Although – in the final analysis – it is only the books that count, I’ve always found it useful to speak to as many of the crime writers from different countries as I can for insights into both their working methods and their philosophies. What follows is a selection of conversations I’ve had with key American crime authors.
JAMES ELLROY
‘Fasten your seat belts – it’s going to be a bumpy night.’ Bette Davis’s warning is something that any interviewer of James Ellroy might profitably bear in mind. His abrasive reputation is legendary, and the self-styled ‘Demon Dog’ of American crime fiction has also described himself as ‘the greatest living crime writer’, a soi-disant observation that a great many of his contemporaries – and thousands of readers – would agree with. False modesty is not James Ellroy’s thing. But this man who has shaken out all the exhausted tropes of American crime fiction like loose nails, leaving behind something as ambitious, corrosive and unsettling as anything in the genre, is famously unsparing with interviewers: he has them for breakfast. This reputation was on my mind as I approached the Taj Hotel near Buckingham Palace (he was in the UK to promote his most recent novel, the gargantuan Perfidia). What’s more, it had been communicated to me that he was none too pleased with my review of the book – even though I’d tried to suggest that the book’s vaunting ambition made the work of most of his contemporaries seem like minnows in Perfidia’s formidable wake.
Certainly, no genteel, collegiate encounter was on the cards. This, after all, was a man who in his own abrasive autobiography My Dark Places goes some way to explain why his work is often a descent into a neon-lit, hellish Los Angeles – and his own psyche. That book presented an unvarnished picture of his terrifying childhood. His mother was murdered when he was only ten years old, and his teenage years were a smorgasbord of drugs, alcohol and a variety of off-kilter sexual obsessions (which included raiding women’s apartments for their underwear). A robust 66 at the time of the interview (2014), Ellroy has a reputation for taking no prisoners. Am I – in American argot – about to get handed my head?
There is little argument among aficionados that Ellroy’s monumental L.A. Quartet (The Black Dahlia, 1987; The Big Nowhere, 1988; L.A. Confidential, 1990; and White Jazz, 1992) is the greatest of modern crime novel sequences. Starting with a relatively simple premise (a killing at an all-night diner is under investigation by three LA cops, each of whom has a very different agenda), Ellroy utilises the discursive narrative to produce a massive panoply of Los Angeles in the 1950s, more assiduously detailed than the work of that other great chronicler of the area, Raymond Chandler. Blending his fictional scenario with real events and characters, the picture-postcard vision of the city (with its non-stop sunshine, glistening beaches and universal prosperity) is swiftly undercut by Ellroy’s penetrating view of the darker side, but his real subject is the psyches of his three very different police officers. It is in this area that the true greatness of the novels lies, for while the psychology of his protagonists is laid open with a scalpel-sharp precision, the task is always performed in prose that is as accomplished as anything in literary fiction. Perhaps the ‘Great American Novel’ might spring from the pen of marauding Visigoth Ellroy, writing about the defining era of post-World War Two America, stirring into his heady brew real-life figures such as JFK, cross-dressing FBI supremo J Edgar Hoover and gangsters such as Vito Genovese.
But then something happened: Ellroy’s subsequent books were couched in an eccentric ‘telegraphese’, prose so spare (but dense) that it cost him many readers – while not, however, denting his reputation one iota. As I head towards the sumptuous Jaguar suite, I wonder: do I bring up this audacious change of method? My teeth are gritted.
But as James Ellroy walks into the room – tall, elegant, and with the look of a bookish intellectual rather than a volatile streetfighter – I suspect I’m in for a somewhat different experience from the one I expected. It seems my English politeness is a plus; Ellroy has a Hannibal Lecter-like respect for manners over all else, and tells me later that he has walked out of interviews in which he’s felt that the interviewer has been rude.
So, where to start? A discussion of the massive Perfidia, perhaps? No; the first thing we discuss is how he feels about the news that the Republicans now rule the roost in the Senate and that Obama’s presidency is of the lame duck variety. He hadn’t heard the news, and is elated. ‘Really? Is that the case?’ he asks, grinning. ‘That really pleases me – I can’t wait to ring up my left-wing friends and rub that in.’ So, I ask, is he an unapologetic right-winger?
