, we know that he has crossed it.

Most people come in shades of grey and that goes for serial killers as well as saints. While it’s comforting to think that killers are a differently wired species from the rest of us, it’s much more likely that they aren’t as dissimilar as we’d like to believe. That’s why I try to write villains as people first and foremost. Hopefully this makes the character rounded and real, given that you offer up both sides of his personality and the reasons why he does what he does.

Anyway, these guys are much more interesting than a one-dimensional goodie or baddie. Partly because it is easier to identify with the other side of them, whether you like it or not and even if they end up doing the most terrible things.

Attempting to make a serial killer sympathetic is a tricky business and probably not to be recommended. However it is possible that readers may sympathise with his motives if not his methods of putting them into practice. If that leaves the reader in the uncomfortable position of siding with something they know to be very wrong then I can live with that. It’s fun to play with people’s moral compass by putting them on the side of the devil, if only for a while.

That means as a writer putting yourself in an uncomfortable position as well, putting on the devil’s shoes. The saving grace is that you can take them off again once you are done.

AG: With serial killers, I wonder if it’s more fascination than sympathy we end up feeling – but a fascination that runs so deep we’re sometimes not sure what it is. Is it the fear of identifying with evil, and maybe even of admiring it? The fear (and thrill) of recognition? If a serial killer is well-drawn and believable, spending a few hours with them can be disturbing and stimulating in equal measure. Who could ask for anything more?

Andrea Japp

It seems to me there are two sorts of ‘baddies’ in thrillers and my approach depends on which kind I am dealing with. There are ‘ordinary baddies’ and ‘extraordinary baddies’ – those who are so extreme they appear to have lost their humanity.

When thrillers deal with ‘extraordinary baddies’, serial killers for example, I think they very often depart from reality and enter the area of dramatisation. A particularly successful example of this is the brilliant ‘Silence of the Lambs’. The main reason for the dramatisation is simple: no one wants to read about the bloody exploits of real serial killers for entertainment. The second reason is more complex and derives from the very essence of the crime novel, which is actually akin to the Greek tragedy (or the Western!): good is pitted against evil, with man in the middle – which way will he turn? The fictional serial killer has come to symbolise evil, which Man must combat. So very often the literary version of the serial killer becomes all-powerful, extremely intelligent (although really many serial killers have a lower than average IQ), rather attractive, completely lacking in either fear or remorse, breaking all the taboos and prohibitions, in short the Devil, even in societies that no longer believe in the Devil. The important thing when writing such a character is not to seek to ‘understand’ them but to destroy them. Of course, that’s a generalisation. Some authors have created serial killers that are very closely based on reality.

AG: Yes, I think since The Silence of the Lambs the serial killer has become the great secular bogeyman – the devil for infidels, and as a result has perhaps been romanticized and troped out of the realm of the realistic. In more recent times I think the serial killer may have been supplanted by the predatory paedophile as a more disturbing repository for all our fears. The psychic damage caused by sexual abuse is a remarkably widespread theme in modern crime fiction writing.

The ‘ordinary baddy’ on the other hand, is simply someone who has taken a wrong turning. From a novelist’s point of view, writing a character like that provides the opportunity for a detailed psychological study. What is that makes a human being turn to wrongdoing? The writer tries to understand the criminal’s motives, even where their crimes are unforgivable, and sometimes even forms a certain amount of compassion for the baddie. It is all within human reality (our dark side) unlike with the fictional ‘extraordinary baddie.’

AG: I find this easily the most interesting and satisfying kind of baddie. Take old Philip Mathers in Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman – his motive for killing is that he needs the money, but he then spends the rest of the novel in a maelstrom of guilt. Our closeness to his psychological state means that we suffer the torment with him. Another good though very different example of this might be Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley – he’s not evil and twisted in any cartoonish sense, the murders just seem to present themselves as necessary solutions to inconvenient circumstances, and of course Highsmith’s genius is to create the sort of suspense where we find ourselves rooting for him and willing for him not to get caught. Then we find ourselves implicated in the crimes and exploring how we could be on the side of such a vile, amoral character. Luring us into this kind of psychological quicksand is what the best crime fiction does.

