Crime Beat

A week or so ago I had a run-in with the Irish crime writer and blogger, Declan Burke, on his site Crime Always Pays. In return I gave him some of the rubber hose treatment and posted a transcript of the interrogation to Crime Beat. Anyhow, one of the questions I wanted answered concerned the average kill count in his novels. ‘Pretty low,’ he replied. A few days later he posted further thoughts on the matter which are worth repeating.
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But first, to refresh your memories, here’s his answer to the Crime Beat question: ‘I’m not a fan of gratuitous murders, and I especially hate killing for the sake of advancing a plot, or to get rid of an inconvenient character, or to invoke some undeserved pathos. I think two people died violently in my first novel, Eightball Boogie, and none at all in the second, The Big O. Actually, The Big O was in part conceived as a fun exercise in how authentically I could write a crime novel without any killings and the bare minimum of violence. I had a friend who died young, and violently, so maybe that’s one reason I don’t take lethal violence lightly.’

The issue set Declan Burke to further musings and early in November he ran the following thoughts on his blog: ‘[The kill count] was a question that got me wondering: what’s an acceptable “kill count” in a novel? Should I be killing off more people in my books? Are there people who put down books when they’ve finished, disappointed and muttering about the lack of corpses, the way some people complain about a lack of sex in a novel?

‘There’s a character in a book that’s out with publishers for consideration right now (a Harry Rigby story, “The Big Empty”), and he’s a fairly repulsive character, and at one point I so badly wanted to kill him off – except it wasn’t absolutely necessary that he had to die. So, while the guy took a bit of a beating, he got to live… Now I’m wondering if I shouldn’t have just gone ahead and slotted him.

‘Maybe it’s because the story takes place in Sligo, in northwest Ireland, where a murder, or any kind of violent death, is still a very big deal, as it is anywhere else in Ireland. In that context, the context of the story and its setting, it’s hard to justify anything more than the absolute essential in terms of corpses. But there’s something more to it, too: the idea that, in a world where life gets cheaper by the day, and I include Ireland in that, there’s a kind of responsibility that goes with writing about violence and death. I definitely think that people (and I eventually come to think of characters as “people”) shouldn’t be slaughtered for the sake of ‘entertainment’ and vicarious thrills. As for the “torture porn” that masquerades as some kind of social commentary, in which an author is so concerned about (say) the rape, torture and murder of women that he/she recounts said rape, torture and murder in intimate detail – I just don’t buy it, literally or figuratively.’

Okay, time to fess up. I’ve put characters through torture scenes, those scenes where they (in one instance a female character, in the other two, males) get their hands pulped for withholding information or not telling the truth or as a mechanism for ensuring that they do tell the truth. Was it ‘torture porn’? I don’t think so. Was it social commentary? Of a kind it could be argued although I thought it had more to do with the characters’ pathologies (those inflicting the torture that is) than with making a statement about deceit and the viciousness of hidden agendas.

As for intimate descriptions of murder, there’s not much to describe when someone gets shot. Bang, bang, you’re dead. If it were a knifing or a bludgeoning, well, then I could see plenty of room for lots of visceral glee and spillage but I tend to favour bumping off ‘people’ (see Declan’s comment about characters above) with a silenced .22. The upcoming number two in my Revenge Trilogy (‘Killer Country’) has a high body count – eleven I think. But then the guy with the gun is a hitman and he does what hitmen do. Certainly those who die, die for a reason so I hope I’m not guilty of ‘slaughter[ing] for the sake of “entertainment” and vicarious thrills’, as Declan put it.

Finally there is his point that in a world where life gets cheaper by the day – and let’s face it in our beloved land it’s been valued at the price of a cellphone, often much less, and when we’re dealing with family slayings it carries no value at all – so maybe there is ‘a kind of responsibility that goes with writing about violence and death’. Dunno. I could be Aristotelian about it and say confronting murder in fiction is about catharsis. That the effect on the reader is one of a purging of fear with the relief that comes when the baddies are dispatched. Put another way I could admit that sometimes there is great pleasure to be had in whacking a particularly loathsome character. There are occasions, too, when the drama demands a death, sometimes the death of a good character and on those occasions writing crime fiction can be testing. Then again, no one ever said it was going to be anything else?