‘Well, I’m in the country of Margaret Thatcher and Winston Churchill, both heroes of mine – as was Ronald Reagan. In fact, all three shared something other than sensible right-wing views: a love of splendid, old-fashioned oratory.’
But oratory (in at least two of those cases) written by others, I demur…
‘That doesn’t matter!’ smiles Ellroy. ‘What they said – and how they said it – is what counted.’
To the book: I ask if Ellroy really needs to do this kind of promotional tour – exhausting, multi-country, multi-event. Surely his books will sell whether he publicises them or not?
‘Yes,’ he replies. ‘But they will sell more if I do Manchester one night and Rome a week later. And I want to support my publisher. Besides’ – he looks me in the eye – ‘sometimes the boredom is allayed when I’m asked something I haven’t been asked before.’ No pressure for me, then.
How – in his sixties – are his energy levels for these kinds of junkets? ‘I have terrific energy levels. And I’m good at husbanding my resources. I’m able to focus on the things that are important in my life and to cut out the crap. For instance, if a restaurant or bar is playing loud rock music – which I loathe – I simply get up and go. I cut short a meal the other night because the restaurant was simply too loud. If there is going to be music in my life, it will probably be Beethoven. Experiencing genius recharges one’s own batteries and is immensely good for the soul. I don’t allow myself too much untoward stimulation. I want fewer people in my life – I’m not looking for new friends. Most of the time I live in a sort of monkish seclusion; I see a friend and his wife, and we watch things like The Killing – both the American and the Danish versions. The original, incidentally, is about 30 times better. I don’t assiduously read what my crime fiction contemporaries are writing, however.’
Ah, yes – the soul. Does Ellroy share with the Republicans whose victory pleased him a strong belief in God? ‘Absolutely,’ he answers. ‘I’m able to find God everywhere, and that offers me the same solace as the music of Beethoven. After my grim childhood and a life that has hardly been peaceful, I know the value of things which now give me peace – such as God.’
But this isn’t the iconoclastic figure I had been prepared for. I try to stir things up. Hasn’t religion (I suggest) been the source of so much strife throughout history? The things done in the name of Christianity and Islam? But Ellroy is not to be provoked: ‘We can hardly blame God for the things his followers do in His name, can we?’
‘The murder of my mother is something that affected the subsequent course of my life – and continues to do so.’ He smiles gently (something I’m realising is his default mode – no channelling of the ‘Demon Dog’ in this interview). ‘My mother’s killing… I always wonder how long it will take before it comes up in any interview.’ (I avoid pointing out that it was Ellroy himself who brought it up.) ‘Of course, that trauma was immensely influential for reasons I wrote about in My Dark Places, and the excessiveness of the event was perhaps a harbinger of the excessiveness of the life I was to lead – until now, that is.’
I also avoid mentioning that I’d written the review of Perfidia with which he was not best pleased, but ask him how he responds to the critical reception of any new book.
‘Perfidia has had some… interesting reviews, some of which get the book wrong, but I don’t review the reviews. I can’t afford to take on board hostile criticism of, for instance, my attempts to take risks with language. But Perfidia is the first of a new quartet and then I’m thinking of writing a trilogy, and in all of these I’m planning to do something different.’
I ask if it’s something of a Damoclean sword, being ‘the greatest living crime writer’; that can’t be too relaxing, can it?
‘Fuck, no – it isn’t, but writing is one area where I’m not looking to relax. I want to write better and better books. Sometimes the writing process is not an organic progression, but something shocking. L.A. Confidential – in its entirety – came to me as something of a synoptic flash, and in the backlash of that flash, I realised that whatever I could conceive, I could execute. It was a seismic, life-changing moment.’
Ellroy leans back and sips his mineral water; he doesn’t drink any more. I am by now starting to wonder if the dyspeptic view of flawed humanity one gleans from his books is, in fact, illusory. ‘I’m an optimist!’ he exclaims. ‘Whatever people may think, I have an ameliorative view of human nature. Sex, for instance, may be a deeply troubled area in my books – and many of my characters are deeply fucked up in that area. But I see sex as an expression of love and a very positive thing. Love and sex have always fuelled me.’ But what angers him? ‘Do you want to know what I really hate in people? Nihilism! That really pisses me off.’
