Foreword: Showdowns on Main Street

James Sallis

America is a nation founded at one and the same time on violence and high ideals. Both run in our blood. Is it any wonder we’re forever off kilter? A strange tribe, this, wishing to be left alone and apart in one breath, tasking itself to repair the world around it in the next, Henry David Thoreau and Clint Eastwood riding double.

The American detective novel developed in synch with our nation’s movement from a rural to urban society. By definition, it concerned itself with the dark corners, basements and back rooms of our national experience – those poor stitches and loose seams that held the thing together. What you saw was never what you got. American life wasn’t about apple pies, proper behaviour in the Hamptons and drinks at the club; it was about the repudiated, the pushed-aside, about men and women and communities on the run, never knowing which would happen first, if the sky would fall on them or the ground give way beneath their feet.

Coming as I did from a dual background in poetry and realist fiction, crime stories first attracted me for the power of their imagery and their underpinning. Mythopoetic, my professors back at university would have said. Tapping the subconscious: buckets lowered into a well of archetypes hardwired in us all. These stories were about the things that scare us most, as individuals and as a society, and at the same time about all the things, material and non, we believe we most want. Soon I began to understand, as well, that they are our truest urban fiction, that these stories speak of our cities and our civilisation, address what we have made of them and of ourselves, as do no others.

The quantity of fine work being done today, as you’ll see within, is extraordinary. So is the wealth of viewpoints, voice, ambition and sheer reach – such that genre seems profoundly lacking to describe so rich a body of work. All writing, be it literary fiction or epic poetry, is genre. Over the years, both as writer and as critic, I’ve come to think of crime fiction simply as a literary mode. A mode is a specific manner in which something is experienced or expressed, a particular set of notes comprising the scale from which melodies and harmonies derive. Which seems to me a more fruitful way of thinking about and approaching the grand array of crime fiction.

The arts do not progress, they develop by accrual: circling back, refitting old clothes, refurnishing rooms. But there is today in crime fiction some of the best writing being done anywhere, work that honours its past while reaching far beyond.

Finally, any body of work depends for its vitality and enrichment as much on its readers as upon its writers, and the ones taking point there, making all our lives richer, are the critics, editors, commentators and anthologists. As editor of Crime Time and as wearer of many hats, Barry Forshaw has introduced us to the best of current writing, helped us parse the roots and branches of the Nordic mystery, again and again has led us to broader understandings of films and novels.

When quite young I was oddly short and small for my age. My woodworking father, who’d given me the nickname Runt, built a pair of stilts so that I could be, in my mind and in my secret life, taller. What my dad did for me, our arts do for us all. They give form and vitality and validation to secret lives within us. Barry knows that. He has never, even for a single moment, lost sight of how important it is.