In my own novels, whether contemporary or historical, my ‘choice’ of baddie is a function of the impetus I want to give the story and characters. Human nature fascinates me; especially it’s capacity for change. How will Mr and Mrs Average, like you and me, who lead a more or less peaceful life, who are good citizens who wouldn’t hurt a fly, react when faced with a terrible event or a situation of extreme danger (a murder, or the disappearance of a child etc), a situation they could never have imagined themselves being faced with? Will they try to fight against it, will they collapse, will they be cowardly? How will the experience transform them? If I want to explore such transformation I will choose to create an ‘extraordinary baddy’ – the perfect catalyst for such a transformation. On the other hand if I want to explore the dark side of humanity, I would paradoxically create an ‘ordinary baddy’. Most often I have both types of baddy in my novels.

CR: I like the distinction between ordinary and extraordinary baddies although I’m less sure of my ability to always know where one finishes and the other begins. Perhaps within every extraordinary baddie there is an ordinary one, still in touch with their humanity, bursting to get out. It may be that readers fear the extraordinary baddie but identify with the ordinary one – and that is something which might frighten them even more.

I think Andrea is absolutely right in that exploring the dark side of human reality through someone ordinary is what makes baddies particularly interesting. The extraordinary baddie’s dark side is obvious and as a result less appealing. It’s exploring our own dark side that is fun.

Alan Glynn

With baddies, I think, before sympathetic or believable, must come interesting – and baddies tend to have an edge in this department. The devil, it turns out, has all the best tunes, and even someone of John Milton’s stature couldn’t help making Satan the narrative engine of Paradise Lost. It’s the bad guys, after all (or, indeed, the bad ladies, as my six-year-old son likes to call them) and not the good ones, who instigate things, who commit the crimes, and transgress, who take us on these wild, headlong rushes into the darker cess pools of human nature and then give us permission to wallow there. So these people pique our interest from early on. But of course on its own this isn’t enough, and in order to make a baddie believable – and then perhaps, even sympathetic – what you need to give him or her is a psychologically and intellectually developed interior life. The bad guy in Avatar doesn’t have one of these, and is therefore one-dimensional and like something out of a pantomime. Macbeth, by contrast, does have one – as does his wife – and here are two enduring characters we feel we know and are able on some level to understand. The bad guys in my novels have tended to be businessmen, property developers or politicians, and I’ve written them from a close third-person point of view, which allows the reader to spend time in their heads – a place where the characters themselves tend not to be judgemental about their own actions. My bad guys have also tended to be somewhat tortured – racked with anxiety, guilt and paranoia. Either that or they are the sort of socialized psychopaths who are wholly unaware that what they are engaged in might be perceived as evil, or even criminal, at all. And when you mix this kind of moral ambivalence or lack of moral sensibility with a vivid interior life – observations on everyday concerns, health, family, work – you draw the reader into a type of looking-glass world, but it’s one where they can easily identify with the characters and even sometimes sympathise with them.

CR: I agree entirely with Alan that one-dimensional bad guys are less interesting and far more difficult to engage with. The same goes for unsophisticated heroes but the obvious difference is it’s relatively easy for us to understand a good guy’s motives without an insight into his interior life. With bad guys we need to know the ‘why’ before we can identify, sympathise or even properly condemn.

Like Alan, I’ve placed readers inside the baddie’s head where the character is not judgemental about his own actions and left them to deal with that. It doesn’t mean that they have to sympathise but hopefully they will at least understand the thought processes that took him to the place he’s at.

AJ: When you speak of characters being ‘tortured – racked with anxiety and guilt’ would you agree that that could never apply to ‘real’ serial killers, the kind that are the subject of criminologists reports? In other words, in order to write a criminal character that readers can engage with, the author has to create a literary version of the super-horrible-baddy.

The panellists

Alan Glynn is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin, where he studied English Literature, and has worked in magazine publishing in New York and as an EFL teacher in Italy. His first novel, The Dark Fields (2001), was described in the Daily Telegraph as ‘fast, clever – and horrifying’, and his new novel Winterland has recently been published by Faber. He is married with two children and lives in Dublin.

Andrea Japp is one of the grandes dames of French crime writing with over twenty novels published. She is a forensic scientist by profession and weaves this knowledge into her books, giving them particular authenticity. She is the author of The Season of the Beast, The Breath of the Rose, and The Divine Blood , published in English by Gallic Books.

During his 20-year career with the Sunday Post in Glasgow, Craig Robertson has interviewed three recent Prime Ministers; attended major stories including 9/11, Dunblane, the Omagh bombing and the disappearance of Madeleine McCann; been pilloried on breakfast television, beaten Oprah Winfrey to a major scoop, been among the first to interview Susan Boyle, spent time on Death Row in the USA and dispensed polio drops in the backstreets of India. Random is his first novel.