Aha – so I’ve found an area that may channel a little of the Ellroy bile which has been conspicuously absent so far in our talk. One source of anger, surprisingly, is the youthful audience he spoke to in trendy Shoreditch in London the night before. ‘Hipsters – God! They were all so nonconformist in an utterly conformist way; they all resemble each other; the fashion accoutrements are a straitjacket. I do find hipsters immensely self-regarding, and bizarrely enamoured of squalor in a rather effete way.’
But isn’t Ellroy himself the hippest of writers? He smiles wryly.
‘All I can say is that I like to surround myself with square people. I was never really “hip”. The hipsters like rap: misogynistic, semi-literate doggerel. The voice of urban youth? Give me a break. Rap as art? Fuck, no! Art should encompass the world, open avenues and cross boundaries. At least it’s what I try to do.’
SARA PARETSKY
Outside, the driving hail has Londoners hunching their shoulders against the elements, but in Victoria’s well-appointed Goring Hotel, a comforting coal fire warms the equally well-appointed guests in the lounge. A few of these glance up as one of America’s most celebrated crime writers walks in, but then their gazes flicker away; the celebrity of a crime writer – even one as prodigiously successful as Sara Paretsky – hardly matches that of glitzier trash celebrities. As ever, Paretsky quietly exudes the elegance and style that have become her hallmarks: she is slim and fit-looking, wearing her years very lightly indeed (a result, she says, of her rigorously maintained keep-fit regime). She is visiting a freezing London to call on old friends and to promote a provocative standalone novel, Bleeding Kansas, set in the county she grew up in before moving (like her female private eye VI Warshawski) to the more cosmopolitan Chicago. Paretsky takes a seat looking out on the garden walls of Buckingham Place; she is some distance away from more corpulent American hotel guests, and muses on the fact that obesity is not quite that simple class-led issue it might seem to be: ‘In certain areas of Chicago, those involved in the service industries – mainly African Americans –- often tend to be heavily overweight, and that’s probably due to bad diet as well as avoidance of exercise – no doubt that’s true of working-class obesity in the UK.’ She smiles. ‘But the well-heeled Americans here have not piled on the pounds with burgers and fries – it will be expense account lunches and haute cuisine.’
Paretsky is also well known for her social commitment, and talks about serious issues in prestigious venues from New York to Oxford. After she orders a mint tea (she tells the waitress that the mint tea is the reason she stays at this hotel), Paretsky seems keen to talk about a hundred things rather than her work: the rise of religious fundamentalism in her own country; the Iraq war; the erosion of women’s rights along with many of society’s personal liberties. But her publicist has left her with a gentle admonition that it’s necessary to mention Bleeding Kansas once or twice – and it’s not a particularly difficult task, as the novel crackles with many of the issues that concern its author, sporting a narrative about religious intolerance in a conservative Kansas community thrown into disarray by a freethinking woman from the big city.
As she says this, Paretsky’s penetrating blue eyes shine with intensity, but then her expression becomes opaque: wary and slightly guarded. Like her rival in the bestselling American crime fiction stakes, Patricia Cornwell, there is a certain vulnerability here: both women are aware of what a fragile-boned thing fame is, and Paretsky in particular always assumes the polar opposite of an Ozymandias-like ‘Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ position – even though her sales and critical acclaim should give her good reason for a certain amour propre. But perhaps she is aware that the provocative, multi-stranded Bleeding Kansas is a harder sell than her effortlessly entertaining Warshawski books and may enjoy something of a mixed reception.
By now the lounge of the hotel is packed (with a card game at a nearby table), and the noise levels seem higher than one might expect from such an upscale clientele. As Paretsky gathers up the schedule given to her by her publicist, she wonders if she has been sufficiently coherent during the interview – self-deprecation is one of her most winning characteristics. As ever, of course, the answer is resoundingly in the affirmative. As anyone who has spent an hour in her company will tell you, you leave with an enhanced, open-eyed apprehension of the world we all live in, with both its injustices and its splendours.
She is quickly talking about one of her favourite themes: religion versus science. ‘I see you have a great brouhaha at the moment about embryo research, with Catholic MPs and bishops lining up against those who want to advance medical science? I feel like I’m back in the US…,’ she says sadly.
