FOREWORD

by Lee Child

What’s up with English crime fiction?

It’s a question that gets asked with some regularity, and right now—early 2006—it’s a newly relevant question, because our genre’s Third Age is drawing inexorably to a close. A century ago the First Age was all about Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes. In hindsight we see that the Second Age—in full flower seventy years ago—was codominated by Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. Then, perhaps thirty years later, the Third Age took over, with Ruth Rendell and P. D. James hitting their magisterial strides. For a hundred years, very little was published in the genre that didn’t owe practically everything to one of those five authors. Sleuths that were amateur, or brainy, or aristocratic, or “more than” mere policemen, or eccentric, or unlikely, or who had arcane hobbies and enthusiasms … we’ve been there and done that. And what a ride it was. But now, with the grand dames—literally—Rendell and James on their last lap, what comes next?

Or, what’s up with English crime fiction?

The same things that are up with England itself, really. Three factors are becoming increasingly massive over there—the nation is more than ever metrocentric, more than ever multicultural, and less than ever dominated by class.

England has in fact always been completely dominated by London. It’s a small country with a huge capital city. It’s a fact of life inside the country and out. People in the United States hear that I’m from England, and their next question is usually, “Which part of London did you live in?” But now the phenomenon is even greater than ever.

And London (and therefore England, remember) is now a huge ethnic mosaic, in my experience easily rivaling New York City for diversity. It’s another fact of life, so well accepted now that it’s no longer even worthy of notice or comment.

London is now an overwhelmingly middle-class city, which in traditional English terms means no class at all. Birth and accent mean very little there anymore. When I opened my first bank account—too many years ago to happily contemplate—you could pretty much guarantee that a bank manager would be white, from sturdy English stock, and educated at one of a narrow band of schools. Now you could pretty much guarantee that she wouldn’t be any of those things.

The Fourth Age of English crime fiction writers grew up with these changes. They’ve internalized them. To their elders, class was always an issue. Stock, semicomic stereotypes were plucked from the lower orders and paraded for our smug amusement. Lord Peter Wimsey could quell a street riot with his accent alone. And wasn’t he wonderful to accept a middle-class Scotland Yard Inspector as his brother-in-law! Faint but clear echoes of the same attitudes are clearly audible in the bucolic fantasy that is Kingsmarkham.

Fourth Age writers are past all that. That class is a dead issue is beyond taken for granted by them.

Their elders put people of color and non-English ethnicity into crime fiction from the start, but mostly as curiosities, often as villains, and never quite to be trusted. Fourth Age writers are past all that. Their casts of characters are as instinctively multicultural as the London phone book.

And their elders usually glamorized London itself: Scotland Yard was presented as an effortless center of excellence in comparison to dull provincial capabilities. “They’ve called in Scotland Yard” was as great an accolade as a rural crime could ever earn. Addresses in London were chosen for their glitter: Piccadilly and Belgravia—or maybe Bloomsbury, if some real sense of edge was required.

Fourth Age writers are past all that. London is where life happens, nothing more, nothing less, on the outskirts, near the M25 Beltway, out at Heathrow, in parts we’ve never heard of, but should have.

Fourth Age writers have moved on. And we should move on with them. Perhaps with Simon Kernick in particular, because he might just be the best of them. I’ve read all his books, purely as a fan. They’ve got great plots, great dialogue, great action, and some spectacular violence. But what strikes me most is how they’re rooted in a kind of effortless modern authenticity. They’re real. They’re what England is today. In fact, all the above musing was generated by one simple question I asked myself: “How does he do that?”

So, what’s up with English crime fiction? Simon Kernick is, that’s what.