Has your work, and the genre itself, been affected by the popularity of crime procedurals on television? Are true crime writing and crime fiction blurring? How closely related are they? Does new crime fiction follow true crime trends?

and the diverse group of authors we asked to give us their views are:

	Armand Cabasson, a psychiatrist working in the north of France, is the author of several novels and short stories, including the Quentin Margont series of thrillers set in the Napoleonic Wars. The third in the series, Memory of Flames will be published by Gallic Books in October 2009. Armand has also written the introduction to Napoleon Bonaparte’s only novella, Clisson and Eugénie, also published by Gallic Books in October 2009.
	Jay Dobyns, alias Jaybird, is an ATF undercover agent who infiltrated the Hells Angels motorcycle club from 2001 to 2003. He was offered membership into the gang after faking the murder of a rival Mongols Motorcycle Club member and providing ‘evidence’ of the staged murder to Hells Angels leaders. Dobyns and his partners worked undercover for 21 months leading to Federal arrests and search warrants on July 8, 2003.
	Born in Manchester in 1960, R.N. Morris now lives in North London with his wife and two young children. A Vengeful Longing follows A Gentle Axe in a series of St. Petersburg novels revolving around the character of Porfiry Petrovich, originally a character in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.

Armand Cabasson

Who-dunnit, or how-dunnit?

In my novels it’s both, because I can’t separate ‘how’ from ‘who’ and ‘why’. As I’m a psychiatrist as well as a crime novelist, I consider that if the ‘who’ is revealed but not the ‘why’ then the crime is not really solved. And the ‘how’ is necessary to understand ‘who’ and ‘why’.

I have met a few killers in psychiatric hospitals and in jails and I can say that there is nothing more different that two people who have commited the same type of murders.

Wow, what amazing experience and expertise to bring to the writing of crime fiction! I’ve never actually met a murderer – or at least not knowingly. These days readers do demand this kind of joined up sophistication between the who and the why. It didn’t used to be the case: I think it was John Dickson Carr who said that the solution of the crime doesn’t have to be psychologically plausible, just logically possible. Our readers demand more!

Has your work, and the genre itself, been affected by the popularity of crime procedurals on television?

I would say that the genre has very definitely been bolstered by the number of crime procedurals shown on television in recent years. My short crime stories have been influenced by television but not my historical crime novels

Are true crime writing and crime fiction blurring, and how closely related are they? ?

I do think that there is often an overlap between true crime writing and crime fiction.

For example, the diary of a serial killer has been published in France – let’s hope no one buys it. And there are novels written as if trying to make the reader believe that they are true stories. (I think this is partly linked to the huge success of movies like The Blair Witch Project, which was shot to look like a documentary put together from actual footage).

Some killers even find that their crime has been fictionalised and they are able to read their own story written up as a novel whilst still in jail.

All those tendencies blur the frontier between fiction and reality.

And also run the risk of glamourising the crime!

I believe that writing and reading crime fiction decreases the risk of commiting a violent crime, although I know that some people believe the opposite. For five years I have been part of a team working with violent teens and young adults (some of whom have committed crimes). Very often, violence erupts because a person experiences a sudden violent emotion (frustration, hate or fear, for example) and they find themselves unable to manage it. So they react with the “3 F response” : Fight / Flight / Freeze. For some of the young people I worked with, it was an all-too simple equation: intense unpleasant feeling = instantaneous violent gesture.

All our work is aimed at helping them to learn to express their feelings in words. Putting their thoughts into words gives them some distance from and some control over their initial violent reactions.

So perhaps a similar mechanic is at work in the writing of crime fiction. Perhaps it is partly an attempt to get close to real crimes in an effort to control the violence in our society. If that’s the case, we still have a lot of writing to do…

This is a fascinating theory, which certainly rings true to me. (My mum used to read a lot of crime fiction, and she never murdered anyone!) It’s obviously important that we, as a species, confront and process our violent feelings, and maybe crime fiction is one way of doing this. I also think it is a way of confronting, and dealing with, the idea of death. In the west, our society is not, generally, as exposed to the threat of sudden violent death as we used to be. But the fear of it seems to be hard-wired into us. I think we also need to acknowledge our own capacity for violence, or – if you like – evil. But we also, deep down, want good to prevail. Crime fiction can provide these complex consolations.

Does contemporary crime fiction follow true crime trends?