Has she seduced us with her diverting crime novels in order to sneakily slip us the big political book, where she grinds several axes?
‘Not really! Frankly, one of the things I wanted to do in Bleeding Kansas was to try to explore what drives the Religious Right. I grew up in Kansas and I never imagined wanting to set a book back there, but there were several reasons why this particular book became something that I wanted to write. From the time that I first started thinking about it, it was a good ten years before I actually finished it, and I kept playing with it and not being able to move it forward. I sometimes think that maybe going back to the land of your childhood is… well, Thomas Wolfe said it… you can’t go home again.’
Is the book – set in the state where she ‘became the person she is’ (after an unhappy childhood with warring parents) – a way of exorcising personal demons?
‘Well, it may have started that way, but such notions don’t really work. I mean, I think if there were people you couldn’t stand up to when they were alive, flogging their ghosts doesn’t help you. I was hopeful I could do this, but it didn’t work. On a physical level, however, I went way out of my way to burn down my childhood home.
‘We were one of the few Jewish families in the area when I was growing up and the service man for the Sears Roebuck vacuum cleaners and so on that my mother used had belonged to a tiny sect that believed that Jews were the original chosen people of God so he would never charge my mother for a service call. And then on the other side, we had all the usual kinds of stereotypes about money-grabbing, etc. However, I didn’t have any personal experience of anti-Semitism until I was in high school and I was asked to try to explain Judaism to religious groups who wanted to know why Jews controlled all the money in the world.
‘We had a fundamentalist revival of religion in our high school – it was a small town with just one high school – and attendance was mandatory. It was really very frightening being taken in to the auditorium and the preacher would be bellowing at you for five hours on what your sins were, and during my final year in school the Supreme Court had just ruled that you could not have sectarian prayer in publicly funded schools and I and three Catholic girls whose parents didn’t approve of that and one boy whose family were flagrant atheists went to the principal and demanded to be excused. And so we were taken and locked in this little room. I used to think about what would have happened if the school had burned down.’
Bad reviews – has she had any?
‘You know, my favourite bad review – usually they just hurt my feelings – was for one of the VI books. Time Out here in London wrote that it was time for VI to retire to a home for deranged feminists and then I should follow her; my friends and I just said that this was such a wonderful idea – a retirement home for deranged feminists. So my husband suggested the name “Gelding Manor” – perhaps one of these sprawling Victorian mansions with turrets upon turrets.’
In fact, of course, Paretsky is very much a man-friendly feminist in person; her husband, a physicist who was an associate of Fermi, is much in her conversation. And her upbeat attitude concerning the relations between the sexes is part of an optimistic, if unsentimental, view of life.
‘Grace Paley has this sentence in one of her short stories that I love: she says that “unlike life I am merciful to my characters”. And life is too hard. When I read I don’t want to be left utterly bereft. I just read Sarah Waters’ The Night Watch, which I thought was a beautiful book, extraordinary in construction, but also a little bit too heartbreaking, and maybe I’m not a strong enough person to tolerate that much heartbreak.’
SCOTT TUROW
Speaking to Scott Turow in London a couple of years ago was a pleasurable experience. For the jaded crime fiction journo (who has perhaps spoken to too many none-too-stimulating American authors), it’s deeply refreshing to encounter a writer whose engaging personal qualities are matched by a sharp intelligence. The conversation ranges over many issues, with his bestselling novels – such as his mega-selling Presumed Innocent – being only one among many topics, and it’s hard to know what to spotlight first. How, for instance, does Turow regard his putative readers?
‘I take my readers as I find them,’ he says. ‘There are those who are looking for a page-turning thriller; fine, I’m happy to provide that to the best of my abilities. Some want plausible details of how the courts and juries work; I’m pleased to have them on board too, as that’s an area – in all modesty – that I know a great deal about.’
So why do we readers continue to have a fascination for the legal profession while regarding lawyers as something akin to pond life? (Though possibly higher up the evolutionary scale than bankers…)
‘I think there is a plurality of values here,’ replies the author. ‘The law is the arbiter of values. And, of course, we’re all cynical when there is a clear miscarriage of justice; for instance, when the OJ trial came to its famously controversial conclusion, many people felt a sense of outrage. But, on the other hand, if you’re being prosecuted for a major crime, who are you going to call? A lawyer like Johnnie Cochran, of course, who gets the job done. He used whatever material came to hand – he did his job, in fact, whatever we think of the result.’
Is Turow worried by the fact that so many legal thrillers are clogging up bookshops? A trend that he and John Grisham might be said to be responsible for?
‘I don’t think the market is in danger of being swamped yet. There appears to be a stable level of high interest, and for the time being, readers still seem fascinated by the legal thriller genre. But all these things are cyclical, aren’t they? And, like all trends, this will pass, and only the best books will make an impact.’
Turow talks about his belief in science, and is briskly dismissive of the idea that America is rushing headlong towards a kind of dumbed-down religious state, despite appearances to the contrary.
‘I think the Religious Right is in the minority, and they get more column inches than they actually deserve. They’re on the back foot now, thankfully, although I imagine it doesn’t appear that way to sceptical observers in the UK. Fortunately, many of us are more concerned with science, with the rational. I have a great faith in DNA, fingerprinting, ballistics – the latter is a key element in one of my books, Reversible Errors.’
Inevitably, we touch on the Hollywood success of the film of Presumed Innocent with Harrison Ford. ‘All my books have been optioned, whether they get made or not,’ says Turow. ‘And that’s both a good and a bad thing. After seeing the film of Presumed Innocent, I have to confess that – whether I liked it or not – Harrison Ford’s face became mentally overlaid for me on the face of my protagonist. But in the end, it’s the book that counts, isn’t it? And that’s the thing I’m responsible for.’
PATRICIA CORNWELL
There is absolutely no question as to who rules the roost in forensic crime fiction. After her first novel Postmortem, in 1990, Patricia Cornwell bagged almost every important crime award, and she consolidated her success with a sequence of books featuring the tenacious (if vulnerable) Dr Kay Scarpetta, now the definitive fictional forensic pathologist. Cornwell’s books are a canny marriage of the traditional police procedural with something new: an investigation based on minutely detailed and gruesome posthumous evidence. Successive novels firmly fixed the author as a brand, and such books as Blow Fly made even the unsparing forensic detail of the earlier books look restrained, while Scarpetta’s independence makes her deeply unpopular with her long-suffering bosses.
On a visit she made to London, I asked Cornwell some questions.
Can we talk about your roots?
‘I was a crime journalist, but I didn’t read crime fiction. I went on patrols at night with the police, investigating homicide scenes. My interest in pathology probably began when I heard about a death row inmate being beaten to death by fellow prisoners when I was on a 1980 night shift. I remember phoning up a nurse and asking about the victim’s injuries. This question was met with some surprise, but basically I was taking the view of an archaeologist looking at a given set of circumstances. The morgue became a place of fascination for me.’
Why did you choose to have as your protagonist the forensic expert Kay Scarpetta?
‘It was almost an accident that I began writing about crime. My ambitions, in fact, were to write a literary novel, but after I had had several books rejected by a publisher, I asked an editor what she felt was wrong. She replied: “You clearly want to write about your forensic pathologist character. Make her the centre of the book.” After that, you might say, I didn’t look back.’
Were you aware of creating – or at least changing – an existing genre, the forensic crime novel?
‘Not at all. I didn’t read my contemporaries – something that is to a large extent still true today – and I simply wrote what I had to. Postmortem was not an immediate success, though it had something of a succès de scandale: it was banned in Richmond – people would say that they were disturbed by the fact that a woman was at the centre of all this violent activity. But basically I didn’t have a clue about what else was being written in the genre, and I really had no intention of shaking it up.’
It goes without saying that you seem to relate to Scarpetta, your pathologist protagonist, more than to any of the other characters.
‘Undoubtedly. As a journalist, I was always keenly interested in the basic facts; very much the approach for Kay Scarpetta. I do share one other thing with Kay: a respect for the real life behind the bodies. But, as for identifying with her, I try to place myself in the minds of all my characters.’
You obviously have extensive experience of real-life forensic situations.
‘Yes, enough for many books. But the science is changing all the time and I try to keep up with that.’
How do you feel about the criticism directed against women such as yourself who write violent crime fiction?