Yes, two of the most striking examples of this can be seen in the fashion for writing about serial killers and the fashion for writing about detectives employing the most sophisticated detection methods (perhaps in the highly optimistic belief that technology will conquer crime).

I think that this is a good point for discussion. In my opinion a determined and relentless investigator relying on wits and guile is always better than an average cop with the most cutting edge technology. For me, the human beats the ‘robot’ hands down.This would be an interesting fiction story for someone to write: A crime is committed. The crusty and experienced detective is a ‘dinosaur’ of an investigator. A young hot-shot who doesn’t know as much has all the gadgets science can offer. They are both trying to solve the crime.  The opportunity to create interesting characters with tics and quirks is endless. Throw in the element of a countdown or deadline and, in the hands of a skilled writer, you probably have a commercially successful book.

Jay Dobyns

I have firsthand experiences that in fact television, movies and books have affected real life crime fighting.

Fictional adventures have exposed America’s real-life jury’s to extraordinary crime fighters with incomprehensible technologies. Satellites that peer down from miles above to capture hand-to-hand drug transactions. The fictional ‘Jack Bauer’s’ of our television and movie screens take chances that are only exceeded in risk by their heroism.

In real life and in non-fiction writings, the heroes are only mere mortals. They are human beings who make mistakes and don’t always win or complete their assignments with a happy ending. The technology we can dream up as writers would be wonderful if it were available. Those jury’s judging our cases are sometimes ‘brainwashed’ by our entertainment creations and simply can’t accept that the AAA batteries in the transmitter duct taped under my nuts gave out.

Very unglamorous but very real.

I think this chimes in with my own thoughts (below)! As I say there, it’s not just juries’ preconceptions, its readers’ too.

R.N. Morris

My own work, as a historical crime writer, is in some ways a reaction against ultra-modern technology-driven shows such as CSI. I was a fan of the original series set in Las Vegas, but not so much the Miami and New York versions. It all comes down to the characters. Without great characters, when it’s just about processing DNA samples, then it becomes boring. But these shows do have a tremendous influence. I know one young man who is training to be a crime scene investigator as a result of watching them. Now that he is undergoing the proper training, he complains that they don’t represent the reality at all. And I believe that there is a concern in judicial quarters that juries are bringing the ‘knowledge’ of procedure that they acquire from such shows to the courtroom, with totally unrealistic, and unhelpful, expectations. I think people take similar expectations from TV to the books they read, and authors are bound to be influenced in the same way.

I agree with perspective wholeheartedly. When i became a Federal agent I wanted to work undercover. I envisioned myself as Sonny Crockett in the Miami Vice television episodes – driving a Lamborghini; nice clothes; poolside at a South Beach mansion; super models serving me cosmos while i negotiate for huge shipments of Columbian cocaine – not! Reality was that i was driving an ’83 Chevy Malibu and the windows didn’t operate up or down. I was dressed in cut off camo shorts with a wife beater t-shirt and flip flops to fit in with my ‘clientele’.  No mansions, just trailer parks. The pools and cosmos were replaced with kids in a mudhole with a garden hose and canned beer. No super models, just women who appeared to have survived a collision with a high speed cement truck.  And, no giant drug deals. Instead i was buying an 8-ball of meth for a hundred and fifty dollars from a guy with a large caliber pistol stuffed in the front of his waistband.

As for true crime writing and crime fiction blurring, this certainly happened in the case of the Polish writer Krystian Bala, whose book Amok was based on the murder of Dariusz Janiszewski. Bala claimed that he had got the information from newspaper reports, but the police proved that actually he knew so much about it because he was the murderer. This is an extreme example, but it’s inevitable that writers of fiction are going to turn to real crimes for inspiration. However, it seems to me that true crime (considered as a literary genre) and crime fiction are fundamentally different, in both aims and effect. Crime fiction has a tendency to restore the disrupted universe. It needs resolution, which true crime can’t always provide.

I agree with the end of your analysis, particularly when you speak about “the disrupted universe”. But I would describe the disruption as being to the human spirit rather than the universe. We see our societies as disrupted, whereas in fact they are only mirrors in which we do not recognize our own disrupted spirit. I mean that if we can first succeed in changing ourselves, then we will change our societies. So yes, my point of view pretty much coincides with yours – I believe that crime fiction (and also many other kinds of fiction) do help to restore the disrupted universe/human spirit.

Let us know your thoughts by leaving a comment below.