‘Ironically, I always get that question in Britain more than in the US. My first response is that women are the principal victims of crime, so why shouldn’t we write about it? Actually, in the US, it’s not the violence as much as other aspects of the books that are likely to upset the Religious Right, such as the fact that my character Lucy is a lesbian.’
There are so many people now who write in the Patricia Cornwell style – do you try to keep up with them or any of your other peers?
‘Actually, I make a point of not reading crime writers as I am wary of being influenced by something I’ve read. At the moment, for instance, I’m reading a biography of the writer William Golding.’
KATHY REICHS
Why does she do it? Why does Kathy Reichs – so comfortably at the top of the tree in the crime-writing stakes – put herself through the punishing publicity grind for each new book? Surely, at this stage of her career, she can afford to put her feet up and let the inevitable healthy sales follow? It’s a question I put to her in her bijou London hotel on a gloomy Monday morning.
She sighs – and smiles. ‘Actually, to be frank, I still quite enjoy the whole publicity process – whenever I’m in a given city talking about my books, I’m fine – it’s fun. It’s just getting there; it’s the travelling which is such a drudge. If there were some way I could circumvent that boring bit of the process, then everything would be absolutely perfect.’
Kathy Reichs has a full CV; she is vice president of the American Academy of Forensic Scientists, a member of the RCMP National Police Services Advisory Council, forensic anthropologist for the province of Quebec and a professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte. She is also a frequent expert witness in criminal trials. In 2001 she was called in to join the National Disaster Recovery team after the Twin Towers terror attack on New York. She worked around the clock for two weeks – sifting through the rubble for traces of human remains and packing it up for medical analysis. She has also testified at the United Nations tribunal on the Rwandan genocide and helped to identify people buried in mass graves in Guatemala.
Her first book, Déjà Dead, quickly became a New York Times bestseller and won the 1997 Arthur Ellis Award for best first novel. All of her Temperance Brennan novels have been Sunday Times bestsellers. Reichs – no underachiever – is also a consultant on the TV series Bones, which features her character Brennan, and is the author of a forensic series aimed at young adults, including the titles Virals and Seizure.
Since I last spoke to her, she remains as busy as ever – and is clearly showing absolutely no signs of slowing down. But does she plan to take things easier at some point?
‘I’m more than happy keeping busy – ultra-busy – with all my various activities,’ she replies, ‘including the forensic consultancy work. And I have one thing that keeps the latter stimulating for me – I can, in fact, pick and choose the cases that I want to work on. If I feel a particular case is not for me, I can refer it onwards. So I’m always working on a case that has a particular interest or fascination for me.’
Given that expert witnesses have been getting a particularly hard time in Britain lately, discredited for the wrong decisions, has she noticed that syndrome in the States – the credentials of expert witnesses being questioned, for instance?
‘Those credentials should be questioned,’ she replies firmly. ‘It has to be said that there are some people out there who are claiming to be forensic experts who are no such thing. They have just done some very basic training at the fringes. Their parameters are very narrow – and such people are prone to comment on areas that they really don’t know enough about. The thing for any witness to do in such a scenario is to simply say “I don’t know” – in other words, don’t expose yourself if you’re out of your comfort zone where your knowledge is concerned.’
Déjà Dead established Reichs’ reputation in 1997, and Temperance Brennan made an immediate mark as a solid and reliable heroine. By the time of Death du Jour, Reichs had begun to consolidate and refine elements present in the early books and clearly established her as a truly impressive writer, decisively moving her out of the shadow of Patricia Cornwell. With Deadly Decisions, the consolidation process continued – including through frequent festival invitations. I ask her how her appearance at the 2012 Cheltenham Literature Festival went (we had both done panels there but our paths had not crossed).
‘Oh, I really enjoyed it,’ she replies. ‘Despite the rain (and even the hail, which I managed to miss). I had a very lively panel with Val McDermid.’
The mention of McDermid prompts a mention of a familiar issue – one that now bores the Scottish Crime Queen: did the usual ‘violence and female crime writers’ question come up?
‘It usually does, but I think I’m in pretty safe territory,’ Reichs replies. ‘Actually, I never use gratuitous gore in my work. I tell the reader the truth – unsparingly – about what happens to the human body, but to some degree I think that is my duty as a writer, isn’t it?’